Now I know perfectly well that
few will wish to learn in this way, yet it would be better if the majority of
young men who say they are studying philosophy did not go near a philosopher. I
mean those spoiled and effeminate fellows by whose presence the good name of
philosophy is stained.
I’m afraid that many who are drawn to the study of
philosophy are also quite fond of a sedentary life, such that they confuse the
gift of contemplation with the weight of sloth.
Instead of recognizing that work and reflection will
ideally go hand in hand, we are tempted to separate labor and leisure from one
another. I have as much respect for Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis
of Culture as the next aspiring Thomist intellectual, but I
am fairly certain that the gentleman was not asking us to divorce productivity
from pondering. Too often, a distinction of complementarity is confused with an
assumption of contradiction.
I am not immune to this weakness myself, having
attended enough academic conferences and cocktail parties to get just a bit of
a taste for the self-gratification that comes from looking down my nose at the
other fellow, the one who must park my car, mix my drinks, and serve me my
dinner. I, after all, should have the benefit of my “free” time, so that my
thinking is not hindered by any worldly distractions.
Not only did this make me lazier, but it also made any
of my reflections quite useless, since they were bound up in a theory with no
relationship to any practice. My lust for posturing would too easily overcome
my love for living.
When we see idle people pursuing ideology, it is no
wonder that we think poorly of philosophy, and then we also fail to see that a
good day’s work ought to be profoundly philosophical. It would be as if we
thought that the right hand should be at war with the left hand, or perhaps
more accurately that the head should be an enemy of the gut.
There are all sorts of ways we might encourage a
greater unity of life, as a part of a greater unity with Nature, but I can
already imagine what would happen if a philosophical training required many
years of moving into the country to work on a farm.
Only a very few would even consider such a
commitment. Yet they might, however small their number, be precisely the sort
of followers that philosophy so desperately needs.
“Shoveling shit? I’ll have none of that!” I’m
sorry, you went to a top-rate college, and you aren’t deeply familiar with that
task? Or do you think your own shit smells better than that of a cow or a
horse?
By the time I began to learn some of my own hard lessons
about where the dignity of human life is to be found, I had already wasted too much
of my youth with frivolities, and I had burned too many bridges to double back.
I was left with making the most of what little I still had left, though Musonius,
like any decent Stoic, would surely remind me that it could be more than enough
to still become a good man.
Written in 11/1999
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