Topics Profession

Question Is it emotionally difficult to be a professional philosopher? Sometimes philosophical questions and subject matter seem so disturbing and intense, that it must surely be taxing psychologically. Does non-philosophical subject matter become pale and boring in comparison? Are professional philosophers socially isolated because of boredom with the non-philosophical, concomitant with the disturbing nature of the philosophical (so that it may not be acceptable in non-philosophical company)? Thanks.

Accepted:
September 13, 2007

Comments

I'll have to admit that most of the Sturm und Drang in my life hasn't got a lot to do with what I think about professionally. Questions like "do quantum states support measurement counteractuals?" or "does indeterminism serve any real function in Professor X's account of libertarian free will?" or "is there an acceptable notion of objective probability that explains how probabilities can be action-guiding?" aren't exactly the stuff from which high monthly psychoanalysts' bills are made. All of those questions are very interesting (No. Really!) but they aren't high on the angstometer. And I have a feeling that if you thumbed through the typical philosophy journal, you'd find much the same for much of what you saw.

This isn't a criticism of my chosen profession and first intellectual love. Many of the questions that philosophers wrestle with are deeply fascinating if you have the taste for them, but they often abstract, often not very closely connected with the things in the world that really worry us and are closer to doing science than to the goings-on in novels by Jean-Paul Sartre.

That's not to say that philosophy never deals with disturbing subject matter. It does. So does medicine. So does psychology. So does political science. Or, for that matter, so does Ordinary Life 101. Philosophers aren't even close to having a special fix on the sources of existential anxiety, and the image of the philosopher as a Gauloise-smoking melancholic staring into the nihilistic abyss doesn't fit most of my professional acquaintances very well. (We do tend to wear black berets, though...)

As for boredom with the non-philosophical, most of the philosophers I know have very broad interests; they're curious about all kinds of things. In fact, my guess is that philosophers have the personality factor that psychologists call "openness to experience" to a higher degree than people in many other academic professions. The world is a fascinating place that's sometimes distresssing and sometimes delightful, but often for reasons that have no special connection with philosophy.

I'd like to add a comment to Allen Stairs' excellent answer: it is worth distinguishing between philosophers who write about 'angst', and the experience of angst. In existentialism, for example, the experience of anxiety is often considered to be philosophically interesting (the fact that anxiety is experienced shows something, or even that anxiety itself is a form of showing) but not yet philosophy. Moreover, the philosopher (like everyone else) must spend most of the time in a state of everydayness, false consciousness or whatever, enjoying a Gauloise and an espresso in a cafe in the sun -- or if gloomy, for perfectly ordinary reasons.