Stephanie's Pillowbook

A few random bits and pieces…

1) I was just reading Freiya’s blog The Other Side of the World and something she wrote yesterday about watching television struck a nerve: “its funny but when you’re on your own there seems less incentive to watch it. I never realised how much of a social thing watching television is“. I agree entirely. Back in the ’80s I used to watch Dynasty, Dallas, the Brookside Omnibus, and I always watched them with friends. That was the fun, discussing the actors, their characters, their clothes, their ridiculous situations, tearing them apart, making jokes and arch comments and so on. Dynasty, for example: you could always tell who was supposed to be gay – they would always be wearing, for some reason, the most tastelessly appalling chunky sweaters. Spotting that sort of thing and laughing about it with others – that was the entertainment. When I came back home I stayed at my parents for a few months before moving into my flat. So during the first week I sat down with them to watch the soaps and as usual started talking at once. I was immediately shushed: “Now I missed what so-and-so said!” I was astonished. Was I supposed to sit there in silence and actually watch the programme? But it’s rubbish. My father doesn’t even like me talking through the football – I can’t keep my mouth shut, though, I’ll burst! It feels so unnatural just to sit there and say nothing. When I moved into my flat it was too sad to watch the soaps on my own. So I gave them up.

2) I really need to learn how to touch-type. I can type pretty fast but I make tons of mistakes. And I have to look at the keyboard mostly. I have played all those games which are supposed to help increase your speed and accuracy like Typespeed and gtypist and I can do quite well at them. The trouble is that they simply make you better at doing what you already do. Your bad habits are confirmed and reinforced. Most of my faults arise from the fact that I am left-handed. So, for one thing, my left hand covers most of the keyboard. More seriously, my left hand reacts more quickly than my right so I notice that most of my spelling mistakes at the keyboard are the result of the left hand being faster than the right. The worst thing, though, is that your hands become accustomed to making particular movements. So, when I come to type “its”, for example, I almost always type “it’s” – not because I don’t know the difference (I certainly do and would never make a mistake when writing) but because my fingers automatically make the movements for it’s. When I learnt how to write at school we were forced to do a lot of apparently meaningless exercises – lines and lines of a’s and b’s and so on. I’m sure the purpose was to make writing an automatic business that you don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have to think about consciously. I need to learn typing the same way. The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult to go back to being a beginner at something you can apparently already do. I have thought the solution was to change to using a Dvorak layout – except, as someone pointed out, it leaves you eventually unable to use other people’s keyboards effectively.

3) I followed a link once from Tranniefesto to a site called Gaping Void. The writer of this blog asked people to submit mini-manifestos. One of them, contributed by somebody called Seth Godin, was the purest tosh. This point in particular had me gnashing my teeth: “Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.” What a dismal philosophy that is! If I thought for a moment that was true I’d go out and hang myself. How dead do you have to be inside to really believe that everyone is engaged all the time in “selling themselves”? This is the kind of silly statement made by those apologists for capitalism who don’t understand that it is, for good or evil, an historical phenomenon. It’s the product of certain particular conditions. It hasn’t always existed and won’t always exist in the future. Human nature, therefore, is not coterminous with homo oeconomicus

[From my responses to comments] Whatever you want to call it, selling, marketing, it’s personal relations mediated by money – it’s not an inevitable or necessary part of human life. It’s pure capitalist ideology to pretend otherwise. I’m rather disturbed, actually, by the way you conflate reputation and brand. The latter is surely a reified form of what the former used to be?

I’m not arguing with you that marketing is sometimes necessary and appropriate in particular circumstances. But Seth Godin was making a generalisation – that marketing is what we all do all the time. That I do object to. Human beings aren’t naturally and fundamentally commodities – Godin’s statement implies that we are.

You seem to be generalising the word “marketing” – like Godin does – to cover any activity in which one person is influenced by the action of another. Do you really mean that? Do you really believe all human relationships are mediated by money? Do you not at least dream that there might be the possibility of contact that is not reduced to the concept of selling something for a profit? No, it’s a dismal and hateful ideology Godin has and I reject it…

4) This summer [of 2007] has had a few highlights – such as my sailing trip with my boyfriend – but otherwise it has been a dreary season for me. The oppressively hot weather finished me off. I wilted under the heat. I couldn’t be bothered to do anything so I became bored. Feeling bored all the time I became frustrated and depressed. Now summer is just about over and I’m feeling much better for it. This is my favourite time of year (just as twilight is my favourite time of day). There is a mellow and melancholy atmosphere which suits me well and there is the first slight chill in the air to presage autumn. September always feels like a new beginning – it is the proper month for making plans. I have spent so long at school and college that I tend to keep to the academic year. How pointless is it to celebrate the new year on January 1st when one is normally in the midst of things?

5) The weekend with my friends was very refreshing – good company, good food, good wine. One thing struck me, though, when a couple more friends came round for Sunday lunch. At all these kind of gatherings I am always the one who ends up playing with the children. I wonder why? Well, the children don’t jump on any of the other adults or drag them off to play football or have balloon fights or help with puzzles. Do they detect something about us? When I mentioned it, one of my friends said she thought it was because I wasn’t afraid to make fool of myself. Children may be naive and lack knowledge of the world but they are often astute in piercing the masks and pretences of adults

6) Late yesterday afternoon I went over to the local shops for some cooking chocolate and some vanilla so I could make a chocolate Impossible Pie. In front of me in the queue at the till was a boy and a girl of 18 or 19. They were joined by another boy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood. Here is part of the conversation: “… it was so funny… we had him down on the ground in the underpass and Carl was stomping on his head… ha ha… I’ve seen people cry but this was just… it was fucking hilarious, man, ha ha.” It’s not the violence exactly which shocked me. No, it was the normality of it. This boy felt perfectly at ease telling his story out loud in a crowded shop. And he really did think it was the funniest thing ever to see this other boy cry his eyes out because his head was being stomped – I mean, his eyes were glistening with pleasure. And they were still laughing five minutes later when I walked out of the shop…

7) It was my mother’s birthday today and my father took us out for dinner. Now, around these parts finding somewhere decent to eat is difficult enough so when a restaurant opens that actually garners something of a reputation… Well. So, this evening we made our way to The Fox in Willian. We sat for a while in the rather well-scrubbed bar and munched on home-made crisps. When we were led to our table we were served with a few slices of bread and oil. For my first course I had, and I quote from the menu, Confit chicken rillettes bound in a tarragon creme fraiche, crispy Parma ham, pink grapefruit and citrus compote. It wasn’t bad at all, very nice indeed, but it lacked something and I couldn’t help but look a little enviously at my father’s pigeon breast on a beetroot mash. The main course, however, was almost perfect. Char grilled marinated lamb chops with caraway greens, garlic and rosemary parmentier potatoes and port and mint syrup. Accompanied by a piquant and peppery Chianti it was gorgeous and succulent. I followed it with ice-cream and a rather rich brandy. I don’t often eat like this so you can imagine I came away very satisfied…

8) Ruth Brandon’s Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945 is an entertaining book and quite interesting, but rather journalistic in style and ultimately disappointing. She observes perfectly correctly at the beginning that the Surrealist movement was primarily a literary movement. It’s a shame, therefore, that she wastes so much time on that preposterous old fraud Salvador Dali. In fact she ends up seeing surrealism as either descending into Daliesque shock-spectacle and commercialism or being subsumed into New York Abstract art. There is no mention of post-surrealist groups like Lettrism, Cobra or the Situationist International. There is little mention of the spread of surrealist ideas around the world. A more absorbing book might have situated the Breton circle more firmly within the general artistic and intellectual milieux of between-the-wars France. I certainly find some of the more tangential figures – Leiris and Bataille to name but two – rather more fascinating than many of the second-rate poets and hangers-on of the legitimate group. Even with the concentration on Breton much seems to be overlooked. A vitally important part of Surrealism was the attempt to overcome the boundaries between art and life for instance and for discussion of that we must still go to Maurice Nadeau, it would seem.

9) This time last year I was reading quite a bit of Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. Romantic, evocative, cool, compelling, enchanting, mysterious tales of estrangement, memory, loss and desire. I like the style of writing which is at once poetic and colloquial. Murakami’s world is an easy one to get lost in – so much so that reading anyone else seemed an unwelcome intrusion. In the end I felt I had to drag myself away forcibly from it.

10) I’ve just finished watching How William Shatner Changed The World on Channel 5 and very entertaining it was too, although it lost its way somewhere around the middle of the show. William Shatner was his usual witty, ridiculous self. The programme proposed the idea that Star Trek’s vision of the future actually influenced scientific progress of the last few decades. Absurd? Not really. Since our earliest days important things have often appeared first as play. Anyway, it’s a thesis which has more promise so far as the original series is concerned because it is certainly possible to argue convincingly that there was a close connection between technological innovation in the 1960s and popular culture. The computer itself might have been the tool of the military-industrial complex – but we surely wouldn’t have the PC without a lot of old hippy ideals (and GNU/Linux might be seen as the latest manifestation of that counter-cultural impulse). Technology mixed with freedom could be a heady brew. It was amusing to note that Star Trek became less popular the more a pessimistic, irrationalist, anti-scientific animus took hold in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have to confess I was not really a fan of Star Trek in any of its incarnations. Well, the original had a certain charm – but it was a guilty pleasure (like eating white chocolate). In fact I don’t like any television science fiction – or many films. I’ve never understood the appeal of Star Wars or any space opera or fantasy. I like my sci-fi hard.

11) As soon as I started using a computer I enjoyed playing games (starting with Star Trek in 1978). But for a long while they were just arcade games and that sort of thing. Then, around 1999, 2000 my brother gave me Settlers III Gold Edition for my birthday. I quickly became addicted. I loved watching all the little people run around building things and fighting each other. I soon moved on to Red Alert and Starcraft and Age of Empires. Although I tried other genres I always came back to Real-Time Strategy. Starcraft was my favourite – so perfectly balanced and with a story that was actually interesting.

But then I discovered the Total War series. I was a little late coming to Shogun but I got enough of a taste to buy Medieval Total War as soon as it came out. For me that was the best game ever. I loved the scope of the game, the fact that it demanded real decisions regarding economics and diplomacy and real strategy when it came to battles, the fact that every game was unpredictable and different. Every major character in the game had a personality that could influence one’s failure or success. I remember one game, for instance, where every one of my Kings was either a loon or a coward – I could not prevent the gradual decline, the unhappiness of the population, the constant revolt of the generals. But there were other games where a great general would appear at just the opportune moment to enable me to seize real power. I became reasonably good at it, too. I could play a one-province state like Denmark or Aragon on the hardest level – and win.

I was very enthusiastic when Rome: Total War came out but I agreed with those who said it was dumbed-down from Medieval . In fact, I preferred to play the Total Realism mod. Then, I suddenly stopped playing. I haven’t played a computer game – other than arcade games – for nearly three years now. I suppose it was just a phase. But great fun while it lasted…

12) In olden times it was believed that one’s health, both mental and physical, was determined by the balance of the four humours that supposedly lurked in the blood. If one of the humours became “burnt”, then the balance would be upset too far and melancholy adust would be the result. Over the centuries melancholy was reduced from a permanent disposition towards madness or genius to a temporary mood, a feeling of sadness without cause. Well, none of this has the slightest relationship to truth… and yet, it does have a certain psychological appeal. Every few weeks it seems as though my veins become filled with poison, some dark ink colouring my emotions. There is no external reason why I should feel sad, touchy, tearful and yet I do. It may not be an imbalance of humours but I would not be surprised to learn that there is some physical factor involved. A fortnight later it is as though there were a tonic flowing through my veins and I am alert and curious and full of smiles. This cycle of moods is, I stress, quite independent of events in life which rightfully induce happiness or depression – it’s an underlying swell and fall. Oh well, at least the swings aren’t as violent as they were in my twenties.

13) I have always been a little suspicious of Wikipedia, notwithstanding that I use it often enough. The trouble is, the very first entry I ever looked up was that for Friedrich Nietzsche, the one subject for which I can claim to have some knowledge. I was appalled. Every sentence was incorrect if not idiotic. I was tempted to rewrite the whole thing myself until I realised there was nothing to prevent some ill-read student overwriting me. Still, I have to admit that the quality of the Nietzsche entry has improved over the years: where once it was a disgrace now it is merely sophomoric. I think most people with any real knowledge of philosophy would sooner direct the curious to the Stanford Encyclopedia. The standard of writing is much higher, each entry being written by an acknowledged expert, and is well worth the reading. The main article on Nietzsche by Robert Wicks is acceptable and has a good bibliography. There is also an excellent article on Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy by the always brilliant Brian Leiter. To repeat, so far as philosophy is concerned, the Stanford Encyclopedia is much to be preferred over Wikipedia.

For me, perhaps the greatest intellectual resource freely available on the internet is the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. What a wonderful thing it is. Originally published in 1973-74 it is, as the preface has it, “a culminating work in a tradition that had been energized by the fight against fascism. It was a tradition committed to the pursuit of disinterested scholarship in the academic sphere and to free expression of thought in the political sphere”. The articles were written by such luminaries in their field as Isaiah Berlin, George Boas, Owen Chadwick, Mircea Eliade, Sidney Hook, Claude Palisca, John Plamenatz, Arnaldo Momigliano, R.C. Lewontin, Judith Shklar, and many others. Browsing randomly through the entries we find fascinating articles on Biological Homologies and Analogies, Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer, Harmony or Rapture in Music, Cosmic Fall, Game Theory. Enough to keep anyone occupied… for months, for years.

14) Non-Photography Day is the idea of one Becca Bland and her defence as presented in a BBC News article is a catalogue of various New Age idiocies. The whole argument is constructed around a series of simplistic binary oppositions: mediation is bad, the immediate is good; the partial is bad, the whole is good; technology is bad, the natural is good; appearance is bad, essence is good; representation is bad, the real is good, and so on. “Experience life in an unmediated fashion”, she writes. Perhaps she would like to explain how that can be done. Is an unmediated experience possible? In the first place, what is involved in having an experience? Surely it implies all kinds of mediations? I suspect Becca Bland has never read Hegel. She continues, you should experience life “without anything in front of your eyes”. She means, of course, without holding a camera in front of them – and yet, how do you see anything in an unmediated fashion with your eyes? You don’t see the thing itself: light hits your eyes, is focused through the lens, is collected and manipulated on the retina, is converted into electrical nervous impulses to be reassembled and interpreted by the brain. Mediation after mediation!

Then we are urged to “Live in the moment”. Admirable advice, I’m sure. New Age types, however, always assume such a thing is simple, we just have to throw off the shackles of civilisation and it is done. They invariably speak of freedom as though it were already achieved. The ancient philosophers, too, believed that we should live in the moment – but they tended to relate such an approach to life to the knowledge of death and thought it could only be achieved after the intense practice of what Pierre Hadot called spiritual exercises. Nowadays, in a world devoted to immediate satisfaction, phrases like “live in the moment” belong to the language and ideology of advertisers.

And so on…

15) I thought Non-Photography Day was a tiresome gesture and now I’ve just discovered that two days ago it was No Music Day. This was the idea of Bill Drummond who apparently started it back in 2005. Last year he wrote a manifesto in The Observer entitled Silence is Golden – or for at least one day of the year it is. It’s not very convincing. In the first place Drummond shows too much concern with novelty for its own sake. As though the chief interest of music lies in hearing something you’ve never heard before. I don’t deny that can provide an exciting experience. It’s a mistake, though, to identify pleasure in music with the satisfying of an urge for novelty because, as Drummond, indicates, the novelty always wears off. Sooner or later you become jaded. I couldn’t help thinking, too, that the desire to not listen to any music for a day was just another way of satisfying that urge for novelty. Secondly, I detect in Drummond’s article the hint of a common tendency among those who don’t really like music as such. What they really like are the things that music reminds them of, the things in life which are so often accompanied by music. As a middle-aged man he will never again have a first kiss – likewise no music will ever mean so much as that which did form the background of his first kiss. I can sympathise with much of what Drummond says but music is more than either commodity or soundtrack. So, I won’t be celebrating a No Music Day this year or any other year. I suspect anyone who sings or plays an instrument is aware that music is inseparable from silence. There is no need for gimmicks.

First posted on various dates during 2006 & 2007

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

For those taking their first steps in the subject a good place to start is with The Philosopher’s Magazine Online. The site contains news, articles and quotations suitable for the beginner, as well as a series of games and quizzes designed to test one’s thinking about logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so on. Try Staying Alive, a little game about Personal Identity.

A venerable site is Causes of Deaths of Philosophers. A few good ones: Thales: Drowned. Sextus Empiricus: Doubtful causes. Ryle: Gave up the ghost. Descartes: Stopped thinking. Berkeley: Divine neglect.

P.D. Magnus and Ryan Hickerson have an amusingly absurd Philosophy Quiz with questions such as Evaluate the following argument: “If conventionalism is true, it must be true by convention. We do not believe in conventionalism. Therefore, we should change our beliefs because conventionalism is self-evident.”

Norman Swartz has a page called Para-Frays, or, The Writes of Passage with examples of philosophical writings which have made him laugh, intentionally or not.

The blog Thoughts, Arguments and Rants had a post some time back entitled Philosophy in Questionable Taste on the subject of philosopher’s breaking-up lines. There were dozens of comments adding a load more lines. A few examples:

The Solipsist: It’s not you, it’s me.

The Humean: Just because we’re always together doesn’t mean we BELONG together.

The Nagelian: You just don’t know what it’s like to be me.

The Heideggerian: I’m just not comfortable with being-in-this-relationship.

The Nihilist: I told you all along that nothing would come between us.

The Unnatural Enquirer has a page on the Philosophy of Kissing with funny definitions of different kinds of kisses. For instance the Zenoian Kiss: “your lips approach, closer and closer, but never actually touch.“

Butterfliesandwheels has a good Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense on their site. For a flavour just take the first two entries:

Acceptance

Nice, warm, cooperative way of evaluating ideas, much better than argument.

Accuracy

Exploded concept. Foolish, Platonic notion that we can get our facts straight.

I love random generators in general and one of my favourites is the Kant Generator developed by Mark Pilgrim which produces sentences based on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The programme is discussed in chapter nine of Dive into Python on XML processing and you can download the source files to run it yourself. Here’s a paragraph I produced earlier:

We can deduce that time is the key to understanding metaphysics, as any dedicated reader can clearly see. There can be no doubt that the transcendental aesthetic (and the reader should be careful to observe that this is true) stands in need of the transcendental unity of apperception; therefore, the things in themselves, in view of these considerations, stand in need to space. The Ideal of practical reason, by means of the practical employment of the Ideal of natural reason, is by its very nature contradictory, as is shown in the writings of Galileo. (Since all of the things in themselves are speculative, the discipline of pure reason excludes the possibility of the manifold.) It is obvious that, in so far as this expounds the sufficient rules of natural causes, human reason, even as this relates to necessity, can thereby determine in its totality the never-ending regress in the series of empirical conditions. By virtue of pure reason, we can deduce that, for example, the thing in itself, in the full sense of these terms, is a body of demonstrated science, and some of it must be known a priori, yet the transcendental unity of apperception would thereby be made to contradict our a posteriori concepts.

Wonderful gibberish – yet it sounds very close to the real thing. As Pilgrim points out, though, it’s much funnier if you’ve ever studied philosophy and had to read this sort of stuff. Kant’s first Critique is the masterpiece of the Enlightenment but his style, it has to be said, is verbose to the point of tedium. If you look at the kant.xml file it’s quite easy to see how the text is produced – although it’s best to read the code from bottom to top and go from paragraph to sentence to clause to vocabulary. There is a Husserl module as well which is also good. I’d like to see a Heidegger Generator – you never know the latter might even throw out random sentences that make sense (which would be an improvement over the original). If you don’t have python installed you can get a few paragraphs of Kantian by going to a page on Bert de Bruijn’s site. Matt Webb has converted the programme into Perl – you can download the source from his page or just view an example in your browser. And you thought philosophy was boring!

The magazine h2so4 has a section Dear Philosopher in which famous philosophers of the past answer reader’s questions. The place to go if you want to hear what Nietzsche has to say on the query “Why do women wear white pumps?”

There are a lot of laughs to be had at Howlers and the Like. The first half are from student essays on philosophy and include such words of wisdom as “Going to a boarding school for the first time, most people are a little apprehensive about leaving the care of your parents and facing life on your own. Death is the same… “. These are followed by howlers from other sources. For example: on a packet of macaroni – “Try it, and try to forget it!” Or from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: “Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen appearances were mending; she began to cut her hair and long for balls… “

Of course we have to mention The Philosophers’ Drinking Song of Monty Python fame – Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle and all that.

If that has whet your appetite you can try the very curious Philosophy Songs – Solipsism’s Painless, Hume on the Brain and the rest!

Sharon Wahl has a written a brilliant and funny story called I Also Dated Zarathustra which is warmly recommended to those who have read Nietzsche’s book.

Daniel Dennett is the editor of The Philosophical Lexicon which introduces to the language such invaluable terms as:

buber, v. To struggle in a morass of one’s own making. “After I defined the self as a relation that relates to itself relatingly, I bubered around for three pages.” Hence buber, n. one who bubers. “When my mistake was pointed out to me, I felt like a complete buber.”

foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.”

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. “It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.”

Tech Support Nietzsche style. Any user requesting help is a weakling who deserves to be crushed beneath your feet with contempt. A travesty of Nietzsche, of course – but still funny.

World’s shortest philosophy books. My favourite: Coping with Change by Parmenides.

The Atheists of Silicon Valley have published a list of 452 ridiculous proofs of God’s existence. I particularly like/hate this one because I have horrible memories of participating in it more than once, grrrrr:

ARGUMENT FROM INFINITE REGRESS

(1) Ask Atheists what caused the Big Bang.

(2) Regardless of their answer, ask how they know this.

(3) Continue process until the Atheist admits he doesn’t know the answer to one of your questions.

(4) You win!

(5) Therefore, God exists.

An essay to ponder, The Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla. I had some trouble finding this again. This site explains why – with a perfect example of human stupidity!

Finally, a joke:

Dean, to the physics department. “Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn’t you be like the math department – all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper.”

And some old advice:

Don’t LOOK at anything in a physics lab.

Don’t TASTE anything in a chemistry lab.

Don’t SMELL anything in a biology lab.

Don’t TOUCH anything in a medical lab.

and, most importantly,

Don’t LISTEN to anything in a philosophy department.

EDIT: Thanks to Lisa for reminding me about Monty Python’s Philosophers’ Football Match. Here it is:

First posted in January 2006

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