An Unabashedly Non-Arm’s-Length Account of My Lifelong Affair with Philosophy

Very Early ImpulsesMy life-long favourable disposition toward philosophy started very early, although unknowingly to me at the time.It sneaked up on me very gradually, perhaps starting as early as the age of nine and certainly by early adolescence.It was probably prompted by where I spent my childhood and teen years.I grew up on a family farm in southeastern Kansas, the kind of farm on which work was the default position for everyone, whatever your age.So, by nine, I was deemed old enough to graduate from garden work with my mother to "going to the field" on a tractor by myself for many hours at a time.By early adolescence this meant full days of 12 to 14 hours.Due to childhood asthma, my assigned task for most of the summer was cultivating the corn and beans with an old Case tractor.This required sitting on an iron seat with no back, trying to "man"-handle a tractor with no power steering and bad brakes, and doing so with unwavering concentration to avoid moving more than two inches to the right or left and thus plowing up the tiny plants I was supposed to be nurturing.Now, part of the point of noting these details is to emphasize that this was an inherently lonely way to spend much of my early life.I was forced by necessity to be my own company for these long hours.But the main point here is what can be done with that company.Another detail thus needs to be added: all of this went on at the often break-neck speed of one mile an hour.So it must be said that this work was also inherently boring.Daydreaming was one way of dealing with this boredom, but at that age and on a Kansas farm, the content of this itself can be equally boring.I soon discovered that active thinking was much less boring-and much less likely to result in the fence at the end of the row suffering serious injury because a tractor had failed to turn soon enough.Thus, if philosophy involves focused thought, and, in particular, thinking about thinking, I suspect it was cultivated into my bones at a very early age.To be clear, none of this is meant to suggest that I was some sort of philosophical prodigy, something like one of the main characters in an early Mathew Lipman philosophy-for-children novel.Or, that I even knew what philosophy was.In fact, those involved in a Kansas farm life in the late forties and early to late fifties seemed singularly unaware of the existence of philosophy.(However, having recently found and reread two letters that my father wrote me, one when I graduated from high school and the other when I decided to apply for Conscientious Objector status to the Vietnam War, I must add that I think my father was a natural born philosopher.Almost always, he could see at least two sides to any question.)Thus, exposure to the real stuff came relatively late, not until I went to university.In fact, I think it fair to say that my early schooling did not support this kind of thinking, and in many ways militated against it.When one's first three years of school are located in a three-room schoolhouse with one teacher, no classmates, no indoor plumbing, and only five students in year three (and one of those was an older brother), the curriculum is pretty basic.Still, since I almost always

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