Speaking and listening

 It felt good to get back in the classroom yesterday, though I was feeling talked out and a bit sore-throated by the end of the day. Obvious remedy: talk less, listen more. 

And so I responded affirmatively to the student who emailed later to ask if I was familiar with the work of Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, aka Richie Alpert, who said “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” True. And that was indeed a message I tried to convey on Opening Day, that the collaborative form of philosophy I hope to foster in our classes involves just that willingness to listen as well as speak. I need to practice what I preach.

Richie's obit describes him as a "peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities," but I don't think he was quite my style of peripatetic. Or Aristotle's. That doesn't mean I shouldn't try to hear what he might have to say. "Be here now" is a wonderfully pithy piece of wisdom. If we do that in class and really attend to one another's contributions, not leap to dismiss what sounds unfamiliar or uncongenial, we might learn something. 

Richie eventually learned something his pal Tim Leary, who turned on, tuned in, dropped out, orbited the planet for  a few years and then literally crashed and burned, apparently did not: "He said he realized that his 400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies..."

I hope we have some of those this semester too, in and out of class. Listening respectfully will help. But as William James knew, philosophers also must speak. They must fire their volleys of vocables from their conceptual shotguns, and the honest among them also know that only a few of those volleys will approach their targets. 

Truth and fact do well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. But words are our medium and currency, so another of my Opening Day messages was that we've got to speak up if we're going to be any decent kind of CoPhilosophers. And pay attention to our peers.

Words are also, said the poet, a powerful and amazing drug when judiciously dispensed. Getting the dosage right is a challenge, but a worthy one. Let's drop in, and let's converse.