The shabbiness and dilapidation of Toyon Hall was typical of the entire campus of
California Coastal College, which had begun life as an evening business school, then
expanded and flowered briefly as an undergraduate college, and was now obviously in a
phase of entropy. On his walk to the lecture through the unsavory tenderloin, Julius had
found it difficult to distinguish unkempt students from homeless denizens of the
neighborhood. What teacher could avoid demoralization in this setting? Julius began to
understand why Philip wanted to switch careers by moving into clinical work.
He checked his watch. Seven o`clock exactly and right on cue Philip entered the
auditorium, dressed in the professorial uniform of checkered khaki pants, shirt, and a tan
corduroy jacket with sewed–on elbow patches. Extracting his lecture notes from a
properly scuffed briefcase and, without so much as a glance at his audience, he began:
This is the survey of Western philosophy—lecture eighteen—Arthur Schopenhauer.
Tonight I shall proceed differently and stalk my prey more indirectly. If I appear
desultory, I ask your forbearance—I promise I shall soon enough return to the matter
at hand. Let us begin by turning our attention to the great debuts in history.
Philip scanned his audience for some nod of comprehension and, failing to find it,
crooked his forefinger at one of the students sitting nearest him and pointed to the
blackboard. He then spelled out and defined three words,d–e–s–u–l–t–o–r–y, f–o–r–e–b–e–a–r–a-
n–c–e, andd–eb–u–t, which the student dutifully copied onto the blackboard. The student
started to return to his seat, but Philip pointed to a first–row seat, instructing him to
remain there.
Now for great debuts; trust me—my purpose for beginning in such a fashion will, in
time, become apparent. Imagine Mozart stunning the Viennese royal court as he
performed flawlessly on the harpsichord at the age of nine. Or, if Mozart does not
strike a familiar chord(here the faintest trace of a smile), imagine something more
familiar to you, the Beatles at nineteen playing their own compositions to Liverpool
audiences.
Other amazing debuts include the extraordinary debut of Johann Fichte.(Here a
signal to the student to write F–i–c–h–t–eon the board.) Does any one of you remember
his name from my last lecture in which I discussed the great German idealist
philosophers who followed Kant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:
Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte? Of these, Fichte`s life and his debut was the most
remarkable for he began life as a poor uneducated goose shepherd in Rammenau, a
small German village whose only claim to fame was its clergyman`s inspired sermons
every Sunday.
Well, one Sunday a wealthy aristocrat arrived at the village too late to hear the
sermon. As he stood, obviously disappointed, outside the church, an elderly villager
approached him and told him not to despair because the gooseherd, young Johann,
could repreach the sermon to him. The villager fetched Johann, who, indeed, repeated
the entire lecture verbatim. So impressed was the baron by the gooseherd`s
astoundingly retentive mind that he financed Johann`s education and arranged for him
to attend Pforta, a renowned boarding school later attended by many eminent German
thinkers, including the subject of our next lecture, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Johann excelled in school and later at the university, but when his patron died,
Johann had no means of support and took a tutoring job in a private home in Germany
where he was hired to teach a young man the philosophy of Kant, whom he had not
yet read himself. Soon he was entranced by the work of the divine Kant…
Philip suddenly looked up from his notes to survey his audience. Seeing no glint of
recognition in any eyes, he hissed at his audience:
Hello, anybody home? Kant, Immanuel Kant, Kant, Kant, remember?»(He motioned
to the blackboard scribe to write K–a–n–t.) We spent two hours on him last week?
Kant, the greatest, along with Plato, of all the world`s philosophers. I give you my
word: Kant will be on the final. Ah ha, there`s the ticket...I see stirrings of life,
movement, one or two eyes opening. A pen making contact with paper.
So where was I? Ah, yes. The gooseherd. Fichte was next tendered a position
as a private tutor in Warsaw and, penniless, walked all the way only to have the job
denied him when he arrived. Since he was only a few hundred miles from
Konigsberg, the home of Kant, he decided to walk there to meet the master in person.
After two months he arrived at Konigsberg and, audaciously, knocked on Kant`s door
but was not granted an audience. Kant was a creature of habit and not inclined to
receive unknown visitors. Last week I described to you the regularity of his
schedule—so exact that the townspeople could set their watches by seeing him on his
daily walk.
Fichte assumed he was refused entry because he had no letters of
recommendation and decided to write his own in order to gain an audience with Kant.
In an extraordinary burst of creative energy he wrote his first manuscript, the
renownedCritique of All Revelation, which applied Kant`s views on ethics and duty to
the interpretation of religion. Kant was so impressed with the work that he not only
agreed to meet with Fichte but encouraged its publication.
Because of some curious mishap, probably a marketing ploy of the publisher,
theCritique appeared anonymously. The work was so brilliant that critics and the
reading public mistook it for a new work by Kant himself. Ultimately, Kant was
forced to make a public statement that it was not he who was the author of this
excellent manuscript but a very talented young man named Fichte. Kant`s praise
ensured Fichte`s future in philosophy, and a year and a half thereafter he was offered
a professorship at the University of Jena.
«That,” Philip looked up from his notes with an ecstatic look on his face and then
jabbed the air with an awkward show of enthusiasm, «that is what I call a debut!» No
students looked up or gave a sign of registering Philip`s brief awkward display of
enthusiasm. If he felt discouraged by his audience`s unresponsiveness, Philip did not
show it and, unperturbed, continued:
And now consider something closer to your hearts—athletic debuts. Who can forget
the debut of Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, or Michael Chang, who won grand–slam
professional tennis tournaments at fifteen or sixteen? Or the teenaged chess prodigies
Bobby Fischer or Paul Morphy? Or think of JosГ© Raoul Capablanca, who won the
chess championship of Cuba at the age of eleven.
Finally, I want to turn to a literary debut—the most brilliant literary debut of all
time, a man in his midtwenties who blazed onto the literary landscape with a
magnificent novel…
Here, Philip stopped in order to build the suspense and looked up, his countenance
shining with confidence. He felt assured of what he was doing—that was apparent. Julius
watched in disbelief. What was Philip expecting to find? The students on the edge of their
seats, trembling with curiosity, each murmuring, «Who was this literary prodigy?»
Julius, in his fifth–row seat, swiveled his head to survey the auditorium: glazed
eyes everywhere, students slumped in chairs, doo–dling, poring over newspapers,
crossword puzzles. To the left, a student stretched out asleep over two chairs. To the
right, two students at the end of his row embraced in a long kiss. In the row directly in
front of him, two boys elbowed each other as they leered upward, toward the back of the
room. Despite his curiosity, Julius did not turn to follow their gaze—probably they were
