The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  During the remainder of this fractious gathering, we three teachers struck a bargain with our woefully ill and possibly insane employer. Professional ethics, we insisted, forbade us to sit back and watch her deceive yet another member of our fellowship. We fully intended to give Jordan Frazier of Baltimore a complete account of Yolly’s genesis, making it clear that, for better or worse, Jordan would not merely be tutoring the girl but crafting her moral essence, and if Edwina contradicted us on any point, we would gleefully tell the children that they each had two sisters—three, counting Edwina. For our part, we would allow Londa and Donya to continue believing they were amnesiacs bereft of siblings, and we would prevail upon Jordan to nurture the same illusion in Yolly.

  My colleagues persuaded me to spend the rest of the afternoon in their bungalow, sampling beers imported from various Miami microbreweries and attending what Henry called “the first official meeting of the faculty of Hubris Academy.” I wasn’t sure to whose hubris he was referring, ours or Edwina’s, but the name fit in either case. As our colloquy progressed, we gradually convinced ourselves to adopt a more generous attitude toward Lady Daedalus’s scheming, something between acquiescence and acceptance. After all, beyond their deontological difficulties, both Londa and Donya seemed fairly well adjusted, and Yolly was probably equally sound of mind and body. True, Edwina meant to exploit them, but it so happened that this exploitation looked a great deal like love.

  “I’m afraid our efforts to help the children may prove even trickier than we imagine,” I confessed, sipping my coconut ale.

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Henry said.

  “Martin Heidegger,” I said.

  “Heidegger was a Nazi,” Brock said.

  “A Nazi, a nitpicker, and the worst sort of pedant, but I still have to respect his concept of Geworfenheit,” I said.

  “Sounds like a character out of the Brothers Grimm,” Henry said, sampling his mango lager. “‘Geworfenheit and the Enchanted Lederhosen.’”

  “Geworfenheit, thrownness, the paramount fact of the human condition,” I said. “Every person is hurled into a world, a culture, a set of immediate circumstances not of his own choosing. The authentic life is a quest to comprehend one’s status as a mortal Dasein, a self-conscious subject, an entity for whom the riddle of situated existence—being there, inhabiting the given—is a central problem, if not the central problem.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Henry said irritably, an attitude I attributed to his enthusiastic beer consumption.

  “But if the average person is thrown into the world,” I continued, “then Edwina’s offspring have been shot into the world, like a circus performer getting blasted out of a cannon. For most of us, pondering the mystery of Dasein leads to anxiety. For Londa and Donya and Yolly…well, I shudder to imagine what they might be facing down the road. Exponential despair. Angst to the nth. But there’s reason for hope. According to Heidegger, a Dasein can ameliorate its encounter with nothingness by adopting a nurturing attitude toward other beings.”

  “And according to me, a Dasein can ameliorate its encounter with nothingness by not reading Heidegger,” Henry said.

  “I’m feeling pretty anxious myself right now, but it has nothing to do with my thrownness,” Brock said, taking a long swallow of velvet cream porter. “I keep thinking about that ontogenerator thing. I’m jealous of it.”

  “You’re jealous of a machine?” Henry said.

  “It got to Donya before we did,” Brock explained, “filling her brain with whatever crap Edwina and Charnock thought she’d need to survive. I feel like—this sounds strange, but I feel like I should’ve been Donya’s first tutor, not that damn DUNCE cap. I want to go to Edwina and say, ‘The next time you ask Henry and me to forge somebody’s soul, invite us in sooner, and leave technology out of it.’”

  “I’ll tell you what’s got me rattled,” Henry said. “It’s not that Edwina decided to make three copies of herself. It’s that she insists on collapsing them into a single person.”

  “E pluribus unum,” Brock said, nodding.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Henry said, “So now all Edwina has to do is exile good old-fashioned linear time from Isla de Sangre—a simple enough trick if you’re the Übermom—and she gets to nurture her precious Yolonda in a grand spasm of maternal self-actualization.”

  “E pluribus unum,” Brock repeated. “And Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I echoed, lifting the coconut lager to my lips. “A man who, if you subscribe to the Western world’s most popular theology”—I took a final sip—“was likewise three persons in one.”

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON FOUND ME browsing through the Faustino library, searching for whatever Heidegger works might be in residence. I’d decided that the more deeply I plumbed his notions of Dasein and Geworfenheit, the more effective I might be in treating Londa’s nascent despair. I didn’t expect to come across Being and Time, that Mount Everest of philosophy tomes, but the collection did boast What Is Metaphysics? sandwiched alphabetically between Hegel’s Aesthetics and Husserl’s Logical Investigations. I abducted the book from beneath the conquistador’s vigilant gaze, returned to my cottage, climbed into bed, and began the ascent.

  My initial perusal of What Is Metaphysics? yielded no insights into Londa’s situation, but my efforts were nevertheless rewarded. “Only because the Nothing is revealed in the very basis of our Dasein is it possible for the utter strangeness of what-is to dawn on us. Only when the strangeness of what-is forces itself upon us does it awaken and invite our wonder. Only because of wonder, that is to say, the revelation of the Nothing, does the ‘Why?’ spring to our lips.” Where else but in Heidegger could a person find such exhilarating obscurity? This wasn’t the Food Channel. This wasn’t Chicken Soup for the Credulous. This wasn’t Jesus on a stick. This was philosophy, by God, red in tooth and claw, Sinuhe wandering the banks of the Nile, asking the great “Why?” question until Isis and Horus and even wise Thoth himself were sick of hearing it.

  A frenzied pounding interrupted my idyll. Reluctantly I abandoned Heidegger and stumbled to the door. My visitor was Edwina, breathlessly announcing that Londa was in trouble.

  “An ark full of assholes has run aground in the cove,” she elaborated. “They’re driving her crazy, which speaks well of her ethical development, but she could use our help.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get dressed.”

  As always, I bristled at the Übermom’s presumptuous manner, but if Londa indeed needed me, then my obligation was clear. I buckled on my sandals, then joined Edwina as, huffing and puffing, she made her way down to the Bahía de Flores.

  Our three intruders, beefy men in Bermuda shorts and strident Hawaiian shirts, had recently enjoyed a picnic supper on the dunes, or so I guessed from the smoldering cooking fire and the trail of trash strewn between the campsite and their beached dinghy, a procession of beer bottles, soft drink cans, empty Kraft marshmallow bags, hot-dog wrappers, white plastic utensils, and paper plates streaked with grease. In the middle of the bay, a sleek fiberglass cabin cruiser, the Phyllis II according to her stern, lay jammed against the coral reef. Not only had the intruders despoiled the beach, they were also polluting the water. A profane halo of full-spectrum, iridescent petroleum surrounded the yacht’s hull, spreading outward like the rainbow through which Satan had sealed his covenant with Exxon in Genesis 9:13.

  Londa was wandering around the picnic site, conscientiously picking up the trash and placing it in a burlap sack. The intruders showed no inclination to assist her, being content to play Frisbee in the gathering dusk, killing time while waiting for the rising tide to free their yacht.

  Upon spotting her mother and me, Londa halted her bagging operation and strode toward us wearing an expression of supreme dismay.

  “This is a private island, not a public dump,” Edwina informed the nearest sailor, a bearish man with a Hapsburg jaw. “Kindly dispose of your cr
ap.”

  The yachtsman raised his hand, nonchalantly intercepted the Frisbee in midflight, and offered Edwina a deferential nod. “Of course, ma’am, you’re absolutely right.” To judge from his headgear, a captain’s cap embroidered with an anchor, he was the skipper of the Phyllis II. “If there’s one thing I respect, it’s private property.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear that,” Edwina said dryly.

  “Ralph Gittikac, CEO of Gittikac’s Getaway Adventures,” the captain said, as if we were dying to know how assholes earned their living these days. “That’s my brother Brandon with the major sunburn.”

  “And I’m Mike the Spike,” said the third intruder, his neck hung with gold chains, “king of the investment brokers.”

  “Well, I’m Edwina Sabacthani, queen of Isla de Sangre.”

  “Queen, huh?” The captain set the Frisbee spinning on his index finger and shouted to his friends. “You heard Her Majesty! Hop to it! In five minutes I want this beach looking as neat and tidy as Buckingham Palace!”

  Resentful grunts arose from the other two Frisbee players, but they proceeded to obey their captain’s orders. While brother Brandon held Londa’s burlap sack wide open, Mike the Spike combed the beach, gathering up armloads of debris and dumping them into the cluttered cavity.

  “Your Majesty’s resemblance to this exquisite creature”—Ralph tipped his cap toward Londa—“tells me I’m in the presence of a mother and her daughter.”

  “Quite so,” said Edwina, ever eager to cultivate her favorite falsehood.

  “And the way you rammed your boat into the reef tells me I’m in the presence of a piss-poor pilot,” I said. “Your ineptitude has caused an oil spill.”

  Mike the Spike halted his beachcombing long enough to say, “No, sirree, she’s been dripping like that ever since we left Sugarloaf Key. We’ll try to fix the leak later today.”

  “You’ll try to fix it?” Edwina said, aghast.

  “With all due respect, ma’am, oil spills aren’t the unmitigated disaster certain Marxoid squid kissers make them out to be,” Mike replied. “Aquatic bacteria gobble the stuff right down. I’m giving you basic biology here.”

  “You’re giving us basic horse manure,” I said.

  Ralph shot me a poisonous glance. “Who is this person?” he asked Edwina. “Your court jester?”

  “My daughter’s tutor. His specialty is moral philosophy. Let me suggest that you hire him yourself.”

  “He’s absolutely brilliant,” Londa said, her first comment of the afternoon.

  “Ma’am, I can see we’ve caused you grief,” Ralph said, bowing before Edwina, “for which I’m truly sorry, so let me make it up to you.” From his wallet he retrieved a business card, pressing it into her palm. “Just send me an e-mail mentioning that you’re the feisty lady with the private island and the lovely daughter, and I’ll see to it your whole family and all its philosophy tutors receive a special gift—like, for example, first-class tickets on the Titanic Redux when she steams out of Southampton in maybe ten years from now.”

  “Ralph knows how to think big,” brother Brandon noted.

  “You’re building a new Titanic?” I said, at once intrigued and appalled.

  “Project Titanic Ascendant,” Ralph said, beaming. “We’re recreating the grand old Ship of Dreams right down to her last frigging rivet, keel to crow’s nest, poop to prow.” He pointed in the general direction of Greenland. “There’s a whole raft of demons out there, Your Majesty—all those imps, devils, and angels of catastrophe who haunted the North Atlantic on the fateful night of April fifteenth, 1912. We’re going to exorcise the lot of them. And once we’ve sent all those wicked spirits back to hell, presto chango, the way will be clear again for the sort of entrepreneurial derring-do that gave birth to the first Titanic. Brandon here knows the Latin word for it. What’s that word of yours, Brandon?”

  “Catharsis,” Brandon said.

  “Catharsis,” Ralph said. “Our plan is to take the whole catastrophe and give it a by-God catharsis.”

  “The word is Greek,” I noted.

  “I’ve never heard a more arrogant idea in my life,” Edwina said.

  “I have,” I said, casting a cold eye on my employer. She bristled and frowned.

  “There are lots of ways of being arrogant, ma’am,” Ralph said. “Some people would say it’s arrogant to practice extortion on our country’s most creative sector and call it progressive taxation. Some people would say it’s arrogant to pay welfare mothers for spreading their legs.”

  Before Ralph could further develop this subtle line of thought, the metallic shriek of a Klaxon horn echoed across the bay. The captain pivoted toward the Phyllis II, frantically waving his arms. “We hear you, Billy!”

  “Looks like we’re afloat,” said Mike.

  “Don’t you worry about the leak,” Brandon told Edwina. “The bugs’ll take care of it. Gobble, gobble, gobble.”

  Moving with the confident swagger of the congenitally privileged, our visitors loaded their bagged trash into the dinghy, scrambled aboard, and rowed toward the damaged reef. As the three sailors climbed into their vessel, Londa made her second remark of the day.

  “Phyllis II,” she said, pointing toward the yacht. “I guess that means they’re boorish materialists—you know, Phyllistines!”

  “Very witty, sweetheart,” said Edwina.

  “A clever name,” I said. “But let’s remember”—I touched Londa’s forearm—“it’s easier to label our enemies than to forgive them, and easier to forgive them than to love them.”

  “Love our enemies?” Londa said. “We haven’t gotten to that lesson yet, have we, Mason?”

  “I’ve been saving the worst for last.”

  “Someday I’ll have more enemies than I can count,” Londa said, “the better to propagate my love.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING we continued our voyage through Ethics from the Earth. Had Londa and I dropped anchor at the next scheduled port of call—chapter seven, “From Parable to Parousia”—we would have ended up exploring that vast moral continent first reconnoitered by the same Jesus Christ who’d exhorted us to love our enemies. But I sensed that she was not yet ready for such heady terrain, so we sailed on, circumnavigating the Dark Ages, cruising past the medieval era, and skirting the Renaissance, until at last we disembarked in the Enlightenment, subject of chapter twelve, “From Revelation to Reason.”

  My pupil was profoundly impressed by Immanuel Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative—doing the right thing because it is right—versus the hypothetical imperative—doing the right thing to get what you want. Indeed, Herr Kant’s imperially rational construct was in her words “the perfect way to keep Ralph Gittikac and his fellow Phyllistines from gaining the upper hand.” But she balked at Kant’s claim that the “moral law within” amounted to a proof of God’s existence.

  “Do you prefer some other proof of God’s existence?” I asked.

  “I guess you haven’t heard the news,” she replied. “I’m going to stop believing in God.”

  “You’re going to stop?”

  “If it’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s all the same to me, but it’s hardly the same to most people. The leap into disbelief is not a step one takes lightly. It will put you at odds with the rest of the world.”

  “I’m already at odds with the rest of the world.” She picked up my dissertation, squeezing it against her chest as tightly as Donya embracing Deedee the chimp. “I know that the God hypothesis has its partisans, but, oh, what a boring idea. Where did the universe come from? He did it. How do we account for rivers and rocks and ring-tailed lemurs? He made them. Ho-hum.”

  “You’ve been reading ahead.”

  She smiled coyly. “Your chapter on Darwin took my breath away.”

  I studied my reflection in the conquistador’s breastplate, which suddenly seemed to me a kind of crystal ball or scrying glass. Darwin had taken Londa’s breath away, even as her mo
ther and Vincent Charnock were busily taking Darwin’s breath away. The bright metal showed me the convex shape of things to come, a future in which humankind, tired of being mere Homo sapiens sapiens and enamored of the RXL-313, had elected to plunge headlong into a perilous age of cottage eugenics and do-it-yourself evolution. At the mirror’s glittering center stood the forbidding figure of Charnock, leaning over his titanium cauldron and pulling out confection after confection, each wet, slippery neonate stronger and swifter and smarter than the last.

  A terrible pounding arose in my skull. Nausea unfurled its cold, quivering wings in my stomach.

  “You look sick,” Londa said, joining me by the conquistador.

  “Hedonism, anyone?” Quetzie said.

  “Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens sapiens,” I said.

  “If you’d like to go home and take a nap,” Londa said, “that’d be all right with me.”

  I was tempted to accept her offer, but instead we continued our conversation. With admirable coherence and startling confidence, she argued that the Kantian “moral law within” did not necessarily imply the existence of a benign, omnipotent deity who spent his waking hours supervising human affairs. The God who’d planted a conscience in his creatures might instead be the deus absconditus of Enlightenment skepticism, winding up the universe like a clock, going home for lunch, and never coming back. This Unmoved Mover was no more a continuing presence on the planet, argued Londa the teenage atheist, than was that long-dead Uncle Max who’d willed you his stamp collection.

  On Tuesday we left God on his Enlightenment lunch break and took up the next topic in my book. Chapter thirteen, “The Square Root of Happiness,” featured my attempt to explicate Utilitarianism, that imperially pragmatic—indeed mathematical—system devised by Jeremy Bentham in his quest for an ethics unencumbered by values, ideals, and other squishy sentiments. It soon became apparent that Londa had grasped neither my critique of Bentham nor the refinements in Utilitarianism wrought by John Stuart Mill and G. E. Moore, but as we parted company, she agreed to revisit the chapter and prepare a paper or project—anything but a one-act play—proving that she’d wrestled chapter thirteen to the ground.