Many people have to be persuaded that studying too is a job, and a very tiring one, with its own particular apprenticeship - involving muscles and nerves as well as intellect. It is a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort, tedium and even suffering.
(Antonio Gramsci)
Although a couple of months have passed already, my BA in Philosophy feels like yesterday. I am still processing this achievement, and yet I have decided to pursue an MA in order to continue the wonderful journey as a part-time student, mostly because I feel like I have only touched the surface of a vast ocean of knowledge. Therefore, next week I will be back in the classroom and once again ready to spend my evenings with more books than usual.
I have often been asked why I am doing this and how it is going to affect my professional career, but this is the wrong way to look at my endeavour. Usually one’s studies are strictly related to one’s future job(s). However, not everything we learn has to be measured in terms of money. I have always, always loathed this simplistic view that reduces all knowledge to a bag of tricks one can leverage to earn a salary. Put otherwise, what is wrong with learning for the sake of learning?
This is something many find hard to digest, accustomed as we are to a society that links price and value of something inextricably together. Moreover, I work in a field where philosophy is either frowned upon or used just as an abstract label for self-help literature or the misleading words of online moralists.
I am in no way interested in fixing this situation. First of all, I keep my day job as a Clojure developer and my philosophy student’s life separated. I respect my co-workers for their programming skills, but I would never embark in a discussion about Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with them, much like I do not expect the person next to me in the classroom to appreciate the finesse of my Emacs configuration.
Furthermore, I have never considered philosophy as a standard school subject. How it has changed me is not related to the amount of concepts I have memorised nor the pleasure I experience when reading it. The change in me is the result of the combination of theoretical exercise and thoughtful practice. Since I started to understand what philosophers mean in their writings, I have also started to think and act differently. I find myself more concerned with the world around me and at the same time capable of comprehending it a bit better. This immediately translates into tangible consequences: I see problems where I did not before and I know I can do something about them.
An MA is the obvious prosecution along this path of ethics and praxis.
Philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts.
(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)