This series invites seasoned philosophers to share critical reflections on emergent and institutionalised shapes of and encounters within philosophy. The series collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will also help young academics and students navigate philosophy today.
Advice for a Student Beginning Graduate Philosophy
Go ahead—Google it yourself. How many years does the planet have left before climatic changes irreparably damage its essential life-supporting systems? The IPCC predicts that Earth will heat at least 1.5 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels by the early 2030s, pushing many of the natural systems that sustain humanity past critical thresholds. Already many essential water, agricultural, and coastal systems are failing, especially in the global south. So, counting from this year, 2022, the world has eight, maybe ten, years to act. Assuming optimistically that it takes you four years to get your Ph.D., and assuming with even wilder optimism that it takes an additional five years to get a job and tenure, you will be in a position to start working to preserve a livable world the very year it becomes too late.
This throws a monkey wrench into a lot of plans. What is a new philosophy graduate student to do? Here’s some advice.
1. Know yourself. You—the beginning philosophy graduate student—are blessed with unusual talents and proclivities. You are very, very smart. You are adept at understanding ideas, those forces that most powerfully drive human civilizations. Ideas are invisible, but you can see them; elusive, but you can follow them; insubstantial, but you can juggle them; powerful, but you can annihilate them. You can even hold conflicting ideas at a time, though they lead you in different directions. This abstract intelligence, this unusual ability to manipulate ideas, has moral consequences, as we shall see.
2. Accept that if you have been given important gifts, you have been given important responsibilities. Your sparkling mind and intellectual agility—and the privilege to maximize them—are gifts. It is a sin to squander them. The greater your gifts from the world, the greater your duties to it. So, you can’t sit this one out. As a beginning graduate student, your work right now is to acquire the ideational skills and wisdom required to stand against the wreck and pillage of the planet and the fiery dangers of hoarded power and wealth, and then to use those abilities to help turn the crank of history toward planetary restoration and cultural redemption. Anything less betrays your abilities.
3. The world is calling out to you in the language of storms and suffering. Don’t let anybody distract you from your work for this reeling world. With some important and courageous exceptions, many of your professors are economically secure, socially privileged, safe, self-satisfied, and—to the extent that they are disengaged from the screaming world—useless. Professorial silence about the calamities we face is not “passive silence,” to use George Monbiot’s phrase. “It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis.”
The university system protects senior professors’ power to define useful work by means of their curricular, promotion, grant, and tenure decisions. That allows them to dictate what questions are unaskable, what answers are unthinkable. So it allows them to turn their backs on a world begging for help. These professors are a danger to you; they will waste your time, waste your life, by requiring that you mimic them in their uselessness, asking the same questions, publishing in the same journals, drinking the same ethereal Scotch, until the world—with a bang or a whimper—interrupts their last zoom lecture on the false subtleties of the four syllogistic figures.
Find the mentors who are answering the world’s call with conscience and imagination. You may find them in unexpected places—in other departments or between disciplines, in newspaper columns or unemployment lines. Often they are among the disenfranchised. But they are there, looking for you.
4. Bite like a gadfly. You are called to a life that will be insecure, unsafe, self-doubting, and essential. In an unjust and self-destructive society, where lies and corruption herd the sheep, baaing and still buying, toward the cliff edge, the philosopher must be a gadfly, as Socrates called himself, on trial for his life Gadflies swarm bloviating creatures. “I am a gadfly,” Socrates wrote, “all day long and in all places, I am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.” So. Arousing. Your work is to wake people to the moral and existential peril in their stubborn march toward climate catastrophe, and if that takes a painful bite of flesh, so be it. Persuading. You are called to teach with irresistible clarity what distinguishes true from false, noble from shameful, smart from terminally oblivious, creative and new from business-as-usual. Reproaching. Sting the powerful impresarios of oil and evil. Bite the craven, corrupt politicians. Lay your eggs in their nostrils.
It’s true that there is no “gadfly” category in your CV, but what of that? Maybe a university will never hire or tenure you, and maybe an elite philosophical journal will never publish you. That doesn’t matter anymore. It’s remotely possible that your place is in the university, shattering the norms. It’s more likely that you will find your most important students and readers outside of the academy—online, or in the streets, in NGOs and activist organizations in frontline communities. Or maybe under an olive tree somewhere, or in a marketplace.
5. Know what you can and cannot change, to whit: A. When a university has sold its spine to corporate/military/extractive-industry/religious sponsors, it is very difficult to push it to change. Have you ever pushed against an invertebrate—a jellyfish or anemone? When you push against something that has no spine, your fist is absorbed into its flimsiness and the creature turns itself inside out to expel you. B. You cannot push the professional journals to change. Either they have their feet planted firmly in the corporate world, or they are servants of the status quo, preserved by the self-replicating tenure system. Duck around them and publish in venues people actually read—social media, podcasts, newspapers, zines. C. You cannot change philosophy’s narrow self-definition. But who cares about the tenure committee’s inevitable question, Fine, but is it philosophy? The better question is, Does it matter?
What you can change, of course, is yourself, your ambitions, and your relationship to changing times. Remember Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Not good news for a university. But great news for you.
6. When the times call for all hands on deck, know your station and its duties. Professor Friedrich Buechner said that you will find your calling at the intersection of your greatest joy and the world’s greatest need. That is baloney. Nobody said this was going to be joyous work. We plunge through a radically uncertain and dangerous sea. Like whalers on a very bad day, we are called to a deck that is pitching at treacherous angles, slimed with oil, and awash in blood and spume. Here, you will find the calling worthy of your life—at the place where your greatest abilities meet the ship’s greatest need.
What are the abilities of a young philosophy graduate student? Let’s make a list.
• You ask good and pointed questions. Hard questions, but just the right ones.
• You are powerfully generative of new ideas, in a world that stands in desperate need of creativity, imagination, and a better understanding of the synergistic power of ideas.
• As the old (capitalist, individualist, anthropocentric) worldview shatters against the hard rocks of reality, you have a mind eager to explore both new paradigms and the survival-wisdom of ancient cultures and other species.
• In a time of disastrous dogma, you are a master of the hypothetical statement, the if-then logic of imagination, of uncertainty, of possibility, of story-telling.
• In a time of willful, well-funded confusion and invincible ignorance, you are clear-eyed and committed to reality. Reason is your tool, and you are good with it.
• In a time of bullies—academic and otherwise—you have been and will continue to be courageous.
• In a time of grief, you have the strength to push back against despair, insisting that there is meaning and worth in the human experiment.
• In times when hope fails you, you have your integrity to hold you to the compass course.
• You are a beginner. You are fallible. You can learn.
Okay, so yeah. Here you are in your little apartment, gnawing on ramen noodles, ready to start grad school. You already know that these next eight years may well be the most important years in the history of the planet. You already have a general notion of the essential work you can undertake in collaboration with others, which is (choose one or all) to call out injustice, bear witness to cruelty, critique unsupportable ideas, defend human and natural thriving, imagine a fair economy, create communities in which new ethics can evolve, reconceptualize everything from laundry to litter, teach creative and critical thinking, figure out how to redress wrongs and reallocate respect and resources, and, in every way, stand strong against the ideas that underwrite the plunder of the planet and the immiseration of its people.
There are ample reasons to believe that a philosophical education, broadly understood and boldly and strategically crafted, can empower you to move into this world of essential work. Ideas matter. And so philosophy, the creative and critical study of ideas, matters a great deal. By all means, if you are good at conceptual thinking, go after the education that will make you the best there is at doing what needs to be done.
But waste no time in transit: move quickly beyond academics to loci of imagination and change—cooperatives, nonprofits, start-ups, think tanks, political campaigns, publishers, activist (maybe underground) organizations of all sorts. Do your work with courage and determination. Let your imagination soar, not to envision the end of civilization, but to set a compass-course for its redemption.
Kathleen Dean Moore
Until 2013, Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she studied environmental ethics. But her growing horror at the enormity of the extinction and climate justice crises – and OSU’s largely disappointing responses -- led her to leave the university in order to invest all her time writing and speaking out about the moral urgency of action. Since that time, she has spoken from coast to coast, written for the popular press, and published five climate books, beginning with Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (co-editor Michael P. Nelson, forward by Desmond Tutu). Her most recent book, Take Heart; Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers (drawings by Bob Haverluck), helps readers find courage to continue their work for the world -- not empty hope, but deep and honest reasons to remember that the struggle matters. As a public philosopher, Kathleen works closely with musicians, filmmakers, and the wild coast of her Alaska home. Her newest film, “The Extinction Variations,” is a musical collaboration with pianist Rachelle McCabe, a plea for the reeling world.
Of course, this is not about navigating “philosophy,” the discipline, but about navigating the world in this time of ecological crisis. Many of the author’s relatives are professors, as she was until fairly recently. She is a prolific writer and public speaker, which perhaps not all of us were born to be. But she may well be right when she suggests that the best way to save our world is not through doing what may lead to tenure in academic philosophy.
Hello,
Such a nice article.
Thank you so much.
I have studied philosophy at undergrad but have no plans to continue further. I would rather explore the graduate philosophy as I experience the real world challenges.
I blog at fouaad.com