It’s not a calling, there are choices, the field is wide. You do not take up philosophy the way you enter the seminary, with a credo as your sword and a single path as your destiny. Should you study Plato, Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, or even Husserl? Esthetics, politics, morality, epistemology, metaphysics? Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite – for this turns the university into a sect.

–from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, p. 252.

New Jerusalem, The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, by David Ives, wonderfully performed at the Lantern Theater, tells the story of philosopher Baruch (“Bento”) de Spinoza (1632-1677), his trial for heresy, his expulsion from Amsterdam, and his excommunication from the Jewish people. Was Spinoza an atheist, or was he the most God-drenched of men? He saw God and nature as the same (“Bento’s Rule”: Never just say “God;” always say, “God, that is to say, nature…”.) He deemed sacred scripture to be superstition meant to direct the actions of people in a certain manner, and not as a conduit to truth. He advocated a determinism that struck his accusers as fatalism and the undoing of all ethical life. He believed the “peace” accord struck by the Jewish community and the “tolerant” Dutch protestants came at too high a price, and although he protested unceasingly his commitment and love for the Jewish people, he was unwilling to renounce his freedom to think his own thoughts. This made his love for a Christian woman and the loyalty of friendship impossible for him (the former in his refusal to convert to Christianity, the latter in his friend’s willingness to inform on and testify against him). The question that haunts me in this story – magnificently acted all around – is this moral and political one: Should Spinoza have been excommunicated? Spinoza himself, on his own views, could not really answer this question. Could we?

The Whipping Man, by Matthew Lopez, performed at the Arden Theatre, tells the story of a seriously wounded and on-the-run Confederate soldier returning to his home at the close of the Civil War. He, Caleb, is a Jew, and he finds one of his slaves, an older man named Simon, still occupying his home, both of their families (slave owner and slave) gone away. Another young now-former slave, John, enters the story, and he also seems to be on-the-run. The former slaves are Jews, too, having been raised and educated as Jews in the Jewish slaveowner’s home. A recurrent question is: Are we Jews or are we slaves? Scripture teaches that Jews could have slaves but not Jews as slaves. So what is the truth of their status (or former status)? The situation and context of the play provides ample space to pursue the intricacies of slavery, freedom, religion, family (the twists and turns of the plot are dizzying at times, as evidenced by vocal reactions from the audience at points). The older man, Simon, has kept the faith, despite intense trials, but the young Caleb has lost his belief in God. He saw the horrors of war, and fell into despair. John, who has been looting the abandoned homes in the area, is also troubled by his past, wanting explanations that are not forthcoming. Both Caleb and John, intertwined in a classic master/slave dialectic, are seeking their freedom by demanding certainties. “Two peas in a pod.” Simon tells them, in effect, that our freedom does not consist in having the answers but in being able to ask questions. To lose the ability to ask questions – especially about ourselves – is to lose our freedom.

Spinoza would have agreed.

The Whipping Man ends in silence, in a situation in which nothing meaningful can be said. But the characters must live on, despite the deep uncertainty, guilt, failure. The play left me thinking that we are John and Caleb. We cannot un-live our own histories, cannot wrest free from our past, cannot really know what to make of all our intentions and entanglements. But we must live on, find love when love is in question, help each other when we don’t really know ourselves. It is our only hope.

…philosophy is not something done, finished, of which one may take a draught at his pleasure. In every man, philosophy is something which has to be fabricated (fabricarse) by personal effort. This does not mean that every person needs to start from scratch or invent his own system. On the contrary. Precisely because we are dealing with radical and ultimate knowledge, philosophy finds itself mounted (montada) on a tradition. And this means that, even in the case of philosophies already formulated, such an adscription is itself the result of personal effort, of an authentic intellectual life. The rest is a brilliant ‘apprenticeship’ of books or a splendid course of grand lectures. One can, indeed, write book after book and spend a long life as a professor of philosophy, yet not even graze the outskirts of philosophical life. Conversely one can totally lack any ‘originality,’ yet possess in the most recondite part of himself the internal and silent movement of philosophy.

–Xavier Zubiri, “Our Intellectual Situation”

When one can access so much information so quickly and so painlessly; when one can express and publish to the world one’s reactions so immediately and so unthinkingly in one’s blogs or micro-blogs; when the latest opinion column from the New York Times or El Pais, or the new- est viral video can be spread so quickly to people half a world away, shaping their perceptions and feelings, then the laborious, painstaking work of serious, critical thinking often gets short-circuited.

One can “cut-and-paste” without the need to think critically or write accurately or come to one’s own careful conclusions. When beautiful images from the merchants of consumer dreams flood one’s computer screens, or when the ugly or unpleasant sounds of the world can be shut out by one’s MP3 music player, then one’s vision, one’s perception of reality, one’s desiring can also remain shallow. When one can become “friends” so quickly and so painlessly with mere acquaintances or total strangers on one’s social networks – and if one can so easily “unfriend” another without the hard work of encounter or, if need be, confrontation and then reconciliation – then relationships can also become superficial.

When one is overwhelmed with such a dizzying pluralism of choices and values and beliefs and visions of life, then one can so easily slip into the lazy superficiality of relativism or mere tolerance of others and their views, rather than engaging in the hard work of forming communities of dialogue in the search of truth and understanding. It is easier to do as one is told than to study, to pray, to risk, or to discern a choice.

I want to do work, I want to do good to a human being; and it is ninety to one that that human being whom I have helped will prove ungrateful, and go against me; and the result to me is pain. Such things deter mankind from working; and it spoils a good portion of the work and energy of mankind, this fear of pain and misery. Karma-Yoga teaches how to work for work’s sake, unattached, without caring who is helped, and what for. The Karma-Yogi works because it is his nature, because he feels that it is good for him to do so, and he has no object beyond that. His position in this world is that of a giver, and he never cares to receive anything. He knows that he is giving, and does not ask for anything in return and therefore he eludes the grasp of misery.

–from the Teachings of Swami Vivekananda (pp,179-180)

Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers’ organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance. Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace . Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution.

– Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory & Practice, 1947

The first begins:

I was in the middle of teaching the difference between knowledge and belief when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a call from the dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Liberal Arts. The dean informed me that he was very sorry but, barring an unlikely immediate solution to the state’s financial crisis, the university had decided to eliminate the Philosophy Department, which I chair. In July, I would be given a one-year terminal contract. After that, the university would fire me, along with all of my departmental colleagues, after twenty years of service.

The author, Todd Edwin Jones, continues:

Puzzlement over why people study philosophy has only grown since Socrates’ era. It is not surprising that in hard economic times, when young people are figuring out how best to prepare themselves for the world, many state college administrators and the taxpayers they serve believe that offering classes in philosophy is a luxury they can’t afford.

Suprising? Maybe not. Unwise? Definitely. The reason, of course, is the subject of my previous post.

The second article, by Stanley Aronowitz, begins with this observation:

The reasons why public education is suddenly an issue despite years of neglect by politicians and the media are straightforward. In this depressed economy credentials seem to have lost their advantage. Many parents and politicians claim schools have failed to deliver what students need.

Notice both the similarity and significant difference from the first article. The first article shows that some people (including, preposterously, college and university administrators) think that in difficult economic times, people don’t have the time or money for “luxuries” like philosophy. The second articles takes note that in difficult economic times, people start to notice that “credentials” may not be worth the money – again, see Matthew Stewart’s essay in the Atlantic called “Management Myth.”

Aronowitz claims our obsession has been with the credentials and not with the appropriate education (and all that means), and we’re finding that some of our academic “emperors” are wearing no clothes.

At the core of our trouble is that we “don’t know much philosophy.” He writes:

In France, high schools have required the study of philosophy, though less so in recent years. High school graduates had knowledge of the main traditions of European philosophy in its classical form: the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, medieval thinkers, Descartes and Kant, Bergson and some 20th-century philosophy.

Philosophy has been excluded from the U.S. secondary schools, with the exception of elite, mostly private schools. This is a telltale sign that we don’t take critical thinking seriously as an educational goal. If philosophy has pedagogic value, it is to teach students the value of doubt, without which it is impossible to penetrate propaganda and discern the presence of particular interests within knowledge.

If I may paraphrase J.S. Mill in order to gain some clarity on this issue:

It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of *understanding* are low has the greatest chance of having the sense of *being* fully satisfied, *i.e., to believe he knows*; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any understanding which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

So, is this the time to rid our curricula of philosophy? Is there ever such a time? I suppose that depends on who you ask. If you ask the same swine who blame teachers and union labor for the collapse of our economy (!), I suppose they’ll think the single most important initiative to preserve their vision of the world is the extinguishing of all critical thinking. If you ask foolish administrators, who evidently haven’t a clue about what philosophy is, who mistake it for useless fancy, then the answer will be dictated by this ignorance.

But if you ask one who is neither a swine nor a fool, someone who knows both sides, both philosophy and commerce, then the answer will be “Never!”

If you value a free society, if you value economic innovation, creativity, and genuine prosperity, if you value living a supremely human life, philosophy is a necessity, not a luxury.

The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God’s love have been removed or overcome.

One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men.  We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do.  We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs.  But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us – whatever it may be.  If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss the one thing we need.

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed. [ch.7]

Then, about a paradoxical vocation:

Each one of us has some kind of vocation.  We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom.  Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom.  If we find that place we will be happy.  If we do not find it, we can never be completely happy.  For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary:  to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.

We must not imagine that we only discover this destiny by a game of hide-and-seek with Divine Providence.  Our vocation is not a sphinx’s riddle, which we must solve in one guess or else perish.  Some people find, in the end, that they have made many wrong guesses and that their paradoxical vocation is to go through life guessing wrong.  It takes them a long time to find out that they are happier that way. [ch.8]

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of a person he is.”