Teaching and the good life: A critique of the ascetic ideal in education

In the so-called vocations of life where everybody must make a choice, men reveal a pathetic modesty. They say in effect, "We are 'called' to serve our fellow men and be useful to them, and the same is true of our neighbor and his neighbor too." And so each man serves another, nobody has a calling to exist for himself, but always for others. So we have a tortoise resting on the back of another tortoise, etc., etc. When each man finds his own goal in someone else, then nobody has any purpose of his own in existing. And this "existing for others" is the most comical of comedies.