The Executor by Jesse Kellerman Read Free Book Online

bunch of thinkers who refuse to play by the rules.
    For many Continentals, the mechanics of an argument are secondary to its outcome. These writers tend to describe the world as they, as individuals, see it, and as a result they often (appear to?) eschew logic in favor of rhetoric, asserting as self-evident all sorts of ideas that an analytic philosopher would question. When, for example, Sartre posits that the essence of our humanity is freedom, he takes for granted that freedom exists. Not so fast, says the analytic philosopher. We’re free? Prove it. Only then can we talk about whether freedom is important. To which Sartre replies: I don’t have time for your petty bullmerde.
    The animus on each side is considerable. I remember my sophomore tutorial leader outlining for us the rules of his favorite game: “First I name a philosopher. Then you name a worse philosopher. We each take turns, naming worse and worse philosophers, until someone says Jacques Derrida. That person loses.”
    I am sure that equally snide games take place in universities all across France.
    In sum, Continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy misses the forest for the trees, and analytic philosophers think that Continental philosophers are unintelligible, egomaniacal morons.
    Father Fred and I had read a lot of Kierkegaard and early Christian theology, as well as some existentialist fiction, works by Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevsky—which is to say, I’d mostly studied the morons, and was thus underprepared for what I faced at Harvard, so grossly that I briefly considered abandoning the concentration for something more user-friendly, English or government. But I persevered, spurred on by the notion that I couldn’t, and just as I taught myself not to drop my r’s or elongate my vowels, with practice I learned the system, coming to appreciate the crystalline beauty of the analytic style and winning several departmental prizes for my writing.
    I had a dirty little secret, though: all the while I’d been nursing a nasty addiction to existentialism. I couldn’t get away from it, especially Nietzsche, whose ideas gripped me in a way I could not easily explain. People will always argue about what he really meant, but what stood out for me was his insistence that we are radically alone—and therefore bear ultimate responsibility for creating ourselves. His concept of the Übermensch, so often vilified as amoral, made perfect sense to me. I had done precisely that: I had overcome, rising up out of an unread cesspool, breaking myself down, reforming myself in a mold of my own making. As senior year rolled around, and I found my professors encouraging me to pursue a Ph.D., I could not help but believe that Fate had big plans for me. Or, more accurately, that I had big plans for Fate.
    Thus it was that I enrolled in graduate school intending to write my dissertation on the one topic that meant most to me: free will. And damned if I wouldn’t nail that puppy to the floor, melding existentialist fervor with analytical precision, forging a new mode of expression that would not only reshape a three-thousand-year-old debate but clear a new path for philosophy going into the twenty-first century. Applause, please.
    Such grandiosity was misplaced. To begin with, I’m not smart enough, although it has taken me years to come to grips with that. (If I even have.) More important, I was out of sync with the times. The bitter facts of contemporary American academia are thus: one writes not to change the shape of the world but to get one’s degree; one gets a degree in order to get a job; one gets a job because one must live. If one is very talented and very lucky, one catches the attention of Oxford University Press; one sells three hundred copies, all to other philosophers, and toasts oneself with a bottle of mediocre merlot.
    I was naïve—not to mention arrogant—to expect an exemption. Yet all the great thinkers have that presumptuous streak, a sense