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Always Trying to Escape
When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take
some humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found astronomy--as a
humanities
course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature
and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find.
Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to
political
liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in
social occasions--the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the
"destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk," in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is
the remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is
now used to conve ideas through writing on the blackboard.
But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always trying to escape.
But when we had to write a theme on Goethe's
Faust
, it was hopeless! The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else.
I was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, "I
can't
do it. I'm just
not
gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!"
One of my fraternity brothers said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to
do the work. You oughta write a theme on
something
--same number of words--and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the
Faust
, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to writ e a theme on it."
So I did that. I wrote a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how
there are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do
with
Faust
. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote
into
the
Faust
."
"Ridiculous!" I said.
But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.
"All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try."
So I added half a page to what 1 had already written, and said that Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and Goethe
is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked it all in, and handed in my theme.
The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I went in expecting the worst.
He said, "The introductory material is fine, but the
Faust
material is a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good-- B + ." I escaped again!
Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class,
and he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a
thing
. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to
pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers
and drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga mugga mugga wugga wugga . . . and everybody got excited! They were
all talking to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga," and
phoom!
--it sank back into chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were
to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have,
called sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it
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