Category: Sage Advice

A Reader Wants to be a Professional Philosopher

From a reader's e-mail: "Now, I want to be a professional philosopher, period! It's not as if I kind of want to, or happened to be thinking about it."

My young correspondent does not tell me what he means by 'professional philosopher,' or why he wants to attend graduate school, so I'll begin by making a distinction. In one sense of the term, a professional is one who makes a living from his line of work. Now it is a fact of life that one can make a living in a line of work without being particularly good at it. There are plenty of examples in the field of education of people who are incomptetent both as teachers and as scholars. Although these people manage to get paid for what they do, they are amateurs in point of competence. In a second sense of the term, a professional is one has achieved a certain high standard of performance in his line of work. This of course is no guarantee that one will be able to make a living from it. Now if a person persists in his line of work without remuneration, there is a clear sense, etymologically based, in which he is an amateur: he does what he does for the love of it. But this is consistent with his being a professional in point of competence. There are quite a few historical examples. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professional philosophers in point of competence but not in point of filling their bellies from it. Employing a Schopenhauerian turn of phrase, both lived for philosophy not from it.

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Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The present can always be borne – if sliced thinly enough – and it is only the present that must be borne.

This aphorism of mine is in the Stoic spirit. It illustrates the Stoic method of division. Any process or procedure or undertaking which seems overwhelming or unbearable when surveyed as a whole can be managed if one breaks it down into its parts. Since it is not all at once, it needn’t be managed and borne all at once. One does not run the marathon all at once, but stride by stride. The wise marathoner at the starting line does not remind himself that he must run the daunting distance of 26.2 miles, he just starts running. Near the end, when he is spent, he thinks only of the next step. One can always take another step, and only one step needs to be taken at each time.

Here is Pierre Hadot (The Inner Citadel, p. 133) quoting from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (XI, 3):

A seductive melody . . . you can despise it if you divide it into each of its sounds, and if you ask yourself if you are lesser than each one of them taken separately; if you are you would be filled with shame. The same thing will happen if you repeat this procedure in each figure . . . In general, then, and with the exception of virtue and its effects, remember to head as quickly as you can for the parts of a process, in order, by dividing them, to get to the point where you have contempt for them. Transpose this method, moreover, to life in its entirety.

Analysis destroys the seductiveness but also the fearfulness of processual wholes by decomposing them into temporal parts that can be easily negotiated. How will I get through this life of trial and tribulation? How will I bear up under sickness, old age, and dying? I will do it day by day, hour by hour. One can always get throught the next hour, minute, second. As Hadot puts it, “No object can make us lose our mastery over ourselves if we submit it to this method of division.” (133)

There is a comparison worth exploring between the soteriological use to which Stoics put analysis and the use to which Buddhists put it, as in Milinda’s Chariot. But that is a large topic for later.

How Not to Begin the Day

A thoroughly bad way to begin the day is by reading a newspaper. For it is not only the hands that get dirty, and the house cluttered; the mind in its early morning freshness is degraded by useless facts, polluted with badly written opinions, and suborned by seductive advertising. There is plenty of time later in the day to load up on the sort of drivel with which one must deal in order to survive in an imperfect world. The mornings should be kept free and clear under the aegis of Thoreau’s admonition, “Read not The Times, read the The Eternities.”

The morning is to the night as virtue is to vice. It follows that one should so arrange one’s life as to secure the maximum quantity of morning. Arise early, before the birds. The true lover of silence finds even the birds too noisy. In the morning all is cool, clean, and quiet. The worldlings are asleep, the universe is yours. Now read something worth reading, something that inspires, improves, ennobles, challenges. There are the great scriptures to choose from: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Old and New Testaments. There are great writers such as Shakespeare and Melville. Great philosophers such as Plato and Augustine wait patiently to engage us from across the centuries. If if it is self-help you need, why read the latest New Age hucksters when Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca lie to hand?