The image of the scholar is fading; his is a place in history. We no longer value his treatises; our admiration is for the equations of the scientist, the extrapolations of the economist and the theories of the social scientist. We no longer discourse on Plato or Aristotle; we try ever harder to advance the fields of physics and chemistry, psychology and medicine, economics and sociology. This is the era of empiricism.

It is an era in which the scholar of the humanities is confined to the university. It is a prison for his ideas. Literary theory, philosophy, history—all the liberal arts are confined there. They are becoming more and more abstract and pedantic as the rift grows between them and the “real world.”

Ask yourself: why is becoming a professor the aspiration of so many liberal arts majors? Is it perhaps because their skills and talents often have no place outside academia? Inevitably, they try to stay within it. But many can’t.

Consider a common stereotype for philosophy majors: that many end up in law school. They go from bright-eyed freshmen ready to delve into Kant to nervous seniors cramming for the LSATs and worrying obsessively about their future. After all, the philosophy major teaches skills like analytical thought and incisive argumentation that are very important in law. So why not apply them?

The impulse to move from studying the pure liberal arts to applying the skills during their study is one that makes the purist cringe. It is a perversion of everything scholars hold dear. But the prevalence of this impulse is a blatant call back to stark reality. And when reality hits, people ask themselves: “What the hell am I going to do with a philosophy degree?”

The answer is simple. You can do pretty much anything that does not require a high level of technical skill (e.g., engineering). As a liberal arts student, you can make yourself marketable as a person who is able to think rationally, and consequently make good decisions, something that major prepares you for well. But what’s the catch?

You need to step outside of purism. The fact is that no one cares about Hegelian dialectic or Cartesian nativism outside of the classroom. While these issues may be incredibly interesting and engaging, chances are that the only time you will spend engaging with them is in Hamilton and Butler. In the real world they dissipate.

What your goal needs to be is to take the skills you have learned and figure out how to apply them in the worlds of business, law, journalism, or anything else you want to spend your time making a living at. A liberal arts education can prepare you for anything. But you need to be willing to apply it first.

The fact is that the university is no longer an end but merely a means. In days of lore, people would aspire to be scholars and achieve the status of learned men. But this is not that time. Today, people don’t go to college because that is some kind of end for them. It is a means for a job, for a life. You need to put food on the table. Period.

So while you may want to spend your days discussing Kant and Nietzsche, consider that you cannot do this forever (unless you are one of the lucky ones who gets accepted into a top PhD program and you graduate in the top percentage from that program after 6-7 years. Oh, and then you need to find a job in an incredibly cutthroat environment.) So Kant and Nietzsche are probably not going to feed or clothe you. This is a stark reality, but a reality nonetheless.

While the Old White Men who make up approximately 64.5% of our beloved department avoid the moniker, I do declare proudly along with professor of early modern philosophy and feminist philosophy Christia Mercer that I, mammoth homo, do stand by my (old white) man.

To defend the life of study, I will stand by Nietzsche and do a quick and crude examination of the pursuit of truth—or, as my man calls it, the will to truth.

But first, some context: It is the project of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals to examine the value of our near universally accepted value judgments “good” and “evil”. These value judgments, in (very, very) short locate “evil” to our natural impulses and “good” to certain ascetic practices. They are, for Nietzsche, the product of the weak covering up weakness with moralizing reinterpretation. The namesake “genealogy” is a sort of disentangling of the interpretations imposed upon practices—e.g. pronouncing Jesus’ generosity the antithesis of sin, and the pillages of Roman nobility its very definition. It would be wrong to say Nietzsche posits a concrete alternative to this system of valuation, but such a replacement can certainly be extrapolated from the text. While the (primarily) Christian system of good and evil is for Nietzsche in some important sense arbitrary, its opposite would be equally so. The factors Nietzsche considers when ranking values and practices, then, are the only values he considers not to be arbitrary: life-affirming versus life-denying; vital, healthy, and power-increasing versus sickly and life-undermining.

Where does the will to truth fall on this perhaps less arbitrary scale? At first, Nietzsche seems to put it on par with the most destructive of all forces in the Nietzschean picture, the Christian god. He says at the end of the third essay of the work that, “everywhere else that the spirit is strong, mighty, and at work without conterfeit today, it does without ideals of any kind—the popular exression for this abstinence is ‘atheism’—except for its will to truth.” If honesty is the mark of an acceptable ascetic ideal, the will to truth does not, it seems, make the mark.

There are two ways in which the will to truth is not honest. First, Nietzsche recognizes in the will to truth underpinnings of the Christian keystone truthfulness. Truthfulness is part of that morality Nietzsche impugns, and so he distrusts the will to truth. The more important dishonesty of the will to truth is its propensity to posit itself as its own ascetic ideal. In claiming objectivity or knowledge of the infinite, to put it simply, someone who pursues truth in this way does as badly, in Nietzsche’s system, as someone faithful to an omnipotent god. Recall the gap between practice (Jesus’ generosity) and the meaning bestowed upon practice (the antithesis of sin): the pursuit of truth is bestowed a certain glorious meaning and so becomes dishonest. Nietzsche describes such a truth-seeker (tweed, anyone?) quite precisely: “This kind of ‘objective’ armchair scholar…[is] half parson and half satyr…Why did nature give me my foot? To kick!... For kicking to pieces these rotten armchairs!”

Now, hopefully, there is some shared understanding of the dangers Nietzsche sees in the will to truth. It may have a tradition based in dubious Christian morality (let us leave that one aside), and it potentially creates its own farcical asceticism. Assuming we seek the truth not as agents of Christian morality, and that we do not fall into “worshiping the question mark itself as God”—what does Nietzsche make of the will to truth? If it can be separated out from the meanings we attach to it after the fact (‘objective’, ‘infinite’, etc.) it is without doubt, for Nietzsche, life-affirming, vital, healthy, power-increasing. Creative and intellectual pursuits devoid of impedimenta are in fact necessary for Nietzschean health. Agents of Christian morality enter into their life-denying system of valuation for a reason: to avoid the despair that is the world, that is their weakness, to avoid willlessness. The will to truth is an alternative, perhaps the only alternative.

Have I made a case for myself? Or have I merely demonstrated the putative problem of the life devoted to thought—that it can’t really answer the questions we face out there in reality? But wait! It can! Surprisingly, perhaps, this translates into a few final words of real-world defense: The university is in an important sense monastic (but let it not fall into false asceticism!); it is an escape, a real escape from the despair in the world. There is a real risk of willlessness in the modern reality, and perhaps the university, the life of study, is its antidote. Do not enter graduate school to get a job: you will probably not get a job, and if you do, it will probably be in Kansas. Enter graduate school to watch your creative and intellectual pursuits flourish, and for the health that may bring.