Opening Day!

Yet another one (finally!- after a week lost to weather) [but see Margaret Renkl, below: that week was a gift, not a loss], and even after all these years I still give it an excited exclamation mark. The first day of class, like the first day in  MLB, is a seasonal highlight. 

If you want to make a good first impression on your professor, class, do not tell me you don't know what "MLB" means. Most of you don't, these days. So I'll also have to explain what a scorecard is, and what it means to get to first base. In CoPhi as in life, the goal is to get there so you can eventually come home... and maybe "know it for the first time," as the poet from St. Louis said  ("the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started"). He didn't come home, he went to England and made a new home there. I came to Tennessee and made a new home here. The simple point is: when you make it home, you score.

The state of higher education, not unlike the state of the American union, is chaotic and of uncertain future. 

"It’s been quite a year. Colleges became flash points for protests over affirmative action, abortion rights, free speech and hate speech, affordability, equity, policing, sexual harassment and assault, unionization, and the Israel-Hamas war, provoking, arguably, the most divisive and contentious campus conflicts since Vietnam..." Inside Higher Ed

But all of that is not our concern on Day 1. Our job is to begin to learn some of the pedagogic ropes, to introduce our subject matter in broad strokes, and to introduce ourselves to one another. Who are you? Why are you here? 

Students usually give a variety of responses to that second question, some quite literal (because I was conceived and birthed) or prosaic (because I needed the credit hours) or conformist (or so it seems, after a string of short answers all say because this school is close to home) or pietistic (because god put me here). Many seem to interpret why to mean how, offering a biological explanation of their origins rather than an existential exploration of their aspirations and intentions. It's all good, on Day One. Nobody's in the cellar on Opening Day.

But I would propose, to those who say (or didn't say, but think) they don't want to know why they're here because that would create more anxiety to fulfill others' expectations,

Sounds like you think your purpose is something necessarily imposed externally, rather than something you yourself discover, fashion, and have a personal stake in. Not to have a purpose that you've made your own and internalized is to court nihilism. Or, it's to turn yourself into a robot like that forlorn little guy on Rick and Morty who learns his purpose is to pass the butter. Thing is, whether we're originally "programmed" (by nature, genetics, experience, god) with a set purpose or not, being conscious, reflective, and free means we get to regulate and possibly even re-write the program. I hope you'll come to see philosophy as an invitation to do just that, to find and follow the purpose-driven life. Otherwise, your answer to why you're here is: don't know, don't want to know, don't care. Doesn't matter.

I say it matters. You're not a butter bot. Find your purpose. 

And to those who matriculated here because they didn't want to stray too far from home:

Home is sweet, but again I encourage you all to push yourselves to expand your horizons and your conception of home. Growing up means making yourself at home in the wider world. Carl Sagan said it best: to be a true cosmopolitan is to be a citizen of the cosmos, no matter where you hang your hat.

What you want to do is what Jennifer Michael Hecht says the old "graceful life philosophers" like the Epicureans did: 

The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one's path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you're done; just try to have a good time. — Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson by Jennifer Michael Hecht

The great task of a reasonable life is to stop searching maniacally for a way out of the “forest” (the natural universe). "Hang a sign on a tree that says Home" and be done with it.

I did that once, or got Younger Daughter to do it back when she was in her arts-and-crafts phase. The sign eventually faded but the message has stuck.

 

So to begin: Who am I, why am I here?

Well, I'm the designated instructor, a veteran MTSU prof and also (like the poet) a native of the St. Louis region who ran away, I not so far though  as old Tom. (I had a professor at Mizzou who told me I wrote like Eliot. I chose to take that as a compliment, but many of my peers think less of poetic prose than I do. Their problem.) There's more about me in the sidebar bio, if anyone cares.

Why I'm here (in Honors 218): to introduce my field of study and promote the relevance and value of philosophy for life. Why I'm here on the planet: to ameliorate what I can, and keep moving forward-- to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.

And that, for present purposes, is who I am: a meliorist and a peripatetic, a guy who says most problems are made soluble-- or tolerable at least-- by putting one foot in front of the other and repeating. A guy who never took Latin but loves to say things like Solvitur ambulando and Sapere aude, and who likes to award bases to students who can translate such expressions and explain them. A guy who agrees with Carl Sagan that knowing we live on a pale blue dot ought to make us kinder, more humane, more enlightened, and more in love with life.

Time at last to make first contact. See you in class!