Say you're worried only about mistakes. Then you call yourself a
"philosopher." Owners of
that word are all over you: "You've grabbed the wrong name, friend. You're a functionary, a technician, an
agent. You carry out what's
already been determined, a purpose.
Until there's a purpose there are
no mistakes. Don't we have enough
stories establishing this? You
know, guy goes into a place, asks to be castrated, is castrated, then discovers
that the place also does circumcisions.
'Oi, that's what I meant, circumcised!'"
All right, error philosopher, you're only the guy
with the knife. "Great
technique" is the highest compliment you can aspire to, "zero
mistakes" the best entry in your record. Somebody else decides what you're
supposed to do with your knife.
Think of the praise his kind of decisionmaking can
bring. "Oh, he knows
what's best for genitals I'll tell you.
With some castration is best,
with others even circumcision is bad.
Depends on what kind of life is best." If the purpose is to live the best life then this doctor can
aspire to the highest compliment: "He knows what's best for human
beings. He knows what they should
go for, what purposes they should have in living." So no wonder he gets the big
compliment-word, "philosopher."
In a way I can accept that. People who determine ends should get
more credit than people who carry out means. Their job is harder and they influence our lives more. Where I complain is in the assumption a
lot of those people make: that people worried only about means are no help
determining ends. They haven't
thought about them or studied them.
They don't need to. No
wonder some of them are clueless.
I speak up because I have a clear memory of the
moment when, feeling most intensely the absence of purpose in my work as an
English Composition teacher, I had a vision of purpose. Not a clear vision, not the kind where
you can say, "I know just where I am going," but a vision nevertheless.
It came to me in a supermarket checkout line, as I
was contemplating the reading matter offered on the racks. Maybe you remember, in the
eighties: "Space alien
abducts baby." "Dead mom gives birth in coffin." It was the extreme of what we have now,
and will probably always have.
And, because it said to me, "Trash, trash, trash," so loudly,
I could see the outcome of my teaching that I most wanted to avoid, the Worst
Possible Case, the Big Mistake, the Failure: students writing crap like that,
students believing it, students not recognizing it.
That gave me my purpose, my ideal, my shining
Truth. But it didn't locate
it. It just gave me instructions
for a good guess at it, in navigator's terms: "Identify the outcome of
your work that would most disappoint you — which, in the teaching of writing,
would be the biggest pile of what will make you spontaneously say 'trash' —
then set your course so that you leave that pile directly behind you. 180 degrees. Your goal, your ideal, your truth, your destination, will be
somewhere in the direction your bow is pointing in."
Since we distinguish among philosophers according to
their different ways of finding truth, and I see this as a way, I call English
Composition teachers (and all such functionaries) "error
philosophers." They come at
truth the back way, in the daily workroom, grappling with error. The model error philosopher, as I have
said, is Florence Nightingale who, claiming no more knowledge about what a
hospital should do than that it shouldn't spread disease, took us from the
germ-pits of the 1850s to the shining wards of the 1890s.
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