Category: Sage Advice

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday

Kant Can SoImmanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 40 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 40 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 294th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

A Budding Thomist Seeks Advice

This from a reader:

I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.

As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.

Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?

Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.

One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:

Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?

Graduate School and Self-Confidence

Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities?

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated. 

To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:

Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation. 

It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.

More on this in The Academic Job Market in the 'Sixties.

Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.  

I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career.  The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.

How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.

Safe Speech

"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.  Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's  mouth shut.  That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in  – she construed it as sexual harassment.  You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble. 

In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion.  To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be.  Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?

Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed.  Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals.  Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior.  The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the kid's 'culture.'

You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them.  My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs.  But I will.  Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose. 

Companion post: Idle Talk

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Rules for Men

Keith Burgess-Jackson offers six items of sound advice, each both prudential and moral. Here is #1:

Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).

I would add a qualification: unless she is your wife and you have a loving relationship. (And if you don't share a loving relationship, why are you still married to her?)

That is a good point about the nature of consent, by the way.

I would say that the above, even with my qualification, is a rule of thumb (rule of hand?), which is to say that it is broadly accurate. 

Suppose you are seated opposite a woman not your wife whom you find attractive and with whom you are enjoying a tête-à-tête. She strokes your hand. She has given you a signal that may justify your touching her in a similar way even without explicit consent.

Prudent? Moral? The near occasion of sin? You decide!

In any case, don't be an Al Franken. Where is his hand? And what can be inferred from the gal's 'goosey' expression?

  Franken's hand

 

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The Wise Live by the Probable, not the Possible

The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the merely possible.  It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry.  But it is not probable. 

Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way.  What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out.  People don't change.  They are what they are.  The few exceptions prove the rule.  The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities.  "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12)

It is foolish to gamble with your happiness.  We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose.  So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that  you will change her.  You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.

The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.

Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After

Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert?  Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over?  You missed the party and with it the  ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk.  Are you now troubled by your spiritual continence?

As for idle talk, here is something good from  Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

KafkaI have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything important in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’  An expression of boredom, it does little to alleviate it.

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age

The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:

No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]

The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.