The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  A LONG TABLE, draped in white, and five folding chairs occupied the center of the Schneider Auditorium stage, as if the audience were about to endure an avant-garde play in which the characters spent two hours sitting down and standing up and doing other minimalist things. Clutching a fresh printout of Ethics from the Earth to my breast, I trod across the boards, assumed my place at the table, and locked my anxious gaze on a plate of frosted doughnuts and a dewy carafe of ice water.

  My committee entered from the wings, each member carrying a copy of my dissertation. One by one they shook my hand, beginning with Dr. Eberling, wearing the pessimistic countenance of a deer who knows about prions and hunting season. Then came Desmond Girard, last of the medieval scholastics, stocky, grim, reportedly in possession of a steel-trap mind, though these days he baited it not for bear but merely for the occasional logical positivist who found his way to Hawthorne. Next to greet me was Joseph Schwendeman, our Nietzschean department chair, radiating his usual air of exultant nihilism. And finally I stood face-to-face with Pielmeister, a hulking, densely bearded figure who looked prepared to defend his views via whatever forum might present itself, from philosophical colloquium to pie-eating contest.

  A palpable hush settled over the auditorium as the committee, seated now, passed the carafe around and filled their tumblers. Dr. Girard asked if I, too, would like some water. I accepted his offer, lest I appear diffident on a day I was expected to exhibit tough-mindedness.

  Dr. Eberling said, “Mr. Ambrose, please begin by telling us what you feel you’ve accomplished in Ethics from the Earth.”

  “Be happy to,” I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed précis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective. Indeed, by problematizing our tendency to view ourselves as creatures apart—God’s Chosen Species, discontinuous with the rest of nature—the evolutionary paradigm obliges us to address the assorted evils, from overpopulation to climate disruption to habitat destruction, that we have visited upon this, our only planet. Through a Darwinian deontology, we might at last come to know the true character of our sins, a catalog of transgressions not against heaven but against the earth and its life-forms.

  Throughout the auditorium there arose mutterings of approval mingled with bursts of applause, a smattering of jeers, and several sustained moans.

  “Mr. Ambrose, are you saying that your naturalist ethics supplants the other moral systems surveyed in these pages?” Dr. Girard removed his glasses and rubbed his aquiline nose. “Are you telling us to forget about Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Thomism, Kantianism, and Utilitarianism?”

  Although I was prepared in principle for Girard’s question, a nugget of dread congealed in my stomach. I took a slow breath, swallowed a mouthful of now-tepid water, and assumed a swaggering smile that immediately degenerated into a grimace. For the next ten minutes, I spouted convoluted and uniformly incoherent sentences, many turning to vapor before their subjects could enjoy intimacy with their verbs. Phrase by awkward phrase, I endeavored to explain why the admitted materialism underlying my dissertation was perfectly in step with the parade of ethical discourse that had tramped through human history from the ancient Greeks to the early Christians to the twentieth-century Rawlsians.

  The audience grew restless. They’d come for blood, not dialectic. Only in my concluding remarks did I manage to articulate a reasonably feisty thought.

  “Rather than eclipsing Kantianism or Utilitarianism,” I said, “Darwinian deontology adds yet another pigment to the palette of moral philosophy.”

  At this juncture Felix Pielmeister slammed his copy of my Ethics on the table—violently, righteously, as if to crush a cockroach. From his throat came a sound suggesting a wild boar simultaneously enjoying a good joke and an important orgasm.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Ambrose,” Pielmeister said, “postrationalist thought is not ipso facto at odds with the arguments of Charles Darwin. And yet I find that these fulminations of yours carry the reader far beyond the theory of natural selection, depositing him in a place devoid of all hope, meaning, and teleology. Is that in fact your position? Is transcendence an illusion? Is God dead?”

  Excited murmurings wafted through the hall. This was why our audience had gotten up at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning—to watch state-of-the-art Augustinian theology stomp Mason Ambrose into the dirt.

  “It depends on what you mean by transcendence,” I said.

  “I believe you know what I mean by transcendence,” Pielmeister replied.

  “Honestly, sir, I can’t unpack your question.”

  “Stop temporizing, Mason,” Dr. Schwendeman said.

  I fixed on the uneaten doughnuts. A solitary fly hovered above the pile, wondering what it had done to merit such sugary grace. My dilemma was elegant in its simplicity. I needed merely to assert that evolutionary biology, like the other physical sciences, had nothing to say about God, and I was home free. I had only to insist that I had no fundamental quarrel with either Jesus Christ or Felix Pielmeister, and I could pick up my union card.

  With an impertinent flourish, I seized the carafe and filled my tumbler to the brim. I sipped. The fluid that entered my mouth, however, was not Hawthorne tap water but some metaphysical beverage drawn from the Nile by Sinuhe himself. It tasted sweet. I savored the sensation, then took another swallow. Why did I want to be a doctor of philosophy anyway? Would I jump through any conceivable hoop to join that dubious fellowship whose attention I had momentarily claimed? What quantity of self-respect was I willing to lose in acquiring this most conventional of prizes?

  “I believe I can best answer Dr. Pielmeister’s question with a few questions of my own,” I said at last. “They all begin with Sinuhe’s favorite word, ‘why.’”

  “Sinuhe?” Dr. Girard said. “You mean from The Egyptian?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “That’s not a very good movie,” Dr. Girard said.

  “The book was better,” Dr. Schwendeman said.

  “Why,” I said, “do our postrationalist theologians, Dr. Pielmeister among them, expect us to prostrate ourselves before a deity who, by the Darwinian insight he claims to endorse, stands exposed as a kind of cosmic dilettante—”

  “That is not the language of philosophy,” interrupted Pielmeister, wagging his finger.

  “—a kind of cosmic dilettante, idly tinkering plants and animals into existence only to have them go extinct from the very environmental conditions he provided for them?”

  Delicate but palpable vibrations filled the stuffy air of Schneider Auditorium. The attendees shifted in their seats, delighted that the gladiator had mysteriously elected to insert his head into the lion’s mouth. My committee was likewise astir, wondering what demon had possessed this outwardly rational candidate.

  “Why,” I continued, “was Dr. Pielmeister’s presumably competent God unable to produce the contemporary biosphere through any process other than the systematic creation and equally systematic obliteration of countless species?”

  Nervous laughter emerged here and there throughout the audience.

  “Why,” I persisted, “would this same divine serial killer have begun his career spending thirteen billion years fashioning quadrillions of needless galaxies before finally starting on his pet project: singling out a minor planet in an obscure precinct of the Milky Way and seeding it with vain bipedal vertebrates condemned to wait indefinitely for the deity in question to disclose himself?”

  “Mason, this isn’t going anywhere,” Carol Eberling asserted.

  “Right you are,” I said. “The show is over. Time to close the concession stand and sweep up the peanut shells. I would rather teach front-end alignment at an auto-mechanics school in Framingham than continue to cast my lot with higher education. And so, with all humility and a deep appreciation for the eff
ort you’ve expended in reading my dissertation, I withdraw my candidacy.”

  “Mason, no,” Dr. Eberling said through gritted teeth.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” said Dr. Girard.

  “Most Nietzschean,” said Dr. Schwendeman.

  “Withdrawal accepted,” said Dr. Pielmeister.

  “Go back to your offices, good professors,” I concluded. “Pick up your paychecks. See who’s reviewed your latest book in the Journal of Astonishingly Articulate Academic Discourse. But from this moment on, Sinuhe is his own man.”

  I rose and, stepping toward the footlights, dipped my head in a theatrical bow. The audience members variously clapped, booed, hissed, and cheered. As I rushed down the aisle and into the foyer, a young man drew abreast of me and asked if I wanted to star in his student film about Sigmund Freud’s first sexual encounter. I gave him my e-mail address, then hurried into the street.

  EVERY COLLEGE CAMPUS has its beer hall, its rathskeller, its underground den of inconsequential iniquity—someplace where the philosophy majors can huddle in the corners hashing over eros and mortality while the athletes sit at the bar discussing fucking and sudden-death overtime. At Hawthorne, this favored hangout was the Shepherd’s Pie, a convivial Commonwealth Avenue grotto where, according to rumor, H. P. Lovecraft had composed what is probably his worst piece of fiction, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” but the theory is dubious at best, as that hidebound recluse rarely left Providence.

  I skipped dinner and headed straight for the Pie, where I ordered a pitcher of Guinness, then sidled toward my favorite alcove, the very niche in which I’d once gotten my fellow Ph.D. candidate Matthew Forstchen, a card-carrying pragmatist, to admit the logical flaw in William James’s assertion that refusing to believe something is itself a kind of faith. (Do I have faith that the moon is not made of green cheese? Must I experience a divine revelation before rejecting Ouija boards?) Although my intention was to celebrate my escape from academe, I could not summon the requisite jollity. My position at Watertown High was about to evaporate, and since I wasn’t remotely qualified to teach front-end alignment in Framingham or anywhere else, I would soon be staring privation in the face. Returning to my parents in Philadelphia wasn’t an option, as the law of self-preservation required me to distance myself from the slow-motion train wreck that was their marriage, nor could I imagine moving in with my sister Delia, who was barely surviving through a combination of waitressing and off-Broadway acting gigs and didn’t need a grumpy unemployed little brother in her life.

  I was also enduring the emotional aftermath of my meltdown in Schneider. Holding forth on the stage, I’d imagined I was participating in a venerable heroic tradition—the individual versus the system—but now I simply felt like a screwup. I vowed to send apologetic e-mails to Eberling, Schwendeman, Girard, and perhaps even Pielmeister. Tracy Blasko also deserved a letter, a real one, the kind that reposes on paper and arrives in an envelope. I would thank her for tolerating my idiosyncracies during the past five years, then attempt to explain why I’d jumped ship.

  “Mind if I join you?” a sonorous voice inquired.

  I looked up. My visitor was an owlish black man in his late forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and eyes as dark and soft as plums.

  “I’m not in a very good mood,” I told him. “Have a seat.”

  We shook hands.

  “Dawson Wilcox, paleontology department,” he said. “Your notoriety precedes you. Mason Ambrose, late of the philosophy department, author of a quirky dissertation called Ethics from the Earth.” On the nearest empty chair, he deposited a leather satchel, brown and scuffed and also bulging, as if perhaps it contained a fossil mandible. “May I buy you a beer?”

  I gestured toward my pitcher of stout. “I’m fixed for the evening. Here’s a question for you, Dr. Wilcox. Does this pitcher truly hold four beers, or merely four potential beers, each awaiting the reification that will occur upon being poured?”

  Wilcox gave me a blank look. “No wonder philosophers can’t get funded.”

  I filled my glass with stout. An ivory wave of foam frothed over the rim and cascaded onto the table. “Will you help me get to the bottom of this? The pitcher, I mean, not the ontological mystery.”

  Wilcox fetched a second glass from the bar, along with a bowl of miniature pretzels. I poured him a beer, grabbed a pretzel, and took a gulp of Guinness.

  “I followed you here from Schneider,” my drinking companion said. “Let me congratulate you on what was perhaps the liveliest dissertation defense in Hawthorne history.”

  “Seppuka makes a great spectator sport,” I said, munching.

  “I’m here to offer you a job.”

  “I never even played with plastic dinosaurs.”

  “Oh, no, not in my department, though I appreciate the kind words you put in for Mr. Darwin this afternoon.”

  “Let me guess. You decided to become a paleontologist when you fell madly in love with Tyrannosaurus rex in fourth grade.”

  Wilcox issued a cryptic laugh and downed some Guinness, embroidering his upper lip with a second mustache. “Ever hear of Isla de Sangre?”

  “Blood Island?”

  “Ringed by a rare species of red coral,” he replied, nodding. “The coccyx of the Florida Keys, so far south it nudges the Tropic of Cancer. The owner’s a former colleague of mine, Edwina Sabacthani, a molecular geneticist. Eccentric, capricious, smart as God—the sort of person who’ll show up on the last day of an academic conference, sniff out whoever’s been a particularly pompous boor all week, and start hinting that she noticed a major methodological flaw in his latest published results.”

  I drained my glass. The Guinness started doing what it was designed to do. “Three cheers for academic conferences,” I said. The one time I’d delivered a paper at a conference, “The Geist in the Machine,” a précis of my master’s thesis on Schelling, I didn’t meet any minds of Edwina Sabacthani’s caliber, but I was memorably seduced by a tenured Utilitarian from Princeton named Frédérique Wintrebert, who said she’d become aroused by my use of the word “praxis.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Wilcox said. “Edwina wants me to find a tutor for her teenage daughter. I think you’re our man.”

  “I’m a neo-Darwinian atheist, Dawson. The average American mother would rather fill the position with Humbert Humbert.”

  “It’s not your Darwinism that caught my attention,” Wilcox said. “What impressed me was your rambling but nonetheless astute overview of Western ethics. I’ve never met the young woman in question, but evidently she has a handicap. In Edwina’s words, Londa Sabacthani ‘lacks a moral center.’ You’re supposed to give her one.”

  I poured myself a second glass. “Maybe I should print up a business card: ‘Mason Ambrose. Failed Philosopher. Superegos Installed While You Wait.’”

  “This is a sad and serious case,” Wilcox said in a mildly reproving tone.

  I gulped some stout and picked up a pretzel, orienting it so the parabolas suggested laudable breasts viewed from above. “There’s a whole science to pretzels,” I said as still more Guinness washed through my brain’s aching capillaries. “Mathematicians can plot the twists and curves. Wittgenstein would not be impressed. Actually, I don’t think anything impressed Wittgenstein, with the possible exception of Wittgenstein.”

  “The position pays one hundred thousand dollars for the first year. After that, you and Edwina can negotiate.”

  I sucked on the pretzel, enjoying the sensation of the salt crystals copulating with my taste buds. One hundred thousand dollars? Pielmeister probably made more than a hundred thousand a year, but certainly not per student.

  “You have to realize, this is an extremely difficult decision for me. I’m broke. I’m about to lose my job. I just threw away my future. And yet, sir—and yet you have the audacity to imagine I would accept a small fortune for taking an undemanding sinecure in a tropical paradise.”

  Wilcox patted his battered satchel. “I’ve
got the paperwork with me.”

  “I think I should meet the girl before I sign anything.”

  “A sensible precaution, but Edwina and sensible precautions haven’t been on speaking terms in years.” Wilcox unzipped his satchel, rooted around, and pulled out a file folder labeled SABACTHANI. “I’m afraid you must either accept the job right now or send me off in search of another ethicist.”

  “One hundred thousand dollars? No fine print?”

  “None required—the bold print is outrageous enough. Edwina expects you to drop everything, fly to Key West on Friday, and be prepared to give Londa her first lesson starting at ten o’clock Monday morning. On my way over here, I made your plane reservations, and my graduate assistant will sublet your apartment and forward your mail. Don’t worry about your worldly possessions. We’ll crate everything up and ship it to you.”

  “No moral center,” I said. “What could that possibly mean?”

  Wilcox shrugged, then set the contract on the table, taking care to avoid the liquid rings stamped by our glasses. “Your liaison in Key West will be Edwina’s colleague, Vincent Charnock, another geneticist. Maybe he can answer your questions.”

  I retrieved a ballpoint pen from my jacket and clicked the cartridge into place. “One hundred thousand?”

  “Plus room, board, and travel expenses.” Wilcox ate a pretzel. “By the way, it was third grade, and it was the ankylosaur, so here I am at Hawthorne, working it all out.”

  Chapter 2

  IN A CHARACTERISTIC DISPLAY of procrastination, I put off packing till the last minute. As dawn’s embryonic light suffused my apartment, I jammed the normal necessities into my suitcase—toothbrush, electric razor, underwear, yellowed Penguin paperbacks—then topped off the jumble with a bound copy of my dissertation. I pulled on my Kierkegaard T-shirt, hurried out the door, and, by the grace of Isis, Thoth, and public transportation, caught my 8:20 A.M. flight, wafting from staid and predictable Boston to the exotic metropolis of Miami.