“Last night I had the misfortune to watch someone young die.”
Coffee cups were put down abruptly, hands stilled over notebooks and laptops. There was one soft exhalation from a young woman on my right. Fair-haired and slight, her name was Karen. The name jarred me. The other Karen who liked to be called Courtney might have sat in this room just last year.
Several of the students wouldn’t meet my eyes. I could hear their silent protests. This was philosophy, for Pete’s sake. Why all this reality so early in the morning? This course met a distribution requirement for the Humanities Division, so we were blessed with the appearance of several science majors who clearly conveyed they were going through the motions. Well, no ‘going through the motions’ would work this morning.
“You felt pain when I said that, didn’t you?” I looked at each person around the table, one at a time, waiting until she or he made eye contact. It took a while, but it was worth the time. No holding back here.
“So feeling that pain also makes it possible for you to know that love, commitment, and, in fact, being in a relationship are good things. You know that’s good because you also feel bad about loss, maybe even the loss of someone young whom you didn’t know. But it’s loss, it’s real.”
One hand rose slowly. Isabelle Oliveira, an international student from Brazil. Second year science major.
“I didn’t understand this reading on Aristotle at all. I thought after last week that we’d said pain and loss were the definition of evil from that other reading. Now we’re supposed to think they’re part of good?”
Her voice gained in strength as she voiced her grievance. Science majors thought definitions should hold up, not be offered one week and then unsettled again the next week.
Beside me Hercules lowered his chin to let his mustache hide his smile. Unsettled questions and ambiguity were his philosophy of life.
I glanced around the room, still trying to hold eye contact. It was heavy going.
“Anybody care to take a crack at answering Isabelle’s question? The reading we had last week from Nel Noddings did say pain and loss define evil. So how can they also be part of good according to Aristotle? Do these thinkers disagree or is there a way these ideas can go together?”
I primed the pump a little by giving them the name of the author of last week’s reading. Smart they might be, but in a school where the sciences and economics held supreme, philosophy came way down the list of things that needed to get read. They looked at their computer screens, or down at their backpacks contemplating whether they’d even brought that book from last week along (probably not) or they just took a sip of coffee. One student blew his nose in a wad of tissue.
They weren’t going for it. Teaching can be threatening to one’s self-esteem. I felt like a feminist stand-up comedian trying to get a bunch of Christian fundamentalists to laugh at her jokes about patriarchy.
The key is to wait.
Finally a large hand went up at the far end of the seminar table. Edwin Porterman, African American, six and a half feet tall, a brilliant economist. Edwin had one of the few athletic scholarships at this school, playing football to keep himself debt free. I’d met him in the fall. Playing on our Division III football team seemed not to tax him at all, and he was a straight A student in this university’s challenging economics department. He must also have a campus job to earn extra money. I suddenly remembered he’d been one of the student workers helping to pass the canapés at the reception last night.
This class filled no distribution requirement for Edwin. He’d signed up at the beginning of this term as an audit. Edwin and I had a history. I’d been useful in preventing him from being accused of murder. But there was more about ‘Good and Evil’ that he was clearly working out in his own mind from the events of the fall. As I saw his serious brown eyes fixed steadily on me and Hercules each week, I wondered how he was doing with that self-imposed task. Edwin did nothing without deliberation.
I nodded at him and his measured voice rumbled out over the class.
“Aristotle and Noddings aren’t disagreeing. They’re saying that good is connected to evil and vice versa. The Stoics in Aristotle’s time were saying you had to avoid all attachments to achieve happiness, because attachments bring pain. Aristotle said, ‘right,’ but attachments are also how you can know happiness. There’s no ducking it.”
He placed his large hands with their long, graceful fingers on top of the Fragility of Goodness book.
“This here is a philosophy of what life is really like—damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” His hands moved to grip the book as he ground out these words.
The other students stared. Not only pain but passion in the classroom. This was going from bad to worse. Physics did not normally include a punch to the solar plexus. And Edwin was the only African American in the class. Most of them tried to disguise it, but they were afraid of him, well indoctrinated by the drumbeat of white supremacy in this country. But they were also intimidated by his brilliance. Some of them probably secretly wanted to see his birth certificate.
The waves of discomfort that went around the room were nearly visible like heat in the desert.
Into the silence, a gentle voice spoke.
“Is this our damnation as humans, or is it our only salvation?” Hercules asked, easing the tension caused by their fears.
“If I cannot feel, am I not already a dead person, a thing of no passions?” His softly accented voice still had no trouble carrying around the whole room.
Hercules stood and walked unhurriedly to the other end of the seminar table where Edwin sat. He put a thin, parchment-colored hand down by Edwin’s big brown one on the top of the book. He waited, their two hands resting side-by-side, liver spots and wrinkles next to dark youth and strength.
“Here is difference, and here is the same. Blood, muscles, nerves, same pain, same pleasure. Look carefully please.” He paused, every eye on him and Edwin. I was holding my breath. I knew I was not the only one.
“When I do not see the same, only the different, I lose my own humanity. When I make a friend,” here he slowly grasped Edwin’s hand and shook it, “my life becomes richer. I have the good of friendship. But good is not without risk, because my friend is different from me. But that is also a pleasure.”
I would give a lot to become the kind of teacher that makes the classroom a real place. I met Hercules’s eyes down the length of the seminar table. Under his bushy white eyebrows, a brown eye winked at me. I laughed aloud with pleasure in this friendship. The students looked at us like we were crazy. All except Edwin. He shook Hercules’s hand back so vigorously that the little man’s whole frame moved up and down.
But the ice was broken. Hands rose all around the room. Friendship as both pleasure and pain is something young people trying to live in community are deeply concerned about.
8
I need to get out of here
Go somewhere
Get away
From myself
“Escape”
Amber Brown, #1100
StreetWise
Thursday, May 18, noon
By the time class ended, I was on such an adrenaline high I could have set rebounding records for the Chicago Bulls. Especially this