Interview with Awee Prins on his student days

What kind of student were you? 

"Next to philosophy, I studied in the Academy of Arts. To support myself financially I worked as a nightguard at a psychiatric clinic 3-4 nights a week. I was not a very disciplined student. I hardly came to class. My father was a professor in mathematics and he insisted that I graduated high school with a natural sciences profile, so I had not really gotten the skills I needed to become a student in philosophy. I used my first two years in philosophy to read all the great classics in literature. I still believe it is very important to have a good understanding of (multi-)cultural history. I needed time to broaden my perspectives, as I was trained too much in science."

You say you were not a very disciplined student, but that didn’t limit your study success?

"Like most people at the time, I didn’t study nominally. I was disciplined in the sense that philosophy became my life. I believe that being a philosopher is someone who brings philosophy with him to everything. But I did not finish my classes in time. Back then, you could choose to either write short essays for every class or not go to class and write a longer essay. I chose the latter and finished my courses by writing 35–40-page essays on my typewriter."

You said that as a philosopher you bring philosophy to wherever you go. When you’re a philosophy student you encounter many philosophies that raise existential questions and the conclusions are not always very cheerful. So being a philosopher can also be heavy. How did you experience this as a student and as a philosopher later?

"To be very frank about my character, I have always been very attentive to dark matters (which is also the title of a book by one of our brilliant alumni: Prof. Mara van der Lugt, University of St. Andrews). I wouldn’t say I am a moody person who likes to indulge in the darker sides of life, but philosophy is about being a nothingness. Philosophy is about life and death, from the very beginning. Philosophers who do philosophical anthropology will very soon encounter the question: what does it mean to be human? Then, you will come across themes like loneliness, isolation, love, care, friendship. If you think about human beings, you think about vulnerability, fragility, death, loss, sadness, fear, anxiety. The latter is for some philosophers even the most fundamental mood. In Sartre for example, anxiety is the experience of responsibility. It is you who decides what is meaningful and what not. This is a very interesting, joyful and liberating thought, but it also puts great pressure on the person who is thinking this. I have seen many students struggle, and not because they are young – students are young in all fields of science. I do not believe philosophy attracts students who are more tempted to depression and anxiety. But it is true that philosophy students are more susceptible to questions that are neglected in sciences and who even prefer studying these questions. Philosophy is not neglecting crucial questions in life. Which doesn’t mean that we’re giving an answer to the meaning of life. Broadly speaking philosophy is about ‘What does the world mean?’, ‘What does it mean to be alive?’ and ‘Why do we get out of bed every morning?’. Fundamentally, these questions come down to ‘What does it mean to be in the world?’. Nietzsche is still one of the greatest philosophers and he is someone who suffered from his own thoughts. He decided to ask this question about being human on this earth, without any recourse to a comforting answer. Then he came to a philosophy that was very demanding. There are of course ways to evade this pressure a bit. And, some students or philosophers do that by choosing a different direction within philosophy, for example philosophy of science – in a similar way not all students in sociology and political sciences decide to work on climate change. This doesn’t mean that there are some strong philosophers facing existential questions and the rest are cowards. Definitely not! It is about finding out what you think you can contribute to. I convinced myself as a student that I could contribute to this question of what it means to be in the world."

Is there hope or light to find for a student in philosophy, that can exist next to or with the heaviness? 

"If we broadly look at the situation in philosophy now, which is articulated by Nietzsche in the words ‘God is dead’. Which means that there are no definite truths, no deeper goals, no deeper meaning in life or reality. We are just some very clever animals on a very small speck in the universe, who invented knowledge. That is the situation. You might say it is a gloomy situation. If you study philosophy you do not end up with an answer to the questions ‘what is beauty?’, ‘what is right or wrong?’. But the bright side is, that everybody on this earth is in this situation whether they like it or not. Overall, in society I see what Nietzsche called nihilism. We don’t expect to find the meaning in life, so what we do is to try and make life comfortable for as many people as possible, try and make the world a better place, in a pragmatic sense. A philosopher would know that although that may be the project of well-meaning politicians, we are in this situation in which we don’t really know the answers. This also means in a fundamental sense that there are very many perspectives. If you study philosophy, philosophy as such is a constant creative exercise in perspectivism, or what I call stirring thinking. You observe phenomena and you are able to stir things up, to see them as a perspective and know that there are many other perspectives. This is something that not only is a great intellectual joy – no,  that would be too sterile. It is challenging, it keeps you alert, you’ll never be lazy and never satisfied. But it is also liberating, even in personal relationships. That, in a conflict you’re able to see that you and the other are both defending perspectives, and that there is truth to both sides. Knowing this doesn’t solve the problem, but it is a new truth and it allows us to think beyond ultimate truth."

What book/film/artwork/album/play etc. helped you through a rough patch and why? 

"I’ll be very specific. It is an album and also a film. Something that really does it for me is Stop making sense by The Talking Heads. This challenging title to stop making sense doesn’t mean to stop thinking and to stop doing philosophy. It shows what we are continuously trying to do as philosophers: making sense. There is some gloominess in the lyrics, but the songs and the film are mostly very vivid and funny. It’s a wonderful experience of how an artwork can tell us more about philosophy than we as philosophers hardly ever do."