“I’ll teach you to think!”
That is — in effect, even if not in those exact words — what almost all of the public-school teachers back in my schooldays said whenever they caught anyone daring to try to think. It’s like the cop back in those same days telling someone who has just called him a “pig” or some other such evaluative name “I’ll teach you to talk to an officer of the law that way!” just before he and his partner slammed that person against the cop car, handcuffed him, and slung him into the back seat of that car to haul him off to jail, as happened to me once.
I’m glad to report that the efforts of the police and the efforts of my schoolroom teachers alike failed to teach me what they were trying to teach me, which was something such as “respect for duly constituted authority.” My contempt for such falsely-called “authority” remains to this day as strong as it ever was — and that is very strong indeed. Such authority figures never teach anyone anything worth learning, They are never genuine teachers at all.
In contrast to all such authoritarian pseudo-teachers, throughout my life my greatest teachers — in the true sense: namely, those individuals who truly helped me learn the most and to whom I owe the most and am the most grateful for what they so helped me learn — were people I never met. At least I never met them in the ordinary sense: I never came into their physical presence, nor did I ever introduce myself to them by letter or any other means.
In fact, the teachers for whom I am most grateful, those who taught me the most, were often dead long before I ever learned anything from them. Nevertheless, I had deep and lasting contacts with them all, and treasure all that they taught me. I will always remain deeply grateful for the many lasting gifts they gave me, even though I never met any of them in person.
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By far the most important teachers in my own life were two men, one of whom died more than forty-five years before I was even born, and the other of whom lived far away and died when I was 30. I never met either of them, even in my dreams. Nevertheless — maybe even in part for that very reason — each of them had a profound and lasting impact upon me, upon how I approach and think about everything, most especially my own life and all my involvements with other people.
The first of my two greatest teachers was Nietzsche, my first great love in philosophy (see “My First Love in Philosophy,” the post I put up on this blog last fall, on October 24, 2022). I began reading him just a few months after I’d read John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government when I was still fifteen.
Nietzsche remained the closest companion of my thought from that first time I read any of his work — from that point on not only to the end of high school but also almost to the end of my undergraduate college days. In my last semester as an undergraduate, however, I began really to read Heidegger, my second great teacher and my thought’s closest companion ever since that first real encounter, supplanting even Nietzsche in that role.
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I owe primary thanks to my parents for giving me the opportunity to be taught thinking by those two great thinkers. From my very earliest childhood on, my parents always encouraged me to explore my own interests, and always trusted me when I did. I owe the opportunity to learn from such great teachers as Nietzsche and Heidegger above all to them, my mother and father — and to the sheer chance of being born into a time and economic class and culture that allowed me to find my own way to such teachers, without permission granted from any designated “authority” figure.
Besides being grateful both to my parents and to sheer chance for giving me the opportunity to learn thinking from such master thinkers, I’m also grateful to the coach who taught my 10th grade class on “Western Civilization,” and assigned me Locke’s Second Treatise to read and deliver a lecture on to the whole large class. I learned a valuable lesson from Locke, as I recounted in one of my preceding posts.
I am grateful to that old high-school coach for giving me that assignment. I am even more grateful — though still far less grateful than I am to my parents — to some of my university professors. The first of those to whom I’m thus grateful was a professor with whom I took a couple of undergraduate classes, and who at my request let me do an independent study on Husserl’s Ideas, which he had never read himself. I met weekly with him for an hour or so, and shared what I was getting out of Husserl, from whom I was learning much.
Another professor to whom I am grateful is one I never even met until registration time for my last semester as an undergraduate came around. I needed just one extra hour of credit in addition to the couple of regular courses I was going to take, in order to get just exactly the total number of credit-hours I needed to graduate — seeing no reason at all to pay for more credit-hours than I had to have.
For that lousy single hour of college credit, I decided it was finally time I get around to Heidegger’s Being and Time, which I’d picked up and looked at a few times before, but without being able to work up enough enthusiasm to keep reading more than a few pages. The professor in question was the only one on the faculty of the university I attended who at that time knew much of anything about Heidegger’s work. So I introduced myself to him and asked if he’d be willing to supervise a one-hour independent study on Heidegger for me.
He agreed, and told me to read as much as I could of Being and Time. He said I could get back in touch with him if at any time as I was reading that text I thought I needed his help. Otherwise, he went on to finish, I should just wait till the end of the semester, then schedule an hour or so with him to talk about what I’d read. For a mere one hour’s credit he was, quite reasonably, not very concerned.
So I went off to read Heidegger, but kept putting it off until finally, about a month before semester’s end (and with a hangover from the previous night’s drinking, it behooves me to add), I started to read Being and Time. As I read it, that book then struck me like a bolt of lightning. It was a revelation. It kindled a fire in my thought that has sustained itself ever since.
Thus did Heidegger and Nietzsche, neither of whom I ever met or ever will, teach me to think!