One exam down, and a frustrating one. Very weird paper which threw everyone else off, but I was mostly unaffected, lucky for me, but I managed to screw up one of my three answers due to not thinking the answer through carefully enough and losing my structure and running out of time. This was the question where I wanted to roll out my Actual View, to stick it to the various Balliolites who disagree with me, and I messed up my execution of that.

To maintain motivation for tomorrow’s exam I’m thinking about how my tutor got a third in his first attempt at doing a degree, but then tried again and got the highest mark the University of East Anglia has ever awarded (studying maths & philosophy, in fact), then returning to Oxford for his bphil. Well, I have next year to work extremely hard and do really well. That doesn’t really apply to the paper I did today, though, which I really had worked hard for.

My self-image w.r.t. all this could do with a lot of improvement. My issue tends to be that if I don’t do well in these sorts of exams, I can’t help but think of all the engaged people I knew at, say, school, who didn’t work hard enough to do well in formal exams, and therefore kind of vanish—people who could be doing the philosophy I do or some other subject, but instead have stopped climbing the academic ladder. I feel as though I am worth nothing at all if/once that happens to me. It’s also really bad that I think less of other people in this way; I very much dislike that about myself.

I know this is a terrible set of thoughts. The fact is that these exams definitely do not define the academic ideal that I aspire to, only, in fact, one aspect of it—the strictly meritocratic part. There are plenty of people who are really good at these exams, and at the competitive turn-out-papers part of academic life, who I would have no desire to be anything like. And so far as this academic ideal of mine is what I reckon to be the good life for me, I respect the fact that there are plenty of other good lives for others, and that comparatively few modern academics lead them.

That doesn’t change the fact that philosophy finals are the thing I ought to be focussing on at the moment; instrumentally I need to do well, but I am very far from writing them off as just jumping-through-hoops; there is a lot of good stuff. My all-or-nothing attitude about success and failure, though, is proving to be very very hard to get rid of.