We are all philosophers of a sort. Some of us may keep the head bent, eyes on the ground, and thoughts on immediate concerns so we don't stumble and fall into a well, as did the philosopher Thales, walking in the village, his thoughts on philosophy. Alan Watts pointed out that "[t]he self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position." [Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are 39 (New York: Collier Books, 1967)]. Watts argues that:

anyone who thinks at all must be a philosopher--a good one or bad one--because it is impossible to think without premises, without basic (and in this sense, metaphysical) assumptions about what is sensible, what is the good life, what is beauty, and what is pleasure. To hold such assumptions consciously or unconsciously, is to philosophize. [13].

Philosophy grows from practices and limits that define our thinking. To see and experience the world one way rather than another is to have a philosophy. (No one can have it all, be everything its possible to be.) You don't have to know what your philosophy is or believe that you have one to live one philosophy as opposed to another. "[T]o laugh at philosophy itself is a kind of philosophy." [William A. Luijpen and Henry J. Koren, A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology 9 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)]. This means that a practical enterprise like philosophy is both a mind-set and a philosophy.

But are we really all philosophers? Some of us do not question the roles we adopt, or the worlds we inhabit. We do not try to think beyond the conventions we mouth and and those paraded before us for ready consumption. Doesn't philosophy require the raising of questions? How do I see the world? How do others see me? How am I to understand and live with the gap between what I know myself to be and how others would have me be? Philosophy is a way not just of reflection on what we assume to be worthwhile, beautiful, worthy of commitment, just? How can we be philosophical when we disavow reflection, contemplation, introspection, and critical self-examination?

The irony is that many of us live in the day-to-day certainty that we can, without cost, eschew philosophy. The disdain for philosophy in legal education is a case in point. Carl Friedrick warns that "lawyers of the more practical sort"...are likely to be the "very person whose judgment is most enslaved by doctrines that need remodeling." [Carl J. Friedrick, The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1963) (1958)]. One of my students observed that: "Law students are like cows, that seek a path of least resistance and stick to that path, rarely straying left or right in their travels from one place to another." He went on to say that in the first year of law school, "they begin to pump in the fog. The fog obliterates all views but `thinking like a lawyer.' Law school turns everything gray. It obliterates ethical issues and we shuffle along, giving appropriate legal responses, not the moral or ethical ones." Without a philosophical perspective are we not lost in a "fog"?

Jacob Needleman, the author of a sensible and accessible book on philosophy, argues that we cannot live without philosophy. [Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)]. Yet, we live in a culture that holds philosophy in disdain, as extraneous to the practical affairs of everyday life and work. The irony in this disdain for philosophy is that the final decades of the 20th century may be described by future historians of legal thought as an era of heightened moral and ethical concerns in the legal profession. (Moral and ethical concerns will, I assume, also be linked by legal historians to the emergence of the various critical schools of contemporary jurisprudence. Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Jurisprudence, Critical Race Theory, and Narrative Jurisprudence are all rooted, in more or less obvious ways, to moral concerns.)

Jacob Needleman argues that without philosophy we are dead. We get a glimpse of this living death in the reports of lawyers who have grown increasingly dissatisfied with their work. When legal work loses its meaning, lawyers are subject to burn-out, and depression, and drug abuse. We see growing signs of what Needleman calls "inner death" [3] in the legal profession. And if we take the possibility of "dying inwardly" seriously, as we all should, we will pay more attention to philosophy and the philosophical means to avoid this death.

Philosophical concerns, to those most intent on learning the "ins" and "outs" of the law, seem extraneous, unnecessary, and marginal to their quest. Law offers those who study and practice it enough action to keep philosophy relegated to the far margins of professional life. And what, Needleman asks, happens if we do not make a place for philosophy? We "will be absorbed by the external forces of nature and society" [3] , by a lawyer role rooted more in an assumed necessity than an act of imagination.

Law work claims us as we claim it; it has the power to transform the lives of all it touches, legal claimants and lawyers alike. It is the necessity of Law's everyday life that envelopes us and creates a state of "metaphysical forgetfulness." [3]. A life "absorbed" in work may be "'lived' by the emotions, opinions, obligations, terrors, promises, programs, and conflicts that comprise the day-to-day life...." [3]. The task of philosophy is to help us inquire into the "tissue of illusion" that infects our memory. But this is not easy. We have "strayed so far from philosophy" we no longer know how to remember. [Id.] We turn to philosophy to make possible that "experience of deep memory [that] has vanished from our lives..." [3]

I am, or so students sometimes complain, too philosophical. Consequently, I have a personal stake in trying to understand philosophy and how it sets me apart. I am not a philosopher by trade, training, or education. If philosophical means thoughtful, reasonable, reflective, curious, and concerned about how one ought to live, then I can take solace in the idea that I am devoted to philosophy.

I suspect, however, that by philosophical students mean abstract, ephemeral, too unwilling to engage them in the pragmatics and strategies for successful lawyering. They may also have in mind by philosophical , that I am obscure or out-of-step with the times, a man whose teaching can be laughed at as the maids laughed when Thales, his thoughts on philosophy fell into a Greek well.

Philosophy must be recaptured from philosophers, reinvented for daily use. It is philosophy closer to home, the philosophy we live in our conversations, stories, and lives, philosophy that is a constant reminder of our most human concerns, our promises, fears and dreams that I find most worthy. As Carl Jung noted, "philosophy is no longer a way of life as it was in antiquity; it has turned into an exclusively intellectual and academic affair." [C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self 84 (J. Lange ed. 1969)].

Philosophy demands clear thinking, but clear thinking, is not enough. As Stanley Hauerwas has put it: "The moral life, then, is more than thinking clearly and making rational choices. It is a way of seeing the world." [Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue: Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection 36 (Fides Publishing, 1974)]. The intellect, as we know from Freud, often shields us from uncomfortable truths about ourselves. While it may not be possible to rid oneself of self-deception (which itself will justify many from making the effort), we can try to see what philosophy we are living and how it has shaped our character, our moral stance in the world.

Most of us have some curiosity about our own lives and philosophy is one way we follow up on this curiosity. Most of us don't want to be unconscious. As one philosopher notes:

The fact that you never give morality a second thought doesn't mean . . . that your decisions have no moral import; it simply means that you are unaware of the moral dimension. The fact that a person cannot spell or even pronounce the word "philosophy" doesn't mean that he has no operative philosophy in his life; it simply remains unconscious. [Edward Stevens, Business Ethics 8 (New York: Paulist Press, 1974)]

To the extent that we eschew reflection, resist philosophy and submerge ourselves in everyday life, we let the routines and conventions of everyday life become our reality. The philosophical stance we have adopted lies hidden as we go about being-in-the-world.We ignore the philosophy that guides us. And its not all that easy to change course. Philosophical self-scrutiny is difficult. E.F. Schumacher argued there is nothing more difficult than to become critically aware of the "presuppositions of one's own thought". "A special effort is needed: that almost impossible feat of thought recoiling upon itself--almost impossible but not quite." [E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed 44 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)]

Doing philosophy, we try to find and take account of what Schumacher called "presuppositions of one's thought." We inquire into and struggle with the hidden premises and structure that shape our lives. Philosophers are archaeologists digging "in" and "down" and "around" to find those views of the world that shape our world views. It may be, as Schumacher noted, an "almost impossible feat" but it should be a part of every professional's education. If it is a philosophy that guides judgment, then we must become conscious of how this philosophy works. A sense of one's self as a philosophical project changes the quality of one's thinking, and perhaps, one's life. Philosophy is not only a method, and a perspective, but a way of life.

In "doing philosophy" we engage in the reflective work of (i) knowing the world; (ii) forming judgments about this world and how it works; and (iii) then confronting the reality of the world with what we know. The task, as in phenomenologist describe i it, is that of "knowing the person as the center of his world and that of knowing the world of which he is the focal center." [Herbert Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology: Essays on and in Phenomenology 39 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979)]. Reinhold Niebuhr is said to have prayed: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." [Philip Rhinelander, Is Man Incomprehensible to Man? 8 (San Francisco, W. H. Freeman, 1974)]

We are all enmeshed in philosophy as we go about living and the simple and not-so-simple task of being. As Philip Rhinelander puts it, "[w]e are all philosophers insofar as we try to think critically and coherently about important problems and especially about our habitual ways of dealing with them." [Rhinelander, at 9]

We want to think that being a lawyer allows us to live a good and decent life, that a good lawyer can be a good person. What follows is a judge's effort to reassure us that the proposition is sound:

My personal experience has been that the practice of law is an inspiring and noble profession. Of course, there are some unprincipled and incompetent lawyers. But for the most part lawyers are decent, dedicated, and honorable persons who make an important and lasting contribution to society. Lawyers frequently plead the causes of those who depend upon them for family, reputation, worldly goods, and even life itself. They conscientiously and sincerely advocate and defend civil rights and humanistic causes. They preserve confidences with utmost fidelity. . . .

By and large, I believe the profession has made, and continues to make, a meaningful contribution to government and society. The enormous multiplication in the number of lawyers and the extraordinary growth of litigation in this country seem to demonstrate that the public -- individuals, business, and industry -- does have confidence in the legal profession and the administration of justice, and that courts are readily accessible. . . .

Lawyers, educated in the humanities and history, trained in the power of analysis of issues and the logical formulation and expression of ideas, are natural community leaders. . . . .

Your knowledge of philosophy, history, and literature, and your studies in the law, have aptly prepared you for service in the large world, with its moral and humanitarian obligations.

[Rosenn, The Social Conscience of a Lawyer, 69 Iowa L. Rev. 319, 321, 324, 326 1964) (Rosenn was a Federal Circuit Judge at the time his comments appeared)]

Aristotle begins a treatise on ethics with the observation that "Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good." [Aristotle, Ethics 63 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976)]. Our aim for the good and the accuracy of that aim is subject to moral inquiry and moral discourse. Some of us, by choice or by habit, aim our lives and practices toward the good. To find such persons and honor their goodness is a worthwhile endeavor.

Yi-Fu Tuan points out that a desire to think and talk about such a good life is impeded by the absence of a language for doing so. [Yi-Fu Tuan, The Good Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)]. Our aim toward the good is, arguably, diminished when we adopt a skeptical stance toward philosophy and turn away from moral inquiry. Tuan asks: "What can liberal education mean if not to reflect intelligently on the nature of the good life?" [6] The problem, of course, is that so many students are not students of the subjects that Judge Rosann suggested as the foundations of our "natural community leaders."

If one mark of an educated man is that he can recognize a good person when he sees one, is it not strange that almost nothing in our enormous program of higher education deals with the question of how it is done? [Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent 158 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)]

Even liberal education itself seems to have lost interest in the question--"how is it best to live?"

We must address those who have forgone liberal education and help make them anxious about what they have missed and how it can be reclaimed in the form of self-education. But first, some preliminary observations. We are always, already, in the act of dealing with the gaps and holes left by our educations. Yet, we must deny that our education is incomplete or seriously flawed. Consequently, the paradoxical ("loopy") feeling: We must do what we claim need not be done. If we content ourselves with "I'm already doing it," then we commit ourselves to the vagaries of a "natural" perspective toward the good. We will have, without a moment of conscious thought, limited the good to what we already do, to the practices to which we are already committed. But the good limited by the status quo sets us in opposition to change. Inattentive to self-deception in this unexamined ("I am already doing what I think is good") stance, we defeat the possibilities of moral discourse, philosophical inquiry, and measuring our own "aim" against that of others.

Without philosophy (and practical reason) in the service of hope, we are prisoners of settled ways of doing things, settled practices we shield from critical scrutiny. "Practical reason becomes innovative in human affairs when it demands reasons for practices which have been so represented. . . ." [Hampshire, at 57]. Without practical reason and the inquiry it supports, we become oblivious to a fundamental fact of history:

Every person and every social group is to a greater or lesser extent blind to many of the injustices of its time, because its own culture and education, supporting a particular way of life, represents embedded and distinctive features of this way of life as unavoidable features of human life in general. [Id. at 59]

Stanley Hauerwas suggests that: "What is new about our present situation is that our best moral wisdom can conceive of no alternative. We seem able only to suggest ways to make the game more nearly fair. We are unable to provide an account of morality worthy of requiring ourselves and others to suffer and thus releasing us from the prison of our own interests." [Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics 9 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)]

The good life is a moral life,a life being "the kind of people we should be, the kind of virtues and character we should have." [Stanley Hauerwas, Natural Law, Tragedy and Theological Ethics, 20 Amer. J. Juris. 1, 5 (1975)]. We are good when we live as we should. Personal embodiment of the good is a practical concern. "Conceptions of the good are normally the outcome of a person's experiences of satisfaction and disappointment, of the personal influences in his life, of his temperament and his talents and his imagination, and of the habits prevailing around him, rather than of original thought and abstract speculation." [Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience 104 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (1989)]. Congruence in moral matters, getting our lives to more accurately reflect our moral pronouncements and expressed ideals is the goal of the good life.

"[T]he roads I have traveled down and have come from exist in the past, and I cannot discern them anymore than I can discern why the ocean is always near the shore. Our past is always colored by who we are now and who we think we are. In many ways I am lucky. I was raised in a dual culture. The first, rural Braxton County, up a 'holler' where my father was born. And the other, a city, Charleston, alongside brick-laid alleyways. I know the ways of each, their illusions and realities, and yet I commit to neither. When I am in one I long for the other. We never know what we've got until it's gone.

My heroes in high school were Bob Dylan and James Bond. I tend to extremes. I give everything or nothing, yet even when I give all, it doesn't seem like enough. I'm beginning to feel that life, the constant search for a home, is not a place but a journey. It is not the material wealth we gather during a lifetime which defines us, but, rather, the things we've seen and done, the intangibles, the forgotten words said to a friend in need, the guidance given to a child, the wide open stare at life. I agree with Whitman, it's all a miracle: darkness and light, desert and meadow, sea and air.

I always get a bit confused when I stop and look about me. It's easier when you're in the process, always becoming. Once you become it's the end, and unless you start again you die. One challenge after another, one struggle after another. What if Alan Watts is right and we're all God playing hide-and-go-seek with himself/herself/itself. And through its (our) different manifestations is how God grows and keeps from getting bored.

* * * *

Where do I go from here? After three years of law school what do I do now? Where has the study of law taken me, and where have I taken it? When I came I was bright-eyed and eager to succeed -- I even liked the sound of it: the study of the law. And I have succeeded in many respects (Law Review, Order of the Coif). I participated in most of my classes, several were actually intellectually stimulating. But now I feel that those three years could have been something more. I feel as though I haven't given enough. I feel a little guilty about not studying more. I felt it more during my first year but law school seemed to trivialize my personal life, the time I take to listen to music, spend with friends, being in a relationship, or watching a movie. When I do enjoy some personal pleasure my mind is on what I could be doing at the law school. Always that nagging feeling that I could have done more, that I could have been something more. Moreover, there is the fear that I'll be exposed as an intellectual phony; that I'll expose to the world how really shallow and superficial I am. As I know and accept law school, and my role in as a student, I see the gaping holes, and the trees blocking the view of the forest. Yet there are gaping holes, trees blocking the forest.

Where is this taking me? I attempt to make sense out of law school even though at times it seems to make little, if any, sense. I keep wondering what it is I can do? What is my responsibility in law school? If law can serve as an outlet, an expression of the beliefs, personalities of others, then to what degree can it express mine? Or is law rigged from the very beginning only to express a certain attitude, in certain ways?

What difference do I make? During the sixties I rationalized that I did not make a difference, that we were dependent upon the whims of whatever structure we were a part. In therapy I started looking more towards what I was responsible for. I started looking positively and optimistically at the possibility that we, as people, as a culture and society, create structures and we can change and re-create them. It is true that structures perpetuate themselves and change is slow. But even so, how can I more responsibly live, and be a human being?

I remember hearing and reading the work of the poetess Nikki Giovianni. In a poem about revolution she wrote about a dream of being the one who signed treaties following a revolution. Only later did she realize that the real revolution did not happen by dreaming about it. So she sought to dream natural dreams. This lead me to reflect on my contribution to society, to try to infuse who I was in to the situations I encountered in life. There was a growing feeling that each of us is ultimately responsible for his own actions. We have a choice (I also know that choice is not freedom) in how we live our lives, of what to do and what not to do. When we choose we decide what kind of world we want. The major failing of law school is that it does not help determine, nor does it adequately address, the necessity for the law student to decide the kind of world in which he want to live.

At best we learn the law as an end rather than a beginning. The growth of a culture can be viewed in terms of what beginnings we make of our endings. Where, do we go? Do we merely plod along worn out paths, or can we, by knowing who we are collectively and individually, create roads on which to travel? To be professionally responsible is to be responsible for creating those "new" ways of living.

The association of law with baser elements reminds me of early impressions of "law," fragments of which I struggle now to bring to mind. I saw law and justice from a very different perspective before law school. It was a time in life when I was reading Plato and was enthralled by the story of the cave and the concept of "Ideas." What a wonderful, almost mystical notion.

I scavenged through moldy college books and retrieved a long-forgotten volume of the Republic and read again the story. Imagine, Socrates tells Glaucon, a subterranean cavern in which there are men who have been fettered from birth so they see only a wall in front of them. Imagine further a fire burning higher up and behind them, and between the prisoners and the fire a low wall above which puppets are shown. Would not these men see only shadows, and think there was nothing else in all the world but shadows? Suppose then, the men were freed and forced to stand up and look upon the light and see the objects that made the shadows. They would feel they had only known illusion, and that these puppets were reality. Suppose further that the men were dragged up out of the cave into the sunlight. So the region we inhabit is like the cave, and we think things are such a way because we see them. Plato (recounting Socrates' dialogue) shows how the ascent to the sun is analogous to the soul's ascension to the intelligible region of the Forms, or Ideas. These Ideas are timeless models. We know these forms, Plato says, by reason or intelligence. Unlike the objects of sense perception which change and decay, the forms are single and changeless. Thus, love, justice, and beauty exist as patterns which a rational person can know.

The notion of eternal, timeless Forms appealed to me, especially when viewed as something to strive toward, a goal to attain. I was also, at this time, taking a course in logic and felt myself to be a logical, rational person, just the sort who would have a chance of surviving in the dazzling light beyond the cave.

When I first began to think about law school my image of a lawyer was that of a person who made it out of the cave, a person who understood things most people would never know existed. A lawyer was someone close to the law, a sacred body of Forms. And when I went on a law school class trip to Washington, D.C., I sat alone in front of the Supreme Court Building, enraptured by its beauty. It was bathed in the gold of the sun setting behind the Capitol Building and almost shimmered. It was the end of a winter's day, and important looking three-piece suited and cashmere coated gentlemen with watch fobs draped across their bellies came filtering out of the building. I was sure I had seen one of the Justices. What wonderful men they must be, I thought, holding the Law in their hands like a priest holds the Eucharist. "Equal Justice Under Law" was boldly etched across the pillared entrance. I was too shy to walk inside the building, but I knew what was there--velvet drapes and massive oak doors, and a library full of delicious-smelling, leather-bound books embossed in gold. During that same period, I read Clarence Darrow's story, and delighted in his account of the Scopes trial. Here was a man who made it out of the cave and beheld the wonders of the law.

And yes, those were my naive days. I did not have the slightest idea what "Law" was, but adored it, perhaps because I didn't understand it. But, even now, when I slide into a seat in the back of the courtroom, or hold a heavy volume of the Southeastern Reporter, a bit of the awe returns, just for a second. I hope I retain a little bit of that delight in the practice of law.

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