Reinventing yourself
A blogpost by Liam Kofi Bright on how he no longer believes in his work begins in the following sobering way
For a while now I have been unable (unwilling is what I should say, but from the inside it feels stronger than that) to really commit to doing philosophy research. (I have stuff from before this in the pipeline so it might not be obvious from the outside that I have not been doing new work, but to those who know me this is not news.) The basic issue is that I do not think my work is good or interesting.
Reflecting on this, and without making any reference to Liam's work (as he requested), I'll offer some reasons to think that the reason Liam offers is never by itself a good enough reason to stop doing philosophy. My claim is not agent-relative. It doesn't matter how good or bad you are. Obviously, there may be other reasons to cease doing philosophy that I think have more merit, such as Mitchel Aboulafia's delightful post on why he stopped writing philosophy altogether.
What often seems to happen is that we need to reinvent ourselves when we reach an academic milestone. It may seem surprising that defending the dissertation, finally getting a permanent job, getting tenure, come with this horrible sense of emptiness and slump in work. For tenure, there is the well-known phenomenon of the midcareer slump.
What precipitates this is the falling away of an external motivator (such as the looming tenure dossier, or the harrowing job market). With that motivator gone, we need to find a new motivation for doing our research, and it's not always easy to find.
So when Liam writes that
Since I have now passed this review, the extremely strong instrumental reason I had to publish despite my self-assessment has vanished. As such, where before I thought my word worthless but kept producing it in miserable bad faith, now I can simply follow my heart.
This is part of a broader phenomenon. For my part, before getting my first permanent (in the Netherlands) junior job I sent papers to top-10 generalist journals not because my heart was in it but because I needed a job, and these journals seemed to help in that regard. Since I received that permanent position, and then later one at Oxford Brookes, my motivation to write for those journals melted away and I needed to rethink how I could spend research time.
While you're in that liminal state (pre-tenure, pre-TT job etc) there's nothing better but to publish, so you have to push away all those self-doubts. You need to push on and hope for the best. But once the motivator falls away so does the pressure, and the self-doubts come rushing back in.
In any case, when you reinvent/build yourself up after the external pressure falls away, then it is a tremendous liberty to finally find what you are happy doing and that you deem worthwhile (I think this is better than "what are you good at") and then you can really flourish.
I was watching this interview with a philosopher (I believe Steven Nadler, I cannot remember for sure) who said that he wanted when he got tenure to do something that felt more meaningful to him than writing specialist articles, so he began to write books for a large audience. He is happy doing this. Nadler is a prominent example, but I know also plenty of less high-profile authors who have built themselves up again after tenure and who write very compelling beautiful things. They aren't necessarily famous or widely-cited, but their work matters and they can do it as they see fit. Therein lies the power of academic freedom.
Lowering your standards
I'm a big fan of the general principle Liam outlines that philosophy is collective and that your voice doesn't need to be read, say, 200 years from now, but could just be a little contributing voice. Not everyone is a conversation starter, ender, or changer, but we can all be partakers. One's work could even be below average and *still* make a difference. And I for one am inclined to think that if you try to be intellectually honest, then you won't be pernicious.
So, of the three options Liam offers to continue to publish (1, lower standards, 2 full speed ahead, 3 get good) I opt for "Lower standards." I am not even sure that "lower standards" is the right word for it. I think that even people who are less good than average (whatever that may mean) at philosophy can make meaningful contributions to the vast conversational tapestry that our discipline is. Even someone whose work is widely admired benefits from adopting (1), think of Jason Stanley who thought (in a now no longer available tweet) that his work would only be worthwhile if it were read 200 years from now. What a horribly daunting high standard to put for yourself!
Lowering your standards also allows you to take a chance, a risk. I frequently hop topic (it's just a temperamental thing, I seem to work best when I get utterly obsessed with a topic/author and then just go on until I tire of it/them after a while). When I begin a new project like that, I never look at the top contributors in that topic and then think "can I do better" or "do I measure up." That way, I would not even get started! But rather, I think "Is there anything interesting I can contribute to this conversation?" -- I know that that question can also be plagued by self-doubt ("I have nothing worthwhile to say!") but one must try before one can make that assessment, as William James noted.
For William James, on faith and self-trust, you have to jump, and you have to believe you can make the jump for you to be able to do it. Similarly, if you can convince yourself the chasm is less vast than it might be in reality, the jump becomes easier. Maybe it is self-delusion for me to work this way, but if so, it has worked so far.
I do think for many of us this is the only realistic path when continued to be plagued by self-doubt: to try to publish. Valuing philosophy for its own sake is good and well, but it's hard to do this without any incentives such as publication (and as Liam said in the blogpost, he has not been doing new work" so it does seem that this matters).
Closing thought: every voice matters.
I have been writing fiction since 2017, more seriously 2020, and learned a lot from this. I am a very mediocre fiction writer (I only have one "pro" level publication, a story in Escape Pod). But I have never felt discouraged because there is a dictum in fiction writing "Don't self reject!" and also "Every author has something meaningful to contribute." Everyone has a story that is worth telling. Of course, there is considerable craftsmanship in the telling (as I found out, trying to get published in fiction) and so no guarantees they will take your fiction. But what you have to contribute matters. Literally this is the case for everyone.
I think it's the same for philosophy. Our philosophy is so influenced by our specific situatedness, by which I don't only mean the accident of our birth, our gender, social class etc but even the interests we have make for a unique constellation of expertise and ideas. All that positions us to tell compelling things that are philosophically relevant. This does not guarantee publication, but it should guard against self-rejection.
Anyway, I wrote these thoughts in part because I imagine some people thinking, reading Liam's post "Oh no, Liam is such a brilliant philosopher with such highly original ideas, if he even thinks it's not worthwhile, then where am I?" As I said, my advice for lowering standards and taking a chance are not agent-relative. It doesn't matter if you are a bestselling author or someone several years out of PhD struggling to get their first article published, everyone has things to say that are potentially of interest, and hence can take a chance.
I think it's also worth considering the ebbs and flows of inspiration, creativity, and level of engagement. Ours is a creative job, and creativity waxes and wanes with time and depending on life circumstances. There have been long periods of time (long as in years) where I felt disengaged and unable to write anything of value. Then after awhile (without any particular impetus that I was aware of) both my interest in the field and ideas/inspiration for projects would come flooding back. After watching this pattern over the years I've become less likely to conclude, during a dry period, that it's going to be a permanent state.
Posted by: Anon | 07/19/2023 at 03:30 AM
Yes, that's right. I wrote about it here -- https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2021/11/fruitfulness-versus-productivity-thoughts-for-writing-what-you-want-to-write.html
Specifically, it takes time to get your projects to fruition. Sometimes things just need to gestate. We're, to use an agricultural analogy, fruit trees, not milk cows. Treating oneself in the manner of a milk cow that demands a constant flow for productivity is a sure recipe for burnout. Subconscious processes of thinking are also very important, and why you can't force it. This ebb and flow of creativity is one reason I'm a big fan of tenure, which allows the kind of project that needs time and security, to come to fruition.
Posted by: Helen De Cruz | 07/19/2023 at 08:14 AM
"The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.“ - Tommy Aqua. The world is a torrent, an infinite spring. You can at best take a thimble-full and sip. Though we are inadequate to the task, it’s the best task there is. If philosophy is straw, then wtf is being an accountant or HR manager, etc.
Posted by: Hermias | 07/19/2023 at 08:45 AM
I'm worried about how the questions raised here, and the advice to lower standards in particular, connect with the broader problems in academic publishing: huge backlogs at journals, increasing difficulty both finding referees and getting quality referee reviews, etc. I think it's true that most of us are not, and won't ever be, conversation-starters or enders--the best we can hope for us to make some (potentially quite small) contribution to an ongoing conversation. But every one of these contributions comes at some very high cost of time and (often unpaid) labor--how much of that can the field actually bear?
I'm not opposed to the "lower your standards" strategy. But I think it would have to go hand-in-hand with some very significant transformation in how those conversations actually happen.
Posted by: Matt Tedesco | 07/19/2023 at 07:26 PM
Along similar lines to Matt above, I think part of the problem might be that, through grad school, job market, and tenure track, we're encouraged to adopt a set of values that aren't necessarily our own. I've never authentically valued getting published in a "top 10" journal. I rarely read things in those periodicals and I find much of what appears there deathly boring. But for a time I felt that I had to shoot for these milestones. I started making real progress in my career (and in my overall health) when I shifted my focus to doing work that I found personally valuable, which meant publishing in places most philosophers haven't heard of, but are important for the kind of interdisciplinary work I do. This is only "lowering my standards" according to the toxic mindset of competing to publish in "top ranked" journals, success at which is as much (probably more) a matter of luck as it is a matter of skill.
I didn't "lower" my standards; I embraced my own standards more authentically and rejected the standards that were imposed on me.
Posted by: Permanent Lecturer | 07/20/2023 at 09:21 AM
Billy Joel stopped writing new music in 1993 and to this day says he wished another 25% of his music he never released. He still played Madison Square Garden once a month right up to the pandemic, and still plays regularly now. He only does all of his hits to a happy crowd, and he's happy doing it. When Elton John mentioned that he wished Billy Joel wrote more new music, Joel said he wished Elton John wrote less.
Paul McCartney keeps coming up with new songs and albums, keeps touring at 81. He can't stop writing new music, it keeps driving him, even though I'm confident 99.9% of his fans would trade him performing his new track for an extra Beatles song. On the other hand, Johnny Cash died with one of his biggest hits since the 70s, albeit it was a cover.
I'm really happy Harry Frankfurt got his "Kate Bush" moment in 2005 for an essay that no one in philosophy cared about in 1986, and I think its great we have people who published right up until they die, some even posthumously. But I wish our institutional incentives allowed, even celebrated, people like Billy Joel rather than Paul McCartney. We shouldn't talk shit about (and deny step raises to) people who have accepted that their best days are behind them.
Posted by: Barry Lam | 07/22/2023 at 05:05 PM