by Richard Farr
As everyone knows, the word philosopher comes from two Greek words — philo, a rich, buttery pastry and by extension a person with a weakness for any self-indulgence, and sofa, a couch. Hence: a person who’d love to find a comfortable chair.
If you are a plumber or a tax attorney, or maybe an epidemiologist specializing in tropical blood diseases, most random strangers will understand in a broad way what you do for a living and why it is that someone else is prepared to pay you for doing it. Even if you work in a university and teach poetry, or the extinct fauna of the Oligocene, no great mystery. Even people who think it’s a complete waste of time will understand roughly why other people don’t.
Philosophy, on the other hand.
I was in my late twenties, Ph.D. still fresh-baked and steaming. Not yet accustomed to being addressed as Professor, I sat on the bus next to a complete stranger one day and had a conversation with him that went something like this:
“A philosopher, eh? Really! So what’s your philosophy then?”
Uh-oh! How to begin? How to navigate the truly remarkable fact that in our culture it’s typical even for highly educated people to signal thus that they have never encountered this once-central thread in our civilization’s story? That they have literally no idea what the subject / field / discipline called “philosophy” is?
I choose a poor way to begin. “I specialize mainly in modern political ideas. And ethics.”
“You teach politicians to be ethical?”
“No no! That would not be — well, I supposed it would be logically possible, even nomologically possible. But — anyway, no. That’s not it.”
“So tell me more about what you do.”
“I spend a lot of time on normative ethics.”
“Eh?”
“As opposed to meta-ethics, which some people consider more hip.”
“What?”
“I’ve been writing a paper in which I attack as incoherent a group of superficially attractive non-consequentialist theories.”
“Huh?”
“The view I’m criticizing can be found in some well-known thinkers.”
“Tony Robbins? Deepak Chopra?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been writing mainly about John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Bernard Williams.”
“Never heard of them. But tell me what this ‘paper’ is. You’re writing something that disagrees with these guys? And it gets published somewhere?”
“That’s the theory.”
“And people read it?”
“That’s the theory.”
“Do they pay well?”
“Oh, they don’t pay me anything. The university pays me a salary.”
“I see. To make up for the fact that nobody pays you for the stuff you write.”
“You could say that.”
“But why?”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Well, it sounds like you have a sort of a job. They pay you a salary, you say, and you get an office and a phone and such? Show up on a Monday morning and sit at the keyboard and produce something? ”
“That’s the theory — ”
(Must stop repeating myself.)
“ — though often to be honest I spend most of the day staring out of the window without a thought in my head.”
(Shut up. Shut up.)
“But I don’t understand the economics.”
“Different department, Economics.”
“What I’m saying is, why does the university pay you to write papers no one will pay you to read?”
(Pause.)
“I’ve never thought about it before.”
“OK. Think about it now.”
The obvious thing to say, the obvious out, would be that I’m paid partly because I teach. But I don’t say that because I have a presentiment that the next question will be how many hours a day I teach, and I don’t want this nice man to get hung up on the details. I consider saying “That’s a really excellent question!” or more honestly “I have no idea!” I also consider saying that my main interest is the history of political ideas, which would be a fib but easier to explain. Dates and names, votes and revolutions, lies, assassinations and shouldering people aside at the trough. But the gods are smiling — I’ve arrived at my destination. I heave a sigh of relief as I say goodbye and step down onto the sidewalk in front of the department. He’s looking out of the window at me, as puzzled as he should be.
Next time, I say to myself, I’ll say I’m in psychology. I’ll claim to be teaching rats to play the stock market. Or seeing whether I can frighten tomatoes. Or trying to prove that chimpanzees use sarcasm. People love that kind of thing.
*
Safe in my natural habitat, I have a full day of my economically mysterious work ahead of me. No classes this morning, no pesky students (I have heard a colleague use this phrase), so several hours can be devoted to the real stuff. Which, if I’d wanted to freak out the puzzled stranger with some radical honesty, I could have described like this:
Those of us who have been initiated, those of us who know exactly where to look in the alley behind one of the uglier 1970s concrete buildings, can find a weeded-over staircase that leads as if to an abandoned basement. At the bottom there’s a rusted door, and behind the door is a secret rift, on the other side of which lies the Bronze Age. A steep rocky path leads down, down, and levels out in a measureless cavern. A fire burns here continually and has been burning here for thousands of years. Shadows caress the rocks. Pungent euphorias of steam erupt upwards from the bowels of Tartarus. I strip to a loincloth, dip my hands into a stone bowl filled with oil, and anoint myself in ritual preparation for the wrestling.
Torches in iron brackets light the central space. My opponent stands waiting there, a marble boulder the size of a house. It has been polished smooth by millennia of handling, but tradition is tradition and I cannot touch it until the acolytes, in robes the color of dried blood, have emerged from the darkness and smeared it afresh with animal fat.
Generations without number have toiled here before me, grasping and grunting and sweating. They have grown stooped with effort and short-sighted from looking too closely. From time to time these precursors have shouted for joy, turning to the acolytes with their hands raised, insisting that the sacred monolith shifted under their exertions. I have even claimed this myself, once or twice. But careful measurement using the pickled hoof of an albino goat always results in the same terse shake of the head.
It has not moved. Not by an inch. Not by a millimeter. Not by the width of one of those fine, downy hairs you find on the belly of a micron.
*
The afternoon returns me to the present day. Back in street clothes, back in the light, I cross well-tended lawns where flocks of students strut, squawk, and nuzzle each others’ plumage. They put me in mind of W.H. Auden, writing in the aftermath of war.
Among bewildering appliances / For mastering the arts and sciences / They stroll or run. And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter / Are shot to pieces by the shorter / Poems of Donne.
Fifty or more have arrived at the lecture hall ahead of me and are already settling, cooing, preparing for sleep. I glance at my notes on the back of an envelope — sometimes literally the back of an envelope, because I’m an evangelist for pedagogical spontaneity — and start passing on a fragment of the Tradition.
Being junior faculty, I’m stuck with the big survey course that my senior colleagues insist is one of the glories of the curriculum but stop short of volunteering to teach. Philosophy 201: Western Thought from the Presocratics to Popeye. It satisfies the university’s ‘humanities requirement’, according to the catalog. I doubt it’s capable of satisfying anything else. Certainly it won’t — as promised on the back nutritional panel of philosophy’s original packaging — quench the burning thirst that’s caused by what we might call Actual Philosophical Problems. Students have these by the bucketload: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods? Couldn’t the course of true love run smooth just for once? Why can’t I be like to one more rich in hope? Or featured like him, or like him with friends possessed? How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this campus.”
I stay away from that stuff, or I’m supposed to. Generally I do what I was trained to do, which is drone for the allotted fifty-five about some of the largest words in the English language — true, know, good, right, fact, because and (largest of all) be. I expound on Aristotle’s theory of the state, whether Anselm or Descartes have better reasons for believing in God, and Hume’s argument against the credibility of miracles. Hobbes on rational self-interest. Kant on the limits of empirical knowledge. Popper versus Kuhn versus Tom, Dick, and Harry on the Nature of the Scientific Enterprise.
I don’t like the sense I have that philosophy has become just another cog in the machinery of Higher Ed’s sausage factory. We owe young people so much better than that. So I try here and there to play the subversive, stealing freely from the best and most acidic. “It’s important” I say — mainlining Bertrand Russell while attempting not to fall into a parody of his accent — “it’s important especially in an educational institution to remember that people are not born stupid. They are only born ignorant. It is education that makes them stupid.” And I try to convey some of my own excitement on discovering a subject that isn’t a subject because it’s about all subjects, a way of thinking that’s about ways of thinking, an activity that can feel like a sudden blast of sunlight after education’s relentless dreary rain of information.
I even try to hold open for students the idea that this track they’re on — many years of training, followed by earning an income large or small by working for someone else in a thing called a job, followed by senescence and death — is a relatively recent invention and worth distinguishing from the human condition itself. In a seminar that’s supposed to be about Hegel and History, I sense that a question about work or labor or creativity is leading somewhere so I let the digression go unchecked. We find ourselves discussing what a “job” is — as the man on the bus said, what the economics is, but therefore also the sociology and the politics and the ethics. Rich minutes follow in which we are joined by Epicurus, Locke, Montaigne and Kroptkin, for starters. We talk of fulfillment, of life goals, of freedom from coercion and freedom from ourselves, of alienation, and whether there is such a thing as a human nature from which we can be alienated. We even talk about why the heck we are here, doing this, in this classroom. The sheer energy of their interest is thrilling to me. It makes me feel good at least for an hour about this particular sort-of-a-job. Perhaps not quite such a scam after all? Perhaps briefly I am for them — as the ancients took it for granted they were — a therapist. An iatros of the psyche.
One of my students grins as she walks out. “So we’re all prisoners in Plato’s cave! But hey, grokking that you’re in prison is the first step in the escape plan, right?”
I feel proud and happy — she’ll probably be imprisoned for real some day as a political activist.
*
In the evening, back in my apartment, I ignore a stack of grading and decide that a generous martini (very dry, very cold, served with one olive carefully rinsed in a glass that’s been kept in the freezer; thank you) will help me finish that blasted paper. It doesn’t, but it does help with something. I shuffle my notes, write a couple of paragraphs, cross one of them out, notice that it’s raining. When I look out into the dark I see my own face reflected, but it makes me think again about what I might have said to the man on the bus.
“Philosophy,” I might have said, “is interested in only two questions, but they are the biggest, most urgently practical questions — what can I know, and what should I do about it?” (Here I’m stealing from the first philosophy lecture I ever attended.) “In an educational world set up differently, thinking more about those questions could guide people to a precious liberty, helping them approach in new ways things that matter to them, including especially a lot of things that powerful forces in our culture encourage them to stay docile by ignoring. But the people who most need and deserve and can use that philosophical education are children and young adults. They are the people whose brains have not already turned to coral. They are the ones with the best chance of learning to think for themselves. They are where our time and care and resources should be applied. As for universities paying people like me to write an umpteenth paper about technical difficulties in non-consequentialism, which will be read by ten people and make my CV one line longer? Nah. It’s a historical accident, like the existence of neckties. People who have the itch for it should be like poets. They should do it because they can’t not. In the deep of the night. On their own dime.”
It’s a line of thought that makes me increasingly nervous. What I ought to do, or what some version of me ought to do, is knock off that grading right now and then really get down to the paper. That extra line in the CV, plus a couple more, might be what wins me entrance into heaven, otherwise known as tenure. A comfortable chair!
But there’s another part of me imagining something very different at the same moment. What would it be like to get up tomorrow and quit? And become a monk, or an itinerant cobbler, or a novelist?
I’m ashamed to note that I never asked the man on the bus what he did for a living. How rude of me. How incurious. I glance sideways at the grading, feeling both more guilty about it than before and even less inclined to do it. The rain intensifies then retreats again like sarcastic applause. It occurs to me that I may have an Actual Philosophical Problem.
I make another martini.
***
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