The Slip. Mark Sampson
took a long, deep breath. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” I said, unsheepishly as I could, into the abyss. I could have said more to them; probably should have said more, facing head on what they had seen and read on Twitter and Facebook and in the Toronto-fucking-Sun. They could have asked me questions and shared their “feelings.” And we could have related what I had said on TV — that abominable blunder — to what we’d been reading and discussing all term. It was applicable, after all; and I was even a little impressed that my slip had caused such a shockwave through these tyro philosophers.
But I didn’t. Chalk it up to cowardice, I suppose. Instead, I took up my copy of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals — a book I had first inhaled as a fifteen-year-old in Charlottetown, one that ripped through the fog of adolescence like a sunbeam — and held it aloft in a gesture that said, You’ve read this, yes? No acknowledgement, one way or the other. I pressed on, making a few biographical comments on Immanuel Kant and situating him into our somewhat jumbled chronology of the Enlightenment. Then I asked the most basic question one could to anybody who’d read the book. “Okay, people, in a nutshell, what is Kant’s categorical imperative? How does he define and explain it in the context of our reading?”
Nothing. The girls merely scowled at their desks or examined their cuticles. The boys lay slumped in their seats as if poured there by a cement truck. A few of the faces threw tight little smiles my way, but they were full of unmistakable malice.
No matter. I slogged on, working myself into a lather about Kant and his immeasurable contribution to both the Enlightenment and all of Western thought. I threaded a careful needle with our previous readings, explaining how Kant’s works had added a crucial shading to those of his contemporaries, how his introduction of deontology to the mix had crystallized so much of what the Age of Reason was trying to articulate about human nature. “It’s clear to even a casual reader what the categorical imperative means to the study of ethics,” I said, “but what about reason itself? What does the categorical imperative contribute to our notions of the rational?” Dead silence. Not even the gentle susurrus that often preceded class participation. I plugged on, detailing the difference between Kant’s categorical imperative and his hypothetical imperative. “What bearing does this distinction have on what we discussed before — about, say, the courts or even industrial relations?” Nothing. “Okay, what does it say about one-on-one interactions between people? How we treat each other?” Nothing again. Okay, kids, I thought, how does it relate to what I said about those corporate assholes on television yesterday that’s put this bowling pin up your asses? But I bit my tongue.
As we approached the end of our eighty minutes together, Sebastian and I unveiled their next fortnightly writing assignment. This was another element that set my course apart, and, to be honest, contributed most to the libellous pouting that took place about me on ratemyprofessors.com. I did not believe in handholding or steering students toward certain thesis statements. Doing so ran counter to what I considered to be the true spirit of scholarship. Sebastian worked the laptop to make their essay assignment appear on the screen behind me. It was, in total, a lengthy quote from the second section of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, followed by the word “discuss.”
I read the quote aloud, explained a few things in it, then asked if anyone had any questions. Their silence lingered for a moment. But then one young man, wearing his baseball cap backward, raised a beefy arm off his desk.
“Yes?” I asked, pointing at him, gratitude flooding me like a fever.
“What does Kant mean by ‘rational being’?” he smirked. “What would he consider to be an irrational being? Like — a woman?”
“Shut up!” the pretty young lady sitting next to him, obviously his girlfriend, screamed. She didn’t so much punch his shoulder as shove it angrily with her fist. Two other girls, less pretty, sitting in the row in front of him, twisted around in their seats. “Asshole!” “You’re such a prick!”
Clearly some residual argument from before I entered the room. Clearly. As the commotion died down, I waggled my furry face at them, a gesticulation that said: What the fuck are you people on about? But no explanation came.
“That is all,” I snarled, gathering up my notes, and fled from the lectern.
Sebastian and I spoke little as we made our way through University College and up its ornate staircase that led to my office, where we needed to discuss Thursday’s group topics. I unlocked my office door — decorated with black-and-white images of Kant, Hume, Rousseau, Locke, Mill, and Descartes, as well as a five-by-twenty plank of PEI driftwood with the phrase SAPERE AUDE (“dare to be wise”) embossed on it — and we entered my large, book-choked lair. Too many books, in fact. The tsundoku spilled out of overstuffed shelves and across the floor and onto the chairs. (Grace had said that if we bought a small cottage in the Kawarthas — something she’d been hankering for us to do for a while now — we would have extra wall space for books, since we didn’t seem to have a square inch left at 4 Metcalfe Street or here.) Sebastian moved some out of the way so he could sit, and I took my place behind the desk, turning on my green-shaded banker’s lamp.
I glanced at my desk phone. The red message light was flashing. I never got messages on this phone. I raised a finger at Sebastian in a give-me-a-moment gesture and picked up the receiver, trying to remember how the fuck I accessed voicemail on this thing. I figured it out, and discovered I had seven messages waiting for me. The first was from Roberta Rosenbaum, a reporter with the Globe and Mail whom I dated briefly in the late ’90s when I first began freelancing for them, and with whom I was still friendly. “Oh, hey, Philip, it’s Roberta R.,” she sang into the receiver. “I bet you can guess why I’m calling. Just hoping you could give me a statement abou —” DELETE. The others were from media outlets as well: reporters from the National Post, the Toronto Sun, two AM talk radio stations, the Toronto Star, and, bringing up the rear, the CBC. I deleted each without listening all the way to the end.
Hanging up, I looked at Sebastian. “Reporters,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Did you want me to …” and he motioned to the door.
“No, no. Stay. We have work to do.”
So we did our work, going over the group topics with stunted, false alacrity. Like me, Sebastian had Kant’s text practically memorized, and I marvelled again at how seasoned he seemed for someone not yet thirty. He took the lead in figuring out which passages to focus on and the discussion prompts we’d give the students. I agreed with each of his choices, but with a kind of torpid distraction. When he noticed this he stopped and looked at me.
“Sir …”
“Hmm?”
“Do you, do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t mean to pry,” he went on. “But are you going to make a statement about …” and he nodded toward my phone.
“I don’t know,” I sighed. Then I looked at him. “What do you think I should do?”
He made that lips-pulled-from-clenched-teeth face again, his throat a brief spasm of dismay. “I think you need to say something. Even if it’s a blanket apology to Sneed so we can all move on. That would be better than nothing.”
I gave a weak chortle. “My wife said the same thing this morning. I … I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Look,” he said, “I know there are lots of people in this department who hate your guts, who’d love to see you eat a big mouthful of crow over this. But there are also plenty of us who respect you deeply, who know that what you do makes an incredible contribution to the political discourse in this country. And we want to see you eat crow over this — because we respect you.”
“You know, Sebastian,” I said, finding his Gefolgschaft touching, “you really are wise beyond your years.”
He tried to smile. “Sapere aude.”
“Sapere aude,” I replied. “Okay,