Whatever happens, do not cry in the conference room

Pablo Picasso, Weeping woman

I did my PhD studies in Europe, not the United States, so there wasn’t a set number of courses to go through and the program was a lot less structured than US grad school. But in spite of the big cultural differences, one thing you learn as you go through a PhD program in Europe, as well as in the US, is that emotions are verboten. Nobody tells you this explicitly, of course. But you learn it all the same through your many interactions in the profession.

As a graduate student, a lot of your time is spent hiding your feelings and faking confidence. You learn to hide your imposter syndrome, outwardly smiling, inwardly thinking: What the hell am I doing? I gave a talk very early in my graduate training for other PhD students and postdocs. It was on cognitive modularity: I gave an overview of the literature, and a brief critique of Fodorian modules, particularly his idea that modules only apply to language and perception. I was 25 at the time and just a couple of months into the program. Upon ending my presentation, my very first academic presentation to peers, one of the postdocs said that she thought my work was shoddy. I was not critical enough of my material. I didn't do enough innovative work. She wondered if a doctorate was the right path for me.

My immediate impulse was simultaneously to apologize for giving a bad talk, to run away, to hide and never be seen again. I admired this postdoc and hoped she would like my presentation. That she hated it was unexpected. I didn't know what to say. Other, more friendly questions came from fellow students, and I did my best but wasn't in a good state to answer them, meanwhile hoping the ground would swallow me up.

What I just describe may sound harsh but is not an extraordinary experience for early-career (or even later-career) philosophers. I saw it happen when a postdoc gave a talk that was commented upon by a senior, well-known philosopher. That senior person said, “I have been allocated twenty minutes to respond to this paper, but I'm afraid it's so bad I will only use five minutes.” And then he went on to destroy the paper. The postdoc sat at the table, still clutching his handout, looking visibly upset but holding it together. I tried to rebut some of the very unjust criticisms by the senior philosopher. But still, the damage was done.

We suppress our emotions in a range of academic settings. Papers should sound dispassionate or we are not professional. When asked an unfair question at a job interview, we do not flinch but try to find some elegant way of not answering it. This is the way of academia. In polite company, we do not talk about repeat sexual harassers (that's more a one-on-one whisper network thing), but instead publicly praise their great works, which justify their continued presence in the profession.

I think this in part explains the allure of the “quit lit” genre of academic writing where people talk about how they were forced out of the profession. There's something cathartic about reading the unadorned venting of others, of how the profession fails people and creates hostile climates. Meanwhile we just all smile and nod along, and are polite and dispassionate.

On the rare occasions that speakers do become emotional during talks—for instance, talks about gender, or abuse, or discrimination—my main feeling is discomfort. I feel a vicarious sense of unease on behalf of the speaker, and maybe also unease at myself for these emotions being stirred up in a setting where I expect them to be well suppressed. I certainly do not want to cry during a presentation. It happened almost the one time when someone gave a very devastating talk about climate change.

Professions have specific virtues to the practice, as Alasdair MacIntyre holds. One virtue of being an academic philosopher is to be dispassionate. We should be masters of our passions, Descartes reminds us in Passions of the Soul. When passions take hold of us, things feel dangerous and unpredictable, and we go off script. There are good reasons to shun passions in our talks, in our reactions in Q and A, and in our academic writing, which facilitate philosophical discourse.

And yet, I cannot help but fear that by my years of enculturation in academia and my training, I have cut off something important and crucial about myself. It is like I am neglecting an entire register of things that matter to me, and an entire mode of engaging with things in daily life that I never do in academic writing. However, when we eschew emotions in academic writing, we block off an entire register which, at least historically, was an integral part of philosophy. Nietzsche, for instance, wanted to create a specific joyful mood to countervail the stifling morality of customs in works such as Dawn and The Gay Science.

It is easier to find the emotional register in my blogposts, maybe because they are not (or not entirely) academic writing. The stakes are lower. They don't matter for me, professionally (except maybe negatively, but I do not care). I would like a better relationship to my emotional life in the way I move in academic spaces. One where it's not a disaster if I get upset upon hearing a talk. I don't know how to do it, though.