Empowerment Through Thought

This week I found myself spending an afternoon reading the Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy specifically about Chinese philosophy. It wasn’t because I was preparing a lecture, writing a paper, or trying to accomplish anything in particular. I simply wanted to learn more. That may not sound remarkable, but it struck me because I realized it had been a long time since I had approached philosophy with that kind of freedom.

When I was in graduate school, I specialized in Buddhist philosophy. Part of what drew me there was a growing frustration with the way philosophy was taught. Throughout my education, the overwhelming majority of philosophers I encountered were European and American. I began wondering what philosophical traditions had been left out of that picture, which eventually led me to Nepal to study Tibetan Buddhism. There I discovered an extraordinarily rich philosophical tradition that had been largely absent from my own education, and I became passionate about making it known that philosophy has never belonged exclusively to Europe or the United States.

That interest was rekindled this week after the philosopher Bryan Van Norden shared several resources on Chinese philosophy, along with his essay arguing that the traditional Western philosophical canon is racist and xenophobic. His post reminded me of questions that had occupied so much of my intellectual life years ago. As I started reading again, though, I noticed something that surprised me. I wasn’t reading because I felt I should. I was reading because I genuinely wanted to know more.

For a long time, I associated what people call “the life of the mind” with academia. Universities are often imagined as places where people are free to devote themselves to ideas, and there is certainly some truth to that. At the same time, academic life places enormous demands on the people within it. Reading becomes preparation for teaching. Research becomes publications. Ideas become conference papers, grant proposals, and articles. None of that is inherently bad, but it does shape the way one relates to intellectual work. There is often very little reading that exists simply for the joy of understanding something new.

Since leaving academia, I have begun to wonder whether the life of the mind depends less on where you work than on the freedom to follow your curiosity wherever it leads.

These days I read differently. I spend time with subjects simply because they interest me. I take notes in the way I enjoy taking notes, usually with colorful pens and little cartoon-like sketches that help me internalize ideas. There is no audience waiting for these notes and no expectation that they become anything more than part of my own understanding. That freedom has made philosophy feel alive again.

Something else has changed as well. Over the past few months I’ve begun hosting Philosophy Club here in South Bend, where people gather to think together about questions that emerge from ordinary life. We don’t begin with philosophers. We begin with questions. The philosophers enter the conversation because they help us think more deeply about those questions, not because mastering their ideas is the goal.

I’ve noticed that those conversations have made me hungry to read philosophy again. When someone raises a question about meaning, identity, or artificial intelligence, I find myself wanting to return to the books, simply because I want to understand those ideas more deeply for myself. Reading and conversation have begun feeding one another in a way I hadn’t experienced for years.

One of the unexpected joys of working outside academia is that many of the boundaries that once felt so important simply disappear. In my philosophical counseling work, no one finds it strange that Aristotle might appear alongside Nāgārjuna, or that Confucius belongs in the same conversation as Simone de Beauvoir. People are generally interested in whether an idea helps them understand themselves and the world a little better. They are far less concerned with whether that idea fits neatly into the categories that academic philosophy has inherited.

Living the life of the mind outside academia certainly comes with challenges. I have less institutional support, fewer colleagues to wander down the hall and talk with, and I have to make a conscious effort to protect time for reading and reflection. Yet despite those challenges, I increasingly feel that I am living more fully the intellectual life I imagined for myself than I ever did within the university.

Perhaps that is because I am slowly building the infrastructure that I once expected an institution to provide. I am creating spaces where people gather simply because they enjoy thinking together. I am reading because I am curious rather than because I have an obligation. And I am rediscovering that philosophy can be something woven into everyday life rather than confined to classrooms and journals.

I used to think leaving academia meant leaving behind the life of the mind. Increasingly, I think it has simply allowed me to discover a different way of living it.