On Forever Putting One's Tool Kit in Order

I had friends in graduate school who belonged to the class of those we jokingly referred to as graduate student emeriti. They were the perpetual students who were "not hung up on completion," to borrow a memorable line from William Hurt's character Nick in The Big Chill (1983). Free of the discipline of undergraduate school, they took incompletes in their courses and then spent years completing them. Some never completed them. Others finished their course work and actually wrote dissertations and won the degree -- some fifteen years after they started. They supported themselves with adjunct teaching and odd jobs, loans and parental hand-outs.

 

One fellow in particular sticks in my mind. I’ll call him Mel. Mel never finished and dropped out of sight. With Mel, the problem was three-fold: unrealistically high standards, performance anxiety, and an obsession with the board game Go. His performance anxiety manifested itself mainly as an obsessive fixation on getting his tool box in order. What I mean is that he felt he could not get down to the business of writing any good philosophy until all his tools were in place. So he had to have a complete library stocked with all the classics, in the original languages. He once unloaded a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on me on the ground that it was in English, when he wanted to read everything in its original language. Many an hour did he spend on foreign languages. But to do philosophy, one has to be able to think correctly, so logic was also on his agenda. Time was spent acquiring an impressive logic library, and somewhat less time on actually reading his acquisitions.

The physical act of writing required, Mel thought, the very best of tools. Since those were the days before word processing, he had to have the very latest IBM Selectric electric typewriter, the model with an erase key! That erase key was a big deal in those days. Luckily, Mel’s father worked for IBM which fact translated into a substantial discount. Mel once showed me his typewriter’s different ‘balls’: different ones for different character sets. Of course, he had one for Greek since he planned to write on Aristotle.

But no office is complete without all the peripherals: wastebasket, organizers stocked with various sizes of paper clips, etc., staplers of different sizes, staple extractors, paper, pencils, pencil sharpeners electric and manual, pens ballpoint and fountain in different colors, magic markers, erasers, all accomplices of his evasion of beginning the dissertation.  A psychologist might refer to this as evasion of an anxiety-producing task by displacement activity.  I suppose we all displace, but some of us are much better at it than others.

Somewhere Schopenhauer quips, "Forever reading, never read." Apropos of Mel, I would say: Forever preparing to write, never read.

Comments

[Kevin Currie]

In all honest,y, Mel sounds a tad like myself. I do not mean or want to be, but I am also a perfectionist when I write. Unless I know everything I want to say, every quote I want to cite, etc, I have a difficult time getting started.

I cannot count the number of times I would start a paper (or book idea!) and stop myself after the first two paragraphs because I STILL don't feel like I have read enough or know enough.

The only thing that stops me from succuming to this and letting it overtake me is the knowledge that I can always go back and add, substract, or revise things, and the reality of deadlines.

[Bill Vallicella]

Kevin,

Perfectionism is a curse! Leave perfection to the gods. The most that can be asked of a mortal is that he strive for excellence within the limits of time, talent, and circumstance. Striving is not achieving, and excellence is not perfection.

You will never get to the point where you have read all the literature on a topic, even a well-defined one. Some of the material is out of print or otherwise unavailable, some of it is in foreign languages. Should you hold off on writing something about mereology until you can read Polish?

Too much reading blocks the channels of one's own creativity. Forever reading, never read.

Writing for publication is the best concrete way of working out your ideas; so if you wait until you know exactly what you want to say before writing, you will miss the best way of determining exactly what you want to say.

[anonymous]

I too recognize myself in this story- but with a difference. I have been diagnosed (many times over) with a severe case of OCD. Everyone is familiar with the standard washing and checking and contamination behaviors, but I hadn't realized that my OCD spilled over into academics until one day years ago when I needed two copies (because they had different introductions) of a book in a language I can't read!

Another example was when a very kind professor who had been very happy with my essays (and exams, and the discussions we'd had during the semester) and knew that I struggled with long writing assignments offered an me 'A' in a course based on the work already completed if I merely turned in something (anything) that fulfilled the requirement set out for the term paper. It could be blather and not make a difference!

At first this seemed like getting out of prison (I'd become so anxious about completing writing assignments, that this was how I thought of it.) with time served. The grade was a given- just write anything at all! Then I realized that I just COULD NOT do it. I took an incomplete and spent the whole summer vacation writing the paper anyway.