At Tuesday's Republican debate, Sen. Marco Rubio Esq. -- practitioner of two of the world's most-hated professions, law and politics (but his dad was a bartender!) -- grabbed the gold medal for bogus populism (and crappy grammar) by proclaiming, "welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers."
In saying "less philosophers" rather than "fewer," the hyper-educated Rubio was no doubt speaking down to both his audience and the star-struck debate moderators, none of whom dared ask Free Market Marco why the free market needs his help to fix the philosopher/welder imbalance. Perhaps they sensed, as fact-checkers were quick to point out, that in the real world people with philosophy degreesdo just fine compared to welders.
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If I had to choose one word to explain why I chose philosophy as my college major, that word would be Nausea.
I'm talking about Jean Paul Sartre's 1938 novel featuring a character so gloriously miserable one might say he put the "agonist" in "protagonist." I read the book during the summer of 1968, after my freshman year at Bucknell, in preparation for a course devoted to the Nobel-refusing French philosopher, a course that inspired hours of late-night (literally) sophomoric conversation about being, nothingness and the absurdity of the human project.
The Sartre course was the beginning of a three-year immersion in phenomenology, existentialism, Greek philosophy, analytic philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, and logic that was invaluable for its own sake. But philosophy also turned out to be more relevant and beneficial to my career than all the business and management books and seminars that I forced myself to consume -- combined.
The ability to think clearly and act decisively is the philosophical gift that keeps on giving. When I was hired as publisher of the alternative newspaper LA Weekly in 1983, I had no idea how to do the job. My only previous employment, editing a New York-based music trade magazine, had nothing to do with alternative newspapers, Los Angeles, or being a publisher.
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I found myself supervising a pack of punks, anarchists, and malcontents whose philosophy was founded on the principle that authority figures suck. The Socratic Method -- asking question after question to get to the root of a problem -- allowed me to learn the job by doing the job. And though I couldn't tell you the difference between a converse and a contrapositive if my life depended on it, logical reasoning mitigated my natural inclination to take personally the slings and arrows that came with the territory.
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