The logic of failure: recognizing ... How to Do Philosophy. September 2007 In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion. But I had some more honest motives as well. I'd tried to read a few philosophy books.
The summer before senior year I took some college classes. Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand. Words I did end up being a philosophy major for most of college. Formal logic has some subject matter. There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. How did things get this way? History. How to Do What You Love.
January 2006 To do something well you have to like it.
That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love. " But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want.
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. Bounds Notes.