Even though graduate school is excruciatingly difficult in various ways, many of us still manage to come through it with silly views about what we've gotten ourselves into. It usually takes five to seven more years of further disabusement in the biz to stop saying quite so many things that you later realize to be foolish.* I think the biggest example for me concerns my views about publication prior to having published very much.
I remember getting the Analysis off-print of my first published journal article, a piece written with Roy Cook called "What Negation is Not."** My wife and I celebrated by going to the bar at the now closed Macaroni Grill in Baton Rouge where an LSU philosophy major would comp us drinks.*** The offprint sat on the bar, soaking up the condensation rings from whatever foofy concoctions sat before us (it still has a weird purply stain). I kept looking at it thinking exactly what Navan R. Johnson is thinking at the video to right.
Of course the outcome wasn't nearly so bad. I never ended up joining the circus, for example. And the gap between what I thought would follow and what did follow was not nearly as wide as that poor Mr. Johnson faced (see the video after the jump, e.g. "He's hates these cans!"). But when I look back I still feel like a jerk.
First, after that first tantalizing bite from Analysis, it took me two more years to get anything else published. While the gap on my c.v. doesn't look like a big deal now, those were some pretty unhappy times. Bob Dylan's throwaway line that his listener had spent twenty years of schooling only to be put on the day shift**** grew louder and louder as I opened my twenty somethingth rejection, right before teaching my fourth class of the day (I was not tenure track).
Second, and this is still something I deal with, I had this naive assumption that if you publish something in a good venue, someone besides the editor and journal reviewers would actually read the article. But this is in general not true. My wife's (journalism related) mad research skills have shed some light on this issue. At least twelve years ago, when she looked into this, it was the case that the average academic publication was cited one point five times, with one of those times being the author citing herself. And the point five times is taken up by a very few articles that are cited thousands of times, not by anything you are going to write.
For the vast majority of us who make it in the biz, our google scholar page reflects this. Very little of what we write is ever cited by anyone else. And to the extent that anything is, it's usually not what you would expect. In my case, a book on video games I wrote with Mark Silcox is actually cited a few times by other people; it's a fine book that I love, but (given the venues) I really thought that by this point at least one author I've attempted to refute with proofs and stuff would have taken notice. But with the citational data my wife collected, I realize that this thought was as silly as Mr. Johnson's thought about the phone book. But, thirteen years on and I still find myself thinking it. Still a jerk.
This has led me to think quite a bit about why we do this. Publishing an article is inherently communicative, so why do we do this when it's overwhelmingly likely that the speech act will fail?
The failure is pretty collossal too. Note that even those of us fortunate and skilled enough to get cited will still almost certainly disappear from history. Suzanne Langer? Hans Vaihinger? Any of our "stars" should be so lucky. So, the chance that one might, just might, win the lottery and successfully communicate doesn't seem to me to be a good enough reason to do it.
A second justification might be to appeal to the collective value of the practice. We're trying to engage in dialogue with the Mighty Dead. Most of what we do is going to be mediocre, actually not deserving of canonization. And nobody can a priori select what will be so deserving (a high school teacher from Koeningsburg? yeah, right). So what you need is a system that provides enough incentive to let a vast number of mediocrities do their thing and greatness will emerge. I think this is basically right,***** and explains much of the reason why the United States in the late twentieth century was so overrepresented in Nobel Prizes (given cultural trends, I would be very surprised if this predominance continues very far into the current century).
But being part of such collective goods is pretty thin gruel when it comes to personal motivation. I mean nowhere in the world does anyone celebrate "I'm a factotum!" day.
A third possible reason is that it somehow is self-improving. This is ridiculous though. If you really want to improve yourself go do yoga classes and week-long meditation retreats where nobody's alllowed to talk. Do charity work. Of course you can do these and academic philosophy. I have two friends who do, but the self-improvement is in part healing the spiritual wounds caused both by the philosophy and whatever various and sundry traumas caused them to pick philosophy as a career in the first-place. Writing papers nobody is going to read and going to conferences to argue with people is not, in itself, good spiritual exercise.
My experiences as a failed musician******* have given me a fourth, and I think correct, possible answer to the question. Years ago (still not tenure track) at the annual Alabama Philosophy Society meeting I found myself at night on a beach with a bunch of grad. students and some professors where all the musicians were taking turns playing songs on an acoustic guitar. This one guy started playing "Alice's Restaurant" and all of the other musicians cringed. Not because we hated the Arlo Guthrie song (though many of us did), but because the song is so damned long that it would be that much longer before any of us got our turns.
I had a little satori then. I realized that this was an Alabama Philosophy Society sanctioned version of innumerable open mikes I'd been to, where the only people in the audience are members of the bands, and most of them talk through the other performances. And I've also come to realize that the economics of rock bands are not that different from the economics of being a philosophy professor. So why do either?
In both cases, my Hegelianism gets me through the night. When I figure stuff out and get it good enough to get accepted somewhere (there are musical analogues) I'm a miniscule part of matter becoming mind. What could be cooler than being a vessel of the universe's self-awareness. And the readings of Wittgenstein (e.g. Ayer on private languages) and Hegel are wrong about the claim that someone has to show up for matter to become mind. You can become mind on your back porch with a dobro and glass slide, with all the birds and trees pretty much ignoring you. Bless your heart, you can do that at least.********
[Notes:
*This is actually liberating and helps you be a better person in all sorts of ways. For example, I no longer sing "Rock Candy Mountain" while walking through poor neighborhoods.
**I have *not* been disabused of doing this schtick with paper title names. Expect "Going for Broca's Area" and "Paved with Good Intensions" at some point in the future, unless someones already beat me to these.
***(1) As my Dad would say, "Do as I say, not as I do." I should note that the student who never took classes with me and who I remain friends with even though he is a lawyer and no longer comps me drinks. (2) I was making $26,000 dollars a year, and my wife had gone back to school, so those free drinks were worth quite a bit to me then. (3)Life before kids.
****Which would have been working at Kmart, in my case, probably managing the clothing section. If Ringo Starr can cut hair, you can restock clothes.
*****And what's dreadfully wrong with administrators and government funding agencies trying to pick the winners. But that is another post.
******Notice that while I linked to my c.v., none are provided here.
*******I realize that when one does seven footnotes to a blog post, one is in danger of being the internet equivalent of the loudest drunk at the bar. This being said, let me note that I don't think you can really do philosophy unless you are a failure. Philosophers of math and logicians are failed mathematicians, philosophers of art failed artists, philosophers of language failed linguists, philosophers of mind failed psychologists, philosophers of science scientists, ethicists failed human beings, etc.
********It has occured to me that this entire post chronicles what Louis C.K. would call a "first-world problem." Fair enough, but I should note that to complain about first-world problems is itself engaging in the very phenomena being complained about. I mean, C.K.s schtick is about those of us who gripe about modern air travel, but his back isn't being ruined by the coach seats. This being said, air travel is a lot worse than being a philosophy professor.]
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