I'm currently working part time at a hardware store. Working at a hardware store, you usually don't expect to learn much beyond home improvement. But every day is different, and some days I am rewarded with bits of knowledge and wisdom.
At the store, I work with a particularly sharp man whom I have a lot of respect for: Thomas. Thomas is is a tall, skinny, brooding man probably in his mid sixties. He's balding with short cropped hair, and has the face of a greyhound. His ears shoot back, and his nose echoes the pointedness of his jaw and shape of his cheekbones. He possesses infinite curiosity. History, philosophy, psychology, engineering--he'll talk to you about anything and enjoy every minute of it. And when he talks to you, his eyes come alive, opening clear and wide as his speech builds. He's an earnest man, who would never mislead you, and he's very engaging to listen to.
In his life, Thomas has done a lot of different things. Probably a lot more than I know about. I guess he used to work in the coastguard before cycling through construction, tech, and for the better part of his adult life, logging and tree-work. I know he never got a college degree, but he did go to college--San Jose State--where he racked up around 120 units in a variety of classes. Physics, psychology, philosophy, physiology, math, biology...the classes were too diverse to fit the bill for any major, and he never graduated.
Anyways, Thomas is always giving me "old man" wisdom. As an example, Thomas recently had surgery on his shoulder to repair a torn muscle (incidentally, received while falling 20 feet out of a redwood tree). His shoulder's still weak and recovering, and for a while he was wearing a sling to work. When it finally came off, he told me to be careful with my body. "Your body has a memory," he said, "so anything you do now you're gonna feel it a couple of decades." Conventional wisdom? Maybe, but it's nice to know my 'cautious' approach to sports might pay off some day.
Back to the story, today Thomas and I got into discussing philosophy, and he was surprised I'd never read any great philosophy, like Socrates or Plato. I told him that I'd had some experience with existentialism. That piqued his curiosity. He told me that in college, he had studied some existentialism as well, under an Italian philosopher. It was a two-year honors seminar with an this scholar who'd apparently been close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre.
His name was Arturo B. Fallico. Fallico had studied under
Benedetto Croce, and ultimately wound up in the existentialist movement. Thomas tells me that Fallico was more than just a philosopher: he had fought Nazis during WWII. "There is one thing I am absolutely certain Fallico and Sartre shared," Thomas told me, "they both carried pistols on them during the war, and they had both killed [nazi] men." Although it may be difficult to verify, this was the same professor whom--as Thomas tells me-- while lecturing on the subject of death one day, pulled an actual human skull out his of his briefcase and set it on his desk--and then said nothing about it for a good half hour as he continued lecturing. The skull had apparently come from an anthropologist whom Fallico knew. Anyways, Fallico was at San Jose State in the 60's, and lived in Los Gatos for much of his life. He was an artist, and helped found the
Los Gatos Art Association. He also wrote a book called
Art and Existentialism.
Returning to the story, in this seminar which Thomas was taking, he says one anecdote really stuck with him, and he's carried it ever since. Fallico told the class about an occasion he spent drinking Cognac with Jean Paul Sartre on one of the main boulevards in Paris (I'm not making this up). Fallico asked Sartre, when forced to pick between options, "how does one decide?" Or another way of putting his question would be: what is the best way to make decisions?
Sartre--as might be expected--had an elegant response. It totally leaves aside any explicit discussion of morality, but is magnificiently geared towards moral behavior. Sartre said:
Make that choice which leads to more choices. [emphasis mine]
In other words, if you have a few different options, choose the option that will allow you the greatest number of subsequent choices. Each choice should allow the greatest possible degree of freedom. A lesser choice constricts one's freedom. If a choice is a dead end, for example, it is probably a bad one. I could kill someone and steal the cash in their wallet, but then my choices become very limited. Flee the country and hope to evade capture, or risk imprisonment for the rest of my life. My options would be very limited, and that would be bad. I guess this is why I would argue that this kind of decision-making philosophy is smart, and ultimately takes into account morality without explicitly doing so.
Anyways, it's always interesting hearing stories like that. Sometimes three degrees of separation can take you quite a long ways.
