The Frustrated Philosopher

As a Zen teacher, I have little tolerance for student philosophizing. Perhaps it’s because I’m a recovering wannabe philosopher. My dad looked up to intellectuals and was an intellectual himself, the real McCoy, the working-class intellectual. Philosophers were the crème de la crème of intellectuals. In college, I minored in philosophy. I might have majored in philosophy if it wasn’t for my meeting with department chair, Martin Eshelman.

Eshelman was excited that I was considering a philosophy major and very encouraging. He told me about his own undergraduate experience. There was so much joy as he recalled plunging into the history of philosophy, taking copious notes, underlining the names of the philosophers in blue, the names of the philosophical schools in red, and the key concepts in green. I left his office with the realization that I was nowhere near meticulous enough for a philosophy major.

I was proud of minoring, glad I had that preparation when I got to Alan Blum at NYU. Officially, Alan was teaching sociology, but to me he was teaching philosophy. Alan called it theorizing, using Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and J.L. Austin to take sociology deeper than I’d ever imagined. What I was to discover was that there’s a deeper and a deeper. There’s Jishu’s “Go deeper” which points to a path of self-discovery, and there’s a “go deeper” which takes you down Alice’s rabbit hole.

Five years after finishing my doctorate, still trying to get my “first article” out of my very theoretical, Alan-inspired dissertation, I found myself in the rabbit hole. Writing in my tiny closet office, I had the idea that my dissertation might even become a book. I was writing the first chapter, trying to lay out the basic assumptions on which what was to come would rest, when I realized that beneath my premises were more basic assumptions, yet unarticulated. I set aside chapter one and began on what I called “chapter zero.” That work was going well when the same thing happened again. There was a layer still deeper. I began work on “chapter minus one.” That’s when I saw my rabbit hole.

I pushed my philosophical aspirations aside and got to more practical writing, managing over the next years to get my twenty plus publications in professional journals. But I never quite killed my philosopher dream. Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Austin are still on my shelf upstairs, and even as Dee and I talk of downsizing – this house is getting too big; we should find someplace more manageable – I have every intention of taking my philosophers with me.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get back to them. There’s so much else on my plate to read and write. But the attraction is still there.