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.
By Jane Drexler
A 13th 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 utterly delightful book, pointedly titled Jobs for Philosophers, Anthony Weston notes that:
Philosophy is 2,500 years old but has been a significant academic profession for only about a century. For the other 2,400 years its heroes were haranguers in the Athenian marketplace, mercenaries between wars, pre-syphilitic philological madmen, raconteurs and rabble-rousers.
Wherever Weston’s philosophers located the value of philosophy, it had little to do with soft skills.
Here’s how Epictetus, a former tortured slave who became Rome’s greatest philosopher, laid it out: “Let others teach lawsuits, others study problems, others teach syllogisms. Here—in this school—you practice how to die, how to be enchained, how to be racked, how to be exiled.”
Epictetus’s bottom line is that philosophy takes a lifetime. The skills it cultivates are anything but soft. They’re about cultivating an internal source of character to face the worst moments of life—the worst pain or torture, the deepest traumas, and most crushing losses, while maintaining the integrity of your soul.
The point is decidedly not to help a person just get the big job. Indeed, in the case of Stoicism, it’s to help when you don’t get it.
“My life is no longer my own.” These are the words that a recent student of mine, Ammon Love, used in a writing exercise to explain the educational and personal path he is on. His uncle—a fellow Lenape Native American—had recently ended his own life, which had been filled with abuse and suffering, and this family tragedy was soon followed by a pandemic that wrapped the world in its own dark cloud of uncertainty and isolation.
When he uttered those words in the summer of 2021, he was not expressing some sense of overwhelming burden, or a lamentation about no longer being free. Rather, Mr. Love was writing himself back into the world. His own experiences of devastating grief, uncertainty, and loss would be the very wellsprings from which would develop his capacity and will to participate in and remake his own and others’ lives.
Why should someone like Mr. Love study philosophy or the humanities at all? Why shouldn’t he just study a subject that offers a direct career path? Why shouldn’t humanities courses only be valued for developing soft skills?
To help us to answer that question, consider Rainer Maria Rilke. When he shared a few of his poems with Rodin, the famous sculptor told him, “These are fine . . . but the problem is…you haven’t really learned how to see.”
Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” was one of the “new poems” that he composed after that encounter. This poem is about a visit to a museum where he comes to a damaged sculpture of Apollo, missing its head, arms and legs, but from which Rilke sees shining an internal brilliance that contains the whole of the god. Looking at this torso, Rilke sees what is not there—what is not given. It glistens, dazzles, is suffused with brilliance. Out of this damaged torso, Apollo “bursts like a star . . . from all the borders of itself.”
Rilke ends the poem: “here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”
Philosophy and the humanities generally matter to my students because, at its core, they teach us how to make real what the last line whispers (or screams): “You must change your life.”
Of course, people like me teach soft skills in philosophy, and we do it well. But that’s not why we matter. That’s not why philosophy belongs in our colleges and universities. If all philosophy did was help people to achieve what had been pre-given as possibilities, then all those who doubt the use of philosophy would be right. But they are not right.
Philosophy matters because it calls on you to learn to see—to see beyond what is given, to see the dazzling “what-is-not” from the “what is” that you have been asked to see; and from that experience to “burst like a star” “from all the borders of your self,” and to change your life.
Recently, Mr. Love was accepted with a full ride to Princeton University (and Stanford, UNC Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt) on his path to medical school. He recently reflected on the value of philosophy and humanities for his own path:
My philosophy and humanities classes came to me at a time I desperately needed them in my personal life. The philosophical way of breaking things down to first principles has guided my mindset in my class choice, major choice, school choice and belief system. Stoic philosophy in particular gave me a clearer sense of what is actually within my control, and what is not, in a way that still centers my mental health in times of crisis. The humanities courses I took gave me critical worldviews and perspectives that honor those I wish to help in my career and life as I pursue deeper meaning. I’ve only become more convinced, as the world depends on more and more complex systems of data, it will require even more of the humanities to ensure critical thinking geared towards the service of all at all levels of our society.
Mr. Love, bursting like a star from the borders of his self, has found Hodja’s keys.
Jane Drexler is a professor of philosophy at Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is committed to the crazy idea that philosophy actually has something to contribute to a life well-lived.
Thrilled to publish this brilliant piece by Jane Drexler. Thank you, Jane, for your wisdom and generosity as a teacher, writer, and scholar. I love this: Philosophy matters because it calls on you to learn to see—to see beyond what is given, to see the dazzling “what-is-not” from the “what is” that you have been asked to see; and from that experience to “burst like a star” “from all the borders of your self,” and to change your life.