Why I Smoke Cigars and Listen to Rock and Roll
When I was an undergraduate philosophy student at Sonoma State University in the late 1990s, one of my professors and mentors, theologian and philosopher Philip Clayton, occasionally came to class obviously just having ridden a motorcycle to campus. The contrast between a Yale-educated, erudite, philosophically compelling professor-type and a leather-wearing, motorcycle-riding existentialist-type was fascinating to my younger self.
Why would a professor such as Philip Clayton feel the need to ride a motorcycle? Was it the thrill? The danger? The image? A bit of rebelliousness? The internalization of some literary James Dean archetype? All of the above? Why wasn’t being a philosopher, theologian, father, husband, and mentor enough? What was this apparently deep-seated need, not only to take life into one’s own hands by getting on a motorcycle but to display the contrast (or perhaps the internal tension) between his East-coast Yale-educated self and his (perhaps) more authentic motorcycle-riding self, and even between himself and the other professors in the Sonoma State philosophy department (which itself contained an interesting set of diverse personalities at that time)?
Looking back now as an approaching-middle-age philosophy instructor myself, I find myself channeling and displaying this inner duality in my own life, appearance, and demeanor as a philosophy instructor. I may not be Yale-educated, even though I did spend a year on the East Coast as a first-year graduate student at Syracuse University, but I do sometimes have the appearance of an erudite, Ivy League philosophy professor. (As an interesting aside, years ago when I was a teaching assistant at UC Santa Cruz, one of my students drew a picture of me teaching our discussion section instead of writing a written evaluation of me as a teaching assistant. In the drawing, this student labeled me “East Coast,” as apparently even then my dialogical teaching style struck this student as more of an East Coast teaching style, a teaching style I undoubtedly inherited from and modeled after the teaching style of Philip Clayton, even to this day.)
Not only do I sometimes dress and act the part of an erudite philosophy instructor, an image that is simultaneously fully authentic and a type of theatrical performance, but I also find myself manifesting the same rebellious tendencies and contrasts that I once perceived as being typified by Philip Clayton’s motorcycle riding. Two specific manifestations of this rebelliousness come to mind: cigar smoking and listening to rock and roll. I may not be brave or brazen enough to ride a motorcycle (in reality, I would be dead within a week were I to try riding one), but I do see the value of taking life into one’s own hands from time to time, especially after being so fully in one’s own headspace as a philosopher and the intellectual heaviness that can come along with it. I fancy my occasional cigar smoking to be my own rebellious way to take my life into my own hands, a metaphorical flipping of the proverbial bird to those who would play it safe their entire lives, a symbolic and literal manifestation of my view that there are more important things in life than mere health—things that may be bad for the body but good for the soul. I think, perhaps that this is also the reason I enjoy hiking up the tallest mountains wherever I happen to be, such as the days long ago that I spent hiking up the tallest peaks in Yosemite’s High Country. It’s safer to stay in the valleys, risker to go it alone and blaze up the trail, one foot after the other. But the reward is worth the risk to life and limb.
So where does rock and roll fit into the picture? I have always been a musician—a pianist, and now also a guitarist and a drummer as well. But I get my existential kicks not only from playing music but from listening to it as well, letting its rhythms and harmonies and melodies permeate into my very being, physically, letting my body resonate with the sympathetic vibrations, often at the highest possible volume—not merely to listen to the music, but to feel it. But, like the symbolism of a Yale-educated professor leaving class and hopping on a motorcycle, I, too, find myself using this aspect of my personality to signify something to my students. A common sight (or sound, as the case may be!), before or after class at the community college where I now teach, is to hear and see me entering or leaving the college’s parking lot with the rock and roll blasting from my car at full volume. I am signaling, even though I am a heady, intellectual, eloquent, quasi-erudite, nearing-middle-age philosophy teacher now, that I am also embodied, artistic, and well-rounded, or at least more well-rounded than my less-rebellious colleagues with quieter music played safely within the confines of their own vehicles.
My choice of music is equally important. I ensure that much of the music blaring from my car while I am entering or leaving the college’s parking lot is something countercultural from the 1960s or 1970s: The Byrds, Steppenwolf, later songs from The Beatles, occasionally something slightly more modern from U2, and so on, anything that conveys the right combination of rebelliousness, optimism, idealism, and counterculture so essential to my own self-identity. I’ve never been one for being part of the crowd, even when I know I have to play the game socially, professionally, or culturally. And showing my California counterculture rock-and-roll roots outside (and sometimes inside!) the classroom is a surprisingly effective form of value signaling, to make sure my students know that there is more to life than mere philosophy, more to education than mere knowledge, more to being in the world than looking at it and analyzing it from the perspective of a passive observer. I want to show anyone who happens to be watching or listening that I am a genuinely Heideggerian Dasein, an in-der-Weld-Sein (a Being-in-the-World), not a mere philosopher who doesn’t know how to really live. This, to me, is philosophy as performance art, perhaps just as important as any particular philosophy lesson or topic du jour within the classroom.
Am I really such a rebel without a cause? No, I don’t think so. I am a rebel with a cause: to demonstrate to my students, directly or indirectly, that one can simultaneously be fully intellectual and fully embodied, that one can fully play the necessary cultural, political, professional, and social games (or “language games,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein called them) and also be fully authentic as a unique individual, that one can value the norms of a society while also being able to test them by pushing the boundaries of those norms to their visible and invisible limits, and perhaps simply to reveal something fully authentic about myself as an individual to the world at large—whether or not anybody ever notices or cares about the volume of the countercultural music blasting from my car in the college parking lot, occasionally with cigar in hand—“ready-to-hand” as Martin Heidegger called it.
