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September 16, 2005
Reality Check
I have never forgotten a conversation from graduate school, in which a vocal and very confident-seeming professor admitted to having suffered crippling anxiety over question sessions after talks when they were a graduate student - not over having to answer the questions, mind you, over asking them.
If you rarely attend philosophy talks, you might not be familiar with the format, which is different from that in most sciences. (Rob Wilson tells me his recent talk in the biology department had a 10 minute question session.) The speaker generally speaks for an hour, and then there will be a further hour of questions from the audience. The tone of these questions varies a lot from department to department, and from questioner to questioner, but it isn't unusual for such questions to be aggressive, and a speaker who has become defensive can be quite dismissive of a question which he or she sees as having no merit. Add to this the ordinary anxiety a student might feel about drawing the attention of 40-50 people, including their professors, advisor, peers, friends and rivals while issuing what a defensive speaker can easily interpret as a challenge, and you have a situation that might be expected to cause anxiety in ordinary human beings. So it didn't surprise me that anyone was scared about asking questions after talks - as a grade A introvert, I was utterly petrified myself. I only had to form the intention to ask a question and controlling my breathing would begin to seem difficult, never mind using my breath to speak. But it it did take me aback that this professor - young, confident, stylish, and at the top of their profession, a professor who often asked aggressive questions and even appeared to enjoying themselves - had ever been in the same boat.
Yet they told me that as the end of a talk neared, and the moment at which the chair would ask "any questions from the audience?" - the moment at which my professor would have to raise their hand to signal that they indeed had a question - they got so anxious that their arm would begin to feel heavier and heavier...until it seemed almost physically impossible to raise it.
That was just one conversation in grad school, but it meant a lot to me because I tended to think of good philosophers as more than human. And of course, I knew that I was not superhuman, because I had these ordinary mortal weaknesses like social anxiety. So, very occasionally, it's nice to hear good philosophers admit their weaknesses, (and I do see such social anxiety as a weakness - I'd give it up in an instant if I could) because then it shows that it is possible to be a good philosopher in spite of such ordinary human frailty. If you can't see that, then it becomes harder to see why you should be staying in graduate school.
I felt a similar way on reading Greg Restall's confessions regarding the recent issue of the Australasian Journal of Logic. They're on his weblog, so I'm sure he won't mind you reading them. He writes:
As the managing editor, there was a period in this last semester where I wasn’t managing very well, and things piled up and got the better of me for quite some time. To speak overly frankly for a moment, I got quite depressed over the state that things were in and over my own disorganisation. Unfortunately, being depressed is not a good condition in which to be motivated to do anything about that which you’re depressed about.
Now most graduate student philosophers, most students even, let work get on top of them at some point. They put off doing it, they miss deadlines, they get depressed about the whole mess, and, as Greg notes, depression is a motivation-sapper, so the situation only gets worse. So why was I amazed to read that Greg had been in this situation? Because he's an astonishingly successful philosopher and logician and I secretly believed that it's the superhuman few who don't get distracted/behind/depressed who succeed. And how else had he managed to start and run an entire online logic journal, apparently in his spare time, get elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and run one of the best kept websites in the discipline? By exercising his superpowers, thought I.
So his post is a good wake up call in two ways. First the encouraging way: not being superhuman is no reason to give up. But of course, there's a demanding point too: not being superhuman is no excuse for giving up either.
Posted by logican at September 16, 2005 10:52 AM
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Comments
Excellent, insightful post, Gillian. I couldn't agree more with everything you say in it. It's also somewhat reassuring to read such a post.
Posted by: Ming Tan at September 17, 2005 12:57 AM
I find this to be a refreshing post, esp. given the lack of such candor in academia generally. Many of us are so busy trying to convey the superhuman image. But the reality is that we are human, "all too human." But this fact is not something to be suppressed, lest we decieve ourselves and each other. So I appreciate this post and the genuineness it inspires.
Posted by: Michael S. at September 17, 2005 03:06 AM
I’m not a formal philosophy student but because I’ve been interested on ‘Analyticity’ and related subjects I searched the internet and I found the summary of your dissertation. After that I’ve read your weblog regularly. Your recent post is a wise “silent thought” that you’ve said it with a bit loud voice. We all should shout these ‘golden lines of being human’ with our manners. Bless ya!
Posted by: Niessoh Parwa at September 17, 2005 07:53 AM
At the ASL they only gave five minutes for questions! It was particularly odd after Byeong-Uk Yi's talk arguing that logic can't be axiomatized to just hear an argument and have no time for discussion to make it either settle in or see where some issues might be.
Posted by: Kenny Easwaran at September 17, 2005 06:27 PM
Thankyou for the kind words.
Let me also confess that I often feel that way about question time in seminars (more so in philosophy seminars than in logic seminars, to be fair). This anxiety (for me, at least) doesn't go away when you're more established, either -- it just takes different forms. Now in seminars in my home department I often feel a kind of obligation to ask questions (especially in cases where discussion is quiet) as a sign that I've been a participant, listening to what's being said. (This is especially the case when I've been doodling in my notepad -- this might lead people to think that I've been proving theorems and not paying attention.) Anyway, in this circumstance it becomes very difficult for me to articulate thoughts, and quite often the question comes out half baked, partly for fear of the question coming out half baked. Oh well!
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at September 19, 2005 04:10 AM