A quem devemos ter lealdade — à versão de nós mesmos fazendo escolhas ou à versão de nós mesmos que será afetada por elas?
Alice Gregory
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| "Eu tenho um lado um pouco exagerado", disse Paul, professor de filosofia em Yale e autor de "Transformative Experience". Fotografia de Jordan Tiberio para The New Yorker |
O deserto de Sonora, que cobre grande parte do sudoeste dos Estados Unidos, é uma vasta extensão de terra árida onde entidades caricaturais — papa-léguas, tumbleweeds, suculentas altas como postes de telefone — fazem aparições ocasionais. Foi nessa paisagem icônica dos Looney Tunes que dezenas de filósofos se reuniram no inverno de 2022 em um rancho de três mil acres nos arredores de Tucson, Arizona, como se estivessem habitando um experimento mental de seu próprio projeto. Entre a prática de arco e flecha e as aulas de laço, eles se encontraram em uma estrutura de adobe, onde se falava de "relações de inconsistência" e "o conceito de implicação". "Como 'provavelmente' funciona?" foi unanimemente considerado uma das perguntas mais polarizadoras que uma pessoa poderia fazer.
Eles estavam lá para participar do Ranch Metaphysics Workshop, uma conferência anual concebida há quase vinte anos por Laurie Paul, professora de filosofia na Universidade de Yale. Paul é autora de "Transformative Experience", uma investigação filosófica amplamente lida sobre mudança pessoal que foi traduzida para o francês, japonês e árabe, com traduções para alemão e mandarim em andamento. Paul, cujo trabalho ganhou o Prêmio Lebowitz de 2020 por conquistas filosóficas, havia escolhido o rancho por seu pequeno refeitório, que ela esperava que pudesse promover conversas íntimas. Ela queria que o evento combinasse a discussão rigorosa de conferências acadêmicas mais típicas com, como ela me disse, "ser meio legal". Era uma tentativa, mesmo que apenas por alguns dias por ano, de fazer engenharia social de parte do bullying de um campo infame por uma agressão intelectual tão intensa que reduzir um interlocutor às lágrimas era há muito considerado uma marca de debate bem-sucedido.
"Vocês estão apenas fazendo coisas juntos, e isso é completamente separado do tipo de atividade mental que é a filosofia", me disse Ned Hall, um filósofo da Universidade de Harvard que ajudou Paul com as primeiras iterações do workshop. "Vocês estão montando cavalos! E ninguém é bom nisso!" Esporte equestre: o grande equalizador. (O cenário também era uma espécie de piada interna sobre o célebre filósofo Willard Van Orman Quine, que era conhecido por uma visão de mundo minimalista que ele certa vez descreveu como sendo semelhante a um "gosto por paisagens desérticas".)
"Eu tenho um lado um pouco exagerado", Paul, cujas características fortes e simétricas fizeram sua escolha de se vestir como John Wayne parecer elegante em vez de tola, me disse. Ela gesticulou para trás em direção a uma fogueira. Ao redor dela havia uma dúzia de pessoas, muitas das quais, a pedido de Paul, também estavam vestidas com trajes ocidentais. Entre elas estava Ram Neta, uma filósofa da Universidade da Carolina do Norte em Chapel Hill, que ficou feliz em vestir uma camisa xadrez, mas havia traçado o limite, mais cedo naquele dia, para um chapéu de cowboy — o próprio Paul — que ela havia colocado de brincadeira em sua cabeça antes de sua palestra. "Desculpe, não posso fazer isso", ele disse ao público, antes de remover o chapéu e perguntar — com a ajuda de uma equação rabiscada em um quadro branco — "O que são opiniões?"
O trabalho de Paul se opõe a uma tendência poderosa na filosofia, que, como é praticada hoje, pode às vezes parecer mais ciência do que literatura. No último século, um dos objetivos do campo tem sido erradicar a imprecisão e as inconsistências que surgem quando falamos e escrevemos — para fazer a linguagem se assemelhar mais à aritmética. A abordagem, adotada em Viena nas décadas de 1920 e 1930 e eventualmente exportada para a América, aumentou as investigações especulativas, descritivas e semirreligiosas com fórmulas e extensas provas matemáticas. Essa busca implacável, às vezes aparentemente neurótica, por clareza teve o efeito irônico de tornar grande parte da filosofia contemporânea quase indecifrável para pessoas de fora.
No rancho, enquanto os filósofos pastoreavam o gado e bebiam tequila, Paul e eu demos uma volta por uma extensão de arbustos. Os saltos de suas botas pretas de cowboy, pisando no solo, criaram uma nuvem de poeira que obscureceu seus pés. Paul explicou que, em seu campo, a experiência em primeira pessoa — "moleza", como ela disse — normalmente não é discutida. Ela, no entanto, achava que isso poderia ser tratado de forma precisa e rigorosa, da mesma forma que seus colegas poderiam falar sobre quantos grãos de areia constituem um monte. Paul acredita que as ferramentas de sua disciplina podem, como ela diz, "nos dar um tipo de sabedoria e significado para a vida", mas ela está determinada a não obscurecer as questões às quais são aplicadas. Afinal, devemos admirar estátuas, não os cinzéis com os quais são esculpidas.
"Eu simplesmente sinto que a experiência tem um tipo de valor", disse Paul hesitantemente, como se acreditasse estar dizendo algo controverso. A filosofia tende a atrair pessoas que, ela disse, "gostam de estar separadas da vida cotidiana". Uma sombra projetada por um cacto saguaro centenário passou por seu rosto. "Enquanto eu estou totalmente confusa, fascinada e perturbada pela vida cotidiana, e estou desde, tipo, o ensino fundamental." Fazia cerca de dez anos desde que Paul pediu pela primeira vez a seus colegas — em uma disciplina que toma como certa a questão de como seria ser um morcego — para considerar como seria ser pai.
“Transformative Experience”, publicado, como todos os seus escritos, sob o nome L. A. Paul, e lançado pela Oxford University Press em 2014, foi sua tentativa de examinar, em aproximadamente duzentas páginas, os tipos especiais de situações que mudam não apenas o que sabemos, mas também quem somos. Essas experiências transformadoras fornecem novos conhecimentos que antes seriam inacessíveis para nós, e com esse conhecimento nossas preferências, valores e autoconcepção são fundamentalmente alterados. Uma conversão religiosa pode ser um exemplo de uma experiência transformadora. Assim como perder um membro, tomar LSD ou ir para a guerra. Mas foi ter um filho que deu a Paul a ideia para o livro e, de fato, ter um filho se tornou seu tema central, embora nem sempre explícito.
O livro surgiu de um artigo de trabalho, intitulado “O que você não pode esperar quando está esperando”, que Paul apresentou pela primeira vez em uma palestra dois anos antes. Nele, ela argumentava que as ferramentas convencionais de tomada de decisão não funcionam ao escolher se quer ter um filho. A “abordagem natural” — refletir sobre como seria, apelar ao testemunho de outras pessoas — era, ela argumentava, insuficiente. E nenhuma experiência análoga (cuidar de uma sobrinha, por exemplo) poderia lhe dar algo além de uma aproximação defeituosa da experiência real. A questão de ter ou não um filho era, para Paul, uma espécie de enigma que iluminava os limites da racionalidade. Ela explorou a questão por meio da estrutura da teoria da decisão normativa, cuja premissa é que devemos agir para maximizar o valor esperado, seja ele qual for — felicidade pessoal, por exemplo, ou lucros anuais da empresa, ou a expectativa de vida média de uma população. (O encapsulamento mais elegante da ideia é a aposta de Pascal, que faz o caso utilitário para acreditar em Deus: "Se você ganha, você ganha tudo; se você perde, você não perde nada.") Mas tal lógica, argumenta Paulo, falha diante de uma experiência transformadora. Escolher passar por tal experiência, nas ocasiões em que a escolha é até possível, requer que violemos quem consideramos que nosso eu atual é. A quem devemos ter lealdade — a versão de nós mesmos fazendo escolhas, ou a versão de nós mesmos afetada por essas escolhas?
Paul estava morando em Canberra, Austrália, com uma bolsa de pesquisa na Universidade Nacional Australiana quando teve seu primeiro filho, em janeiro de 2004. A data prevista para o parto era dezembro — verão lá — e ela passou as últimas semanas muito quentes da gravidez se arrastando pelo campus à noite, geralmente com o marido, o sociólogo irlandês Kieran Healy. Paul estava lendo os livros que deveria estar lendo para se preparar, mas ela se sentia alienada por suas "avaliações alegres" sobre como era a gravidez, e ela tinha a impressão de que, no mínimo, os livros a estavam embalando em uma falsa sensação de controle. Uma vez, ela ficou tão frustrada que jogou um dos volumes do outro lado da sala. Uma semana se passou, e depois outra. Quando ela finalmente entrou em trabalho de parto, uma enfermeira do hospital perguntou se ela tinha trazido um espelho. Ela queria um, para assistir ao parto enquanto acontecia? "Eu estava tipo, 'Hum, ok, claro'", Paul lembrou. “Mas, antes, eu pensava comigo mesma, Não, eu realmente não estou interessada em ver muito sangue.”
Paul disse que ela se sentiu como “uma máquina medieval, uma roda gigante girando e lentamente abrindo portas gigantes e pesadas.” Ela estava sobrecarregada, incapaz de compreender o que iria acontecer. Quando ela imaginava a cena, sempre era na terceira pessoa. Agora ela era essa pessoa. “E elas simplesmente entram em conflito fundamentalmente,” Paul disse. “Elas não são a mesma perspectiva, e não há como elas se unirem.” Mas olhar para si mesma no espelho dando à luz “tornou o incoerente coerente,” ela disse. “Isso quebrou todas as maneiras regulares que eu sabia anteriormente de dar sentido a mim mesma.” (Paul tem consistentemente afirmado que gerar fisicamente o próprio filho, ao contrário de adotar um, não é um pré-requisito para as mudanças epistêmicas que ela identifica como as mais importantes.)
Quando Paul deu a palestra, em 2012, ela tinha quarenta e seis anos e dois filhos na escola primária. “Foi bem surpreendente para mim que os filósofos não estivessem falando sobre isso”, ela lembrou. Mas uma sensação justa de que seus colegas estavam falhando em abordar a experiência de ter um filho não acalmou sua ansiedade sobre ser a única a fazê-lo. “Isso vai arruinar minha carreira”, Paul se lembra de pensar. “Tudo vai acabar, porque aqui estou eu falando sobre bebês.”
Mas o oposto aconteceu. Quando um rascunho do artigo apareceu online, em 2013, ele foi recebido com ampla cobertura, tanto em blogs acadêmicos quanto em sites de publicações tradicionais, incluindo este. Em um artigo da NPR, a psicóloga Tania Lombrozo chamou o artigo de uma “fusão elegante da vida real com a filosofia real”. Houve críticas: alguns filósofos questionaram as especificidades da modelagem de decisão de Paul, outros com o solipsismo de focar tanto no pai expectante em vez da criança ou do mundo em geral. Mas a resposta geral foi um desejo entusiasmado de que Paul expandisse seu argumento. O artigo foi publicado em uma edição especial da Res Philosophica, uma importante revista trimestral de filosofia, acompanhado de outros treze artigos respondendo a ele.
“Transformative Experience” foi lançado um ano depois. Como a própria Paul, seu estilo é acessível e amigável. A epígrafe é uma citação da série Winnie-the-Pooh de A. A. Milne, e seu experimento mental de abertura estendido envolve vampiros. Como acontece com a maioria das obras de filosofia acadêmica, o livro pode parecer repetitivo. (Paul considera a repetição necessária e a comparou a examinar uma pedra preciosa lapidada — segurando-a contra a luz e girando-a lentamente para ver todas as facetas quase idênticas.) No entanto, dado o assunto, a repetição é mais poética do que redundante. “Para muitas grandes escolhas de vida, só aprendemos o que precisamos saber depois de fazê-lo, e mudamos a nós mesmos no processo de fazê-lo”, ela escreve. Paul defende a revelação. Ela argumenta que devemos fazer nossas escolhas com humildade — com base em “se queremos descobrir quem nos tornaremos”.
A experiência transformadora agora tem sua própria entrada na Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Foi tema de uma performance de dança moderna, uma feira de arte italiana, um volume de vários autores publicado pela Oxford University Press e, na primavera passada, uma conferência em Yale, com acadêmicos proeminentes de várias disciplinas, incluindo o psicólogo Paul Bloom, a cientista cognitiva Molly Crockett e a filósofa Agnes Callard. A conferência "revelou seu lugar no campo, intelectualmente", Callard me disse. A noção de experiência transformadora foi uma "mudança de paradigma duradoura".
Nem todo mundo está convencido do argumento de Paul. Elizabeth Barnes, uma filósofa da Universidade da Virgínia, me disse que a ideia de privilegiar "a versão mãe de mim" sobre a versão "que está pensando em trazê-la à existência" a deixa desconfortável. "Acho que é totalmente racional preservar seus valores atuais!", disse Barnes. O filósofo britânico Richard Pettigrew escreveu uma réplica de um livro no qual ele defendia um sistema complicado de classificações de valores que poderiam ser somadas, resultando em uma espécie de votação democrática entre os eus. Muitos questionaram como articular o que, exatamente, poderia ser considerado uma experiência transformadora: para que a ideia tenha valor, a classificação teria que ser bem restrita. Mas quão restrita, e quem decide?
Mesmo aqueles que discordam da abordagem de Paul tendem a admirar, ainda que a contragosto, sua inteligência. "Foi muito astuto", Christopher Meacham, um filósofo da Universidade de Massachusetts, Amherst, me disse sobre a escolha de Paul de enquadrar o dilema por meio da teoria da decisão. "Foi uma boa marca, um bom marketing", ele acrescentou, insistindo que "não quis dizer isso de forma depreciativa". A maioria dos pais, ele disse, não está "lendo atentamente os estudos de felicidade ou jogando os gráficos para cima, mas nos perguntamos: 'Quando podemos nos dar ao luxo de fazer isso? Como ter um filho mudará a trajetória de nossas carreiras?'" Ainda assim, Meacham disse que não estava "super convencido" sobre a formulação de Paul.
"Se você apenas resumir a conclusão de Laurie, há uma monotonia nela", Callard me disse. “Mas isso é tudo filosofia. Quer dizer, o que Descartes conclui? Que o mundo externo existe! Mas no caminho ele também surgiu com um monte de bons argumentos para o porquê de talvez não existir.”
Assim como o artigo original de Paul, “Transformative Experience” recebeu atenção significativa na grande imprensa. No Times, David Brooks dedicou uma coluna a ele, chamando a formulação de Paul do dilema de “engenhosa”. O livro fez de Paul um dos poucos filósofos contemporâneos cujo trabalho é familiar para pessoas fora da academia.
Sometime around 2018, I became one of those people. And when I approached Paul about the possibility of a profile, it was in the spirit of self-help. I was thirty-one and obsessed with whether or not I should have a child. The question felt huge and opaque—like one that neither data nor anecdote could solve. I thought about it all the time, though “thinking” is probably too precise a verb. It was more like a constant buzz, scoring the background of daily life in a tone that registered somewhere between urgency and tedium. The bad parts were easy to picture: less sleep, less time, less money. The awesome parts—expelling a new person out of my own body, say—were, quite literally, inconceivable. The dilemma felt impossible, as if I were attempting to convert dollars into the currency of a country that didn’t yet exist.
It did not help that every week it seemed that some gifted writer published a book or an anguished piece of first-person writing about the psychological perils of procreation. Having a baby was brutal. It was annihilating. Its effects were both devastatingly material and mystically vague. These memoirs—sometimes they were essays or “novels”—were collectively spoken of as a new genre of literature, representing an urgent corrective to the rosy, delusional portrayal of motherhood that had apparently come before, of which neither I nor anyone I knew could think of a single serious example. I read these books as I would gossip magazines at the grocery store: quickly and with a frantic, dismissive pleasure.
I found Paul’s work, meanwhile, to be therapeutic. It provided exactly the sort of comfort I always sought in moments of anguish: not a solution or advice, or even a description, but the validation that, yes, the problem really was as major and intractable as I thought. I liked (of course I liked) that her academic concerns about the subject were oriented not around climate change or orphans but around, for all intents and purposes, me. There was some solace in the knowledge that here was a person trying—as philosophers do, at their best—to lend intellectual credibility to what might otherwise remain private emotional intuitions. The fact that I was unfamiliar with the formal logic that undergirded Paul’s work seemed irrelevant.
When we met for the first time, in 2018, it was in Paul’s wood-panelled office at Yale, and she indulged my naïve, nontechnical curiosity about her work. I recounted to her my conversations with other people about the issue. “It’s always more interesting to do something than not to do it,” one friend had argued. “It’s the best way to stop thinking about yourself all the time,” a friend’s mother had said, with a little edge. The chance to fall in love with someone I’d never met—an argument I occasionally made to myself—was appealing, I told Paul, as was the idea, in the words of one nonreligious friend, of “finally knowing what your soul is for.” Paul, who had once described such ruminations as “an interesting exercise in imaginative fiction,” was gentle in her response.
She reiterated what she had written in her book: the testimony of other people should be regarded with wariness. This struck me as self-evidently correct. I obviously could not trust the guidance of people who did not have children (they didn’t have children), but neither could I trust the guidance of people who did have children (they had children!). I rattled off all the other circumstantial reasons that my friends’ thoughts on the matter should have no bearing on my own: one had parents who lived nearby; another wasn’t interested in having a career; a few were extremely wealthy; two lived in Berlin. Why would I listen to them? I left Paul’s office embarrassed to have come to her with such commonplace concerns, but also reassured by her affirmation that, yes, I was right to be troubled by them.
Paul dates the origin of her intellectual life to her adolescence, which she spent enduring, as she has said, “the extremely boring suburbs of Chicago” and reading “The Lord of the Rings.” Paul, the eldest of three children, described herself as “the second most unpopular person in school.” (This was less an attempt at humor than a quantitative analysis: Paul still recalls the name—and the enthusiasms—of the most unpopular person.) Puzzled by her low rank in the social hierarchy, Paul thought, I need to analyze this. Why was she being made fun of? What was she doing wrong?
By the end of this examination, Paul had changed nearly everything about herself: her hair, her clothes, her gait, her gestures. She stopped trying to talk to her peers about Tolkien and joined the badminton team. It was a success. “I constructed a response that ultimately worked,” she told me. Paul made friends. Soon, she was dating a baseball player.
Paul recounted this gut renovation of her personality and appearance without shame. This was not a story about someone who had forsaken her true self to please others. This was a story about someone who had identified an obstacle and, through dogged accounting, surmounted it. Paul has come to think of this period as the beginning of her decades-long attempt to decipher life as it is lived, not as it is schematized by contemporary philosophy.
But the tools that Paul needed to do such work were not yet at her disposal. She attended Antioch College, a small liberal-arts school in rural Ohio known for its radical politics, lack of grades, and chronic underfunding. At Antioch, philosophy “seemed to consist of meditation exercises,” as Paul once put it, recalling a fellow-student making a photo mobile for his senior thesis. She majored in chemistry and biology, and planned to be a doctor. But, during an admissions interview at Harvard Medical School, she changed her mind. She remembers looking out at the imposing edifice of Widener Library and having an almost aesthetic epiphany: she wanted to be part of an intellectual community like the one she saw in front of her, and medical school did not belong in that vision. Paul went home and withdrew all her applications.
Paul eventually enrolled in a Master of Arts program at Antioch University in which students designed their own academic course of study. While deciding on a direction, she got a job doing airport pickups and drop-offs for professors who had speaking engagements at Antioch. One day, she was sent to retrieve Quentin Smith, then a philosopher at Purdue University. That drive resulted in a reading assignment (Heidegger’s “Being and Time”), a pronouncement (“You are a philosopher”), and a directive (“Study with me”). Paul attended Smith’s talk at Antioch—though she has no memory of it—and they exchanged contact information.
But she still couldn’t figure out her academic path. Her father, a health-insurance executive, and her mother, a nurse, were disappointed that she was not pursuing medicine, and Paul decided that until she knew what she wanted to study—and could explain it convincingly—it was better to tell them as little as possible. She studied German in Berlin and then Buddhist philosophy at a monastery in India, but left frustrated with a teacher’s insistence on the need for faith. She returned to Antioch, where Smith had been appointed a visiting professor, and entered into an intellectual apprenticeship with him.
Smith was considered strange. He stared at the stars for hours on end, and was rumored to have dug a hole at the beach and attempted to live in it. Paul was uncertain how much of Smith’s personality was a performance and how much was real. He was interested in the origins of the universe and whether there was a God—“Not questions I was interested in,” Paul said—but they both agreed that the significance of experience had been neglected by contemporary philosophy, or what little Paul knew of it.
Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her. Perhaps, he said, they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum. A letter-writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision-by-mail with three of them. Paul offered each a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about their work, as well as comment on a paper of her own. They agreed to correspond with her, she now suspects, “not quite knowing what they were signing up for.” Every two weeks for many months, Paul mailed at least twenty typewritten pages to each philosopher, attempting to dissect their arguments one by one. They responded to all of Paul’s letters. By the end of the experiment, Paul felt surer of herself. She wrote a paper about the philosophy of time—“Truth Conditions of Tensed Sentence Types”—and used that, along with letters of recommendation from her epistolary tutors, to apply to twenty graduate programs, which she chose based on which had the lowest acceptance rates. She got into all but two and decided on Princeton, which was the most prestigious and home to David Lewis and Saul Kripke, two of the most famous working philosophers at the time. Paul arrived in 1993, having heard of hardly anyone in the department.
“I was overconfident,” Paul recalled. “I had a background in natural science, these letters of recommendation.” But she felt “like an alien,” she said. “I just did not fit in.” Panicked, she began to audit undergraduate philosophy classes. “I did a version of what I did in middle school,” she said, laughing. “I realized I needed to learn how to do this work from the point of view of people in the field. I needed to learn, quickly, the jargon and assumptions and history.”
A black-and-white photograph taken at the time shows the members of the philosophy department seated on the steps of a Gothic-style building. Professors in blazers sit among students in bluejeans. Paul appears in the front row, arms crossed, with a shaved head, in dark, gauzy clothing. She is smiling, but barely. Multiple people I spoke with, including Paul, talked about the culture of Princeton’s philosophy department regretfully. It was “combative” and “hostile,” a place of “uncharitable posturing” and “blood sport.” Rumors swirled that the female graduate students were there only because of affirmative action. But the general antagonism, though especially intense at Princeton, was not unique to the university. Jonathan Schaffer, a philosopher at Rutgers and a friend of Paul’s from that time, characterized the discipline back then as “a conservative, shitty, male-dominated holdout.” Sexual harassment was rampant in the field. To insulate herself from it, Paul tried to make her dating life “very obvious” to everyone. “You just had to find yourself a protector,” she told me, “and sort of parade this person around.”
Of her time in graduate school, Paul said, “I learned at David’s knee.” David was David Lewis, a bearded Australophile and model-train enthusiast referred to affectionately by his colleagues as the “machine in the ghost.” He was known for making the radical argument that “possible” worlds are as real as our own, a theory that is credited with reinvigorating twentieth-century metaphysics.
In her fourth year, Paul sat in on a fall seminar that Lewis gave on causation. Lewis, she learned, had read her graduate-school application and liked her paper, and she went on to revise it with his help. It became one of seven papers that she published while in graduate school, an accomplishment made possible, Paul has said, by the “devastating objections” that Lewis would leave for her in the margins of her drafts; she knew that there was no journal editor “who was going to say anything worse than what David had said to me.”
After Paul graduated, in 1999, she published two books about causation with her Princeton classmate Ned Hall and held a series of academic jobs. She got tenure at the University of Arizona in 2007. Five years later, in 2012, she attended a conference in Nottingham, England, where Jonathan Schaffer was delivering a keynote speech. The work Paul was doing at the time was “the sort of very dry and abstract stuff that nobody outside the discipline understands or cares about,” Schaffer said. But she was also playing around with the ideas that would coalesce in “Transformative Experience,” and when she spoke of the work in progress to Schaffer she referred to it as her “little project on the side.”
One morning, the two of them went for a run, during which Paul confided that she was professionally demoralized. “She felt like nobody was really citing her, nobody’s work was really engaging with hers, and she just felt so defeated,” Schaffer recalled. She told him that it was as if she were sending out messages in a bottle and having nothing come back. The image in Schaffer’s mind was more poignant: “It was like she was standing alone in a corner of a crowded room. Everyone saw her there, everyone thought well of her, but nobody was trying to talk to her.” He remembers their conversation so vividly because of its timing. “Here was someone who felt so excluded, so frustrated with her profession,” he said, “and within a year—it really was just a year—she became this celebrated figure. She really did not expect that kind of reception.”
By the end of this examination, Paul had changed nearly everything about herself: her hair, her clothes, her gait, her gestures. She stopped trying to talk to her peers about Tolkien and joined the badminton team. It was a success. “I constructed a response that ultimately worked,” she told me. Paul made friends. Soon, she was dating a baseball player.
Paul recounted this gut renovation of her personality and appearance without shame. This was not a story about someone who had forsaken her true self to please others. This was a story about someone who had identified an obstacle and, through dogged accounting, surmounted it. Paul has come to think of this period as the beginning of her decades-long attempt to decipher life as it is lived, not as it is schematized by contemporary philosophy.
But the tools that Paul needed to do such work were not yet at her disposal. She attended Antioch College, a small liberal-arts school in rural Ohio known for its radical politics, lack of grades, and chronic underfunding. At Antioch, philosophy “seemed to consist of meditation exercises,” as Paul once put it, recalling a fellow-student making a photo mobile for his senior thesis. She majored in chemistry and biology, and planned to be a doctor. But, during an admissions interview at Harvard Medical School, she changed her mind. She remembers looking out at the imposing edifice of Widener Library and having an almost aesthetic epiphany: she wanted to be part of an intellectual community like the one she saw in front of her, and medical school did not belong in that vision. Paul went home and withdrew all her applications.
Paul eventually enrolled in a Master of Arts program at Antioch University in which students designed their own academic course of study. While deciding on a direction, she got a job doing airport pickups and drop-offs for professors who had speaking engagements at Antioch. One day, she was sent to retrieve Quentin Smith, then a philosopher at Purdue University. That drive resulted in a reading assignment (Heidegger’s “Being and Time”), a pronouncement (“You are a philosopher”), and a directive (“Study with me”). Paul attended Smith’s talk at Antioch—though she has no memory of it—and they exchanged contact information.
But she still couldn’t figure out her academic path. Her father, a health-insurance executive, and her mother, a nurse, were disappointed that she was not pursuing medicine, and Paul decided that until she knew what she wanted to study—and could explain it convincingly—it was better to tell them as little as possible. She studied German in Berlin and then Buddhist philosophy at a monastery in India, but left frustrated with a teacher’s insistence on the need for faith. She returned to Antioch, where Smith had been appointed a visiting professor, and entered into an intellectual apprenticeship with him.
Smith was considered strange. He stared at the stars for hours on end, and was rumored to have dug a hole at the beach and attempted to live in it. Paul was uncertain how much of Smith’s personality was a performance and how much was real. He was interested in the origins of the universe and whether there was a God—“Not questions I was interested in,” Paul said—but they both agreed that the significance of experience had been neglected by contemporary philosophy, or what little Paul knew of it.
Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her. Perhaps, he said, they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum. A letter-writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision-by-mail with three of them. Paul offered each a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about their work, as well as comment on a paper of her own. They agreed to correspond with her, she now suspects, “not quite knowing what they were signing up for.” Every two weeks for many months, Paul mailed at least twenty typewritten pages to each philosopher, attempting to dissect their arguments one by one. They responded to all of Paul’s letters. By the end of the experiment, Paul felt surer of herself. She wrote a paper about the philosophy of time—“Truth Conditions of Tensed Sentence Types”—and used that, along with letters of recommendation from her epistolary tutors, to apply to twenty graduate programs, which she chose based on which had the lowest acceptance rates. She got into all but two and decided on Princeton, which was the most prestigious and home to David Lewis and Saul Kripke, two of the most famous working philosophers at the time. Paul arrived in 1993, having heard of hardly anyone in the department.
“I was overconfident,” Paul recalled. “I had a background in natural science, these letters of recommendation.” But she felt “like an alien,” she said. “I just did not fit in.” Panicked, she began to audit undergraduate philosophy classes. “I did a version of what I did in middle school,” she said, laughing. “I realized I needed to learn how to do this work from the point of view of people in the field. I needed to learn, quickly, the jargon and assumptions and history.”
A black-and-white photograph taken at the time shows the members of the philosophy department seated on the steps of a Gothic-style building. Professors in blazers sit among students in bluejeans. Paul appears in the front row, arms crossed, with a shaved head, in dark, gauzy clothing. She is smiling, but barely. Multiple people I spoke with, including Paul, talked about the culture of Princeton’s philosophy department regretfully. It was “combative” and “hostile,” a place of “uncharitable posturing” and “blood sport.” Rumors swirled that the female graduate students were there only because of affirmative action. But the general antagonism, though especially intense at Princeton, was not unique to the university. Jonathan Schaffer, a philosopher at Rutgers and a friend of Paul’s from that time, characterized the discipline back then as “a conservative, shitty, male-dominated holdout.” Sexual harassment was rampant in the field. To insulate herself from it, Paul tried to make her dating life “very obvious” to everyone. “You just had to find yourself a protector,” she told me, “and sort of parade this person around.”
Of her time in graduate school, Paul said, “I learned at David’s knee.” David was David Lewis, a bearded Australophile and model-train enthusiast referred to affectionately by his colleagues as the “machine in the ghost.” He was known for making the radical argument that “possible” worlds are as real as our own, a theory that is credited with reinvigorating twentieth-century metaphysics.
In her fourth year, Paul sat in on a fall seminar that Lewis gave on causation. Lewis, she learned, had read her graduate-school application and liked her paper, and she went on to revise it with his help. It became one of seven papers that she published while in graduate school, an accomplishment made possible, Paul has said, by the “devastating objections” that Lewis would leave for her in the margins of her drafts; she knew that there was no journal editor “who was going to say anything worse than what David had said to me.”
After Paul graduated, in 1999, she published two books about causation with her Princeton classmate Ned Hall and held a series of academic jobs. She got tenure at the University of Arizona in 2007. Five years later, in 2012, she attended a conference in Nottingham, England, where Jonathan Schaffer was delivering a keynote speech. The work Paul was doing at the time was “the sort of very dry and abstract stuff that nobody outside the discipline understands or cares about,” Schaffer said. But she was also playing around with the ideas that would coalesce in “Transformative Experience,” and when she spoke of the work in progress to Schaffer she referred to it as her “little project on the side.”
One morning, the two of them went for a run, during which Paul confided that she was professionally demoralized. “She felt like nobody was really citing her, nobody’s work was really engaging with hers, and she just felt so defeated,” Schaffer recalled. She told him that it was as if she were sending out messages in a bottle and having nothing come back. The image in Schaffer’s mind was more poignant: “It was like she was standing alone in a corner of a crowded room. Everyone saw her there, everyone thought well of her, but nobody was trying to talk to her.” He remembers their conversation so vividly because of its timing. “Here was someone who felt so excluded, so frustrated with her profession,” he said, “and within a year—it really was just a year—she became this celebrated figure. She really did not expect that kind of reception.”
Paul also did not expect that, in the years following the publication of “Transformative Experience,” she would undergo a series of other transformative experiences herself. In 2017, Paul, who was teaching at U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, moved out of the house where she was living with her family and into a bungalow of her own nearby. The next year, Paul and her husband, who had been together for twenty-two years, divorced. Soon afterward, she moved to New Haven, where she had accepted a job at Yale.
Paul declined to discuss the exact reasons for the divorce, but she was open about its effects on her. She came to feel that divorce was just as dramatically transformative as having children. Paul compared marriage to a textile. Her identity had become so tightly woven together with her husband’s that the individual stitches were no longer detectable. All she could see was the general design. She described their divorce as “ripping out the center of the pattern.” Paul had assumed that, if she worked diligently, it would be possible to identify and salvage the threads that had originally been just her. But the threads, she found, were shredded.
Paul declined to discuss the exact reasons for the divorce, but she was open about its effects on her. She came to feel that divorce was just as dramatically transformative as having children. Paul compared marriage to a textile. Her identity had become so tightly woven together with her husband’s that the individual stitches were no longer detectable. All she could see was the general design. She described their divorce as “ripping out the center of the pattern.” Paul had assumed that, if she worked diligently, it would be possible to identify and salvage the threads that had originally been just her. But the threads, she found, were shredded.
“I had not realized just how many of the properties that I would have used to describe myself—that I would have thought of as essential to me—were, in fact, the result of my relationship,” she said. If having a child had taught her things that she didn’t know about herself, Paul felt that, in divorce, she was reminded of things about herself that she had forgotten.
There were many more changes to come. She had to work out a complex custody arrangement with her ex-husband. She bought an apartment in New Haven, inside a converted church rumored to have been struck by lightning. There was a global pandemic, which she weathered in part in Thailand. Her father died, and she and a sibling had to place their mother in assisted living. She began dating again, and eventually got remarried—to a German lawyer and policy consultant with two children of his own. “I’ve had a lot going on” is how Paul put it to me.
Last summer, we met for lunch at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. For the previous few weeks, I had been avoiding e-mails from Paul inviting me on a trip she was taking to England, where she and a handful of colleagues would walk through the Derbyshire countryside, following a pilgrimage trail, and discuss, per the proposed itinerary, “growth and transformation.” I had given a noncommittal response to her invitation and promised to get back to her with a more definitive one, though I never did.
The walking tour was scheduled for the first week of August. I would be thirty-eight weeks into a pregnancy that Paul was unaware of. I hadn’t seen her for months, and the idea of casually telling her over e-mail that I was pregnant, after years of deliberation, had seemed cowardly. It felt as though I owed her some sort of reasoned explanation. How, in the end, had I decided?
Mercifully, Paul, who was already seated in a banquette when I arrived at the restaurant, never asked me the question. She just laughed when she saw me. “Wow,” she joked. “You’re really committed to this!”
It had felt like a kind of experiment: How could I use Paul’s work to help me make the decision? But then, at some point, the investigation evaporated. In the previous nine months, the decision about whether to have a child had come to seem far less interesting than what would happen to me once I did. I told Paul this, tentatively, as if I were apologizing or insulting the premise of her work.
Again, she just laughed. And then she reassured me: deciding had never been the interesting part to her, either. She, too, was more interested in the personal change than in the decision itself. “That I framed it all in terms of epistemology and decision theory—I did that purposefully,” she told me. Paul insisted that the approach was “not a trick” but that it was instrumental. “I knew that if I just talked about having a child—and the kind of emotional and also mental and psychological changes it wrought—no one would listen to me,” Paul said. “I’m pretty good at understanding how to make my colleagues listen to things they don’t want to hear.”
We parted ways. She wished me luck. I went home and made tomato sauce. Something went wrong, though, and no amount of salt or olive oil or sugar seemed to help. The idea of eating it filled me with a dull, bad feeling. The sauce could not have represented more than four dollars’ worth of ingredients, but instead of throwing it away I slopped it into a rinsed-out yogurt container. I imagined myself a few months into the future: sleep-deprived and covered in the vomit of someone I hadn’t yet met, I would be starving and flooded with gratitude for a hot meal, never mind that it was one that I myself had previously rejected. I scribbled “pasta sauce” on the lid and put the still warm container into the freezer.
Despite objecting to some of Paul’s arguments, Elizabeth Barnes, the University of Virginia philosopher, routinely assigns the first few chapters of “Transformative Experience” to her undergraduates. “Most of my students instinctively want to say that Paul is wrong,” she told me. “But in a room of twenty students they’ll give me seventeen different reasons why.” Many of them resist the premise that they need complete information about their futures, or bristle at the notion that changing their minds one day renders rational, present-day thought impossible. This multiplicity of disagreements would occur, Barnes went on, if you stocked that same room with professional philosophers. “And that,” she said, “is the sign of a great argument.” Paul, she continued, “asked an amazing question. . . . You can get why the question is cool regardless of whether her way of answering it is amenable to the way your own mind happens to work. I think sometimes, as philosophers, we forget we need these kinds of questions. I think the field has lost some of that spark—or maybe just the ability to communicate it.”
This ability, which is really a kind of diplomacy, is evident in Paul’s teaching style. When I visited her at Yale, her blackboard-lined classroom was packed with students eager to hear her speak about “the paradoxes of time travel,” which was also the name of the course. While lecturing, she possesses the vigor of a beloved high-school teacher with a politician’s polish. She paces, she scribbles, she tells outlandish, second-person stories. “How do you distinguish between memory and anticipation?” Paul asked, as everyone furiously took notes. “Between remembering something and anticipating it?” She paused. “That should puzzle you.” She paused again. “It’s very weird.” Her theory of mind is well tuned for the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old demographic, and as she went over the syllabus, which would include not just philosophy papers but also sci-fi films (“La Jetée,” “Primer”) and a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, she warned the students not “to use the in-class essays to develop novel theories.” These essays, she said, “are not the right conditions for that.”
Her own work, however, is always being developed in novel ways. Transformative experience has been used to think through issues such as the decision to transition genders, the ethics of Alzheimer’s treatment and the legal enforceability of advanced medical directives, and the “unique challenges whistle-blowers face,” as one Dutch law professor recently put it. Not long ago, Paul was invited to Chicago to give a lecture about her work and its possible implications for neuroscience, and more than seven thousand people showed up. In recent years, she has collaborated with cognitive scientists to work through the ways in which it might one day be possible to fully align the values held by artificial intelligence with our own. Paul has her doubts. “Machines don’t have experiences,” she told me. “It’s a fundamental problem!”
The success of “Transformative Experience” created an inevitable appetite for a follow-up, and in 2015 Paul signed a contract, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for her first nonacademic book. She imagined it, at the time, as a sort of reiteration of “Transformative Experience” for a more general audience. But the subsequent string of disruptions in her personal life made retrospection less appealing. Seven years later, during her trip to Derbyshire, Paul finally managed to articulate to herself what the new book would be about. While trudging along, somewhere near Bakewell, she realized that she was preoccupied by the notion that we all consist of multiple selves who cannot be counted on to agree with one another across time. What drew her to the predicament was, in part, how ubiquitous it is—not just in life and literature but also in such disciplines as economics and psychology. We make plans with people we don’t want to see. We confidently set aside three days to complete a task that historically has taken us fifteen. We recall with repulsion romantic encounters that we once eagerly pursued.
“The problem of other selves is just as deep and mysterious as the ‘problem of other minds,’ ” she told me, referring to a classic and ever-evolving philosophical conundrum about the unknowability of the consciousness of others. “We exploit our other selves. We act badly toward them. We rely on them. Sometimes we try to deceive them. There’s this whole network of relationships that we have with our other selves that are as involved and interesting and important and intimate as the relationships we have with other people.” The fundamentally uncrossable barrier between individuals exists within each of us, too.
This ability, which is really a kind of diplomacy, is evident in Paul’s teaching style. When I visited her at Yale, her blackboard-lined classroom was packed with students eager to hear her speak about “the paradoxes of time travel,” which was also the name of the course. While lecturing, she possesses the vigor of a beloved high-school teacher with a politician’s polish. She paces, she scribbles, she tells outlandish, second-person stories. “How do you distinguish between memory and anticipation?” Paul asked, as everyone furiously took notes. “Between remembering something and anticipating it?” She paused. “That should puzzle you.” She paused again. “It’s very weird.” Her theory of mind is well tuned for the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old demographic, and as she went over the syllabus, which would include not just philosophy papers but also sci-fi films (“La Jetée,” “Primer”) and a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, she warned the students not “to use the in-class essays to develop novel theories.” These essays, she said, “are not the right conditions for that.”
Her own work, however, is always being developed in novel ways. Transformative experience has been used to think through issues such as the decision to transition genders, the ethics of Alzheimer’s treatment and the legal enforceability of advanced medical directives, and the “unique challenges whistle-blowers face,” as one Dutch law professor recently put it. Not long ago, Paul was invited to Chicago to give a lecture about her work and its possible implications for neuroscience, and more than seven thousand people showed up. In recent years, she has collaborated with cognitive scientists to work through the ways in which it might one day be possible to fully align the values held by artificial intelligence with our own. Paul has her doubts. “Machines don’t have experiences,” she told me. “It’s a fundamental problem!”
The success of “Transformative Experience” created an inevitable appetite for a follow-up, and in 2015 Paul signed a contract, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for her first nonacademic book. She imagined it, at the time, as a sort of reiteration of “Transformative Experience” for a more general audience. But the subsequent string of disruptions in her personal life made retrospection less appealing. Seven years later, during her trip to Derbyshire, Paul finally managed to articulate to herself what the new book would be about. While trudging along, somewhere near Bakewell, she realized that she was preoccupied by the notion that we all consist of multiple selves who cannot be counted on to agree with one another across time. What drew her to the predicament was, in part, how ubiquitous it is—not just in life and literature but also in such disciplines as economics and psychology. We make plans with people we don’t want to see. We confidently set aside three days to complete a task that historically has taken us fifteen. We recall with repulsion romantic encounters that we once eagerly pursued.
“The problem of other selves is just as deep and mysterious as the ‘problem of other minds,’ ” she told me, referring to a classic and ever-evolving philosophical conundrum about the unknowability of the consciousness of others. “We exploit our other selves. We act badly toward them. We rely on them. Sometimes we try to deceive them. There’s this whole network of relationships that we have with our other selves that are as involved and interesting and important and intimate as the relationships we have with other people.” The fundamentally uncrossable barrier between individuals exists within each of us, too.
Minha filha tem agora quinze meses. Leio menos agora e limpo mais. Levo uma eternidade para responder mensagens de texto, se é que o faço. Meus anseios intermitentes por liberdade, antes satisfeitos apenas por semanas de solidão distante, agora são saciados por caminhadas de dez minutos ao redor do quarteirão. Meu desejo de permanecer viva não é mais abstrato ou automático, e atravesso a rua com uma quantidade de cautela que é nova. Mas a sensação de ser eu é a mesma de sempre. A maioria dos meus pensamentos foi substituída por pensamentos sobre minha filha, e ainda assim minha mente parece completamente inalterada. Essa durabilidade tem sido o aspecto mais aliviante, mais decepcionante e mais surpreendente de ter um filho. O molho de tomate continua no congelador. Ter um filho mudou minha vida, não a mim mesmo. Não me transformou em uma pessoa que comeria isso.
Contei isso a Paul. "Lembre-me", ela disse, "há quanto tempo você é mãe?" Eu disse a ela. "Ok", ela disse. “Então há apenas um ano de separação entre a linha do tempo real e a linha do tempo possível.” Ela comparou isso à navegação: você dá apenas um ou dois passos fora do caminho indicado no mapa. Não é muito — era onde eu estava agora — mas continue naquela direção, ela disse, e depois de um tempo você se encontrará muito, muito longe do destino original. “Estou lhe dizendo, daqui a dez anos, quinze anos...” ♦
Alice Gregory tem contribuído para a The New Yorker desde 2013.
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