I really enjoy playing the Game of Life with my son. I’m speaking, of course, of the Milton Bradley board game version, not the four score and then some journey we actually live and which does not appear to be a game at all. We have a recent version of the game which I actually don’t enjoy – it’s all millenial, with multiple career choices and lots of overpriced real estate – but when we’re in Maine together, we play the version I played when I was a kid. I don’t remember precisely when we got it, but the box has a 1978 copyright and the clothing worn by the family enjoying themselves around the game looks solidly Carter administration. My sister and I played endlessly and now my son and I, one generation later, are doing the same.
One part of the Game – in fact one of the key pieces of the Game – is right at the very end. You’ve steered your tiny plastic car around a twisting and turning track, earning your pay days and losing your car insurance and striking oil and bailing your uncle out of jail (several times, in fact), and at the very end, you have a choice. If you think you’ve made more money than everyone else, you spin one last time and finish up as a Millionaire, and you wait to see how everyone else finishes – winner is the one with the most money, of course. Except you have an option: if you’ve fallen behind a bit, you can put all of your money on one number and spin the wheel. If you hit, you automatically win – game is over for everyone else, because you’re the Tycoon and the world is yours. But if you don’t get it, you steer off into a browning field, with a tiny white plastic house which looks remarkably like my home in Scarborough, Maine, with the label:
“BANKRUPT! Retire to the country and become a philosopher.”
Even as a child this struck me as odd. Become a philosopher? If you’re really bankrupt after going around the board and living a complete life, wouldn’t you end up a wino on the tracks down by the tire store? Or maybe drooling silently to yourself in the back room of your kid’s house, who would be resentful of your presence and your meager Social Security checks (that’s OAP payments to our UK friends) and your basic failure as a human being? But becoming a philosopher – well, that didn’t seem too bad, but it also begged the question of what the philosopher would use to procure food and shelter given that, of course, he or she was bankrupt and at the end of their life.
My son now also looks at the label and has a curious look. “Aren’t you a philosopher, Dad? You’re not bankrupt. You haven’t struck oil and you also didn’t start off as a lawyer or a doctor, but what does that mean?” He hasn’t asked that directly but he has implied it: we’ve talked about this website, and what Viktoria, Mark and I do on it, and he knows that I’m at least trying my damnedest to be a philosopher. Along with the banking and asset management and what not, of course, but basically, to be a philosopher.
This thought struck me as I read Mark’s latest posting, which is an introduction to a series of essays but the core of which was an exploration of what people “do” with philosophy that avoided that tag: philosopher. Mark didn’t call himself one, although I’d challenge that deferral. Mark spoke of studying philosophy – a course of learning much like any other except for the focus of the material. He spoke of teaching philosophy, again just another academic career choice, albeit likely with lower renumeration and overall less esteem in a modern world which as decided it is materialistic and doesn’t need further examination. He then examined the idea of being philosophical, and of having a philosophy. But he strenuously avoided examining what it means to be a philosopher.
I think this is fascinating, particularly coming from one of the three main authors on this site, which pointedly seeks to examine moral philosophy in an active way. That makes us, of course, philosophers, even though only one of us is actively studying philosophy in the academy today, and only two of us have formal philosophical training. Those two aren’t me: I’m an historian by training – well, history with a large dose of mathematics and computer science. I am, as it were, an amateur philosopher, but so far as I can tell, this doesn’t make me any less capable. I’ve read a lot of philosophy, and most importantly, I think about it actively, in fact almost relentlessly, to the point most people just stop paying attention to me except when I delve into finance or the tribulations of being a dog owner. I am a philosopher gosh darn it, and if it doesn’t bother you too much, and if you can dissassociate philosophy with bankruptcy despite Milton Bradley, I think if you’re reading this, you are a philosopher too.
Being a philosopher isn’t the same as studying or teaching philosophy, and it doesn’t require having a particular philosophy (or one which you’ve articulated anyway), and it doesn’t even require you to be philosophical most of the time. What it requires is what the Greek roots of the word imply: you must love wisdom. Not necessarily any particular kind of wisdom, mind you: there are philosophers of many stripes. But there must be love: a kind of ready and joyful affection for playing with what wisdom seems to be and what it could be. It might be logical puzzles, or the nuances of meaning within and across language, or the array and range of narrative and how those narratives constrain and release us as people to act and think and love and play. It could be anything, but there is at the heart of the philosopher both an active motion – love – and an abstract but human object – wisdom.
As a philosopher, you don’t have any particular responsibilities, which makes it much more enjoyable – much more loveable – than being a student of philosophy or teaching it. There are not lectures or seminars or publishing or deadlines, although if you’re writing a blog sometimes you feel a bit guilty for not posting in a few weeks. As Mark points out, being a student or a teacher of philosophy can actually work against the inclination to be a philosopher because of such careerist objectives: earning ones creditials, or tenure, can serve almost as easily to destroy the love of wisdom, to encourage one to fall into lazy habits simply to win the Game of Academia instead of simply playing with wisdom as one would toss a ball to a dog. Being philosophical is as much an act as it has anything to do with actual wisdom, and having a philosophy often is the death knell of being a philosopher in practice: once you decide on your philosophy, do you really keep exploring – playing joyfully, with abandon, with the hope that you’re wrong today because then you might find out how to be right tomorrow? No, of course not. Marxists are not philosophers: they are Marxists.
I spent the first twenty-two years of my career in banking in being a particular kind of philosopher. I was really, really curious about what role money served in society – not just Western society today, but where it came from (I’m an historian, remember) and maybe even what roles it serves in different societies today. I was trying to play with systems of money in the way that this site plays with systems of moral analysis, trying to answer the question of what banking really was and come up with some sort of idea of what that meant about us, as humans, who both create daily and acquiesce to the implications of monetary systems every day. It wasn’t, per se, philosophy: I was playing with ideas, yes, but not with the very notion of what it was to be aware, of wisdom as a pure abstraction. I was playing with one particular toy – maybe I was a philonumismatist, or a philomonetarist, or something – but I wasn’t a philosopher.
I have become one, though, and I’m very glad for the evolution. I still think about money but now it’s as a more generalized kind of abstraction. We use money in society in a similar way to how we emplant meaning in words, in how we recognize physical power, in how we communicate notions of control: they are all lenses through which we communicate value and relative notions of value. They are also largely irrelevant to how we love, to how we communicate non-relative notions of value, to how we reach across the void to one another and find meaning and wisdom without need for return. I’ve spent much more time in the last five years thinking about those latter concepts – thankful that I have twenty plus years of thinking in a restrictive sense about one kind of value, but also recognizing that I (hopefully) will have a few score years left to think more openly – and more joyfully – about the realm of wisdom, of how we humans express it.
For all of Mark’s points, I’m glad I didn’t have to be a student or teacher of philosophy at any time – although as I turn those phrases, I’m not so sure. One can be a student as a profession and one can be a student as a calling; I know I’m a student by calling even though I’m not sure I’ll be paying tuition or sitting in row 26 of a lecture hall every Tuesday at 9:30am ever again. And I’m definitely a teacher of philosophy – not, again, in a careerist sense, but in trying to impart to my son, and to everyone I meet for that matter, my own love of the pursuit and play of wisdom. I learn from everyone that reads these essays, especially from the ones who comment and write back, but from everyone. And I’m committed to listening to everyone – even the ex-girlfriends – to keep learning. I won’t stop being in love with wisdom – but isn’t that itself teaching philosophy, in the truest meaning of the word?
No one who knows me would say I’m philosophical – I’m sort of impulsive, a lifelong victim of wanderlust, far too curious to be considered centered and calm. And I don’t have a philosophy of life, really. My parents, I think, would acknowledge that, having spent decades trying and hoping that I would adopt some kind of variant of a Thomistic or Augustinian Catholic philosophy, grounded in both faith and rationality. My progressive friends who keep expecting me to come out as a materialist, well, they keep expecting. Even my son’s namesake is frustrated with the fact that I write essay after essay which put no stake in the ground, which simply explore experience and knowledge, and don’t really say anything about what we should do.
But then there are those rare individuals who get me, who look across a table or a screen and see the unalloyed joy of not knowing but of being able to look for wisdom, to play with wisdom with the sure knowledge I will be wrong, and the no less certain intent to keep playing the game…
There is no final spin of the wheel – although Milton Bradley’s Game of Life has a very satisfying green and white plastic spinner. If all of life involved using such a spinner, we’d all be much happier. But no matter: I’m a philosopher. So is Mark, if I may be so presumptuous to call him out – and definitely so is Viktoria. You, dear reader, probably, almost certainly, are too. Not particularly bankrupt, and not at the end of the game by any stretch yet. Thanks, as always, for reading.