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There’s a couple of lines of a passage in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations that’ve been bothering me,

“Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready, too — ready to understand heaven and earth.”

• Marcus Aurelius, Trans. Gregory Hays. Meditations (approx. 170s), Modern Library: New York. 2002. Book 3: Incarnuntum, 13. p 33

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to lose one’s philosophical acumen after graduating if it’s not being put to daily use. Habits of mind are malleable, pummelled and dented by hailstorms of rhetoric. Flattened and malformed under the grand soap box that is social media. Fatigued and made brittle by the fluctuating friction of daily life.

Hence, it’s not simply that one must, like the doctor, keep her scalpel and instruments handy for emergencies. These instruments need ongoing handling. They require ongoing inspection and maintenance. They must be disinfected. Whetted. And free from rust. Lest a patient die under the hands that would save her but for a dull blade and want of practice.

I’m not being hyperbolic. If one isn’t practicing philosophy, one ceases to do what philosophers do. A paper degree folded into plaits to fan one’s ego does not a philosopher make.

And so I reach into my right hip pocket and unfold the paper I’ve forgotten there, now faded and flaking at the seams. I gently pry it open, tape some holes, press it flat under my laptop. Like the greying doctor who waxes his worn black medicine bag, I tell myself, I’m growing old, but I can still deliver. And, more slowly now, I begin to read,

The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language, Rudolph Carnap.