Phenomenology
What is work? What is laziness? I am often plagued by these questions because I cannot avoid them. I have to work, but I suppose the key is simply finding something that I actually enjoy working at. The fact remains that what I work at determines the degree to which what I do is perceived as work. For the purpose of this exercise I will confine my attention to academic work in philosophy.
I am getting mixed messages. In one ear, I hear approval. Continue studying philosophy. Keep working at it. Everyone must find there own niche and perhaps philosophy is yours. You are spending exorbitant amounts of time reading, writing, discussing and contemplating. The skills you are developing through your work in philosophy refine your writing and clarify your ideas. Perhaps most importantly, working through such challenging ideas helps you work through your own life experiences. Thus, the work you are doing is not confined to academia or any future career.
In the other ear I am scolded with disapproval. You enjoy reading philosophy way too much. You escape into your books, your theories, your abstractions. You don’t do anything with your philosophy besides talking the ears off of whatever poor soul who’s willing to give you a minute of his or her time. You interpret everything from a far, but real work requires getting your hands dirty. Your futile attempts at philosophizing are receptive to receiving new ideas, but wherein lies the reciprocity in your work. Where’s the praxis? How will you ever know if what you know is really true if you never actually apply it to the real world. Thus, your current work is insufficient even if your ends are confined to the epistemological. You can’t even know for the sake of knowing by reading, talking and writing about books alone.
Most importantly, however, is what kind of a job are you going to get working with philosophy? Sure, you enjoy philosophizing today, but how do you expect to make a living once you are out of school. You are living the life of luxury, of bourgeoisie meditation. Your work is not really work. You’re not being challenged cause you don’t want to be challenged. No one can touch you or even really communicate with you in your ivory tower with all your big words and profound insights. If you really had a work ethic you wouldn’t worry so much about your grades or your ideas, but rather you’d concentrate on your actions, on making a ripple in the pond. Working requires working through something. It requires falling down and learning to get back up again. Does philosophy make you fall? If a philosopher speaks a falsehood in the middle of the woods and no one is there to hear him or her or understand him or her is that falsehood really uttered? Can that philosopher learn from his or her mistakes? Is isolated self-motivation sufficient for a good work ethic or must we all be prodded at some point or another by a master?
I am lazy. I am afraid to apply my philosophy because I am afraid I will fail and my philosophical foundations, my horizons, will come crashing down. I don’t know what I could do without them, and thus I fear their potential void. On the other hand, I am working through these ideas through my everyday experiences. I struggle each and every day to try as I might to reconcile all the contradictions between my theories and my practices. I am so hypocritical, yet so aware of my hypocrisy. This is both a blessing and a curse. It plagues me and saves me. Just being aware of the fact that I am aware of, if only some of, my own inconsistencies liberates me from the confines of any predetermined probabilities. I am what I will be willing to work to will myself to become.
I feel as though it is a privilege to be writing this. It gives me the sense that I am being productive and at the same time reflective. It kills two birds with one stone, yet the question remains will this continue, can this continue once I leave school? I don’t know and I won’t know until I am out in the real world trying to apply all this philosophy that has been bubbling up in my consciousness. In the end, I am so grateful for my time at school. I have found my work ethic in academia, but I refuse to confine it to that. I have discovered that it’s not about some inherit intelligence, but rather about motivation. I have found that I can motivate myself. My only concern is choosing a truly worthwhile project to work on. My means and ends are reflections of each other. What I mean by this is that my work ethic will by and large be determined by how I perceive the goals of whatever project I happen to be engaged in just as the way I work at this project, that is, the authenticity of my intentionality (which only I can really know) will by and large determine the success or failure of any such project.
The truth is I cannot wait to get out into the “real world” and apply my philosophies. The plurality of my theories maintains a necessary albeit ambiguous tension in which a judgment has never been made yet is simultaneously already always made. I don’t want to take sides, but I want to take action. I know this will require some compromises in my ideology and that is fine, but I guess my concern is that I will fall into one camp and cease being self-critical. The book is never closed. To work is to, first and foremost, work on oneself within oneself. To constantly examine and reexamine why one does what one does. To strive to be as honest with oneself as one possibly can. Such is never easy. It can even drive you insane with hyperconsciousness and self-induced alienation (like everything else, there is a time and a place for philosophy, know when this time and place is requires trial and error, thus pissing of one’s friends with your “constructive criticism” is unavoidable at least in my experience). Once again, it all comes down to motivation and inspiration. Philosophy inspires me to see my ends and means as one in the same. Thus, I work both for the ends of a salary, social acceptance, a sense of moral responsibility, and for the means of enjoying the present and struggling through it not as some sacrifice for a future benefit but because the struggle is what defines me. Only the struggle can give meaning to my life in the present. Try as I might I am unable to deceive myself on this point, so I work and work to give meaning through the transcendence within the immanence in my everyday life.
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