Hanging out with philosophers usually implies some talk about people's (non-philosophers') strange ideas about philosophy and what it is like to be a philosophy student. Two days ago, my friends & I were procrastinating in a bar. It was fairly late. A girl sat down at our table and started talking about the perilous life of students who have been so unwise as to have devoted themselves to the humanities. She talked to us about her husband who is writing his master's thesis in history. He realized he didn't want to be a historian after all and that his education will not guarantee him a job anyway. He realized electrical installations was his thing. The gist of the story was that students of the humanities are more likely to end up regretting their choices than others. We all thought that her "words of warning" were outrageously rude.
Every time I meet my bourgeoise relatives they ask me what I intend to do after I finish my Ph.D. Well, I tell them, I will work on it for many more years and I haven't really got any concrete plans for the future. After that I am inclined to describe my current situation so that it will appear to be a job, and not an education. I am really pissed off that it's so hard for them to acknowledge the toil of a Ph.D as work. And it is almost like this: by emphasizing that something is a job, work, one is proving the "properness" or "usefulness" of something. Crazy. Symptomatically, my relatives tend to react positively when they hear that I am doing some teaching. "Being a teacher" almost resembles a proper, bourgeoise job. What is a proper job, for them? A fat paycheck, a respectable title. It's a job that one can talk about in a way that makes it clear for everyone what one is doing. A job that can be talked about normally, in the same uninvolved, disinterested and non-personal way my relatives talk about everything else.
When I tell people that I am a student of philosophy the most common reaction is a reserved "Oh..." and perhaps "That must be difficult." Very few ask questions about what philosophy is. (Perhaps most think that philosophy is about defining the meaning of life...) If one is challenged to try to say something, it is not easy to elucidate what are the characterizing traits of philosophy. "Philosophy is not an empirical science because it's concern is conceptual problems." Does that sound interesting? No? Heh. The difficulty here is that a discussion about what philosophy is will necessarily be a philosophical discussion. If the person one is talking to is not interested in this kind of exchange, then it is really hard to say anything about what philosophy is.
When I was in high school, I was quite convinced that philosophy solves the deepest questions, the most difficult questions, about reality and existence. In philosophy we are, I thought, taking a stand in essential debates - "Is there a God?", "What is the relation between the soul and the body", and, indeed, "what is the meaning of life". It was this attitude that I was equipped with upon heading for the Philosophy Department at uni. Even though I was vaguely intrigued by the Wittgensteinian approach to philosophy at our place, I soon found myself frustrated. Wittgenstein, and his followers, say so little. I constantly felt that these philosophers ended the philosophical investigations where they should begin. We end up with nothing, I complained. My prime interest during this period was, and I am not kidding, solipsism. Oh well, the sturm-und-drang of youth. It took me quite a few years to realize that philosophical investigations will not lead to any discoveries.
But I should not make fun of these pictures of philosophy and this trouble with the nature of philosophy. Questions about what a philosophical investigation is don't go away. Such questions are a part of what it is to do philosophy. When I am struggling to get clear about the topic of my thesis, I have to be asking myself: what kind of question is this? Is it, really, a philosophical question or is it something else (psychology, sociology)? When one is embarking upon tackling a new philosophical question one will be confronted with the nature of philosophical question afresh.
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