Eduardo Mendieta

Eduardo Mendieta is a professor of philosophy at Penn State, University Park, and associate director of the Rock Ethics Institute. He hopes that his affirmation of others’ humanity can nudge the world to be more caring.

 

 

1. What type(s) of civically engaged or public philosophy work do you do?

Arguably I have been doing engaged philosophy since I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, where I was active in the divestment movement, as well as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and the anti-nuke peace network. I was a witness-for-peace delegate during the Nicaraguan Election that led to cease of hostilities there. All of these forms of engaged philosophy took place during the ’80s and early ’90s. As a graduate student, I volunteered to feed homeless people. We would drive out at midnight to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge with huge containers of soup and sandwiches we had made during the evening to feed some of most indigent people then: Homeless people who were also addicts. But there were all kinds of people: mothers with children, young men, white, black, Latino. As important as feeding them was, in retrospect it was the conversations we would have that were important to them—or at least that was the sense of I got from their gratitude that we would stay until dawn talking to many of them.

 

2. Give an example of a successful project.

Some of my work has to do with critical prison studies, a field pioneered by Frankfurt School thinkers, but really made a field of study and critical engagement in the U.S. by Angela Y. Davis. I think the prison-industrial complex is a blemish on the political and ethical character of the nation, along with its sibling, our nation’s inveterate anti-Black racism. So for me the work I began at State Correctional Institution at Benner (SCI-Benner), Pennsylvania, has been one of the most successful projects I have undertaken. Of course, getting into prison to teach is not an easy thing. I had great partners, such as Efrain Marimon, whom I joined in launching the Restorative Justice Initiative. I have been teaching now for a year and a half at SCI-Benner, offering a seminar-like class titled “Quest of the Hero”—a Trojan horse for a philosophy class with a focus on the classics and ethics. This seminar is probably one of the most important things I have done in my life. It has touched deeply my students, and it has also transformed me.

 

3. What motivates you to do this work?

As a kid raised by a single mom, I have been the beneficiary of the generosity and attention of strangers, and I am always looking to give back. In addition, both a sense of ethical duty and moral outrage are great motivators. The question for me is always: What have you done for those least well off in your community? This is how I try to get a sense of the quality of my own moral character.

 

4. In what ways does the work inform your research (or vice-versa)?

Deeply, so that they are entangled inextricably. My early work on liberation theology grew of my Central American peace activism during the Reagan years. My work on cities grew out my concern with the homeless and the destitute in the great metropolises. And my work on prisons grew our out concern with all those millions of people who are warehoused in what someone described aptly as landlocked slave ships.

 

5. In what ways does the work inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?

A lot of this work informs my teaching. How could it not? But—and you may be surprised to hear this—in my teaching I tend to be what some may call conservative. I teach the classics, the arguments, the debates, the figures, the long history of humanity’s conversation with itself across time. One of my primary aims as a teacher is to inspire respect and awe for the long conversation that philosophy is, but also a sense that this history, this tradition, these texts, are students’ to inherit, to own, to own up to. Philosophy at the very least is its history, and it is one that is ongoing and incomplete. I want all my students to enter into the temple that philosophy is, and feel that they can be active, creative, transformative contributors to its preservation, renewal, and expansion.

 

6. If someone wanted to do engaged philosophy like yours, what steps or resources would you recommend?

The most important thing is that you should abandon all pretension that engaged philosophy is about your career or your theoretical work in philosophy. This has to come from the core of your being, and it has to be gratis. Second, team up with people. Others out there share your commitment to justice, fairness, and doing something for those who our society has deemed unwanted, unworthy, disposable. Third, make sure to make time, to give time, to this—be ready for the long haul.

 

7. How does your department or institution support your civic engagement work? How would you like to see them support you?

My prison work is not something I go trumpeting around, especially with colleagues. My head of department, Amy Allen, knows about it, and she is very supportive. While the Penn State philosophy department does not directly support my work, it is very different with the Rock Ethics Institute, for which I am an associate director. My colleague and the director of the Rock, Ted Toadvine, is unwaveringly supportive. The Institute’s Restorative Justice Initiative has a budget that allows us to host speakers and workshops, and to buy the books for the courses I teach in prison. My prison work itself is pro bono—I wouldn’t do it if I had to be paid. Now, on the other hand, one of the Initiative’s primary goals is to see if we can persuade Penn State to deliver degree-granting programs at SCI-Benner and several other prisons in the area; our delivering curriculum now is part of ramping up such possible programs. For me personally, however, teaching in the prison is about being there for the “citizens in transition” as Superintendent Tammy Ferguson said to me one day. That is why I need to be there—to help these forgotten citizens and remind them that there are people on the “outside” who care about them.

 

8. What is your favorite quote and why?

There is one from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia that is always taped to the inside of my forehead, “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (39, 1978 Verso edition). Adorno is glossing Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great moral philosophers of the 20^th century. What is key in the quote is the realization that all ethical indolence and callousness, all moral turpitude and insouciance stem from the banality of comfort, the sense that we have a place in the world which is ours, that is owed to us, that no one can contest it, that whoever may bump against its borders is an intruder, nay a menace—all of that is what this quote challenges. To be moral is to have the fortitude and courage to look at the world through the eyes of the homeless, the destitute, the refugee, the orphan, the single mother displaced by war, the inmate in a prison where their lives are being wasted.

 

9. What gets you out of bed in the morning? What is your passion?

That the day ahead allows me to be there, present, affirming the humanity of others, and that this form of ethical witnessing may have nudged the world toward being a more caring world. This sounds so corny, but I do get up every morning thinking: I am going to do something good today and I hope to touch someone’s heart.

 

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