I finally heard back from my dissertation director. As you can imagine, impending parenthood has us wanting to defend and be finished! But I have more work to do. Among several options is to incorporate Emerson into the work. So now I have to read a lot of Emerson this fall. Damn. Emerson.
While that’s certainly pleasant reading, I hadn’t planned on needed to do so much. One option was to use the Nietzsche scholarship I worked on for a long time but didn’t because I felt like including research for its own sake was a waste of time. But, I forgot. A dissertation is a HOOP to jump through, like the other hoops from my MA and PhD programs. It’s relevance to knowledge and truth is slight and fleeting. At least, it can relate to them, but has to relate to other thinkers’ relations (and their relations to other thinkers’ relations!).
So while I enjoyed digging in, taking notes and brushing up on my Emerson today, I remembered why I decided that I did not want to be a “working philosopher.” There’s little philosophy in it. Thoreau wrote:
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet is admirable to to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically but practically.
I don’t mean to single out every single academic philosopher. Certainly I had (and have) professors who genuinely inquire[d] even when it’s not for publication or a conference, and I knew (and know) some students of the same suit. But these good folks stand out. This is not encouraged or rewarded. This is something you do for yourself. And I had/have trouble spending my time reading something for a paper and then reading it again for my own investigations. While there are people (and I think I’d include my director) that can balance this in their heads/hearts, I have never been able to. Whether this is a weakness in my major or myself remains to be seen, but I suspect that philosophy majors who don’t want to hear about what hoops they’re going to be asked to jump through would say the latter.
[...] I was initially excited because I thought I’d get to spend my fall reading Emerson. But, you know, I have to read all the scholarly stuff and, ahem, do some more writing. So it’s not all fun and awesomeness. But having Baby on my mind, I’m getting more done in the time I have to work than I did when my dissertation was my full-time job three years ago and when there was no fire lit under my ass. [...]