What skills do you need to be a philosopher? Common examples might include: strong writing skills, the ability to analyze an argument for background assumptions and the structure of inferences, an interest in reading a wide array of different literature, and attention to detail—but what about the ability to fix a car?
Auto repair skills might seem far removed from philosophy, but they really aren’t. If you choose to enter a graduate program in philosophy, you likely already know two things: (a.) the job market upon graduation will be very difficult to enter, and (b.) you won’t get paid much, either as a teaching assistant (TA) or as a professor. That’s simply part and parcel of what we sign up for in pursuing philosophy with such obsession.
Naturally, our material circumstances, in turn, shape how our actual course of study progresses: where we live, how we get to campus, how many books we can buy, coffee budget, etc. The trickle-down effects can include: the quality of sleep, time spent in transit, access to course materials, owning a good laptop, and so on. All these factors will contribute to the study habits we form as grad students and are as much a part of our philosophical lives as formal study itself.
Owning a car can greatly improve graduate life, whether minimizing time spent in transit, expanding the range and quality of viable rental options, or enabling a broader social life—vehicle ownership can foster personal independence overall. But vehicle ownership is not universally freeing. In addition to the costs of gas and insurance, repair bills can be crippling to a grad student’s budget—especially during the cruel unpaid summer. But what if philosophers turned their research skills towards a novel field and literally took their freedom into their own hands?
When I first decided to pursue graduate study, I decided that I was unwilling to live without the independence a car brings. Thus, I had to reconcile this decision with the reality of a grad student’s budget. The obvious solution was to eliminate the least predictable and (often) largest car-related burden: the cost of repairs. And the obvious means to eliminating this burden was learning how to repair my vehicle myself.
Vehicle repairs require a surprising amount of research and attention to detail. While the internet may be your friend, much depends on knowing what to look for, and—in the case of an engine problem—I had no idea what to look for! A phenomenological description of engine symptoms can be a helpful diagnostic, but we are faced with a vast plethora of potential descriptors that underdetermine the nature of the symptom itself. Is that a hissing noise? Or is it raspy? Maybe a raspy hissing? Do I smell burning rubber, or should I say it smells like burning oil—or perhaps both? I’m hearing a rattle, or is it a persistent knock? Or could I perhaps be imagining the sound altogether? Add to these issues the frequent causal overdetermination of a symptom, and your analytical work is intimidatingly large.
Finding potential answers—typically from online forums—requires persistent research. And once you start finding potential answers, you must assess those answers’ provenance. Is the repair manual you found actually a good source for torque specs? When torque specs differ in different manuals, which one seems more likely to be an official specification? What about that nifty trick from YouTube that turns out to depend upon tools you can’t afford? Indeed, assessing whether you will be able to attempt the repair often depends on knowing what the stepwise process will be. How many parts will you need to remove in order to access the broken part? What kinds of tools will be necessary to get you there? Typically, a wrench and sockets will get you surprisingly far, but sometimes you need a specialized wrench (perhaps with a hinged head) or a specialized socket (perhaps with spark-plug grips) to finish the job. Trial and error are often costly, but—for a grad student—perhaps trial and error is the only affordable way to keep the vehicle running at all.
I recall two particularly horrible repair experiences, both during my current PhD program. In the first scenario, my aging truck’s transmission began dying shortly after arrival in Cincinnati. Paying for a specialized transmission shop’s labor costs—let alone paying for a replacement transmission—was completely out of the question, and selling a broken truck for peanuts would not have left me with the funds to buy another vehicle. The alternative to attempting the repair myself was simply giving up on vehicle ownership—hence, I dove into the deep end of transmission repair. It was a messy, wretched experience. By the time I was done, it was late at night, I was covered in gear oil literally from head to foot (it’s amazing how much oil a transmission can continue to leak even after you’ve drained it), and I was unsure of my results. But the proof was in the pudding, and after replacing the transmission’s servos and pressure valves, the truck not only ran and shifted: it ran and shifted better than it had at any point previously.
The other horrible repair experience was even worse: a wheel bearing burned out on the highway, destroying the surrounding brake hardware and heat-welding broken steel to the axle spindle. My grad student budget again precluded paying for repairs, and no dealership would even consider buying a truck with three wheels. This time, the alternative to attempting a repair on my own was paying a junkyard to take my vehicle. As it happened, I was immensely fortunate: off the highway, I parked my truck at a local NAPA shop, where several kindly gentlemen offered advice, sold me parts at an unauthorized discount, and lent me their tools. Between an angle grinder and six hours of curses under the hot July sun, the heat-welded bearings were removed and replaced. (In the trades world, a remove-and-replace job is an R&R, and no amount of dealing with journals will ever shake this prior association from my mind!) And despite itself, my truck was safely driveable by evening.
That truck continued to run safely and reliably for many thousands of kilometers afterward, through snow and heat, in the city and on long drives (including a brief trip to Ontario, Canada). The newfound confidence, pride, and sense of independence from these Macgyvered repairs remain deeply invaluable to me. Yet none of these repairs were my own achievements: I was completely dependent upon strangers’ advice, suggestions, and kindness. Some random guy on a truck forum answered my questions in the middle of the night, sharing decades of wisdom as a mechanic simply because he was a fellow Ford enthusiast. A handful of strangers in a NAPA shop took pity on my situation and gave me their time and tools for no reason other than kindness—and I certainly was a nuisance, with an immovable truck in their parking lot! I truly stood on the shoulders of giants, my own work completely dependent on the work of others who had labored before me. I had to do research, discover what the right questions were, correct my original diagnoses, and assess whether the tools I had were adequate for the job I needed to do—each step dependent on others whose knowledge exceeded and preceded my own.
As it turns out, mechanics is a practice much like philosophy. You must build on the communal work of others, reference and sift through their work, and combine findings with your own experience through the filter of careful, causal analysis. Every single one of these skills is something I first learned and refined through studying philosophy; indeed, auto mechanics is an embodied form of highly synthetic causal reasoning.
Auto mechanics also requires many of the same personality traits as philosophy; perseverance and panic are equally essential to doctoral theses and transmission repairs! Getting an engine to run may not involve much writing, but it certainly involves a lot of attentive study under stress. Owning a vehicle and committing to being fully responsible for it has, by and large, been beneficial to me as a philosophy student: it has literally expanded my toolkit and formed new transferable skills. In this regard, then, I suggest we consider auto mechanics—the people themselves—to be masters of applied philosophy. Professional philosophers will enhance their personal autonomy and professional research skills by studying auto mechanics.
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