Hanna Pickard

Whereas philosophy is certainly not self-expression, and philosophy, of course, is argument. And you can say, "Well, is the conclusion true, or is the argument valid?" Welcome to Five Questions, the podcast where we don't ask if the conclusion is true or the argument valid, but what they say about you. I'm your host, Kiran Setia. In each episode, I ask a philosopher five questions about themselves. There are two ground rules. One is that follow-up questions are allowed. The other is that the question I'm about to ask doesn't count as one of the five. So could you introduce yourself, tell us a bit about who you are, and what kind of philosophical work you do? My name is Hannah Pickard. I'm a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at John Hopkins. I'm originally from Canada, but before moving to the U.S., I spent most of my adult life in the U.K. where I worked both as a philosopher, but also as a therapist for the NHS in a specialist service for people with personality disorders and complex needs. And most of my work really has its root in that clinical experience, so I thought about topics like the nature of mental disorder, responsibility, blame, emotions, violence, and increasingly of late, my work has focused pretty exclusively on addiction, and no matter the topic, I guess I tend to approach it in a really interdisciplinary way, particularly in relation to addiction. At this point, my work draws on philosophy of mind, action, and ethics, but also psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, social sciences, and also a little bit of love. Well, I'm hoping we'll get to talk more about your work as a therapist and how it fits together with your work as a philosopher, but I'm going to wait and see how that comes up in the conversation and start by asking you the question I always start with, inspired by Iris Murdock, who begins the podcast telling us that philosophy is not self-expression, but who also wrote, "To do philosophy is to explore one's temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth." So does your temperament influence your philosophy, and if so, how? So I fear that it does, and thinking about this, I thought there was perhaps one small virtuous way in which it did, but alas, two vices. So I'll start with the virtue, which is perhaps more boring, but nonetheless, a bit of a balance to the vices, which is that I do hope that I'm a kind person and I care very deeply about people, and insofar as my work is about people who have mental health disorders, I do care about them. So that aspect really comes from the heart. It's in my character and it's in my work. The two vices are that I am, I think, quite awful combination of willful and demanding. I wish it wasn't the case that the worst bits of myself were so influential on my career, but I fear it is. So here we go. My career has been unusual because of the way I work, not just as a philosopher, but as a therapist, and I think without the willfulness, I probably would never have managed to step off the beaten track and forge my own way. And the demandingness in ways, I think, is part of the source of the interdisciplinary in my work. So when I'm interested in a question, I can easily get frustrated and a bit impatient if I feel like philosophy doesn't quite have the resources to answer it. And when that's the case, I do tend to look elsewhere somewhat quickly. So the demandingness has kind of pushed me to go outside of philosophy and seek answers elsewhere, which I then do bring back and try to connect with more philosophical approaches to the question. I'm struck by the fact that the vices you pointed to, willfulness and demandingness, although the vices, what they've led to in your work are things that are not defects. I mean, that you went off the beaten track and did something different, doesn't seem like a bad thing. And the interdisciplinarity, it's sort of a particular way of doing philosophy, but doesn't seem negative. Are there ways in which the willfulness and demandingness have affected your philosophical life where you think, yeah, that was just bad. That was just negative. I wish I hadn't been influenced in that way. So I think there are ways in which they have led to, if not defects, then places where I feel anxious about whether my work should be different from what it is. One is that, although I think of interdisciplinarity as a virtue and something that's incredibly important for the kinds of topics I think about, you know, real intrinsic interest. It also can mean that one goes a bit less slowly than one might. I'm mindful of the quote from Murdoch where she says that if you're not going at a snail's pace, you aren't moving at all. And although I think to some extent that's not quite right, I think philosophy can go too slow and you can sort of lose the forest for the trees a little bit. On the other hand, I guess I worry that sometimes I might jump away from philosophy and into thinking about something from the perspective of another discipline, not because I need to then, but because something's too hard in that philosophical moment. So I think it is a character trait that can stop you from going quite as carefully and as slowly as one might and that can be a shame. And as for willfulness, I guess there's a kind of domineering way philosophers can behave and that was certainly part of my training in Oxford as a philosopher and something I don't particularly like then, and I don't particularly like in myself. And I worry sometimes that I'm too willful in relation to students or in relation to colleagues who are trying out ideas that I might not agree with. So I do think it can be a defect, even if there are some things in my work that wouldn't exist as they are if I didn't have those, if I didn't have those traits. A, I love that murder quote and B, thank you for finding ways to look for the negative in this repurposing of vices in your philosophical work. I mean, there's something about it that does strike me as a kind of strategy that at least my therapist has sometimes used with me, which is when I complain about or feel anxious about temperamental vice to point out the ways in which I've been able to use it or I've been able to make something of it or, you know, like the perfectionism or whatever it might be that can be redirected towards some productive end like working harder or pushing myself or something. I mean, was it a conscious thing to do you feel like you were aware of these character traits influencing your work, or is that something that you and sort of consciously involved in that? Or was it something that you reconstruct after the fact? Oh, no, it's totally reconstructed. I thought about it only because I knew you were going to ask me this painful question. I see. Yes. So, so this was this was this was happening without your awareness when it was happening, but but it's visible afterwards. Yes, I think that's I think that's right. And you know, I suppose the the kind of therapist I was or the kind of context in which I worked therapeutically did require that, although, you know, when one always tries to see things positively and to find the good, we did name the bad. So I guess by temperament, I also don't shy away from doing that and probably couldn't be a person who shied away from doing that for me to have done the kind of therapeutic work that I did. Well, the topic of difficult things leads us to question two, I think. Has philosophy ever helped you out of a practical or emotional difficulty in your life? So absolutely. And the answer to that question really is connected to what we were just talking about because I just couldn't have been the therapist I was if I wasn't first a philosopher. And I think there are two kinds of connections here. One is more contingents and has to do with the particular training I had in the particular kind of work that I then ended up doing as a therapist. Yeah, there's a bit more universal. So let me start with the more contingent connection, which is that I was trained in Oxford in the 90s, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that philosophy at that time in Oxford was practised as a bit of a blood sport. Q&A was often incredibly aggressive. People were very domineering and willful, so maybe I get a little bit of that trait from this training. It was also, of course, very male. And I remember as a young graduate student, really consciously deciding that despite feeling out of place as a woman and despite being quite simply scared, I would always stand my ground and ask a question, fight back, hold my own. And then that training proved rather invaluable, much to my surprise. When I found myself working in a therapy group with people with personality disorder, many of whom can have narcissistic, anti-social, obsessive, or aggressive traits. Because I really learned how to stand my ground, and I could challenge people about aspects of their behaviour or their personality that were difficult and that they didn't like to hear. And so philosophy did me great stead as a therapist in virtue of those early days of having to find my voice in that difficult context. The more universal connection, I think, or the deeper connection, is that at least for me the kind of therapist I was really was philosophical. And I want to say right away that there are different kinds of ways to be a therapist. And I'm in no way saying that this is the best way to be a therapist. It was just my style. But I think a lot of what I did that was distinctive in group was to unearth certain kinds of hidden assumptions about how a particular group member or how our culture as a whole conceived of a problem. And in virtue of unearthing them, they could then sort of be brought into the light named and worked with. So I really think of that as doing philosophy about what I was witnessing in group. And to take just one example, almost all the patients who I worked with were people who self-harmed quite severely. And before working clinically, I'd had no experience with self-harm. And really, when I started, struggled to understand it and make sense of it. So I naturally turned to many of the standard frameworks used to make sense of the behavior. And these were frameworks which my colleagues, other clinicians used as well as often the people we were working with themselves. And I just always had this sort of nagging feeling that something really important was missing. The metaphor that comes to mind here is it's almost as if you can sometimes smell about argument. I just sort of smelled that something was off with these frameworks. And I realized at one point that none of the framework said what's true, which is that self-harm is violence. It's violence where the perpetrator and the victim are identical. So there's one respect in which it doesn't fit our prototype of violence. But it's violence nonetheless. And that is really, I think, the orienting concept by which we should understand self-harm. And when I named that for the first time in group, there was this pause and a sort of moment of relief and recognition as if the sort of hidden shameful thing could be seen all of a sudden and therefore worked with. And I guess it's a very nice for me example of something that I think I could never have seen let alone said had I not been a philosopher. Well, there's so much that's fascinating there to pick up on. I mean, one thing just in passing is that there's almost a theme of repurposing negative traits for positive ends, namely the confrontational bloodsport aspect of Oxford philosophy being repurposed as a way of being unafraid of conflict in these therapeutic settings. That seems really interesting to me. And the other thing that seems really interesting and maybe worth pursuing is the idea that sort of what happened in the case study you just gave was if not exactly conceptual invention or innovation, but a kind of finding the right concepts in which to describe something which is given that Murdoch is sort of in the air of this podcast is very much of a piece with how she thinks sort of ethical reflection commonly operates that the challenge is to say what's really happening, to call things what they really are. And that once you've done that, there is a sense in which the sort of the knots you've tied yourself in become untied. Was that a way of thinking about philosophy that you had previously found attractive or or like what in your philosophical background sort of connected with this particular way of intervening? That's so interesting early in my philosophical education both as an undergraduate and then as a BFILD student, I was very interested in Wittgenstein, and I think much of what you said resonates with the idea that philosophy involves sort of finding a way to say things which then allow everything to go back into their places, right, that sort of Wittgensteinian trope. Interestingly though, at this point in my philosophical career, that kind of demandingness and frustration had definitely turned on to Wittgenstein. So I felt very dissatisfied with the lack of genuine answers to some of the more psychological questions that he raised and did not conceive of myself at that time in working in a Wittgensteinian way. But maybe you're right that it's something that nonetheless I carried with me. I mean, at least in the clinic and I'm inclined to say in ethics, naming it is really only the first step. There's quite a lot of work to be done after it's named. So it's true that you can't do the work unless you name it right. But you're just beginning, beginning on the work that needs to be done. So maybe that's one difference in what happens in the clinic in terms of this conceptual reframing and a Murdochian conception of ethics. But it's certainly an interesting parallel that I've really not thought of before. I mean, the other thing that I feel like I have to ask on this philosophy therapy nexus is instead of doing philosophy as therapy, Ella Wittgenstein, you went and did therapy but with a kind of philosophical approach. Did your work as a therapist affect how you do philosophy? I know it affected the subject matter in that part of what you've written philosophically about is say addiction or diminished responsibility or those kinds of questions. But do you think the way in which you do philosophy is informed by your practices as a therapist? I do think it's informed how I do philosophy. I think there are probably at least two ways, maybe more. So one is something that I have knowledge of only because my husband who's also a philosopher Ian Phillips pointed out to me. He says there are places in my papers where it's as if I take off my philosopher's hat and I start to write with the hat and the language of someone who's in the clinic. So for instance, even what I said earlier about how you have to name a problem, that's a very clinical phrase. And these phrases pop up here and there, particularly when he says I'm often trying to make a point which is a little bit more practical, a little bit more ethical about what we ought to do, not just how we ought to think about something. But I think the other way in which it's really affected my writing is that I do write from the perspective of someone who's been in the clinic and I write in the first person in that way. And so obviously that's a very direct way where there's a voice within philosophy now of someone who's also been a therapist. And in ways that's been something that has been a hard thing to learn how to do, I felt quite scared writing in that first personal way when I began. But as I've got older or practiced it more, it's something that actually I think brings out the best of me and is reflective of some of the better papers I've written or the better work I've done. And that's definitely from the clinic. And here I have to fight the temptation to just talk about philosophy and therapy for the rest of the podcast and throw away the original format. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to stick to the format of the podcast and move on to question three, which may take us in a new direction. So is there a work of art that you love in part for its philosophical depth? Yes, so I am delighted to have the chance to talk about this book, which I read last summer and have carried in my heart ever since. And the book is A Heart So White by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. It's absolutely exhilarating. It's the only book which I read from start to end, closed, sat with for a moment or two, and then reopened and started reading again from page one, a bit the way you might a paper that you found really gripping. So I don't know if you know the book, but can I read the first sentence? Sure. I don't know it actually. Yeah, go ahead. So here's how it begins. I did not want to know, but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn't a girl anymore and hadn't long been back from her honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father's gun at her heart. Her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests. So. Wow. Wow, right? Right. Yeah. What do you want to know? So what you want to know when you read that sentence, I mean, for me, it just captured me and I didn't stop reading basically until I finished the book. You want to know why, right? Why? Yeah. Why, why, why did this girl who was no longer a girl do this? And the book really has this kind of the thriller aspect to it. It's not a who done it, but a why done it, but in ways some of the more abstract philosophical themes are really prefigured, I think in that sentence, right? So the book is partially about the pain of knowing the narrator starts by saying he didn't want to know, but did come to know this terrible fact. So it's about the pain of knowing, but it's also about the gap between knowledge and understanding, because although you may come to know these facts, the narrator at the point doesn't understand them. We, the reader, don't understand. And the entire book is to try to shed some understanding about how this came to be, how this could have happened. And so I think that sort of interplay between knowledge and understanding is something that for me really drives my philosophical interest, it drives some of the questions, the particular questions that I've asked. And it's just beautifully, beautifully rendered in this book, as well as sort of a bunch of smaller points about how many of the things we thought we might know or many of the things we thought we understood may just be false. And of course, that's also, I think, an old philosophical theme as well that sometimes you do philosophy. You have to face the fact that various truths you may have cleaved to are not in fact truths. They're mistakes, they're improper analysis you need to let go. I'm really intrigued by the idea that having read it once, you read it again, partly because of the way that interacts with the who done it, why done it aspect, because normally you would think if you've read it, who done it, there's the mystery and at the end you figure out who did it. And then why would you read it again, or certainly your experience of reading it again now knowing who did it is going to be wildly different than your first experience. So why did you want to read it again so soon and what was different about that experience now knowing or whatever you know by the end of the novel? That's a really interesting question. And I think the answer is that why the end of the first read, and I don't want to do a spoiler here for anyone who hasn't read it, but no spoilers. Okay, so by the end of the first read, I could piece together a sort of folk psychological explanation of why this young woman had killed herself in the back room with the other members of her family at the table. But there were more philosophical elements of the explanation that the novel alludes to that I did not yet have my head around. Some of those in particular had to do with the way I think in this book, Madiath is really putting pressure on the concept of the self, the concept of the individual, and also our relationship to time. So to speak first about time, even in that opening sentence, the tenses are somewhat dizzying. We move from what someone doesn't want to know but has since come to know to a person who was a girl but is no longer a girl. And then there's a particular moment described. And so you never know quite where you are in time. And that is a refrain throughout the book partially because he uses this incredibly interesting technique of repetition where exact sentences and indeed passages reappear throughout the book. It's extremely unmooring as a reader. You never know quite where you are. But on the other hand, in the new contextualization of those same sentences or passages, you learn something new about what they mean. And in relation to this idea of self or individuality, another way in which the book is quite unmooring is that there is a pattern of behavior about death and love and guilt and grief, which is repeated throughout the book. It's a pattern which has its origin in Lady Macbeth, the phrase, a heart so white, comes from Lady Macbeth. And it's often quite hard as a reader to know exactly who's being discussed in a moment, whether it really is the person named or whether that person is a stand-in for another triad from another time or place. And part of what's so interesting about that is the way it's as if the repetition of this pattern of human relations makes the individuality of the characters extremely thin, despite the fact that they're all extremely strong characters. So there's this sort of tension between an illusion of self or individuality that they're all striving for. And then this repetition of a paradigm throughout the book, which comes back again and again and again. And so I think the second read really helped me start to see and articulate some of those more abstract themes and just move beyond the original folk psychological explanation of why this young girl shot herself. Yeah. Now I can see why not just philosophical, but philosophical depth is something you would say about the novel. I mean, yeah, it sounds really amazing. I will now seek it out and hopefully this summer I will get a chance to read it. But now I'm going to take us back to philosophy and actually to philosophical pedagogy. So this is question four. If you had a sabbatical leave to work on an entirely new course to teach, what would it be? I really liked this question because thinking about it properly made me think seriously about teaching and the difference between just thinking what you would work on if you had leave and could continue your research or thinking about what you would work on if you had to use that time to actually develop a new course. And at first I didn't track that difference. And so I answered the question just thinking in my mind about what I'd want to work on. And the answer there is somewhat boring. I've spent the last year and a half going relatively deep into learning theory and animal models of addiction and I've become somewhat obsessed with the mind of the rat. And so I jumped at the thought that I might have a few more months just to think about rats and their minds. And although personally I would love to do that, I then thought this is actually the last course that I would want to teach, both because I think it could only be a course that I basically delivered to students as opposed to exploring with them. But also because it would be a course where I really didn't know what more I would get from the teaching that I couldn't just get from my own reading. And so I kind of relished the way that thinking about this question properly made me think about trying to put aside the way one's research and my love of my research can kind of get you stuck in particular and tell you and free you to think a little bit more broadly. So here's the course that I would spend a semester's leave thinking about in order to teach. There's this thing that's been nagging me for, I'm going to say, 15 to 20 years of my life now. I am a committed atheist, but there are these moments that pop up in life where I find myself turning to religious language, religious ideas in order to express something that seems to me very important to express. And I really don't know what to say instead. I don't know what to say as an atheist. So I would love the chance to do a bit of prep and then think with students about how to develop a humanist secular language and ethics that can capture what it is in human experience, which thus far I think we've handed over to religion and don't have other words for. Do you have examples of the kind of sort of religious impulse that you're talking about that sort of finds expression even in an atheistic framework? Yes. I have at least three, so I'll start and we can see how far we get. So the first comes from a really life-defining experience when our girls were little and we were cycling and they were on the back of my bike and we got hit by a car. And I was very badly injured, but both girls escaped from that accident without a single cut or a bruise. And the word I wanted to use to describe how I felt about that was grace. It was just an act of grace that I took all the injury on me and they were spared. There is no secular word that I've come up with which will do that work. The best secular word is luck, but it really doesn't cut it, at least for me if I think oh, you know, how lucky I was that I was hurt and my children weren't. It doesn't have the same meaning precisely because luck is common and trite and in a sense meaningless. It's just a question of chance. So the first place I really started thinking about this was around the concept of grace. The second example is more recent and comes from the fact that at this point in my life I'm at an age where many people I know or the family of many people I know are sick and dying. And what I really want to be able to say is something like I'm praying for you and I can't because it would be false. So instead I say things like I'm thinking of you or I'm really hoping things are okay and it just feels sort of lame and ridiculous and also very passive. And so what I feel like I spend my time doing so it's not to be so passive is worrying. I spent a lot of time worrying about my friends and family and their friends and family. But then that's the last thing you can say to someone. If someone's struggling with illness or death then you say I'm really worrying about you. I mean that's just terrible. You're just burdening them with your emotions. So here I feel there's both the kind of a lack of language but also in a sense a lack of ritual. What is it we should be doing in those moments when really we are powerless but nonetheless want to be alongside someone and do something for them. I'll give you one more example. The last example is the most recent example because I lost a very dear friend this year. This was the consultant psychiatrist of the service where I worked, Steve Pierce, who trained me and ended up being a collaborator and was a wonderful man and a brilliant psychiatrist. Incredibly kind and incredibly able to say things simply and powerfully and directly that helped people. He died young and when Steve died I really felt the force of the question why him. Which I'd never felt before when someone died and in that question there really was for me the idea of an address and that was because there was an idea of an accusation. The question was accusatory and of course that's also not something that I can straightforwardly make sense of as an atheist. So all of these examples are places where I really am a committed atheist, the solution here is not to turn to God but I think there's something missing in our conceptualization of these moments of hardship in life which needs work from a secular humanist perspective and that is the course I would love to teach. That is some time I would love to have to think about. It sounds really amazing and I definitely share your sense that there's a kind of relational aspect to some of these moments where one is sort of reaching out for the thing to relate to and if it's not God, what is it? Sometimes people have this sense, I have it very rarely but I have had it of gratitude directed at things, gratitude for things where it's essential to the experience that it like gratitude is directed at something but I don't really believe in anything to be the object of it and I think that's a piece with the kind of phenomena you're describing and the question of whether we can make sense of them and how to make sense of them seems really gripping to me and I can see why it will be great to think through and teach because unlike the mind of the rats where you might just tell students is what we know about the mind of the rat. It's a place where everyone exploring it would be in a position to from their own sort of first person perspective really contribute something new or surprising or unexpected. Yes, exactly. That's why it would be, I think, such a joy to teach and now I'm thinking if I get the chance I'd never thought about gratitude before. You must come and be a guest lecturer on gratitude, I think with us about gratitude. Or at least I can ask some questions about it and be a guest listener. That would make sense. A guest thinker. Exactly. A guest warrior. That could be me. Well, it may connect with the kinds of anxieties that the final question asks you to reflect on. So this is another Murdoch-inspired question beginning with a quote. It's always a significant question to ask about any philosopher she wrote, what is she afraid of? So what are you afraid of? So what I'm about to say is not my greatest fear, but it is a genuine fear and it's probably the greatest genuine fear that I think is actually connected with philosophy. So the fear is that I'm not really a philosopher. Okay, because you're really a therapist or is it a more general sense of being an imposter or yeah, can you say more about what particular form the sense of fraudulence takes? So I think it's because if I'm a philosopher, I'm definitely a philosopher and a bunch of other things and that's not only a therapist, but also someone who thinks increasingly seriously about the mind of the rat or spent some time working seriously in criminal law or whatever the other conjunct to philosopher and happens to be in that moment. And I guess I do think there's something, at least in how I was trained in philosophy, I of course don't think it needs to be this way, which tends to make us think that you're either a philosopher or you're not as opposed to your philosopher and a bunch of other things. So in reflecting on this question and the answer, I was sort of mindful of how one of the things I can get very frustrated and intolerant about is when philosophers ask the question, what is philosophy? I think I roll my eyes and sort of go to the bar to get another drink rather than staying at the table to be part of that conversation. And I guess I was thinking about how in this particular case that response in me may be a kind of psychological defense mechanism because of course any good answer to that question is going to include some people and exclude others. And I'm scared of being excluded. So I don't know if I've really parsed out how much I think this fear is genuine and how much I think it's a product of some aspects of philosophical culture, which are in no way essential to it, but it certainly is a real fear of mine. And I don't know quite what to do with it or what more to say about it. Maybe the thing to say is that in the end you're more than a philosopher. Certainly being a philosopher plus strikes me as better than the alternative, which is being a philosopher minus. So I'll end by saying thanks, Hannah, for giving me the chance to interview a philosopher and a therapist. Well, thank you so much for having me, Karen. And that was a lovely thing to say, showing yourself as someone who could be a therapist and a philosopher. I'm not sad. Thank you. Thank you. Hannah Picard is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She's the author of Responsibility Without Blame, Addiction in the Self, and Other Essays in Moral Psychology. Thanks for listening to Five Questions. [Music]