How 20 years of university taught me to appreciate the world from contradictory angles

I wrote this blog post as part of a course in online writing, where I am trying to experiment more with personal stories and different themes beyond what I usually publish.

The building of my former Philosophy department.

Photo credit: Reiner Stöcker, Wikimedia Commons. License: CC-By Attribution - Share-Alike

More than 15 years ago, I found myself struggling in one of my philosophy seminars. Around 40 of us first and second-year students were crammed into a small room in the commoners building of the Baroque Prussian castle Sanssouci. The building served as the lecture hall for the Philosophy department of the University of Potsdam, a mid-sized uni near Berlin. “Sans souci” means “without worry” in French, but that was furthest away from what I was feeling in this room. I was worried. And overwhelmed. 

The goal of the seminar was for us to discuss the ancient question of whether humans have free will. European philosophers have been discussing this question for millennia, and we were to recreate those debates by reading selected historical texts and sharing our perspectives on them. Turns out you could group those millennia of debate into just three camps: No free will, limited free will or completely free will.

 All of those positions had their merits, and all of them had their drawbacks. Neither camp had won the debate through the millennia, and philosophers are still arguing these fights today. In medieval times, they would argue whether God determined human will or not. In the enlightenment era, the laws of physics would take over as the possible determinant of human agency. In modern times, computers and neurobiology took over that role.

Yet still, the same arguments are being made over and over.

The whole debate felt bewildering. How could we be so uncertain about something so fundamental to our existence? How can generations of smart people reach so many completely different conclusions about the same question? To 22-year-old me, that whole debate quickly turned into existential quicksand. 

I keep thinking about that seminar when I get asked about my motivation to continue studying, 12 years after I graduated from my first M.Sc. degree in Computer Science. Whenever I introduce myself at a party, a course, or a new job, this question comes up. Why do I continue to enroll in university degree programs, despite working full-time and having no career need for another degree?

On the surface level, the answer is that I love university. I am hopelessly curious, and I want to understand everything! Whether that is how the universe works, how humans tick, societies function, or whether that is how we can understand the world to begin with. My degree in Computer Science is super useful for my career, but pretty much useless in helping me understand anything else that’s not a computer. And university provides the most rigorous way to understand everything. (It helps that I live in a country where studying at university costs next to nothing due to generous government subsidies!)

But a bit on a deeper level,  I have stretched my mind into all sorts of directions through study. This allows me to not just know more about the world, but also see the world from a lot of different angles. Beyond learning more facts and theories about the world, which I might also glean from a deep dive into Wikipedia, immersing myself into different academic communities taught me that we need very different methods for  understanding and studying different academic subjects. And these different methods can only be adopted by deeply practicing the study of a subject within an intellectual community. It is that tacit or embodied knowledge gained more than the factual knowledge that makes academic studying worthwhile. 

My flatmate’s colleague was getting married in Delhi in 2005. Quite the party! (I don’t remember whether this one was an arranged marriage or the couple’s choice, but arranged marriages were pretty common back then.)

Long-term travel does something similar: It expands your mind beyond just learning about foreign architecture and cuisine, if you deeply immerse yourself into a new culture. When I was doing a six-month internship in an NGO in India, I was suddenly able to understand how couples might find a way to make a family-arranged marriage work over the long run, an approach that previously seemed deeply offensive to my German notions of romantic love. 

Of course, I thought, marriage should only be based on romantic love — or should it? The divorce statistics are a lot more sad-looking in Germany than in India. And that is only one aspect of the very layered and nuanced question of how to approach love and family development, which is dealt with very differently in very different cultural traditions. 

The more I study (and the more I travel), the more I appreciate such levels of complexity, nuance and layers in all sorts of situations. 

Studying different subjects deeply allowed me to eventually overcome the existential worries that 22-year-old me experienced in that seminar on free will. My studies have taken me from Computer Science to Philosophy, to Business Administration, Psychology, to Sociology, Political Science and Public Administration. And most recently, to Environmental Sciences.

It turns out that the notion of will and agency is fundamental to many academic disciplines, but in different ways. A liberal arts student studying interpretations of a poem needs a different way to think about human agency than a computer scientist designing an artificial intelligence program. A lawyer considering the sentence for a murder case must assume the murderer acted out of free will, otherwise they cannot be held responsible for their act. An economist modelling the national demand for candy bars will assume that a decision to buy candy is only partially free, but also partially determined by factors outside the consumers’ personality, such as prices and availability of candy. And a neurobiologist studying the human brain needs a causally determined model of how a neuro-electrical stimulus in the brain triggers a specific response of the stimulated body.

From these different needs to approach human agency in different spheres of life, we end up with all these incompatible ways of answering the question of human “free will” that 22-year-old me found so existentially bewildering. 

40-year-old me, having immersed myself in all many different ways of approaching the world, is now at ease with holding many inconsistent but complementary perspectives on life, the universe and everything in-between.