My Interview

Ok, here’s how my mind works. I was in the shower a few minutes ago. No, don’t say anything. I’m not sure I want to know how your mind works after such a prompt. But I was in the shower and in my mind I was being interviewed, though not in a shower. It was a radio show or podcast, or maybe a PBS like the old Charlie Rose show, but I hate to mention that because of the shower reference and now you’re seeing him in a towel. So back to my interview. Here’s how it went. This is all true, by the way.

Let me ask you this. How do you want to be remembered?

As a guy who lived to the age of 150.

No, seriously.

Ok, 200.

I mean, about your work.

Sure, I want to be remembered as a guy who worked all the way to age 200.

Why 200?

I think I’ll know some stuff by then.

Like?

I’m only 72. Ask me again in 128 years.

Do you want to be remembered for your books, or for your talks?

My scintillating personality isn’t a possibility?

No.

Oh. Well, I’d like to be remembered as the guy who helped reinvent public philosophy for our time.

Reinvent?

Well, Socrates kind of invented it, originally, I mean, and it didn’t work out so well for him, being as a result poisoned by public demand and all that.

Why do you think he met that reception?

He didn’t have enough good jokes.

I see. But didn’t Mortimer Adler serve as the first public philosopher of our time, the reinventing guy?

Maybe Bertrand Russell, if your time goes back that far, but he doesn’t count because he was a full time academic university professor who typically operated without many jokes, either, except in his book on the History of Philosophy.

But back to Adler.

Yeah, no jokes at all. I had lunch with him once. I think he was a public intellectual of sorts, the great books guy of his time, but not really a philosopher, based on our lunch chat, which was mostly about how good the club sandwich was.

He wrote about Aristotle, who was a philosopher.

Yeah, I can write about Sumo Wrestling without myself being a huge guy dressed in a hand towel. But you’re right. Wasn’t his first bestselling book, “Everyone! Read Aristotle”? Then the next big book was “How to Read Aristotle,” and the one after that “Not Enough of You are Reading Aristotle.” But it was just a trick to get people to read him, Mortimer Adler, and that’s why he got rich and famous, unlike me, who still had to pick up the check at lunch.

Some might think you’ve done pretty well.

Nobody would ever think I’m either rich or famous unless they were themselves fairly unfamiliar with those concepts. I’ve done Ok, and a few former graduate students know who I am, because they were required to read one of my early books in a seminar somewhere and have been trying for the past 20 years to prove I was wrong.

About what?

About nearly anything I wrote in my academic phase. Almost everyone who read those books concluded I was very original but very wrong, I had to be, the ideas were so outrageous, but they could never agree with each other about what exactly was wrong, and so my books kept being read, though apparently not bought except in used bookstores, which are typically called “used bookstores” because the’ve been used by poor philosophy grad students as many times as the few copies of my academic books that ever got sold.

And then we went to commercial break and I dried off. Charlie Rose unfortunately offered me his towel, but I got my own.