Final post on the M.Phil.
I've just gotten an e-mail from the internal examiner of my M.Phil., John Haldane, informing me that I've passed it. This ends a period of uninterestingly mild but still unpleasant nervousness on my part, and also makes me quite happy. Anyway, I think I can say something about what I've learned from the small amount of reflection I've given it thus far.
The two things I've learned that I feel the impression of most strongly at this point are the incredibly difficulty and vastness of philosophy, and my own mediocrity (which is not a bad thing, in someone as naturally arrogant as me).
I felt when writing everything I'd ever previously written that I didn't have the time to make it as good as I wanted, but that, had I the time, I could do the job without error. These, after all, were typically <4,000-word essays done under mild pressure. I would mentally or literally footnote essays' points with a disclaimer that I needed to defend it against certain objections, or clarify it, but that I couldn't because of the limited space and time allotted me; but I did always believe that I could do that work if I had that time. But I was given fourteen months to write the 40,000 words of my M.Phil., which is a massive amount of time to do that much work. I still managed not to have the time to make my dissertation ship-shape; but I also realised that I was nowhere near having the time to do this. Even the one chapter which was very slow and technical was, I realised later, touching on massive issues in the philosophy of language, resolutions to which would depend on massive issues in other massive areas of the philosophy of language, and so on. For the first time, I glimpsed just how big the space between seemingly naturally-following propositions can be, especially in aesthetics. For the first time, I really saw the truth of the maxim (cliché?), "In philosophy, if you're not moving at a snail's pace, you're not moving at all".
And relatedly, I became aware of just how far away I am from being able to do this in philosophy. I imagined myself, emotionally even after I knew intellectually that I was not up for this, tidying up whole philosophical debates with a single beautiful paper, in which none of the claims were substantially problematic, whatever about clarification of expression or strict logical undeniability. I felt this to be more possible by the mistakes I saw in so many philosophers' works: mistakes so blindingly obvious that even I, a mere Master's student, could pick them out. But my own M.Phil. has plenty more mistakes for its length than any of the philosophers' work whom I previously criticised. So they can't be all that stupid: because surely they see the mistakes in their work, just as I see the mistakes in mine. And they must leave them in for the same reason I did: you just have to stop somewhere, and send your unfinished and inadequate work out into the community, in order, I guess, that others might nonetheless build on it.
So anyway, I guess I'm gaining an appreciation of myself as a mere cog in a massive enterprise. I think this is a healthier self-conception.
The two things I've learned that I feel the impression of most strongly at this point are the incredibly difficulty and vastness of philosophy, and my own mediocrity (which is not a bad thing, in someone as naturally arrogant as me).
I felt when writing everything I'd ever previously written that I didn't have the time to make it as good as I wanted, but that, had I the time, I could do the job without error. These, after all, were typically <4,000-word essays done under mild pressure. I would mentally or literally footnote essays' points with a disclaimer that I needed to defend it against certain objections, or clarify it, but that I couldn't because of the limited space and time allotted me; but I did always believe that I could do that work if I had that time. But I was given fourteen months to write the 40,000 words of my M.Phil., which is a massive amount of time to do that much work. I still managed not to have the time to make my dissertation ship-shape; but I also realised that I was nowhere near having the time to do this. Even the one chapter which was very slow and technical was, I realised later, touching on massive issues in the philosophy of language, resolutions to which would depend on massive issues in other massive areas of the philosophy of language, and so on. For the first time, I glimpsed just how big the space between seemingly naturally-following propositions can be, especially in aesthetics. For the first time, I really saw the truth of the maxim (cliché?), "In philosophy, if you're not moving at a snail's pace, you're not moving at all".
And relatedly, I became aware of just how far away I am from being able to do this in philosophy. I imagined myself, emotionally even after I knew intellectually that I was not up for this, tidying up whole philosophical debates with a single beautiful paper, in which none of the claims were substantially problematic, whatever about clarification of expression or strict logical undeniability. I felt this to be more possible by the mistakes I saw in so many philosophers' works: mistakes so blindingly obvious that even I, a mere Master's student, could pick them out. But my own M.Phil. has plenty more mistakes for its length than any of the philosophers' work whom I previously criticised. So they can't be all that stupid: because surely they see the mistakes in their work, just as I see the mistakes in mine. And they must leave them in for the same reason I did: you just have to stop somewhere, and send your unfinished and inadequate work out into the community, in order, I guess, that others might nonetheless build on it.
So anyway, I guess I'm gaining an appreciation of myself as a mere cog in a massive enterprise. I think this is a healthier self-conception.