Opening Day

LISTEN. Here we go, our first proper Opening Day since January 2020 and first class in an actual classroom in almost eighteen months. 

Not quite proper, since we'll be masked and worried about variant strains. Hope we're not setting ourselves up for another round of lock-down. For today at least, let's assume not. But let's not be reckless.

So the commute is back. Can't say I'm thrilled about that, but the road trip to Alabama to meet my old pals and take in a minor league baseball game Saturday night was a good road test and a nice transition. (A Trash Panda, btw, is an angel-in-training.)

I have two sections of Honors Intro ("CoPhi") today, and another tomorrow. Happiness too. Live and in person. Hope it's like riding a bike (which I'm not yet supposed to do, per surgeons' instructions--that'll make traversing campus expeditiously between consecutive classes a bit of a challenge, but with ambulatory competence now restored by said surgeons I'm ready).

To study philosophy is to learn to die, said Montaigne (following Socrates and the Stoics and others) in one of his gloomier-sounding essays. But of course that's just the flip-side of learning to live. The passing of one of our great musicians, Tom T. Hall, reminds us that the end of a good life is always occasion to celebrate  the privilege and opportunity of living. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born," as Richard Dawkins so aptly said.

I always look for some light way of conveying a serious philosophical point or two on opening day. This time I think I'll bring Data and his daughter into our opening conversation. Philosophy begins in wonder, whether you're a carbon-based biological life form or a reflective positronic AI trying to puzzle out your purpose.

I'll also wonder aloud with them what our purpose is: what's the point of human school?

A smartly written recent essay proclaims that "universities are not for producing better citizens…they are not for producing happier human beings.” But I say we can try. We certainly need better and happier citizens.

Our main mission though, surely, remains the purveying of that old Enlightenment ideal we talked about this summer: Sapere aude, as Kant put it. Learn to think (not just opine, not just feel) for yourself, as I prefer to put it.

The best way to learn that lesson, since thinking for yourself is not the same as thinking by yourself, is through amicable collaboration. CoPhilosophizing is my shorthand for that. And William James's. "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'..."

I think we'll find it much easier to be a collaborative plurality in the classroom than we did in those little Zoom rectangles.