Facing Philosophy

6:49pm Sunday October 6, 2013. The Mill Coffee House in Lincoln, Nebraska.

So this is a post that’s been in the works for a while now. I  would like to talk about the difference between philosophy in college and philosophy in grad school (as always though, it seems to go beyond just that). This difference became most apparent to me when I  brought my first paper to a professor’s office hours to discuss it. It was my third draft but it was the first time I  was showing it to a faculty member. He didn’t even have to look at it. I  told him my thesis: given one professional philosopher’s account of accidents and another professional philosopher’s account of knowledge I’m going to show that the two accounts are incompatible and thats why we can’t have knowledge by accident. Okay, it was a little more technical but thats the gist, for all the non-philosophers out there. This was his response:

“That’s fine, but I’m just not sure where you’re making an original contribution.”

The words just hung there, kind of like they do here. They sit in a puddle of white space in my head echoing like the voice of God. I knew instantly that this was the difference between college and grad school. I  wanted to cry. I  wanted to call my mom. I  wanted to run to the other grad students and have them explain to me how they’ve managed to make these brilliant contributions and tell me it was all going to be okay. More than anything though, I  wanted to hide.

I  was so embarrassed, here I  am trying to prove myself, thinking I’ve done something when I’ve really just written a glorified book report. Now I’m expected to say something no one else has said before and I  wonder if I’m prepared. I  wonder if I  can do this. Until now I  have only been expected to make sense of other professional’s research and now I  guess it’s up to me to make my own way. Now, there’s this professor standing in front of me saying “yes, but now you are the professional philosopher and you ought to have something to say.”

It’s humbling to say the least.

Yet as small as I feel right now, it’s not a bad thing; it’s an opportunity to rise to a challenge. This is where I  can become a better writer, better philosopher, better student than I have ever been before. And I  live in Nebraska so it’s not like I have anything better to do.

Where do I come off, you may ask, getting all sunshine and roses on a largely terrifying situation like this? Part of me wants to say, I have no idea and that I’m nuts to be so optimistic. There’s another part of me that knows though, it’s because I saw Tamar Gendler speak this past week.

For those of you who don’t know who Tamar Gendler is, she is this awesome philosopher and professor at Yale who works mostly in the areas of epistemology, philosophical psychology, metaphysics and philosophical methodology. Dr. Gendler visited our department this past week and I  was lucky enough to see her speak twice and to go out to lunch with her (while at the same time freaking out that I’m massively incapable of contributing anything to my chosen field of study). While her work is fascinating, it wasn’t anything that she said specifically that leaves me feeling so optimistic. It was something she did.

During her first presentation something went wrong with her powerpoint slides such that they were cut in half and the top of the slide was on the bottom of the screen and the bottom of the slide was on the top of the screen… for every single slide. She wasn’t put off in the slightest though, she laughed at her own misfortune and actually had the entire audience laughing at it too, and she simply forged ahead with confidence. All I  could think to myself was, “wow, I  hope I’m that good someday.”

And then it occurred to me - so much of my work, in philosophy and in life isn’t going to be determined by my ability to be constantly excellent. Inevitably things will go wrong, challenges will arise, I  will run into walls, my work won’t seem to be making any original contributions, my powerpoint slides will be hacked up and garishly rearranged, and what’s really going to matter in the end is how I  took it on.

It’s true, most of the time I  have no idea what the hell I’m doing and on the rare occasion that I  have salient ideas, something else outside of my control usually goes wrong. What matters more is being able to pick myself up, having confidence in my own character and forging ahead. In the end, I  know that I  am capable and so I  have every reason to be optimistic. I  think.