I’m taking three courses this semester. In one of them, I experienced a harsh epiphany: I saw in my professor, a man about ten years my junior, the philosopher I might have become had I continued to study after college: fluid in argument, supreme in his specialty yet well-versed in all the peripheral arts his interlocutors might bring to bear on his Fortress of Cogitude. I’m sure this was not just counterfactual thinking on my part but wishful counterfactual thinking. (I wouldn’t put it past me. I do have an unreasonably high opinion of myself.) Maybe even with best tutelage and constant practice I couldn’t have gotten as good as this guy. Wishful or not, my reverie gave me cold comfort, because it reminded me that my chance of becoming a virtuoso in philosophy has passed me by. My brain just doesn’t track information or form associations as seamlessly as it used to. (Maybe if I eat more flax.) At least now I understand why people go to graduate school right out of college. Life is really, really short, and it traces a dispiriting arc for all but the most gifted and best prepared.
Mediocrity is the acid test of devotion. I’m going to have to think philosophy worth doing for its own sake if I’m to trudge through a belated career in the trenches, scrounging for scraps of insight. Maybe I’ll leave behind a little formula, like Ohm’s Law, or a thought experiment, or a “result” in logic that will pop up in geekish cocktail-party conversation. Maybe I’ll write a book, or get “anthologized.” Ugh, I’m losing interest in entering into the history of philosophy even as I talk about it. Something else will have to keep me going. The thrill of the hunt minus the kill, I guess—that, and making a career out of a favorite pastime. I no longer think Sidney Morgenbesser was being flip when he answered a layperson’s question about what philosophers do: “You clarify a few concepts. You make a few distinctions. It’s a living.”
Ephebe's Journal 