From a reader's e-mail: "Now, I want to be a professional philosopher, period! It's not as if I kind of want to, or happened to be thinking about it."
My young correspondent does not tell me what he means by 'professional philosopher,' or why he wants to attend graduate school, so I'll begin by making a distinction. In one sense of the term, a professional is one who makes a living from his line of work. Now it is a fact of life that one can make a living in a line of work without being particularly good at it. There are plenty of examples in the field of education of people who are incomptetent both as teachers and as scholars. Although these people manage to get paid for what they do, they are amateurs in point of competence. In a second sense of the term, a professional is one has achieved a certain high standard of performance in his line of work. This of course is no guarantee that one will be able to make a living from it. Now if a person persists in his line of work without remuneration, there is a clear sense, etymologically based, in which he is an amateur: he does what he does for the love of it. But this is consistent with his being a professional in point of competence. There are quite a few historical examples. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professional philosophers in point of competence but not in point of filling their bellies from it. Employing a Schopenhauerian turn of phrase, both lived for philosophy not from it.
So if I were to sit down with my young correspondent, I would press him on whether he seeks a career teaching philosophy in a college or university. If that is his goal, and I assume it is, then I would feel it my responsibility not to lead him astray. I would give it to him straight: it is very difficult to get a tenure-track job at a reasonably good institution where there is a good chance of tenure. I managed to get a good tenure-track job right out of graduate school, and I got tenure. But I was single, single-minded, hell-bent on achieving my goal, I have some talent, and I was lucky. One hundred candidates applied for the job I got, ten were interviewed at the A. P. A. Eastern, four were invited on campus for a day-long interview, and somehow, they hired me. Not even I believe I was the best person they could have hired. Despite sending out dozens of applications, I had secured only three interviews, one for a one-year position, one at an institution where I had the chance of a snowball in hell, and one for the job I got. That says something about the job market, which I don't think is much better now (though I am 'out of the loop').
So it's a long shot. I am assuming that my young correspondent does not want to spend five or six years earning a doctorate only to end up teaching ten courses a year at slave wages as an adjunct professor in a community college in Fargo, North Dakota or Hibbing, Minnesota, or some such place. Only slightly better would be the life of the gypsy scholar who after a string of one-year full-time appointments spread out over these United States ends up in Beirut or Ankara. (I spent a year in Ankara, and Bob Dylan is from Hibbing. I am not knocking these places, but you catch my drift.)
From a 'practical' and 'economic' point of view, then, pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, and in many fields and not just humanities fields, is a loser.
But I'm an idealist, not a money-grubbing 'practical' type, and the way I thought about the problem as a young man was as follows. Philosophy for me is the only thing that ultimately matters, I consider it my vocation in the root sense of that word, and so I will pursue my vocation come hell or high water. I will apply to grad schools and see what happens. As it turned out, I got a couple of offers that included full tuition remission and a stipend to live on. So I was set to live the kind of life I wanted to live for four or five years. My thought was that even if I didn't get a job, I would have done what I wanted to do for a good period of time while getting paid to do it.
So to my young correspondent I would say this. If philosophy is the unum necessarium in your life, and your teachers tell you that you have some philosophical ability, and you are accepted at schools that pay your way, and you are willing to pay some serious dues living like a monk and foregoing the blandishments that most people in our society think essential, and you go into it with eyes wide open apprised of the very real possibility of having to re-tool later, then I say: go for it!
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