Liberal Arts degrees have expanded across universities in Britain over the last few years and their development reflects a growing sense that it is by knowledge across a range of disciplines that new ideas and perspectives can develop. The Liberal Arts degree at the University of Nottingham has been built to foster these links as we believe that by thinking differently we can build solutions to the complex problems we face in our world.

Liberal arts seeks to address global issues from a multi-discipline perspective

Whether its accusations of fake news, pressing environmental problems or rectifying social inequality, the issues that beset us are multifaceted. They are issues born out of historical circumstances, social issues, political debates, cultural developments, economic decisions and moral concerns. To attempt to address these problems with one approach, could mean we neglect other areas or indeed cause more damage by being too focused on one area.

Therefore, we need to be grounded in history, knowledgeable in sociology, tooled in philosophy, aware of politics, engaged in sociology and practiced in media. We need to be able to think as geographers, psychologists, archaeologists, artists, authors and mathematicians. The solutions to our problems and the means by which we will create our future will not be found in single areas but where our abilities to think in multiple, different ways can be located. Liberal Arts gives us this space.

Consider the impact of artificial intelligence which many commentators have considered to pose significant threats to society. From the apocalyptic visions of machines taking over the planet to the more realistic concerns regarding employment, we need to be able to address how humanity will respond to this new technology. This is a tool that no other generation has had in its grasp, what will be our reaction?

In this brave new world, liberal arts thinking helps us to adapt and evolve to technology.

This may well be a brave new world, but we do have awareness of human responses to new situations. We know how Luddites, textile workers in nineteenth century Britain, destroyed machinery that they believed was stealing their jobs. We know how access to technology in modern India creates new opportunities but contributes to inequality. We know how Confucianism philosophy can provide moral order as we redefine what it means to be human in a scientifically advanced era.

As such, as artificial intelligence takes an increasing role in our society, we can see ourselves adapting and evolving with a technology whose very development has been undertaken to make it think more like us.

Ross Wilson
Director of Liberal Arts, University of Nottingham
nottingham.ac.uk/go/liberalarts

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Back in April there was a Twitter hashtag where you had to complete the sentence #Iamaphilosopherbecause. My contribution was “science cannot tell me what is a number, what is good, what is knowledge or what is causation. And I’ve kids to feed”. With that light-hearted ending, I was pretty surprised how much anger the tweet provoked. I was attacked on a number of fronts. Some tweeters took offence at my audacity to claim that there were questions science couldn’t answer. Others suggested that philosophy could never answer questions anyway.

I certainly think of myself as pro-science, even though I am not uncritical about its practices and methods. I think we all should be critical of science in a supportive and constructive way, thinking how to improve its methods of discovery. Knowledge progresses only when challenged. I also think that a dialogue between arts, science and social science is not only helpful but essential if we want to move closer to a full understanding of the world and our place in it.

The problem I encountered on Twitter is that there are some who think the arts has nothing to contribute at all and science can go it alone. The view that science can answer every meaningful question is called scientism. And it is resurgent. But you can certainly be pro-science while being anti-scientism, as I would say I am. I think it is helpful to have science and the arts interact. Scientism says it isn’t.

Science is the best way to approach many questions: questions that are empirical in nature and have to be answered from a starting point of experience. But not all questions are like that and we hold many beliefs that go beyond the data. I suspect that almost all of us, including scientists, believe that objects exist unperceived. And if we think of science as dealing with the observable, then this belief has to come out as a non-scientific one. It is philosophical; I would say metaphysical. Certainly physics can give us a theory in which things exists when they are not being looked at, but that is a theory that goes beyond what data gives us. It is also perfectly possible to construct a theory, equally consistent with the empirical evidence, in which physical things exist only when perceived. Scientific theories may be based on inference to the best explanation, or induction, but it is a further philosophical question whether these types of inference should be accepted. Again, the data cannot tell us whether they should. The data just sit there. It is philosophers who consider systematically what the correct methods of science should be: philosophers such as Bacon, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.

The rise of scientism is dangerous. I would even think of scientism as being anti-science, given that it is an attempt to over-extend the proper boundaries of the field of enquiry. This was brought home to me when I attended a medical conference last week. Practitioners with various specialisms were discussing some of the flaws in current models. It struck me that these flaws had a common basis. The approaches were failing to treat patients as person, as individual existences, instead preferring large-scale experimentation that delivered statistical averages. Certain interventions, drugs for instance, were only being authorised for use when they could be shown to have on average a positive outcome under very strictly defined conditions. You should expect, however, it to be unusual that an individual is average. Consider the average number of legs for a human: it’s around 1.999. Almost everyone is above average and no one is average. How then can we infer from what is true on average to what is true of one individual?

The alternative is to accept the importance of the person as the key individual existence. It is people who have points of view on the world. They experience and think, adding meaning and value to the world. Science has an in-principle problem with accommodating such a point of view. An aim of science is an objective view, removing the biases that accompany subjective, individual points of view. Science aims, to use Thomas Nagel’s term, for a view form nowhere: a description of the world as if from no particular place and time. Yet everyone is located at some place and time. They have and give us a view from somewhere. The purely objective view thus misses those vital subjective facts, as Nagel describes in his famous essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ It is such subjectivity that we need to acknowledge in effective medicine, for instance, treating people as experiencing and feeling human beings instead of passive slabs of meat receiving biomedical treatments. For such reasons, I’ve come more and more to think of myself as an existentialist. Points of view matter.

I’m almost at the end of my four years as Dean of the Arts Faculty at Nottingham. I called this blog Arts Matters because the arts really do matter. Many of us working in the academic arts sensed a change of culture following the global economic crisis of 2007-08. Governments were stretched and looking for cuts. The arts seemed an easy target. Perhaps it was not entirely coincidental that there was a subsequent revival of scientism. How better to justify the cuts than to suggest the arts don’t actually do anything? But what a disaster it would be to have a world without art, without critical thinkers, and without the study of the humanities. Unless there are social experiencing subjects, capable of pleasure and valuing, all is for nought. Science will enable us to do many, many things but we are the ones who decide what to do. No amount of data can make such decisions on our behalf. I don’t know how we allowed ourselves to get to a position where the arts needed defending. Nevertheless, I saw it as one thing that I and the universities ought to do. I regret that I wasn’t Dean of Arts in better times. The job was interesting and exhilarating even so and I am glad I did it.

Thank you to all who read, tweeted and interacted with this blog over the last four years. I will continue writing but not on the arts in general. I go back to being a philosopher and you’ll find my blogs on The Philosophers’ Magazine online.

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So it’s mid-November, and my first term as a postgrad Arts student (English Lit MA, if you’re wondering) is speeding by. I was lucky enough to study at UoN as an undergrad, so I had a heads up on Nottingham life, but it’s still been a big change. Thankfully, a positive one! I’m doing more reading than I ever thought possible, but so far my fear of becoming a total Hallward hermit hasn’t become reality.

Postgrad problems: shelves buckling under the weight of many, many books.

My masters is only a one-year course, so I’m determined to cram in lots of extra-curricula stuff too. On top of coursework, I’ve been doing some student journalism and have taken on a placement with the School of English to put on a showcase of student work. I did wonder if it might be more difficult to get involved as a postgrad, but it’s been really accessible so far. Now I just have to juggle it all.

One unexpected plus of postgraduate life is being able to access new study spaces. The top floor of Highfield House, the graduate centre for Arts students, is super comfortable and has its own kitchen – I’ve finally kicked my expensive meal deal habit! And of course, the ultimate postgrad perk is being able to book a private study room in Hallward. If you find your motivation wobbling a bit on winter mornings, these are great because the pressure of booking them/knowing you have to collect the key is more than enough to get you to campus.

Two plugs, complete silence and my own bin – luxury.

Of course, it’s hard work, but I feel like I’m reaping plenty of benefits. My ability to motivate and plan my own work has really improved. You do need to be very self-driven as a postgrad Arts student, but this is a trait that really impresses employers so it’s well worth developing. Plus, it’s great studying with a cohort of people who are so dedicated to their subject they’ve decided to pursue it beyond their first degree. Getting to do all this on a beautiful campus isn’t bad, either!

Nicole Jones is studying MA English Literature in the Faculty of Arts.

Faculty of Arts Postgraduate Open Day
Wednesday 26 November
11am – 5pm

Come along to our Faculty of Arts open day to learn more about our extensive range of masters and research courses available at The University of Nottingham. The day will include talks on how to find funding, support and skills development and how to write an excellent postgraduate application. In the afternoon you can attend specialist talks on all the different courses and subject areas in the Faculty of Arts.

You can find out more about being a postgraduate student at our support services fair with representatives from the University’s Graduate School, Careers and Employability Service and many more. You can also join campus tours and postgraduate accommodation viewings.

Find out more and register on our website.

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This week I had cause to look again at Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, a book from which I used to teach but had not read for around 20 years. Wanting to lay hands on a copy in the middle of town, I went along to the book shop in the near certain knowledge that although this text dated from 1641 no decent bookseller would allow it to go out of stock. Sure enough, upon reaching the philosophy section I saw that the classics were all there. I found Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Locke, Rousseau and, of course, Descartes.

I expect that almost all disciplines have their classics. These will be the texts that have shaped the subject area, perhaps took it in a new direction and to which readers will return again and again. All students will be expected to know the classics and will cut their disciplinary teeth by analysing them in their essays. There is even a subject that consists in nothing more than the study of the ancient classics; and in literature one would be expected to know the modern classics. There are plenty of books you have no time to read, but without knowledge of the relevant classics, your expertise can be questioned.

I sat down with my new copy of Descartes’ Meditations, a Penguin Classics paperback. It is at least the fifth copy I own though they are all different editions. I read the text with fresh eyes. Descartes tells us he was full of doubts about what he could know certainly to be true. He decided to sit by the fire, clear his mind of all cares and devote himself to settling the issue. This wasn’t an easy task, for he knew of people who while ill were convinced they were kings when really they were paupers, that they were dressed when really they were naked, or that their head was earthenware. Given these mistakes, it seems that everything can be doubted. Yet Descartes finds one thing that he cannot doubt. Cogito ergo sum, ‘I exist’, he concludes.

It was striking how clear and simple was the argument and writing of this profound revelation. This was one of the classics of my discipline and yet it was all so transparent that anyone with a brain and a bit of concentration could follow it. It seemed, then, that there was no secret formula for making a classic. In particular, the classics of philosophy are not the most difficult texts, nor the most technical, and they are not full of logical symbols.

That is precisely the point. The classics have a universal appeal. They succeed in conveying how something novel and innovative was simple all along, there for anyone to have discovered. Classics challenge the existing wisdom of the age but do so in a sympathetic way that allows every reader to understand the force of the point even if they ultimately reject it. Again, when I look at the classics of literature, I find that they tend to be intellectually challenging but accessible for anyone willing to put in some effort. This gives them a wide interest, for most of us want to learn, to be tested and provoked. A necessary condition of this is that we are not excluded from engaging with the text and it can touch us even if at a high level of abstraction. Such a balance is not easy for an author to achieve, even though it should seem easy for us to read. A work that attains such a quality of simple profundity deserves its status as a classic.

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Schopenhauer claimed that the function of art was to release the individual from their constant restless striving. We have selfish desires that we look to satisfy, desires which seem beyond our control and not always admirable. But in aesthetic contemplation we can lose our sense of self if we become immersed in the object and then personal striving loses its control over us.

In some degree, this seems possible. One might listen intensely to a piece of music, for example. All one’s consciousness is devoted to the experience. It is the totality of which one is aware. In this state, one doesn’t think of other matters. One doesn’t even think who one is. The subject must fall out of their own consciousness.

This is not always easy to achieve. Self-consciousness is an important human ability. We are able to be the objects of our own thoughts. Hence, one can think about an activity while performing it but then also be aware that it is you doing it. It is one thing to think about a painting and another thing to think that you are thinking about a painting. Contrary to Schopenhauer, this ability to think about our own thoughts is vital for our free will. I can find myself contemplating my own failings, for instance, realise I’m doing it, and decide not to if I don’t think it’s good for me.

Although so vital to our freedom, self-consciousness can also be a problem, as most people’s daily experience attests. Someone speaking in public mustn’t become too self-conscious. On the verge of completing a task, one mustn’t start thinking about what an achievement it would be to succeed, for that lessens the chance of success. Athletes know this. Having a match point in tennis, for instance, one really needs to concentrate on playing the point. If at the same time one starts thinking how much the point means and what glory follows from winning it, the chances of success are lessened. This is because, for optimum exercise of an ability, all one’s concentration must be dedicated to it. If a portion of one’s mind is devoted to thoughts of oneself performing the action, then one is not concentrating on the action wholly, usually to its detriment. Instead, one should seek immersion in the activity, losing the self in it. While I value my self-consciousness as a source of my freedom, then, it is also one of the things over which I need to exercise control otherwise I won’t always get what I want.

I sometimes think of life being like walking a tightrope. Tightrope walking is a highly skilled activity, sometimes with a high cost to failure. Total immersion is required. Don’t look down. Don’t start thinking of the possibility of falling, nor even of the glory of success. Instead, one should concentrate wholly on the act. Like many others, I often do things that are outside my comfort zone and do not come naturally to me. If I dwelt on the enormity, I might fall down off the high wire. Sometimes, it’s best not to think about things too much.

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The day before my first birthday, England won the World Cup. England’s greatest footballing triumph passed me by. I grew up never seeing them as a World Cup team as they failed to qualify for the ’74 and ’78 finals. In 1982, I finally saw England kick their first ball in the tournament: and what a start it was, Bryan Robson scoring after 27 seconds. But that competition ended in sorrowful disappointment when Kevin Keegan missed a sitter against Spain and we were out.

It was in 1986 that the tragedy really started. England then were eliminated in no small part due to a handball goal that shouldn’t have been awarded. In 1990, we had an excellent team that made it all the way to the Semi-Finals. Then our penalty-shoot-out agony commenced as we lost to Germany: a Chris Waddle attempt blasted high over the bar. We failed to qualify in ’94 and thereafter the tragicomic defeats all seem to blur into one. There was David Beckham’s foolish sending off when he was goaded into kicking an opponent; and goalkeeper David Seaman being beat from 50 yards when he was off his line. Since ’66, the World Cup has brought England fans nothing but pain and suffering: one unjust or calamitous failure after another.

England are nothing special. 32 teams go into this year’s Finals competition. There will be only one winner. Sports films and literature often construct their narrative around victory and glory: the ultimate fulfilment to be found in success. But the most common experience of the football supporter is failure and defeat. 31 teams will exit the tournament as losers: and there were over a hundred other nations that didn’t even get this far.

Football fans should expect defeat. We have 92 teams in our domestic professional system; only one Premier League Champion. Over 600 teams enter the FA Cup each year; only one winner. Yet the game remains so popular. All these teams have fans. You can only conclude that football is for losers.

Losing is good. In the relatively harmless environment a contest like football creates, it teaches you how to cope with disappointment. Life is full of set-backs and defeats. You often won’t get that job you want, your love for another will go unrequited, or you will be publically humbled in some way. At times you might want to give up. But sport shows us that we can survive and learn from such defeats. We can come back to play again the next time. Nothing really matters in football. It is of no consequence that the ball goes into the net. But the experience of coping with hopes dashed – and recovering to face another day – provides a lesson for everyone: one invaluable when it comes to the more serious challenges of human existence.

Losing is the essence of football and life more generally. During the long period of Manchester United’s success, they had some of the most disliked fans in to the country. I’m not convinced it was all prejudice. Rather, in following a team that rarely lost, they didn’t know what football-supporting is really about. Football is for losers and that’s how it should be. Whether it’s England you support, or any of the other nations competing in Brazil this Summer, enjoy and make the most of your near-inevitable failure. Savour it, cope with it, and contemplate how much your life is thereby enhanced.

A few copies are still available of my print-on-demand book Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011)

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If obliged to live my whole life perpetually in a single decade, I hope it would be the 1970s. Some think of it, with all its excesses, as the decade that taste forgot. But it was a time of extremes and never boring. Starting more or less with the first manned moon landing, there was a sense that anything could be achieved, which for some translated into anything goes. It was an age of decadence, after penicillin and before HIV, where loose morals were indulged and we looked forward to the possibilities of the future.

There were real choices to be made. In the UK, politics were red and blue: not yet fused into an indistinguishable purple on all sides. Ideology wasn’t a dirty word but something to be explored intellectually. And this polarisation was found at a world level too. East and West stared at each other over the Berlin Wall. We weren’t always sure there would be a tomorrow. Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove had shown us how easy could be an accidental Armageddon. We would have a bloody good time while we waited.

Football was fantastic. The club scene in England was at its peak and we came to dominate European competitions. Even Nottingham Forest got in on the act, going on to be the only side Champions of Europe more often than Champions of their own country. Internationally, England flopped but we had possibly the three best-ever World Cup competitions in ‘70, ’74 and ‘78, played in style and increasingly tight shorts.

Only the 60s comes close to the variety and progress in popular music that we saw. The 70s began with a rise of heavy metal and glam rock. We had the androgyny of Bowie, Marc Bolan of T-Rex and Russell Mael of Sparks; not forgetting Freddie Mercury featuring in Queen’s iconic video to Bohemian Rhapsody. Some of those pop stars looked like they came from outer space. Yet just a few years after, this was also the decade that brought the knee-jerk reaction of punk rock with The Damned and the anarchic Sex Pistols. It became gradually more melodic and introspective with the likes of Joy Division. Meanwhile, in Sheffield an obscure band called The Future were inventing much of the soundscape of contemporary electronic dance music and would achieve success after mutating into The Human League. It was such an exciting time to be young.

But there certainly was bad taste. Swedish film Tillsammens (Together, 2000) depicts it well. In clothes and home furnishings, we went crazy with colours and designs. Loud curtains and wallpapers were the backdrop as we filled our houses with challenging shapes, materials, abstract art, impractically uncomfortable chairs and sofas and – the ultimate home accessory – the lava lamp. There were sideboards, serving hatches and unconventional dining room tables. At my house, it needed two strong men to unload and carry our new record player, fully integrated with a radio system and space for storing LP records. The must-get item for most families was the colour TV, financially obtainable only on a weekly rental scheme. To mark the increased take-up, Dr Who changed to colour in 1970. Just look at the garish costumes in Carnival of Monsters to match the outlandish plot.

Yet the promiscuous and permissive society crashed and burned when the underlying economic turmoil became too much. The party was effectively over when Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power in ’79 with an agenda of Victorian values, to revive belief in a long-gone British Empire, and replace all those bright polyester clothes with beige tweed. No wonder us children of the 70s found the pale brown 80s drab and depressing. It was one almighty hangover. Joy Division singer Ian Curtis couldn’t stay for These Days. Some say that if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. With the 70s, it was precisely the opposite. No one who lived through it would forget.

University of Nottingham Department of Culture, Film and Media

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I’ve always had a funny relationship with conversation. I often want to be left alone, to get on with work, read, do the things I like to do, quietly in solitude, and a conversation stops me. Sometimes you can feel trapped in a conversation, finding it dull or uncomfortable, inane and a waste of time, but unable to leave or disengage. In other cases, it is fun to converse, satisfying our social needs for the company of others, but also realising later that one has indulged in idle chatter, a pastime, from which no worth really arose.

Yet conversation is one of the most efficient and immediate ways in which we exchange ideas, make plans and gain inspiration. Certainly there is literature, film, art and all sorts of other media in which people communicate their thoughts but hardly anything is as rapid, responsive and interactive as a simple conversation. I work in a subject area – philosophy – that is perhaps more closely associated with face-to-face conversation than any other. We follow the tradition of Socrates whose method was simply to talk a question through with a collection of dear friends. He wrote nothing down but merely tried to understand an issue by discussing all the possible answers and discovering their strengths and weaknesses through dialogue.

These days I write a lot collaboratively with others and I’m very pleased with the output and results. Each writing project begins with extended discussion, talking through the arguments and trying to construct a plausible theory. An outsider might not see it as work but, for philosophers, this is our laboratory. And it’s not always easy. In discussion, there are few places to hide. A poor idea is likely to be challenged quickly. One’s ideas are held accountable, scrutinised, questioned. Tempers might get raised. But it is through this process that ideas interact and grow. They inform each other and from a thesis and antithesis we hope for a synthesis to emerge that is greater than any individual participant to the conversation could have produced alone. Conversation plays a vital role in the creative process, then, especially where the product of creation is ideas. The outcome will be a mutual manifestation of many minds.

I’ve been in varied conversations this week. Some of them were one-to-one, others were in big meetings, some were formal and some were informal. In all such instances, success or failure depends on the participants’ skills in the art of conversation. How well can someone verbally articulate their ideas; how well can they listen to and understand a different perspective from their own; how well can they take someone else’s idea and form a connection with one of theirs; how well can they keep the conversation on track, aimed towards its final goal; how skilled are they at encouraging each other, making the participants feel relaxed enough to chance a conjecture that might lead to progress, and so on.

If I look at what I do in my working year, I probably spend more time talking and listening than any other activity. Fortunately, I am surrounded by many bright people, with good ideas and who are able to understand and think, so most of the discussions are profitable. In my life it has not always been so. First one needs interesting people. But, second, they have to be people who understand what makes a good dialogue. Someone who lacks either or both of these assets may rapidly become a bore.

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What is Objective Truth anyway? What is Reality? Anyone who has defended a remotely realist philosophy will no doubt have faced a familiar challenge: it’s all a social construction. Take money. That couldn’t exist without a society giving it meaning, imbuing it with value. And God is surely socially constructed rather than a real being living in a heavenly realm. We created God; he didn’t create us. Gender is also shaped by our social practices and power relations. There could be biological differences but they alone couldn’t determine the different gender roles and traits imposed by society.

Philosophers, as seekers after eternal truth, face particular ridicule. How can we make claims about the way the world really is? I once had an argument with a social constructionist who told me that electrons didn’t exist until 1896: the date they were supposedly discovered. But from that point, they existed and had always existed. I pointed out that these claims seemed logically contradictory but this was immediately dismissed because logic too was an obvious social construction, the modern form invented in 1879.

We have all dabbled a little with the thought of the late-Wittgenstein. We know that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. And if there is one thing that it is indisputably a social construct, it is language. Wittgenstein showed that language could work only if it was a social construction but also that our whole way of understanding was determined by it. The way in which we conceptualise the world is fixed by our social practices. It is then easy to heap scorn on the philosophers’ notion of a true reality and a real world that exists independently of our collective thought. We know from the work of Foucault (pictured) that what counts as knowledge is merely a product of the power relations that exist within society.

It might seem as if philosophy – and any realist metaphysics in particular – is doomed.

But I don’t think so. Not everything can be socially constructed and thus there is still room for a metaphysics that considers the nature of reality beyond our social practices.

There is at least one thing that cannot be socially constructed: namely causation. The reason for this is that without causation, nothing could be socially constructed. To be constructed means that something has been produced or made, which is a causal claim. If causation is itself not real, and merely socially constructed, then there could not be any real construction at all but only one in which we have chosen to believe: and then the social constructivist claim lapses into incoherence.

Even worse than that, without causation there is not even a society that could do the constructing. For there to be a society, there has to be interaction between its individual members. We do not have a society if we have a collection of discrete, self-contained particulars that cannot interact with each other. As Wittgenstein showed, language could not emerge unless those individual language-users were able to affect each other’s linguistic usage, enforcing the norms of meaning. A society is a complex system of causal interactions, where the members mutually change and influence each other. Without real causal connections, the very idea of a society doesn’t get off the ground, let alone society constructing anything.

It may be that something profound follows from this. One might say that it shows causation to be a fundamental element of reality. It’s really hard to see how anything makes sense without it. There is thus at least one important feature of a mind-independent reality on which metaphysics can work. Those who try to defend the universality of social construction, on the other hand, need to reflect on what it really is they are asking us to believe.

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There is a rather simplistic thought that every single action you perform, you do because it brings you pleasure. Even when you give to charity, the claim goes, it is purely because it gives you a personal thrill. No act is genuinely altruistic; all are ultimately selfish. It’s a simple, reductionist thesis of psychological egoism and easy to assert.

Despite the initial appeal, I suspect that anyone who has attempted to learn about difficult ideas realises that matters are more complicated. In philosophy, cultural theory, history, theoretical physics, literary criticism, and so on, there are often very intricate, dense and complex theories or concepts that you have to grasp. It is frequently a painful experience doing so. And it is not always the case that those who succeed suddenly become very happy from having acquired their understanding. Rather, the chief motivation seems to be that there is a value in comprehension that is greater than simple pleasure. You learn because you want to know; not because you want to be happy.

As an undergraduate, I was obliged to learn the philosophy of some very deep intellectual thinkers such as Nietzsche, Leibniz, Heidegger, Kant and Marx. It was often frustrating, perplexing and mystifying. At every point the work was difficult. My lecturers gave me their thoughts about the set books but also made it clear that I couldn’t simply take their word for it. The whole point was that I had to struggle with the texts myself in order to spark my own questions, interpretations and thoughts, which I could then bring back to the discussion. I could, of course, simply be told someone else’s interpretation. But then how deep would my understanding be? Not very. One must wrestle with the ideas, attempt to formulate them in one’s own words, synthesise them and find connections with other issues and debates.

Perhaps I learned as much about my own inadequacies as I did about Nietzsche and Leibniz. It was a labour and with essay deadlines, looming exams and anxieties about marks, a far from pleasurable experience. But distanced by time, I can take a different perspective. I’m glad I’ve struggled with Nietzsche. And I can perfectly understand why employers would want someone who has been through that process. I could simply have memorised the lecturer’s notes and repeated them in an exam. That’s one skill. But more valuable is the ability to read a text independently, understand it, summarise it, present the gist in my own words. Maybe it was all about the acquisition of a skill, which is often a difficult process: compare it with the trouble someone goes to in order to learn a new language or to play the piano.

Now I am an academic, that same struggle to grasp new ideas is something I continue to do as part of my job. I can feel satisfied when I learn about new theories and arguments, but I am far from convinced it’s simple pleasure that I get. It’s more that I think it important I know and understand, which I sometimes have to sacrifice more obvious pleasures in order to achieve. I am also well aware that I’m responsible for a new generation of students, going through the same struggles I faced, knowing that it’s not always fun. Learning can be fun, of course, and is probably easiest when it is. But the aim of learning is surely something else.

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