On Endings and Beginnings: Writing a Doctoral Thesis

Esgrid Sikahall
Nov 5 · 4 min read

The process of giving birth to a piece of robust academic work often seems to me to be at odds with even the very basic questions that people, including myself, tend to ask about most tasks.

“How’s your work going?” We ask. If we ask this about the activities that today constitute what ordinary people would call a job, the answer we expect will not be anything but a word or a group of words that expresses very basic value judgements: “yeah, not bad” or “all good” or, if astonishingly we get an honest one, “I hate it.”

The problem with writing a thesis, such as the one I’m writing, is that those basic value judgements only serve to conceal what might be thought of a better answer, especially for the ones implicated in the process of writing it. I’m thinking of the notion of making progress, and the currently unimaginable state, the mythical “being done.”

To be done, to have finished, for the thesis to be over, ended, completed, etc., is perhaps uncontroversial, but why is it that I get the sense that I am working towards something that when achieved will be like getting to one of the ends of the rainbow? Everyone can see the rainbow, especially at a distance. In fact, the distance is crucial. The distance is so important that if removed the rainbow becomes invisible. What to do when this happens?

For this reason, I want to think of my thesis not in terms of endings, or if endings are the end, what is the end of endings? As the wise have noted, opposites are always implicated in one another. To talk about endings means that beginnings are at hand. What is not so clear to me is how to see the “end” of my work as involving beginnings, apart from the trivial way of thinking of it as a “new” beginning, which it obviously could be in the end.

I think that the problem might have partly to do with an inherited perception of “scholarship,” one that is tied of course to a demise of the notion of the university and of “science.” In English the word science evokes flashes of experiments, lab coats, microscopes, chemicals, etc. Wissenschaft in German still preserves a more wholistic understanding, having the term Naturwissenschaften to stand for natural sciences, which is what “the sciences” mean in English. My work would fall in the other category, the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of the spirit, the “humanities.” It is debatable whether philosophy is of course a Wissenschaft, for its object is not a finite slice of reality but the whole, but for the purposes of an academic thesis, you are made to slice whether you like it or not.

Contemporary science (Wissenschaft) in general, has, so to speak, inhaled the spirit of what the natural sciences seem to be, in such a way that a reflection and study of cultural aspects (Bildung) of the world are paradoxically reduced to attempting to parallel whatever the natural sciences do, but now in the realm of society, culture and human beings. One is driven to ask, how is something like literature or art, for example, even possible if standards of “progress” or of “impact” are set? How do we “measure” the worth of cultural “assets”? If we do not feel at least uncomfortable with the way the question is phrased we are already in agreement with the issue being questioned here.

This is not the place to attempt to find a place for what Gadamer calls the “monologue” of modern science, but only to mention that as long as that monologue continues, science itself grows like tumours grow, at a rate that is inappropriate, in the wrong place and endangering paradoxically that which allows it to exist, the entire body.

By being embedded in this perception of knowledge, my thesis faces the terrible shadow of time and also its imminent obligatory maturation after (hopefully) three years of gestation. The new beginnings that endings call for, as I mentioned above, are trivially to think about, but not trivially livable. What is it that begins once something ends? How might new beginnings modify the apparently violent conception of “progress” that seems to pull me and everyone asking for “my work”? A beginning is an opening. As such, the end could also be seen as that. A way of releasing; this bodily posture where I open my hands to give, and note, right after giving, there is no difference in pose between giving and receiving. The position of reception and giving are the same. Maybe I can, as they say, “look forward” to releasing what needs to be given so I might receive what might be given.

Esgrid Sikahall

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Understanding first and then everything else. Sure. How?

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