Being a philosophy major is tough. For one thing, no one really understands what you’re doing and others assume they know everything about your major. When you tell people you’re a philosophy major, they usually just say “wow” or “that sounds hard.” And it is. But not just because of the material learned. Here is some insight to the struggles of being a philosopher:
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People condescendingly saying “Good luck getting a job” or “you’ll never make money.” Thanks, I already didn’t know that! As if I didn’t already know that of the first philosophers was a homeless man!
We know you can’t be a professional philosopher with a bachelor’s degree, but that’s not why we do it. Some of my classmates want to go to law school and others simply just like philosophy. We know it seems like we’re not getting much for the amount we pay for tuition, but that doesn’t faze us. We’re philosophers; we’re not ignorant.
2. Hearing people diss philosophy because it is only taught by rich white guys. Again, Socrates was homeless. Aquinas quit his rich family to be a monk. Since Kant, most philosophers were all professors, and we all know how much that pays. Additionally, this claim dismisses all female philosophers that have shaped the world, including: Hypatia, Catherine of Alexandria, Simone De Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Philippa Foot, to name a few.
Philosophy isn’t inherently evil because it’s not diverse. It’s just that we learn western philosophy and so we happen to learn from those that prominently shaped it, which were mostly white guys.
3. Hearing people misinterpret Descartes as constantly disbelieving in everything or questioning if reality was just a dream. He knew pretty early in his writings that he wasn’t dreaming. Yeah, he said “I think, therefore I am,” but by the end of The Mediations he proved to himself that he, God, and reality existed.
4. Debating the trolley problem endlessly with classmates. For those who don’t know, it’s where a runaway trolley is going to hit five people tied to the tracks and the only thing you can do to stop it is to pull a lever that diverts it to another track that has one person tied to it. Shouldn’t be a hard answer, right? That’s wrong when everyone has a different sense of ethics! By the end of class, you don’t care about pulling the lever/ not pulling it, you just want to get along with your classmates. Granted, it wouldn’t be philosophy class if you all agreed.
5. Explaining/ reading Kant and Nietzsche. Both are smart philosophers with awkward translations from the original German. Kant starts a sentence that goes on for half a page and needs to be re-read a few times to understand. No matter how many times I’ve had to read Beyond Good and Evil, I still feel like I don’t know the Will to Power and feel like I clearly don’t have it.
6. When people assume that you’re an atheist because “God is dead.” Clearly philosophers, like Nietzsche, proved God didn’t exist. When Nietzsche said “God is dead and it is we who killed him!” he was talking about killing the belief in God.
This is accusation of no philosophers believing in the Divine is absurd, plenty of philosophers argue for the proof of God’s existence! While there are other philosophers that argue against God’s existence, like David Hume, but there is no singular and final philosophical voice saying God is dead.
7. Hearing people complain that they still need their philosophy requirement in front of us. Yes, thank you for dissing something I’m passionate about it front of me. Between that and hearing Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson tell the internet that philosophy is useless, it really makes us philosophy majors feel warm inside. What these people don’t realize is that everyone uses philosophy daily: our moral codes are ethics, we make arguments and reasonings based off of logic, we ask why bad things happen to us, and we question the meaning of life. Does philosophy still seem useless to you?
Being a philosophy major isn’t all bad. If anything, we get to sit around and question the ethics of worldwide leaders every day. We have time in class and in our studies to search for the truth. And somewhere in between, we get to make bad puns off of philosophers’ names. In the end, the struggles are worth and they prove we need philosophy majors more than ever. Next time you see one of us give us a high five, it’s better than reminding us of our job prospects.