An Interview with Samantha Matherne

ZG: How did you get into philosophy and why? 

Professor Matherne: I grew up with two parents who were in STEM. My mom was a computer programmer, and my dad an electrical engineer, both retired now. So the idea that you could be a professor as a profession never really occurred to me. But then during my sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, I met some Comparative Literature grad students, and it blew my mind that their job was to read books, write books, and teach about the books they were reading and writing about. It had never occurred to me that you could get paid to do that, but it felt like I was coming home to what I should be doing.

After that realization, I started taking a bunch of different classes in literature, art history, and philosophy. Although I love literature and art, I struggled in those classes because I felt like I didn't want to analyze a novel or work of art to death and tear it apart in a paper. But then I read philosophy, and I thought, well, I should absolutely analyze this to death and tear it apart in a paper. There was just something that felt right about that, and that was what sealed my fate.

ZG: So would you say that maybe there was some sort of resistance to critical reading or close reading of texts that you thought was different in literature versus philosophy?

Professor Matherne: With philosophy, there's a clear method to reading—you look for the thesis, you look for the argument, and then you pose objections. But with literature, there's no one way to read it. And that's one of the great glories of literature—you can read it forwards to backwards, backwards to forwards, you can skip around, you can think in terms of so many different theories, or you can think imminently to the text. However, in college, there was something about that pluralism of method that became a little bit overwhelming for me as opposed to philosophy. With philosophy, I felt like I knew what I was doing. Maybe I wasn’t all that skilled yet, but I knew how to go about reading a philosophical text. That made me feel more oriented in doing philosophy than in doing academic work on literature.

ZG: So we know that you are an eminent Kant scholar. Would you say that your favorite philosopher is Kant? 

I don't know how to pick favorite philosophers! All I can say is that I spent more time with Kant than any other philosopher. Maybe that makes him my favorite, but sometimes familiarity breeds contempt. Ultimately, I think that there's something profoundly worthwhile about Kant's philosophical project that I find I keep coming back to, even when I don't really want to come back to it. It just continues to resonate with me in a way that is unique.

ZG: So how would you say you ended up discovering Kant, sticking with him, and becoming familiar with his style and his work?

In my junior year, I took a graduate seminar with Paul Guyer on the Critique of Pure Reason. I had no business being in that class—I mean, I did not have enough training to be doing graduate work in philosophy, let alone on the first critique! But I remember being so impressed, not just by Guyer's erudition and intelligence, but it was clear that the first critique was still a live text for him. He'd been working on Kant for decades, but he was still philosophically engaged. He still found new things to think about Kant.

And I thought, that's a career—a text that you could work on for 30 years and still find something new. There's something about the inexhaustibility of the insights that Kant had, not that I understood those insights at that point, but I was really drawn to it. It took me a long time to figure out what exactly I was philosophically drawn to about Kant, because there are so many things you could be drawn to in the first critique. But I think that for me, one of the most philosophically interesting issues is human experience—the mundane way that we perceive the world, the way that we see or hear or smell or taste things, the experience that we overlook all the time. I think Kant really recognized how rich the texture of everyday experience is. In the first critique, he unfolds all these layers of experience in a way that not only recognizes that this is a philosophically worthy topic, but also gets a lot of things right. Not that he gets everything right, but, I think a lot about the role of imagination in everyday experience. I think that Kant really saw that imagination is not just something we use to fantasize or dream, but it fills out our everyday experience. And I think that's one of the things that I just keep coming back to in the first critique.

ZG: So, as a Kant scholar, do you apply his philosophy to your everyday life?

Professor Matherne: This is a good question. I think in relation to everyday experience, studying Kant and some of these other phenomenologists that I've worked on, like Merleau-Ponty, has led me to have a more reflective relation to experience. So it's more often that I'll pause and try to step back from a perceptual episode that I'm having.

For example, as I was walking up to William James Hall every single day for Phil 129 this past semester, I would try to be attentive to how the building appeared each day. What color is the sky—blue or gray? How is that interacting with the gray concrete of William James Hall? What are the lights and shadows doing? What am I noticing that's new, like oh, there's a chip on that floor that I never noticed before.

So I've become more reflective about my everyday experience, and I notice different aspects of it in a way that Kant helps me with. But this is something that painters are often attentive to as well. For example, we take colors for granted all the time. But then you can shift, painter-style, and become more reflective about what color is doing in this room, how light is interplaying with it. And this kind of shift is one way that Kant has snuck into my life.

ZG: Is philosophy dying, like are the humanities dying?

Professor Matherne: That’s a big one! I taught a class on Jane Austen this semester. In her first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, there's an interesting stretch, a bit of a narratorial tangent, in which the narrator thinks about why novels are valuable – particularly given a critique that people were making against novels at the end of the 18th century, that they're just for entertainment, or they're making women too emotional.

The narrator talks about the ways in which really good novels give us knowledge of human nature, in all of its delineations, with a little wit and humor (note the Austenian flair). And I've been thinking a lot about what it is to have knowledge of human nature in all of its delineations.

There's, of course, a certain kind of knowledge about human nature that you get in neuroscience, and in psychology, and in other hard sciences. But there's a very different kind of knowledge of human nature that you get when you're doing the humanities, whether that's literature, philosophy, or some other field. This is an understanding of human nature from the inside, rather than from the outside. To be clear, I think that we need both perspectives. But when we are studying human nature from the scientific third person point of view, there's just so much subtlety, so much richness, so much of the experiential ambiguity and nuance that you are missing that you only get from a lived first person point of view. This is a kind of understanding of human nature, of human existence, that we need. It makes our lives better. It helps us relate to ourselves and relate to others better. And I think that this domain of knowledge that the humanities promises—it's of inexhaustible value.

ZG: So do you believe that the concept “human nature” exists?

Ultimately, the Austen quote is not just that the novel promises knowledge of human nature, full stop. It's that it provides knowledge of human nature in all of its delineations. And I think that I'm very wary of the thought that there is some essence of what it is to be a human being or some essential human nature. I think that's a concept to be resisted rather than endorsed.

But I do think that there is a project of trying to understand who we are. Of course, there are all sorts of questions concerning who the "we" even refers to. But that's also part of the project—trying to understand who we are, as individuals and collectively. Who we are is not going to be this essential, uniform thing. It's going to be delineated in all of these different ways, given personal conditions, social conditions, cultural conditions, historical conditions.

So I think that there's a project of trying to understand who we are as human beings in some way, where we don't get an easy answer anymore. It's not like "we're rational animals" and done. It's a project, it's a problem that we can't settle, it's open-ended. But I think that we can gain profound insight into what is shared, what is not shared, where there are variations on certain themes, like the experience of grief, or love, or mourning, or joy. I think that there are delineations of these experiences that we can gain insight into through literature and philosophy.

Maybe a different way to put it is that you might think that human experience in all of its delineations is a text that is there for us to interpret. But just as with any great text, you're never going to settle what the text is with a single interpretation. All you can hope for is more interpretations that unlock the whole of the text, parts of the text, the interconnections between the parts and the whole. You just want better and better interpretations to help you understand the text in deeper ways. And I think maybe that's the frame that I would use for thinking about the text of human nature.

ZG: Now that we know the value of philosophy, do you think philosophy can be applied in the world? 

Professor Matherne: Maybe I'll put it in terms of what I do in my aesthetics classes. I feel like a classic philosophical question is how you lead a good life. There is a long tradition of philosophy in thinking about how to lead a good life. And I think that getting people to reflect on that question, and different potential sources of value for a good life, is important.

One thing that I try to do in some of my aesthetics classes is just point toward the aesthetic as one thing that you might think is essential to living a good life. It's not the only thing—there needs to be moral and political and other kinds of goods, like epistemic goods, for leading a good life. But really getting people to recognize that the aesthetic is, first of all, a domain, and that the aesthetic is something that plays a substantial role in leading a good life—I think that thinking critically about those things in a philosophy classroom matters, because what you do is lead a good life outside of the classroom.

And so I think that becoming alert to certain values that could then organize what we do in the world at large, organize what we aspire to, what we hope for, what we ask for—I think that's something that philosophy can help us think through.

ZG: where do you think philosophy as a discipline is headed in the future?

Yeah, that's a great question. Here are some trends that I notice.

I work on the history of philosophy and the landscape of this field has radically changed since I was in graduate school, in terms of expanding our understanding of who in the history of philosophy merits our attention. There is a traditional way of thinking about history of philosophy in terms of the canon - you have your rationalists, you have Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, then you have your empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and then you get to Kant and he synthesizes it all— and we're very used to these kinds of canonical stories that leave out so many important figures who were making philosophical contributions.

But there's been an absolute sea change in recognizing the value of teaching and researching these underrepresented figures. I've recently edited a translation of a neglected early 20th century German phenomenologist, Edith Landmann-Kalischer, and I did this because I was inspired by other people that I knew who were bringing attention to women philosophers in the early modern tradition and in the 19th century. I think that this is a trend that is going to radically reshape how history of philosophy is taught and researched, and I couldn't be more excited about that. Just when you think history's exhausted, you actually learn that it's fresh, and you just didn't know all of the new things that were there.

Another trend is a rise in public philosophy. Academic philosophy for a long time has been dominated by a professionalized, almost scientific model of what we do as philosophical researchers. On this model, philosophers tackle big problems that we care about, like what is consciousness, but we recognize that we are never going to make headway just by focusing on a big problem. What we have to do is break it down into these tiny, tiny, tiny problems, just as you would do in a lab, and then try to make headway with respect to the big problem by way of working on these tiny technical problems. I think that's a valuable endeavor.

But that endeavor only makes sense to the people who are fully immersed in the technicalities. It's not readable to most other philosophers, let alone a broader public. And I think that a lot of philosophers are feeling the importance of taking up a social role as a philosopher in relation to the public and really trying to get these views that we have about the good life or the importance of the aesthetic, or the value of the humanities—whatever you have, that needs to be something that we vocalize not just to ourselves, but in a broader way. Public philosophy is not fully loved or fully embraced yet, but I think that is going to change.

Got it. Thanks so much. We have some rapid fire questions：

Favorite Philosopher besides Kant? Schiller. Especially his work “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.”

Favorite movie? The Philadelphia Story. Katharine Hepburn who plays Tracy Lord has to negotiate what it is to be both regal and rational and sensible and romantic, and it is just hilarious.

Favorite poets? Emily Dickinson and Sappho.

One thing you mentioned before was the undiscovered figures in the history of philosophy. Who are those figures for you? One person I already mentioned is Edith Landmann-Kalischer. Her writing on aesthetics and value theory is so philosophically insightful and so clear. She has a thesis statement, she anticipates objections, she organizes things. And it's a pleasure to read her writing because it feels so contemporary and fresh.

What's the one piece of advice you would give the incoming freshmen who want to concentrate in philosophy? Read everything. No, really. After college, whether you have time to read or not becomes a question, and typically how you read narrows because of time constraints and because of the profession that you've gone into. But there's something that is so special about your four years at college, where you can just read, and read in an open minded way. You don't have to read in a way that you have to stake yourself, you don't have to read in a way that—this is a Schiller point—you don't have to read in a way that's overly serious. You can read in a way that is genuinely playful, and then read and read and read. So I would say read everything in a playful way.