I do the readings. I suspect I understand them; at least I understand parts or sentences of them. I make notes in the margins, and some of my notes have question marks at the end. Surely this must indicate that I have thoughts or questions about the subject matter? Even beyond my notes, just by virtue of my combined experiences in my twenty-four years, I must have some kind of perspective to contribute to the discussion. In the obituary of John Stallings, Barry Mazur explained the virtue of Stallings’ proof despite the fact that it was less complete than Smale’s (fewer dimensions are more complete, correct?) by noting, “Different proofs bring out different aspects of a problem.” I suspect it is the same way with different people in a class discussion such as ours.

So why, when that opening song ends and conversation begins, do I sit quietly in my chair for an hour and twenty minutes? It’s certainly not because Willie Nelson’s rendition of Poncho and Lefty answered all of my questions about Transcendental Nonsense.

I have a few ideas. I hope that by beginning to write about them and share them here, I can better understand my own thoughts, and maybe start the process of breaking through the block I feel when class begins.

1. I have been taught not to raise my hand. I spent the first half of first semester of law school repressing the desire to volunteer answers to professors’ questions. Don’t get me wrong, I have never known all the answers. But I knew SOME, I just couldn’t say them. I didn’t want to be a “gunner,” right? That’s always been my understanding of the culture of law school: we don’t volunteer answers in lecture, we don’t wave our hand around - or at least we don’t do it every day.

Now I’m supposed to raise my hand - expected to, in some respect - and I can’t. It feels wrong. It feels like I’m violating some kind of norm I wasn’t even aware of until I tried to move against it.

I don’t think this is it, though. Some of my convictions about justice and the court system violate social norms of retributivism and revenge, and I am just as adamant about expressing my views on these subjects - perhaps moreso. It shouldn’t be all that difficult that difficult to break free of a norm, to whatever extent it exists, that I have only been subject to for one semester.

No, I think the underlying issue might really be...

2. Philosophy makes me uncomfortable. In my more introspective moments, I think this the lion’s share of my problem. However, I don’t think it’s a Sandra-Day-O’Connor kind of discomfort, where the psychic pain of wrestling with the many levels of a problem becomes too much for me to bear. I suspect that it’s less of Holmes’ “longing for certainty,” and more of Stallings-style reluctance; “...an inhibition of reasoning by an underlying fear of being wrong.”

I’m not sure why this feeling is more acute for me in the discipline of philosophy than I think it would be in most, if not all, of the other disciplines on the list of organized inquiry. If anything, there is probably less of a wrong answer in philosophy than biology. It actually seems possible, from my layman’s perspective, to disagree with absolutely every premise from some kind of philosophical standpoint. I picture two obtuse philosophers talking to each other: “I am here.” “Are you really?”

Now that I’m reviewing my thoughts on this topic, I wonder if these two types of discomfort are really the same. Perhaps my fear of being wrong stems from a fear of the seemingly near-total uncertainty and lack of objective truth that surround much of what we discuss in class. If that’s true, then Stallings would say that I should begin addressing my problem by cultivating “techniques leading to the abandonment of such inhibitions.”

I guess I should start exploring what those might be.

-- MolissaFarber - 30 Jan 2009

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