Jane Drexler: 'My life is no longer my own.'

What my philosophy student taught me about the meaning of life—and the value of the humanities.

Illustration of Epictetus, with lamp and crutch, in Edward Ivie’s 1715 Latin translation of the Enchiridion. (Wikimedia Commons)

By Jane Drexler

A 13^th century Turkish folk philosopher, Nasreddin Hodja tells the story of a man poking around beneath a streetlight. When a passerby asked what he was doing, he said that he was looking for some keys he’d dropped 50 feet away.

“So why aren’t you looking over there?” asked the passerby. “Because,” he replied, “the light is better over here.”

I’ve been thinking about Nasreddin’s parable in light of the current crisis of the liberal arts.

As higher-ed increasingly prioritizes the value of education as job prep, and as academic professionals strategize how to protect and promote their fields, I’m struck by how folks like me, a philosophy professor, have gotten good at looking for the keys of what we do in an increasingly narrow beam, because it’s easier to see, quantify, concretize, and measure under the fluorescent lighting of “soft skills.”

In an u…