Socrates and academic philosophers

 I notice just then that an extremely tall young man with sharp, angular features, a sallow complexion, and intense blue eyes has been standing just behind me and listening to my brief conversation with Tim.

It is now 10:30 P.M. and, uncharacteristically, I don’t feel like tarrying any longer and chatting with anyone else. For reasons I don’t understand completely, I feel quite drained. I can see he wants to have a word with me, and I try my best to hide my displeasure at being waylaid. Without saying a word, he just starts shaking my hand. He did not say a word during the discussion. Finally, while still shaking my hand, he says, “If we’d had discussions like this at my university, I’d soon have a Ph.D. in philosophy.”

Without prompting, he goes on to tell me that until last month he was a student in a Ph.D. program in philosophy at a university in the Midwest. “I’ve almost finished writing my dissertation,” he says. “But it’s a piece of shit. I’m throwing it in the trash.” His eyes have a faraway look. But then he looks at me and says, “It’s ironic that your topic tonight was on the self, since I was writing my dissertation on the difference between the real self and the imagined self. But it was written in academic mumbo jumbo. I’m sure my professors would’ve loved it, but I hated myself while I wrote it. I came to know my real self well enough to know that being an academic philosophy professor was not the type of philosopher I wanted to be. In fact, I came to the conclusion that most of them aren’t philosophers at all. They imagine themselves to be philosophers, but they aren’t real philosophers. I think what some of them do under the guise of philosophy is criminal.”

I consider whether I should try to talk him out of his decision to trash his dissertation, but before I have a chance to get a word in edgewise, he tells me, “I’d been toying with the idea of tossing it in the trash for quite a while. But this discussion tonight has given me the resolve really to trash it once and for all. I want to be like Socrates.”

“What do you mean?” I ask him, all the while reflecting on the fact that Socrates never wrote a dissertation, never published anything, because he never strove to be a scholastic who committed to advancing a certain thesis.

“It’s not just that academics write in jargon,” he replies. “The worst thing is that most that I know are timid conformists. I think this is sacrilege. They have the rare privilege of having unheard-of job security, of being almost completely autonomous. So you’d think if anyone would be paradigms of Socratic rigor, it would be university professors. But instead they’re almost all anti-Socratic scholastics who write lengthy tomes on small subjects. And they rarely if ever challenge the accepted wisdom of their time.”

“But can’t you stay in academia and be ‘like Socrates’?” I ask him. “One might argue that the easiest thing in the world for you to do would be to abandon ship. But if you really have a vision of what academia can be, if you really aspire to be a Socratic teacher, why don’t you stay within the bounds of academia and fight the good fight?”

This gives him pause. “I don’t know…”

“Why throw away all your years of training?” I tell him. “I can understand why you’d throw away your dissertation. But instead of throwing away your career, why don’t you start over? Why don’t you write the kind of dissertation that you think would make Socrates proud? That might take a lot more chutzpah than simply to quit.”

I go on to tell him that in addition to all my philosophical outreach activities, I am tapping into the academic world in a creative way that is enabling me to exploit its strengths and helping to make me an even more adept philosophical inquirer in the mold of Socrates. (In fact, I will eventually wind up with three master’s degrees: in the humanities, in the natural sciences, and in teaching.)

This seems to give him even more pause. At long last he says, “I think I have a lot more thinking to do.” He turns and walks out the door without so much as saying good-bye.

I have no idea what has become of him. He was only in town that one evening, visiting a friend, and he never returned to Socrates Café. I think of him often. Like me, it seems that he discovered who he was by first discovering who he most definitely was not.

SOCRATES CAFÉ

A Fresh Taste of Philosophy

Christopher Phillips