Thoughts on my thesis

If you do read it, you will find it quite long, about 60 pages. It’s actually much more readable than most graduate-level philosophy, extremely so, something I argue for in the introduction. But it’s still a very long, possibly tedious intellectual exercise. It’s a thesis. No one reads them for fun. There’s nothing heroic about it, nothing too exceptional or controversial. Except that I argue for taking art and philosophy seriously, advocate for an intellectual understanding of censorship, quote a lot of Christians, question the value or academic philosophy, and make the occasional joke. All of which have their precedents in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the people I like and value.

It just wasn’t the sort of thing they wanted, but it was what I wanted to talk about. You can read a little of the intro to get the idea and then skip to the last few pages to get the conclusion. I made use of sources not generally appreciated in secular philosophical circles, but the people they suggested I talk about I absolutely hated and didn’t see any value in including, being part of what I saw as what was wrong with modern academic philosophy, whose main sin is that they’re far too academic in their concerns. Academic work is not the “real work” of philosophy according to my thesis, and that is possibly the heart of the disagreement between me and my thesis committee, who would argue quite the opposite and by that measure declare that I had not done it in my paper. There was a time when my intelligence and writing skill trumped my unusual individual choices, my following of my own personal, weird way (some of you may recall my high school homework that brought such amusement to Kara and Bethany), but graduate school was not that time. Everyone there is ridiculously smart and a decent writer and has their own unique viewpoint, it conveys no advantage and commands no special consideration.

If I were less stubborn or stupid or lazy, or less depressed by my general circumstances at the time (it was a very isolating and depressing experience, which ended with me suffering from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks for quite some time afterward), I might have been able to work out some different conclusion to the whole affair. I’m not entirely certain what I was meant to learn from it, except that perhaps I was not suited to academic philosophy, nor it to me. It certainly set back and threw into chaos my life plans, but I did learn a lot about myself through the experience, mostly by having to let go of a lot of what I thought I already knew. The whole thing seems a bit silly now, and I don’t really regret my choices, even if I regret how things went. I certainly deserved whatever long term consequences I reaped from the whole affair; I earned them. It was inevitable by the very nature of myself and what I was doing. I am sorry to have cost other people their time or money, Amber, mom and dad, as a result of the whole experience. But I’m good at coming up with ideas for things to do that require a lot of effort and cause a lot of learning and personal growth and produce some good things but don’t result in traditional markers of success like jobs, titles, money, prestige, etc.