The study of philosophy is conducted along two lines, one concerned with action, the other with pure thought—hence they may be called practical and speculative philosophy, the former dealing with the conduct of life and the establishment of moral standards, the latter concerned with the theory of causation and the nature of absolute truth. Socrates is the type of excellence in practical wisdom, while Pythagoras concentrated on the contemplative, for which he was equipped by his intellectual power.
—Augustine, City of God, VIII, c . 4.
I.
Everyone is reading Stanley Fish’s essay, “The Last Professor,” in the New York Times (January 25), a column itself based on the title of a book by Frank Donoghue, one of Fish’s former pupils. It seems highly appropriate that a column entitled “Last Things” should be interested in one entitled “The Last Professor.” A professor who does not in his discipline also touch on its relation to the last things is merely a professor, not a wise man as a result of what he has learned about the whole of reality that he encounters in his studies, however narrow. The “last professor” must, as Cicero said in his essay on “Old Age,” finally take his stand before the last things if he is to live, what Aristotle called, a complete life.
The phrase, “the last professor” means, in Fish’s context, that what a professor is said to do in his professorship no longer has any market. The lives of students have no place for the “impractical” enterprise of simply knowing. Everything is now practical, “down-to-earth,” job-oriented. No one, it is said, cares for things “for their own sakes,” to use Aristotle’s expression. As a letter to the editor said, the teachers are looking to the AFL-CIO for help. That is, everyone now recognizes that Fish is right.
No longer do we have “leisure” only “occupation” or “business,” to use the English of Aristotle’s term, “askolia.” And the works of leisure were, in Pieper’s famous essay, the only things that could protect our freedom, keep us from being absorbed into the absolutist state, where our souls have no transcendence but only a function as a part in the whole. We are all employees now, more and more even of the state, not master-craftsmen or those who know things higher than utility. Our virtue depends on what we do or make, not on the habits of what we are, habits that we form in our own souls by our choices and self-discipline.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “professor” originally meant to speak forth or pronounce some position in public, often religious, one that we have deliberately taken. It was an act of making clear what one held or where he stood. His words informed us what he considered himself to be.
In American English, a professor is almost anyone in a college or university who teaches anything from agriculture to zoology and all things in between. Professors have different “ranks”—ranging from assistant, to associate, to full, with things like emeritus or adjunct also modifying the noun.
In the English universities, the name is more restricted. It usually refers to someone who has an endowed or established chair. The qualifications for occupying it are often quite meticulous. The German “Herr Professor” is a rather god-like character. Rashdall says that in the Middle Ages, the terms “Doctor, Master, and Professor” were synonymous. The title is related to the academic preparation and the award of a degree expressing satisfactory or exemplary mastery of a body of study.
We might say that Socrates was not a professor but Plato and Aristotle were. It is not without interest that Augustine placed Socrates as a master of the practical science, the science of how we live. Socrates himself said at one point that he grew frustrated with seeking the causes of things and turned to ethics as a kind of refuge. Francis of Assisi was not a professor, but Thomas Aquinas was. The object of the human mind is omne ens scibile, all things knowable. We are not simply about what we make or do, but about what is. The very word “university,” the concern for all things, still bears this implication.
II.
The Fish-Donaghue thesis is not about what ought to happen but what has happened. Fish is resigned to the fact that the kind of wide-ranging knowledge that he followed in his academic career will no longer be given a place in academia. He is obsolete, the last. He is grateful that he entered academia when it was still possible to spend his life in learning things. This was a world in which students were excited not about what they could make, however valuable this was, but what they knew because reality contained things worth knowing, because truth was a real enterprise of the mind.
Aristotle said that if man were the highest animal, politics would be the highest science. But since he was not the highest animal, politics would be limited to its own legitimate area. The elimination of the last professor, then, has serious political overtones. There is no one left to ask what else is there but success in this world.
Politics becomes more like a self-made metaphysics. The politician recognizes no limits to his scope. The people hold him to his claims. There are no things that cannot be done, only those who won’t do them. Perfection becomes a “right,” but it has no definition but what we want to give it. There is no contemplative order that would hint that man is already something, not simply a political animal.
The political order is not ordained only to itself. It is indeed open to what it cannot, in its own terms, know, but only point to. The limits of politics are reached when the political man turns on himself to reconfigure and refashion what it is to be man. This utopian project is, in fact, where we are.
No doubt professors, the intellectuals, have often been the main causes of our predicament. The “betrayal” of the clerical class, both lay and religious, is a real disservice to what we are. Augustine was not wrong to suggest that the vice of the professor was pride, the temptation to see himself as the origin of all things. C. S. Lewis was not wrong to see his most diabolic character to be a professor who betrayed what he was.
And yet, the professorship is by nature a noble vocation. At his best, the professor is commissioned by society to be free, free to know. He is someone who has learned many things. We have students who listen. We see that this is necessary for the kind of passing beings we are.
The great act of being a student is first simply to listen, to listen to one who knows human and divine things, not all of them, to be sure, but enough to be himself awed by them. The “last professor” implies a world in which the young are never exposed to wonder, a world in which they never experience the fascination of what is because they once encountered an honest man who simply talked to them about what was true.
The last professor may indeed disappear from the universities. In some sense, he already has. My Students’ Guide to Liberal Learning, now that I think of it, was premised on this suspicion. Universities will go on specializing and teaching us how to find a job, how to be practical, something that is not unworthy of us. But we will have to go elsewhere to find out about what is.
All of us, as Plato said, must build a city in speech in our own minds, a true city, not just our own concoctions. We need this city in speech so that we can see that, in the actual city in which we live, the great things we must also know to be what we are no longer are taught or presented to us. Philosophy must return to what Benedict XVI said in Spe Salvi, to a man who is not an academic specialist in current events and projects, but to one who reminds us how to live and what the reaches of what is really are.
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