Stephanie's Pillowbook

1) Many people pointed to Ben Goldacre’s post on his Bad Science blog reporting that Gillian McKeith has been stopped by the ASA from titling herself Doctor McKeith. Actually, I don’t think it matters an awful lot what she calls herself. You would assume that anyone who does go around falsely claiming to be a doctor would soon get found out – they simply wouldn’t have the expertise to back up the qualification. And that to me is the worrying aspect of this case. These days there is such suspicion of the whole notion of expertise that many otherwise intelligent people are quite happy to believe that someone with no training, no education, no experience in a subject whatsoever can somehow see the truth more deeply and more clearly than someone with the very greatest learning. I’m afraid that giving Gillian Keith a slap on the wrist is going to do nothing to halt the growing domination of this pseudo-democracy of knowledge.

2) There is a common misconception that one can be philosophical without studying philosophy. In the first place there is a confusion between a vague notion of philosophy as a person’s Weltanschauung and philosophy as a specific academic subject. The former may be summed up as an overview of life, a guide to the way one lives, the general principles which orient one’s existence. Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness, an interest in the world and the ability to think possesses a Weltanschauung, although perhaps not all can describe it accurately and clearly. The latter, philosophy as an academic subject, is the history of distinct questions and arguments in certain fields of study such as ethics, epistemology, logic and so on. Now the former may be the outcome of the latter but most often it isn’t and therefore, strictly speaking, should not be called philosophy.

What is the value of studying academic philosophy? Well, there are a number of possible answers. I’d like to give one that can be applied to any proper area of study. According to one of the great physicists of the early 20th century (was it Niels Bohr, I’m not sure?) an expert was not someone who knew all the right answers in any field of knowledge. No, an expert was someone who knew all the wrong answers. This is particularly true in philosophy where there are few answers that are not highly contested.

So, if I can claim some basic expertise in, for instance, the philosophy of Nietzsche (thanks to years of research) that does not mean any statement I make about that philosophy should be accepted without demur. It does mean, though, that my statements on the subject are more authoritative than those of the vast majority of people. And the main reason for that is that I am familiar with all the arguments that have been made regarding Nietzsche. If you pick up one of his books and think you have an idea about something in it I can pretty much guarantee that it won’t be original, that I’ve heard it before and that I’ll probably be able to tell you who thought of it first and when. I don’t have perfect understanding but I do know what the wrong answers are and I know what mistakes have been made and can be made in this particular area.

It is laudable that people try to think things through for themselves. To some extent it is absolutely necessary to do so. But to take every matter back to first principles and rely only on one’s own untutored brain? No one ever gets very far doing that. Indeed you end up merely repeating the mistakes that were made centuries past, rehashing stale notions and re-fighting old battles that were won long ago. You need to borrow the brains of others.

3) Well, I didn’t anticipate having to explain my meaning re philosophical affectations but it looks like I should. I have to confess that I find the idea of a democracy of knowledge, which seems to be so common nowadays and is even enshrined in our education system, to be a dangerous one. Of course, potentially anyone can contribute – but in practice they can’t. Having an opinion on a subject is not equivalent to possessing any knowledge of that subject. The acquisition of knowledge takes time and effort. Lots of time and effort. You cannot learn French in 3 weeks. Well, there are certain exceptional individuals who can – but they are trained linguists with a deep understanding of the structure of languages and with considerable experience of learning them. Similarly you cannot pick up C++ in a fortnight. Not unless you severely restrict what you mean by knowing the language to the bare minimum that can be reasonably learned in 2 weeks.

Anyway, I did not mean in my former post that knowledge is reserved to those with formal qualifications. After all, there are philosophers without PhDs. However, no one can claim expertise without doing as much, if not more, work than the accredited experts. That’s what I object to – the idea that that work isn’t necessary. Well, it is. There are no short cuts to knowledge. That ought to be a truism.

4) Let’s look at an old post from a couple of years ago by Mike Wagner entitled Blogging Past the Gatekeepers. His intent in this post was to consider the question, “Why do you blog?” And he gives as his answer a desire to “sneak past the gatekeepers” in order to promote a flourishing of creative ideas. Now in a very general sense I quite agree with him. In the realm of opinion blogging serves an admirable purpose in disseminating viewpoints and bypassing official channels. Unfortunately, he gives an egregiously bad example of the kind of gatekeeper it’s necessary to circumvent. Had I made his argument I would have chosen popular music as my illustration. The representation of popular music in traditional media is, on the whole, dire and repetitive and in thrall to the mass marketing of the multinationals. On the internet, however, via unofficial channels like blogs, the discussion and distribution of popular music (taken in its widest sense) has blossomed in some fascinating ways.

So what is Mike Wagner’s example of the kind of gatekeeper bloggers can and should be sneaking past? Nuclear science! Zealously protecting their domain those pesky scientists won’t listen to your creative ideas about the subject. But why should they? Nuclear science is carried out in an extremely abstruse mathematical language. If you can’t speak that language, you can’t do nuclear science. You can “think” all you like. You can read every popular science book in the world. Your opinions about nuclear science aren’t worth a damn. If you want to sneak past the gatekeeper there is only one way – master the language and the door will be open. It’s true that careerism is as rife in scientific establishments as it is anywhere else. And it’s true that individual scientists are as prey to faults as any human being. It’s a travesty, however, to claim that any science is not interested in new ideas. If you have a persuasive explanation, a convincing mathematical proof, some interesting experimental data then it will be accepted by the community as a whole. If you just have opinions gleaned from your own imaginings then, yes, the gatekeepers won’t even deign to notice you. And quite right, too.

PS. To anticipate one possible criticism, I do not mean to say that it is a waste of time learning anything unless you reach post-doctoral level in that subject. Of course it isn’t. Any knowledge is better than none. I’m sure we are all curious about the world we live in and want to understand it. So, I enjoy reading popular science books and finding out as much as a I can – but I don’t flatter myself that I have any real knowledge of science and nor do I write blog posts pretending I have scientific ideas.

5) I know I shouldn’t be reading the Daily Mail – I mean, do I want to wind myself up in the morning? Take this article, £40m waste of the ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. Taxpayers’ money is being wasted on soft, undemanding university courses. Well, while I wouldn’t want the Daily Mail or its readers deciding what counts as demanding or useful, it is hard to keep a straight face when they pick on ludicrous examples as adventure courses or aromatherapy. It is quite correct that such things have little or no intellectual merit and do not deserve to be placed on a par with physics or mathematics.

For some reason courses on science fiction always raise the ire of Daily Mail types. I’m not sure why. It seems to me a perfectly interesting area of study. I would agree that it is not suitable for a whole first degree – far better as an MA for those already familiar with literary theory or cultural studies. But then one reads the words of a spokesman from the University of Glamorgan who offer such a degree. He claims that many of the graduates from their Science: Fiction and Culture course have gone on to teach science! Is he seriously suggesting that there are science teachers in our schools today whose only qualification is in reading science fiction? We might as well shut up shop.

The most astonishing thing, however, is the defence given. A spokesman for Universities UK said: “This is a misunderstanding of what is happening both in higher education and in the labour market. These so-called non-courses are in fact based on demand from employers and developed in association with them. The skills developed on these courses are essential to the success of the economy.” Let us be brief: skills are acquired through training; education is not the same thing as training; the point of higher education is not to satisfy employers. The reduction of all learning to the acquisition of skills is simply philistine ignorance.

To be honest I don’t know how to speak to someone who represents universities and yet doesn’t understand that. Well, here’s a quick, rough-and-ready explanation: if you are trained, you know how to do something; if you are educated, you know why you did it that way. Education teaches understanding. For most things, from switching on the TV to writing a complex computer programme, it’s not necessary to understand in order to do the thing properly. Understanding, though, is its own end, a pleasure and a good in itself. Unfortunately, while everyone is capable of being trained, to a greater or lesser extent, not everyone is capable of, or even interested in, understanding.

It is merely a by-product of education that it fits you for employment. It is not its raison d’etre. And it is possible that proper education does a better job of it than vocational training. I remember quite a while ago reading in The Guardian about an organisation which prepares graduates for management positions. They devised a test to try and predict which graduates might be best suited for such roles. Arts graduates did poorly. Those who had studied relevant subjects such as Management and Business Studies performed averagely well. At the top, though, by far, were mathematicians followed by philosophers. The reason is surely obvious: a degree in Business or Management prepares one to tackle anything which has already been done. Mathematics and philosophy, however, are abstract subjects – they teach how to solve any problem. Vocational training deals with the predictable; education enables one to tackle the unforeseen.

6) I have been taken to task regarding my earlier post by an email correspondent. Predictably, perhaps, he has missed my point. I’ll repeat: I do not look down on vocational training. It’s very useful and necessary. Indeed, I am doing some myself right now! I object only to confusing it with higher education. My scorn – and I would have thought it obvious – was reserved for those representatives of universities who betray its scholarly ideals for the requirements of industry and business.

My correspondent remarks that proper training inevitably includes education. Well, yes, and education inevitably involves the acquisition of certain skills. Nevertheless, I will persist in stating that education and training are two different things, even if they often walk hand-in-hand. It is amusing, though, that his examples of proper training are as old-fashioned as my idea of university education. What he means by training is traditional apprenticeship to a craft. Yet an aromatherapy course at the local college is as far from that as it is from taking Literae humaniores at Oxford!

It has to be said that the conflict between state and university is by no means a new one. The modern university has its origin in the founding of Berlin University in 1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt with the aim of combining disinterested research into scholarly subjects with the inculcation into students of high culture and the ideal of Bildung. Support came from the Prussian State because it needed increasing numbers of highly trained and skilled bureaucrats. Humboldt himself was quickly removed from his post when he argued for grants of land so that the University might be self-supporting and independent. The true end of of university education was constantly debated thereafter: it was a subject of vital importance to Nietzsche, for instance, to name just one.

Nowadays it is fashionable to dismiss all this as an obsolete romanticism which has no place in a post-modern, or indeed a post-postmodern, society. Yet, however one might have to reformulate the ideal in order to adapt to contemporary conditions I refuse to accept the abandonment of the value of knowledge for its own sake. And yes, I will continue to sneer at philistines who pretend that job training or leisure pursuits, for all their intrinsic interest, are the same thing as academic learning.

First posted in February, May & August 2007

Not so long ago I went down to the town centre, when I was still living in my home town, to visit the local library and I ended up buying a couple of books. For 20p each I got George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (which I have somehow never got round to reading before) and Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking – classics both. It always feels like a shady deal – picking off the library’s depleting stock for a pittance. I walked away ashamed. What are they doing selling books? A few years ago I requested Kant’s Critique of Judgement because I needed to consult it. I knew from an old search of the catalogue that one of the libraries in Hertfordshire had a copy. I couldn’t have it now though. Why not, I asked? It appears no-one has taken the book out in the last five years and so it was sold! Its unpopularity does not surprise me – the Critique of Judgement is an extremely hard work to understand. But to sell the only copy in the county because hardly anyone is interested in or capable of reading it! Isn’t it the whole purpose of libraries to store and preserve literature for the benefit of the whole community?

Many of us in Great Britain, lacking a privileged background, managed to get some sort of education thanks to three great institutions now, it would appear, in terminal decline: the grammar school, the BBC, and the public library. I relied very heavily on the latter in particular. So far as music was concerned, then as now my great passion, the shelves in my home town library were packed with Eulenberg miniature scores, almost the entire piano literature, dozens of books on every composer, and hundreds of LPs. It was a splendid collection for a small town and I worked my way through the lot, just about, as a teenager. Now? The scores have gone – packed off to a central, but largely inaccessible, Resource Centre. You can order them, and pay for the privilege – that is, if you can find what you want using the very limited search engine. No one can browse any more as I did when I was young and let their curiosity move them. It is a great shame. The classical LPs were sold off long ago; these days there are just a handful of crossover CDs. In the seventies the music books took up a whole wall; in the noughties the classical section barely fills half a shelf.

That is, of course, the great question facing anyone in a library today: where are the books? Well, we are told that dusty, boring books are not what libraries are about in these exciting times. It’s all information services and meeting places now. Everything must be contemporary and relevant. There are fewer books to read but there are forty shiny new computers for people to send e-mails and download ringtones. It is rather depressing. Can one really make a good case for public money to be spent on providing free-of-charge what is widely available elsewhere? To allow relatively well-off people to browse Amazon and ebay? There should be computers in libraries – particularly for access to catalogues, collections, official documents, journals and so on that aren’t easily accessible to individuals. I just don’t think new library services should come at the expense of books. And they do. The library at home doesn’t have a third of the books it used to stock. What annoys me about the selling-off of books is the philistine motive behind it: that any book not borrowed in a limited period of time is surplus to requirements. To my mind it is those books not wanted by everybody which a library should be stocking – not the latest best-sellers which they now buy in bulk to satisfy a temporary demand. It has reached the level of scandal in some places. Liverpool – the European City of Culture! – notoriously offloaded a large and valuable collection of music books a few years ago for next to nothing.

Many people would claim that there is no need for physical libraries any more because all the information one could ever want is already available online. This claim is, of course, short-sighted and naive. For one thing it rather underestimates the sheer volume of information that actually exists – only a tiny proportion of world literature, for instance, has yet been transferred to digital form. With extension of copyrights and the introduction of DRM mechanisms it’s likely that much will remain either undigitised or inaccessible. What is available is quite inadequate being too often poorly presented and barely edited. One hundred-year-old translations of philosophy texts, for instance, without notes or index and so on, are next to useless, to be honest. That’s not to deny that the internet has provided access to a great deal of material that was formerly rare and difficult to obtain. I now have digital copies of treasures I never expected to see or hear. Nevertheless, there is so much more and it is precisely that which physical libraries should be preserving.

As for my own library: my books overflow their shelves and are piled up here and there (minimalism is so over). You might be able to detect a certain amount of clumping – most of the Nietzsche books are more or less together here, for instance, and the music books over there – but on the whole it’s just a jumble. I have, therefore, long been keen to catalogue them. Unfortunately, this has always seemed to mean using some database template – and I daresay I am not the only one to give up on having to enter eight or nine fields for every book after doing the first twenty or so. Last year, though, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I can catalogue my books online – just enter the ISBN number and it will search Amazon or the Library of Congress or a large number of University libraries and retrieve all the necessary details. It took me a whole day to do my entire library and another afternoon to make some revisions and add tags. Admittedly, mine is not a large collection – a little under 700 books – but then I sold nearly a thousand back in the late ’90s. Now, of course, a lot of them are boxed up in my parents’ new house. Anyway, one fun result of doing this has been to remind me of some books I really should get around to reading again – although I have also been left to wonder quite why I wasted some much time on others (yes, I am looking at you, Martin bloody Heidegger). Of course, LibraryThing has all the usual Web 2 social things – you can browse other people’s collections, send messages, join groups, add widgets to your blog, subscribe to feeds and so on. There are reviews, recommendations conversations, and statistics to mull over. It has already become as essential to me as Last.fm and flickr. In a word, it’s brilliant. You may browse my library if you wish…

One of the things the site has to offer is, not surprisingly, various ways of discovering literature based on what you have in your library compared with others. There is also the Unsuggester. You enter the title of a book you’ve read and it comes up with books that are not generally found in the libraries of people who’ve also read the same book as the one you’ve entered. For some reason with every book I’ve tried I get loads and loads of Terry Pratchett! All good fun – up to a point. There’s something depressing about it, though. Take the first of the example unsuggestions: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic. Of course I laughed out loud at that conjunction – but why? Why shouldn’t someone read both? Yes, there is a disparity between the books – one is the greatest work of the Enlightenment and the other is frothy trivia. It would be a mistake to value them the same. But we assume that the same person can’t be interested in German philosophy and shopping. Well, I am, actually! It’s perfectly possible to understand the Transcendental Analytic and squeal over finding the most darling satin slingbacks. Why not?

There is a notion that to be concerned with serious matters one must be a serious person – all the time. That I blame on Protestantism for it was the sixteenth-century Protestants who introduced, and eventually imposed, the idea that a serious mien, a sober disposition and a constant vigilance over one’s uprightness were prerequisite forms of decent behaviour. Beyond that, of course, to be a man was always considered a serious business. It’s all nonsense. Indeed, I find it suspicious in a person if they have no place for the ephemeral and the non-essential. I suspect their intelligence doesn’t run all that deep. To make a show of being serious indicates a lack of confidence – one is obviously afraid of being caught out. In fact, perpetual seriousness is a giveaway – just as the surest sign of a philistine is their loudly asserting they hate all pop music or all television and the quickest way to spot someone who is uneducated is their unwillingness ever to admit they don’t know the answer to a question. I regard all three as related and infallible means of detecting pretension.

First posted in May & December 2006

I was recently reminded of something in Umberto Eco’s novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. When I first read the passage it had impressed me – I thought, yes, that is the job for me. So, here it is (p224-5):

“A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.
“Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I’d sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup the whiskey I’d brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: ‘Listen, I’m translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell is it?’
“Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogues, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.
“That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing. I call the client back. ‘All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair.’”

Of course, I’d specialise in ideas not merely information. And no, being able to Google for stuff nowadays is no substitute! You have to know what you are looking for – and where you might find it – and be able to judge the significance of what you find – and understand how it fits in with what you already know. You need a good nose… Of course, anyone who thinks all knowledge can be discovered through a Google search is, how shall I put it, at a disadvantage…

First posted in September 2007

Some time ago I was chatting to a friend who had recently been awarded his doctorate and we remarked how neither of us, looking back over the years, could have imagined ending up with such a degree. I don’t think anybody says, when they are young, “when I grow up I want to be a philosopher“, do they? We also found it interesting how it was that we became fascinated by certain problems within philosophy.

Well, I had my first philosophical thought at the age of six or seven. I remember it quite clearly. A group of us were standing in the school playground talking about what presents we hoped to get for Christmas. I felt suddenly very aware of the fact that other people had different desires to mine. For some time I had noticed that there was a voice in my head which was me and yet, somehow, not-me. I wondered whether everyone else had this voice in their head, too. It didn’t seem obvious to me that they did. In fact, I suspected they didn’t – I suspected that my voice in the head was an anomaly. And for some reason I thought that if my school-friends did have this voice speaking in their heads it should say they same things as mine. Clearly, I was being exercised by the so-called Problem of Other Minds and unfortunately, as I was more likely to read the Moomins than Wittgenstein at that time, I was unable to solve the problem…

Well, while I became reconciled, as I grew older, to the idea that other people were not automatons (!), my own feelings of oddness and difference became more acute. No doubt much of that is attributable to my transsexuality. That certainly left me with the suspicion that things were not necessarily as they appeared. In any case, it has always seemed to me a sign of lack of intelligence to consider conditions as they exist now to be natural and obvious and “the way things have always been”. The more I learned the more I understood that things have been different and can be different. Nothing, it seemed to me, was necessarily normal. Indeed, the very fact that the world existed and that I was living in it at that very moment struck me as strange. I can recall walking to school and laughing to myself that I was on this huge rock hurtling through space. Yet all around me were people scurrying about like ants convinced that their business was of the utmost importance and wholly unaware of the sheer oddity of existence.

So, by the time I was 16 it appears I had definite metaphysical urges. Those urges were fed by a number of books I read during the sixth form: Jack Kerouac – especially Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels – which led me to the poetry of Gary Snyder; John Cage’s Silence and the Cage compilation by Kostelanetz – which led me to Daisetz Suzuki and Alan Watts; Jonathon Cott’s Conversations With Stockhausen, and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It’s difficult to explain, especially after thirty years, what I found so captivating about this impressionistic melange of science, art and Zen Buddhism. So I will just quote from the Preface to the Capra book which had such a profound effect on me in that summer of 1976 (although these days I find its analogies strained and unconvincing):

Five years ago, I had a beautiful experience which set me on a road that has led to the writing of this book. I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks, water and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles. I knew also that the Earth’s atmosphere was continually bombarded by showers of ‘cosmic rays’, particles of high energy undergoing multiple collisions as they penetrated the air. All this was familiar to me from my research in high-energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams and mathematical theories. As I sat on the beach my former experiences came to life; I ’saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ’saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus.

It was around this time that I was first introduced to philosophy as such. Mrs Poole, in General Studies one sunny afternoon, told us about Socrates and the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic. Briefly, we were asked to imagine prisoners in a cave watching a shadow play of images on the wall and believing that is reality. The philosopher is said to be like one who has escaped his imprisonment and sees things clearly, as they really are, by the light of the sun. The imagery is related to other scenes in Plato: the end of the Symposium, for instance, when Socrates, having drunk his companions under the table, rises to greet the sun and meet the new day; and the manner of Socrates’ death when he drinks the hemlock and faces death without fear. At 17 this just struck me emotionally – I was moved but without really understanding.

So, I had no idea then of studying philosophy. Although it seemed to be a settled thing since I was 11 that I would be going to university what subject I would take was a problem. I have written about my school education already so I won’t repeat all I said there. Except to say that I wasn’t obviously brilliant at any particular subject but I was pretty good at all of them. Up until about 14 history was probably my favourite subject. But then music took over. However, when I suggested studying music at university everyone was aghast. How was I going to make a living from that? My father had this mad scheme where I would study engineering or something before becoming an officer in the army. Well, that wasn’t going to happen! So a compromise was reached where I would study Physics with Music as a minor. In the end, though, I ended up somehow at Surrey University to take straight Physics.

I was not uninterested in the subject – although optics bored me and I could never make head nor tail of electricity atomic physics was fascinating indeed. I just preferred the more spectacular stuff, I suppose. I was a poor student, though, and once you’ve lost your way in physics it’s very hard to catch up. And then I was making up for lost time – away from home at last I went a little wild. It was no surprise to anyone that I failed my end-of-year exams so abysmally. What shocked me, though, was after acting like I didn’t care I got a stern talking to from my friend Karen. She berated me for wasting such an opportunity. I still feel the shame she instilled in me that morning. It’s not just a sense of failure that I find hard to live down but even more the realisation that the past thirty years or so have been the most exciting ever in mathematics, science and technology – and I missed it. I could have played some very small part in that and I didn’t and now it is too late.

Well, in May 1981, when I should have been doing my finals at Surrey if I hadn’t been kicked out, I was lying on some rocks underneath a birch tree on an island in Stockholm mulling over my life. I decided I would go back to university. For the next eighteen months I read madly in English literature. I read everything. So, English Literature was to be my subject. I did a couple more ‘A’ Levels at the local Further Education College in my early twenties and passed English with an A after just six months. Getting that grade in such a short time and memories of Brideshead Revisited in my mind (the television series had just been shown) I decided to apply to Oxford. This must have been the autumn of 1982. The last person from my FE college to have applied to Oxford was five years before and nobody could recall the process. Anyway, I had to take an entrance exam. I loved that. It was an excellent examination, I thought, and very testing. The questions were mostly general – I can still remember a few: “How do you explain the rise of Christianity?” “Is political assassination ever justified?” At a good public school you get a term of coaching; I had a few lunchtime meetings with one of my teachers. They were probably the most intense and enjoyable sessions in my whole education. Then I discovered that you had to apply not to the University itself but to a separate college. This was the kind of thing, I think, which kept so many in the past from applying. I’m sure I was not the only one to have had no advice and there was little information available. In the end I chose to apply to Merton – I’m not sure why. It was only much later I discovered that was probably, for various reasons, the worst choice I could have made. Well, I did enough in the exam to be called for interview. We had to stay in the college for two nights. I can safely say they were the coldest and most uncomfortable nights I have ever spent! The buildings may look romantic from the outside but inside those bare stone walls it was freezing. I did feel out of place. One mealtime I was spoken to by a very fey couple of students – spitting images of Charles and Sebastian. They plainly regarded me as some kind of fascinating alien. I visited the college bar on the second evening and chatted to a fellow candidate, a Wykehamist. He was very pleasant but I sensed the gulf between us – especially when he revealed that he was being interviewed by a family friend. I was not interviewed by a don but by the Professor of Poetry. That is an elected post – held in the recent past by Auden, Heaney, Fuller and at this time by one Jones. I realised I was doomed to be rejected when he started the interview by saying that as I was a couple of years older than the average he expected me to demonstrate that I was a couple of years further educated. I resisted the urge to ask that I be put forward straightaway for the DPhil in that case… He swanned about the panelled room in a purple smoking-jacket sipping sherry (he did not offer me a glass). It is ungracious of me I know but I could not contain a smirk when I read, at the end of his term, that he was widely considered the worst Professor of Poetry in living memory.

I also took Sociology A Level at the FE college. My tutor had written in one of my reports: “Stephanie is an extremely intelligent student, but she seems always to allow herself to be sidetracked into the interesting philosophical byways of the subject. She has shown far less enthusiasm for the more routine material“. Quite. So far as English was concerned I had looked at the classic works of criticism – William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and I. A. Richard’s Practical Criticism (which I’ve just discovered you can download from the Internet Archive) for instance – which had given me the taste for such theory. Then, reading Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group led me to G. E. Moore and his Principia Ethica which I managed to find in our town library. This was the first work of philosophy I had ever read and it proved something of a revelation. It was not so much the subject matter – a critique of ethical naturalism – that astonished and attracted me as the style. It was logical and lucid. It forced me to read slowly. I had to take as much care in following the argument as Moore had evidently taken in formulating it. And I enjoyed doing that immensely.

I arrived at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1983. First years in Humanities were encouraged to take multi-disciplinary courses so I chose 20th Century Poetry, Literature and Science and Knowledge and the Humanities. The latter was taught by the Philosophy department and the first part of the course was concerned with the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. I wrote my very first essay on the Ontological Argument. Handing back the essay my tutor said I should switch to Philosophy because I evidently had a talent for it and should be able to get a First in the subject if I wanted. I did nothing at the time but the compliment stayed in my mind – naturally! Then in the summer holidays I read Jonathon Culler’s On Deconstruction. The book itself I found interesting but what really stimulated me was the preface in which Culler introduced a notion quite new to me:

… a domain as yet unnamed but often called “theory” for short. This domain is not “literary theory”, since many of its most interesting works do not explicitly address literature. It is not “philosophy” in the current sense of the term. since it includes Saussure, Marx, Freud, Erving Goffman, and Jacques Lacan, as well as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It might be called “textual theory,” if text is understood as “whatever is articulated by language,” but the most convenient designation is simply the nickname “theory.” The writings to which this term alludes do not find their justification in the improvement of interpretations, and they are a puzzling mixture. “Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson,” writes Richard Rorty, “a kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor epistemology, nor social prophecy, but all of those mingled together in a new genre.”

Culler gave some recent examples of this new-fangled theory: Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist. I read all three that summer. I wanted to do theory! The mixture of subjects appealed, the whole approach seemed innovative; this was surely where the intellectual excitement was in the humanities. Nowadays there are courses aplenty on this kind of thing but there weren’t in 1984. It seemed to me, though, that Philosophy was closer to it than English, and surely less conservative, I supposed. So I switched departments at the beginning of my second year. Still, having begun with best of intentions my interests at university had soon turned in other directions – to drinking, politics, late nights, smoking spliff and sex. But I did read during the holidays and in term-time I browsed the journals – especially Diacritics with its rather heady brew of post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, literary theory and philosophy.

Unfortunately, this played into my great fault when it comes to formal education: following my own interests at the expense of the curriculum. I had been the same at school. I was a stranger to seminars and I only wrote essays when forced to by the Senior Tutor. Then, in my third year I suffered with depression, alcohol abuse, self-harm. Because of that I had to intermit for most of a year. Anyway, in the end I only scraped through my finals. Well, the external examiner might have been willing to give me a first but the department apparently said they couldn’t give one to such a lazy sod as I’d been. So they gave me a very high 2.1 instead. However, they did allow me to register the following October for an MA by Research and Thesis. So I spent another year at the university reading Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida without really knowing what it was I was actually researching.

I returned home towards the end of the ’80s. I postponed completing my MA and began a series of tiresome temporary jobs. The final one was at Dixon’s Warehouse. Twelve hours a night I unloaded televisions from lorries. It was backbreaking. If you got a 19” Sony portable that Christmas I hate you! Well, I ended that year with a bad case of bronchitis, I was unemployed again and determined never to work like that any more. So what should I do? Most of my friends from university were at this time embarking on careers. I wasn’t interested in a career. What did I want to do with my life? I asked myself seriously the question “what makes me happy?” Some answers I rejected because they relied on the presence and actions of other people. I realised there was one thing, though, I could rely on myself and that was reading and studying. That was the thing that never failed to please and interest me. So, notwithstanding my unimpressive past as a student, I decided I was going to read and study and to hell with anything else.

By now I had become obsessed by Nietzsche. I had, of course, read him quite a few years before, but now I was interested more and more in the interpretation of his philosophy. Around 1990 it had become commonplace to view Nietzsche’s philosophy as fundamentally aesthetic. Many readings based on Heidegger’s first volume of Nietzsche lectures were appearing and Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature was acclaimed everywhere. Nietzsche was hailed – and sometimes criticised – as the godfather of postmodernism. It was a superficially attractive point of view. And yet I saw a problem. If Nietzsche viewed the world as a work of art, if Nietzsche believed all was perspective, then why did he make such a big thing about Wagner? What justified his intemperate criticisms? At the time, following the usual post-structuralist way I considered it simply as a contradiction within Nietzsche’s thought. With that idea I quickly wrote an MA thesis – some guff about art and chaos in Nietzsche’s philosophy best forgotten.

The day after I sent off the thesis I began to read a book which really marked the beginning of my research, although it had nothing to do with Nietzsche directly. The book was Music and Trance by Gilbert Rouget. It is a gloriously rich and fascinating work. The gist of its argument was that music does not induce trance as is usually thought. Music’s role is rather to accompany and control the trance. Rouget does make certain analogies between trance ceremonies and operatic performance – analogies justified by Renaissance theorising regarding ancient Greek tragedy and opera as its modern counterpart. I realised that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner insofar as it rested on the deleterious effects his music was credited with having on its listeners was possibly not justified and in fact might rest on some rather old and unexamined ideas. And I soon discovered there was a long history behind the idea of the “effects of music” and I started to read whatever I could find on the subject.

About a year after that I came across another book that influenced the direction of my research – Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics edited by Large & Weber. From the essays contained within I learned that Wagner’s importance in the nineteenth century rested not only on his status as a composer but as the head of a movement – Wagnerism – that took a variety of forms in different countries. Wagner’s writings preached cultural renewal, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, Schopenhauerian pity mixed with Christianity and Buddhism, vegetarianism and so on. It had a stirring effect on many and arguably can be regarded as one of the intellectual ancestors of National Socialism. I realised that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner was spot on as regards its social, political and ethical aspects. So I started to learn more about Wagnerism.

The more I read about Nietzsche, Wagner, and Schopenhauer, the more I read about history and nineteenth-century culture, the more I became convinced that most interpretations of Nietzsche were fundamentally flawed. That is because most interpretations of Nietzsche are ahistorical. He is read as though he were a contemporary primarily interested in contemporary issues in academic philosophy. That is all very well but it leads many to consider Nietzsche’s writings then as literary, unsystematic, fragmentary, contradictory. It appeared to me that many problems in interpretation could be resolved by reading Nietzsche in historical terms. So, I wrote my PhD thesis to argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy is best understood as a response to Wagnerism. To take one example – why does Nietzsche expend so much effort on the concept of pity? That is a question inadequately answered by most discussions of Nietzsche’s ethics. In the main that is because they see pity in terms of Christianity. Pity, however, was a pressing problem for Nietzsche. It was the fundamental concept in Schopenhauer’s ethics and was taken up in those terms by Wagner. And even where Nietzsche does link pity with Christianity it is a Christianity seen through Schopenhauerian lenses. Nietzsche’s ethical ideas are largely determined by such focus on particular concepts as these.

Anyway, studying for a PhD is quite wonderful – at least in England, and doing a subject in the Humanities – because you are simply encouraged to haunt libraries and read whatever you like for a few years. All that is expected of you is that you keep in touch – so I used to meet my supervisor for a pleasant chat over lunch once a month. Of course, at the end of it you have to produce a thesis. I had my moment of panic about a month before it was due to be handed in. I was, naturally, advised simply to write up something – if I had anything else worthwhile it could wait. A lot of people flatter themselves that because they get accepted onto a PhD programme, and because they manage to do some research, then it doesn’t really matter whether they complete. Except – it is the ability to complete a cogent and concise piece of work that is really being tested. I just about finished on time: I wrote the introduction on the Monday; the whole of Tuesday was spent printing out several copies; and they were bound and posted on the Wednesday with a day to spare. Friday I was off on holiday with my younger sister and her children full of the most splendid feeling of freedom.

My viva was about five or six months later a few days before Christmas. The viva is a relic of medieval times when a doctoral candidate was expected to defend his thesis in public. Fortunately nowadays you only have to stand up against a couple of examiners – and if your supervisor likes you the ones chosen will be broadly sympathetic. Even so it can be quite gruelling. On the other hand you have spent years studying your subject and it has all come down to this one interview. You feel like an athlete who has trained their whole life for one race in the Olympics. I confess I was on top form that day. It was exhilarating. The conversation begins quite generally: why did you think such and such subject worth researching? And it becomes more and more specific: on page 70 you assert so-and-so but surely Professor X has shown that blah blah blah. After an hour and half you are asked to step outside. Twenty minutes, half an hour later you are called back in – handshakes, you’ve passed. It’s curious, though. It’s not like you’ve passed an exam. Rather it’s like they are saying, welcome to the club, now you’re one of us. That evening I was as happy as I’ve ever been.

I was stroppy the day of my first graduation. It didn’t help that most of my friends had graduated the year before. So far as I was concerned it was all a load of flummery and I went through the whole thing exhibiting a permanent sneer. My parents came down, of course, and both my sisters, and they were all far more excited than I was. The trouble is, I couldn’t escape the suspicion that I didn’t really deserve to get a degree – I had put in so little work. I didn’t bother going to receive my MA – I got my certificate in the post. I had no intention of going to my PhD ceremony, either. However, one day my parents said they didn’t expect me ever to pay them back for their financial assistance but… they wanted to see me get my degree. It would have been churlish – and ungrateful – to refuse. So, on a hot July day I sat glumly in the car on my way to Canterbury. Against all expectations it turned out to be a lovely day. When we arrived it was already afternoon and we went for a late lunch. The food and wine made me feel more relaxed. In the early evening we made our way to the King’s School in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral. Going into the hall I realised things would be different this time. The undergraduates were handed plastic packs containing their gowns. Doctors were taken aside and helped to dress. That’s more like it! The gown, I noted, was heavier than before and much more pleated and lined with velvet. The hat was like a squashed top hat with a broad hard brim and two purple tassels – the sort of thing you see Thomas More or Erasmus wear in paintings. I stepped out of the hall to rejoin my parents. As we strolled in the grounds a woman and her daughter came towards us. The woman gave me a funny look and said loudly to her daughter, “Why is that person’s gown more colourful than yours?” “Oh, she’s a doctor”, she replied. I happened to glance at my mother at that moment and she just beamed. I thought, well, that has made up for a lot. From then on I enjoyed myself.

So what now for my education? It was asked of me in my viva whether I was doing philosophy in my thesis or history of ideas. I said philosophy, of course. But the truth is, I think, that I am more interested in the history of ideas. I never wrote a revised version of my thesis for publication. I’ve just never been able to rouse myself. I just lack the necessary ambition and drive, I suppose. I did apply to do post-doctoral research on the theme of the effects of music but I never got the grant (well, they are extremely hard to get). If I had a year’s income and access to a university library then who knows? At the moment my interests are varied and my reading desultory. Actually, what I’d really like to do is another degree… in mathematics. It would be fun, I think. Every so often I take a look at the Open University syllabus…

First posted in November 2007

My first school was a kindergarten somewhere in the countryside outside Brampton in Canada. I don’t remember too much about it – except that there was a Magic Circle where we all had to sit and tell everyone what we had done the day before. There is a photo of me looking rather chubby and wary on the path waiting for the bus on my first day. I had to wear a piece of cardboard attached to my coat with my name on it. I don’t think I was very happy about that. I certainly wasn’t happy with Infants School when we came back to England. Pitched battles, bullying, taunting, strict teachers, vile school dinners.

I went to two very different Junior Schools. The first was called Peartree. It fancied itself as some sort of Prep School – we had Houses, the cane was wielded indiscriminately (not on me, though, I was a goody-two-shoes!), and we spent hours on italic writing exercises. Still, I flourished there – achievement was praised and I was very keen to acquire stars for my work. And what I learned at Peartree stood me in good stead for many years. Then, when we moved across town I went to Martins Wood. That was quite different. The teachers were in thrall to the latest trendy theories in education. In the fourth year for instance we were encouraged to direct our own learning and to make our own lesson plans. I soon came up against the limitations of that ideology. The freedom is largely illusory and constrained by the idea that children need to know only so much (what teachers have decided is “relevant”). For example: there was a maths syllabus which we were encouraged to follow as far as we could at our own pace. I completed it before Easter. So what did my teacher do? Write more lessons? Direct me to a more advanced textbook? No, I was simply told I didn’t have to do maths in the summer term! I’m still dumbfounded by that.

I do have my school reports from the third and fourth years at Martin’s Wood. According to Mr Finlay I am pleasant and produce satisfactory work. I am “interesting and intelligent” with an “original style” and a “good fund of general knowledge.” I used to enjoy Composition in his class – he would throw a pile of cards with colourful pictures cut out of magazines stuck on them and we would have to write something, anything we liked, based on one of the pictures. According to Mr Haslam I show “originality” and an “enquiring mind” and have “very wide interests” although “almost any form of historical literature appeals” to me. Most of my art “always seems to include some aspect of mathematics” and he wishes he could see something more relaxing. I play “a good game of football” and show a “liking for country dancing“! An “ideal pupil“, apparently, I am “friendly with everyone and in spite of [my] tremendous ability there is nothing spoilt about [me].” The headmaster adds “outstanding“.

Unfortunately, once I got to secondary school it was downhill all the way. It’s still a mystery to me what went wrong, exactly. The school itself – Nobel – had began as a technical grammar but had become a comprehensive the year I arrived (the year before me had been the last to take the 11-plus). It was a well-equipped school – science labs, a whole craft block, indoor swimming pool and so on. But somehow I think the teachers lost heart. It was an undemanding education in any case. I soon became bored and spent half my time idly daydreaming. My first form-tutor confidently predicted a place at Oxford or Cambridge – my last didn’t think I was good enough to go to University at all. And whereas I had been a bright and curious pupil before I became increasingly withdrawn and sullen through my teenage years.

Well, the first term started off decently it would appear from my reports: “well-prepared“, “most pleasing“, “very imaginative“, “lively interest“, “splendid results” “great deal of ability“. Every single teacher, however, said I was too quiet. Now, even today I don’t understand what was wrong about that – but it caused great concern and I got a talking to from my Mum and Dad after parents’ evening, would you believe? The second year was good, too: “Stephanie continues to work very quietly. There are flashes of high quality in her written work, but she is reticent in oral work” (English). “Stephanie’s contributions are not very numerous, but always high above average” (Music) – quality, my dear, not quantity! “Stephanie works quietly but has produced work of a good standard” (Geography) But? I don’t understand that “but”. The rot had begun to set in by the third year: “Stephanie has worked well if a little too unobtrusively. A little more positive effort would work wonders” (German). “I think Stephanie has coasted a bit this term. Do not let this decline continue!” (History). My form tutor warns me at Christmas that I “cannot rely on ability alone“. Unfortunately at this stage I could – at the end of the year he writes: “Once again Stephanie has demonstrated her ability in all subjects“. Never fear my comeuppance is not far away.

The fourth year, though, was better – three different teachers use the word “conscientious“. Best report comes from Music: “Stephanie’s work is scientifically thorough and yet reveals imagination and even humour: excellent!” Good old Miss Auerbach. I was, you may not be surprised to know, teacher’s pet. Well, she was lucky to get one pupil a year actually interested in music – so I was given free rein over the music rooms and all the scores and records, which was wonderful. That’s what education should be – giving you the means to satisfy your curiosity to your heart’s content. Miss Auerbach was an eccentric German woman who spoke very fast with a strong accent and loved her subject in a very Middle-European way (indeed, she later resigned from teaching in protest when the National Curriculum was introduced). Her family had escaped the Nazis before the Second World War – and she herself refused ever to listen to Wagner, I remember. My doctoral thesis, many years later, was on Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and I wondered as I wrote whether Miss Auerbach had laid the seed for my interest. My younger sister (a later pet) and I still do impressions of her – for instance, when someone was talking too much she would say, in a deep, slow and exasperated voice, “Stephanie, pleeeeeeeease“, and then flop down until her hands almost touched the floor.

Brows began to furrow in the fifth year – I have “slightly underestimated the difficulty of the task” ahead, I have “a lot to learn” after a “disappointing mock result” and so on. My French teacher writes that I “must make an effort to speak French in class” I suppose that would have been a good idea! Music, of course, is still favourable: “Stephanie copes easily with all aspects of our syllabus; it would be good to see her share her often original thoughts and the results of her wide interests more readily“. Now why do teachers say things like that? The previous year in English we all had to give a ten-minute talk to the rest of the class about something in which we were interested. I chose to do mine on supernovae. What do you think happened? That everyone sat entranced, bombarded me with questions and came round the house in the evening to look at the Crab Nebula through my telescope? Or that they sat staring at me with undisguised boredom, loathing and contempt? Share my interests, indeed.

The Lower Sixth was fairly satisfactory, except for Miss Guppy in Maths who wrote: “Stephanie seems to find new ideas difficult to understand“. Cow. That’s my one and only talent, I’ll have you know. In the Upper Sixth everyone is predicting failure. In Physics my work “has deteriorated considerably” and overall I have made “almost negative progress“. My favourite maths teacher writes “Stephanie appears to be working, but does not produce much written work as evidence” – the story of my life! Oh well, I managed to scrape through and with great luck managed to secure a place at Surrey University…

First posted in March 2006