Academic philosophy is, no doubt, a discipline filled to the brim with brilliant minds. After all, it is a field that is obsessed with the very concept of “mind” and, in my experience, those prone towards genius tend to be more reflective, more turned inward upon their own minds, almost to the point of madness.

Furthermore, academic philosophy is obsessed with the Great Minds of the philosophical past, those brilliant people (usually men) who possessed profound insight into the nature of the world, the mind, and the spirit. Ray Monk wrote a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein — widely regarded as one of the most brilliant philosophers to have ever lived — and I’ve always been struck by the title and how it resonates with the obsessions of philosophers: The Duty of Genius.

On a more practical level, academic job decisions are often made on the basis of who has a “quick wit”, who is the smartest, most brilliant mind. Classroom discussions are like sparring sessions between those with the quickest minds, those able to instantly come up with a brilliant retort (or four), or break down a concept into three alternative theses, two of which are likely false, and the other true, etc., etc. Coming up with an interesting thought experiment on-the-fly is widely regarded as an important skill of Good Philosophers.

In the hallways and the back offices, grad students are often found engaged in rapid-fire intellectual discussion, often with an air of tension, everyone trying to get a read on “who’s winning the debate”. I’ve heard academic philosophy compared to a bloodsport, which is hilarious if you’ve ever known what philosophers are like — usually they’re not exactly the type to have ever excelled at any sport.

Q&A sessions after talks and lectures are almost always opportunities for listeners to prove to the audience how smart they are in coming up with their Brilliant Questions. And Lord Forbid if you are a presenter and take more than 3 seconds to think about your answer before you give it — for a discipline that takes pride in thinking carefully, in the heat of the moment it is more often about how fast you think than how well you think. No one cares that when you got home that night hours later you thought of a devastating reply.

Professors encourage this sort of thing — they stoke the fires of debate in their students and groom the quickest wits to be “rising stars”. It is these rising stars who get the best interviews with the best schools. They are gossiped about in pubs after they’ve given their talks. “Oh, did you hear about Johnson over at Ivy League University? He’s tremendously smart. His response to Jones after his talk was simply brilliant.”

It is in context of all this obsession with intelligence, wit, and genius that those — like myself — who dropped out of academic philosophy are often accused of not having been able to “cut it”. They will say I just didn’t have the chops for it. I wasn’t smart enough. I couldn’t handle it. My mind wasn’t rigorous enough. My skills of logic chopping were not good enough. I was too soft and weak to handle the “bloodsport”.

But is this true, on a whole? Could those who dropped out not…cut it?

Or….maybe…just maybe…they just didn’t have a taste for it. Maybe they don’t like the taste of blood.

That’s how I interpret my own dissatisfaction with academic philosophy. I always excelled at the verbal sparring and my wit was considered plenty quick to engage in the rapid-fire debates that would always be springing up in the grad student lounge, what we lovingly called “The Cave”. I was also an obsessive researcher, reading hundreds of books and even more journal articles in my years as a grad student. While my skills at analytic logic were not the best, I knew how to argue but I often just didn’t want to, at least not when writing journal articles.

My heroes were philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, late Wittgenstein, etc., etc. They were all brilliant — geniuses even. But they did not write how they were “supposed to write”. They carved off their own paths. They did philosophy their own way. I had trouble publishing in top philosophy journals because they are all written according to a certain style. I grew to absolutely loathe that style and refused on principle to write my own papers like that.

Not surprisingly, I never got published the six years I spent in Wash U’s PhD program. My professors often gave me the same feedback: I need to be more analytic, and less synthetic, in my writing. Write more like a philosopher, and less like a writer, less like a science journalist. But in the back of my head I always knew I wanted my writing to be read by more people than just other academic philosophers.

That pathway seemed far too stuffy, locked up in the ivory tower writing letters to other people also locked up in the ivory tower. I wanted to fold my letters into little paper airplanes and throw them out the window, hopefully to land somewhere in the wider world.

So in the end, did I drop out because I couldn’t “cut it”? Maybe. Maybe not. But what I couldn’t abide was the idea of writing in a way that other people wanted me to write, rather than how I like to write. I like what I like. And I write what I like. The rest is history.

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Rachel Anne Williams has a book coming out with Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Transgressive: A Trans Woman on Gender, Feminism, and Politics