The Man With the Answers: Allen GrapplesWith Life’s Questions

"What is my purpose in life?”

It’s the sort of philosophical dilemma that any member of last year’s graduating class might have put to Richard Allen ’78, who sat at a table in New York City’s Union Square last year offering free advice to passersby.

It’s also a question that Allen, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, may likely have asked himself—repeatedly.

Some three decades since he penned “undecided” on his first-year study card, Allen, who goes by Rick, has made a career out of attempting to answer such questions—for himself and others.

His zeal for self-discovery has led him on a winding, uncharted route worthy of Socrates, from the student’s desk to the teacher’s podium to that table in Union Square, with stops in Sussex and Zimbabwe along the way.

“I wanted to see things from another perspective for a change,” he says about his year teaching science in a Zimbabwean high school, but he could just as easily be describing his entire raison d’etre.

‘What Should I Get Out of College?’

Allen’s years at Harvard were defined by a smattering of classes on the “philosophy of mind,” late-night moral debates with roommates and heavy reading, all of which contributed to “developing one’s worldview,” he says over the phone from his Brooklyn apartment. “That seems to be mostly what I’m about, as opposed to occupational success. Harvard was a good place to do that.”

Allen started developing his worldview early in life. Born in Madison, N.J., Allen was 12 when his family moved to “exotic” western Virginia, where he attended the all-male Woodberry Forest boarding school. While his parents encouraged him to study hard (he started reading at age three) it was in high school that he became exposed to the sort of philosophical exploration that would later become his passion.

His two favorite teachers—one of whom taught Allen Far Eastern philosophy—were Harvard grads and encouraged him to apply.

With a stellar high school record, Allen arrived in the Yard with wide eyes and an “overly optimistic, somewhat naïve confidence in myself”—a confidence partly quashed by a first-semester cell biology grade of “C+.” Nevertheless he chose to pursue his scientific interests, taking pre-med courses and choosing to concentrate in psychology. In his sophomore year, Allen fell in love twice—first with Joy A. Maulitz ’78, a classmate at Radcliffe, and then with philosophy.

“I realized the only reason I was interested in the psychology are the philosophical issues,” he says. “After you finish reading these [psychological] studies you’re still left with all these questions.”

Allen’s pursuit of answers to moral questions led him to take a smattering of philosophy courses, an approach that allowed his vast curiosity to roam in all directions. Even though he received his degree in psychology, what Allen really wanted was to pursue his philosophical inquiries.

“He was always infinitely curious and questioning, yet with a very down to earth sense of humor,” says David Sidman ’78, Allen’s three-time roommate, now the CEO of his own Internet startup. “I remember once we were watching ‘Star Trek’ after dinner in the Union [the old student dining hall], and in this episode the Enterprise encounters a giant spinning cube in space. Rick turned to me and mused, ‘Does God play dice with the universe?’”

In the spring of his senior year, Allen was still enrolled in organic chemistry, the most tortuous of pre-med classes, despite having given up on his pre-med program. Joy, by then his ex-girlfriend, told him later that her roommate had seen him at the exam.

“She said, ‘Rick looked so relaxed, completely comfortable in the present, he looked like a Buddha.’ ‘That’s why I love him,’ Joy said. The truth was,” Allen chuckles, “I had no idea what was going on. I seemed the ideal of non-attachment because I was going to flunk the course.”

Joy, now a radio host and attorney, remembers her former college sweetheart as a sharp intellect with often soft edges.

“He’s one of the brightest people I’ve ever known, and one of the sweetest,” she says. Despite his academic enthusiasm, she says she doesn’t recall much talk about life after college. “I remember him being more of an abstract thinker. He wasn’t real career-oriented.”

Allen’s thesis was emblematic of his wide interest in “philosophy of mind” and his academic strengths. It was entitled, “Knowledge, Mind, and World: an Exercise in Descriptive Epistemology.” Even though he says it was “extraordinarily broad,” it earned Allen a magna cum laude degree.

‘What Am I Meant to Study?’

While the Harvard of the late 1970s was a comfortable fit for Allen, allowing him to cultivate “a combination of intellectual seriousness and playfulness,” he wonders if the result was a wealth of knowledge that may have been too broad.

“I indulged every intellectual whim and didn’t specialize much,” he says. “I was always doing well in school because I was doing what I wanted. And that persisted through Harvard.”

He speaks with the softness and delicacy of a patient philosopher, meting out meaning, carefully navigating over a busy landscape of thought. In college, he says that navigation involved “jumping over the hurdles that society associates with eventual success.” But Allen never saw academic life as a race for professional achievement.

“For me, I just loved jumping hurdles. Or, I didn’t experience them as hurdles but as the search for truth. I think that, all around me, people had a much more practical, get-ahead orientation. I was just experiencing this happy coincidence between what I most desired to do—to learn—and what society was pushing me to do,” he says. “It was a very un-alienated condition.”

After graduating, Allen eschewed the job market and traditional professional school path and instead gleefully travelled to England’s Sussex University for a one-year Masters degree program in philosophy. His return stateside in 1979 found him working as a research assistant at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and in New York City, where he took a much-needed breather from the academy.

“I hung out with some artists in the East Village, went out to clubs regularly,” he says of his heady city nights. “I didn’t even unpack my books. I had a year of not any reading at all.”

Allen soon decided he needed to “do something useful” someplace outside of New York. So he took a job as a teacher at Kutama College, an elite high school in Zimbabwe. Aside from teaching science and math and coaching the swim team, Allen helped the Science Club to win a national competition for a psychological study on attitudinal changes during high school. Ultimately the teaching experience was as edifying as his years as an undergraduate.

“It was a really fun and challenging adventure,” he says, “I relished the feeling of being in a whole new culture and making a contribution.”

Allen returned to New York less enchanted with academic life than he had been before. But downtown reading groups on Marx and Baudrillard reminded him of his cerebral bent. “I thought, if I’m naturally gravitating to these reading groups, I might as well go to grad school in philosophy.”

“What Does One Do With a Ph.D. in Philosophy?”

In 1986, Allen entered Columbia’s Ph.D. program to study a slew of fields—from ethics to the philosophy of language—and found himself teaching again. This time he became a preceptor for Columbia’s famous “Great Books” course, where he taught eager undergraduates about philosophers like Aristotle, Locke and Hegel.

That latter German’s approach became especially influential in Allen’s teaching and his own philosophical musing, which he says is always about looking for new perspectives.

“I love the scope of what [Hegel] attempts,” he enthuses. “He puts the focus on what it is to experience being in a particular order, and goes inside the perspective of each position, trying to trace out the contradictions and paradoxes and difficulties.”

Hegel’s notions of development through struggle also played a key part in forming his philosophical mind-set. “If we have a six-hour debate about world history, our positions will have evolved through the encounter,” he explains. “The position you have at 10 o’clock is a result of the flaws you had at nine o’clock.”

With a new Ph.D. under his belt (he graduated from Columbia in 2000), a passion for thoughtful conversation and a bit of career lust, Allen decided to enter the marketplace—of ideas. Last fall, Allen set up a table in Union Square’s fruit market and, hoping to snag future paying clients, offered free one-on-one philosophical consultations to anyone who had a pressing existential concern.

For five to 30 minutes at a time, Allen—a certified “philosophical counselor”—fielded inquiries about the meaning of life, the value of non-violent political action, how to avoid being bored and the age-old stumpers: “Who Made God?” “What is the central philosophical question of our time?” and “Why are people in New York City so low in energy and in a rut?” It was a mix of Hegel, Socrates and Lucy from the “Peanuts” comic strip, who sold Charlie Brown pearls of wisdom for five cents apiece.

But in real life, Allen learned, such therapeutic philosophical guidance, even in the harried world of post-Sept. 11 New York, can’t quite pay the bills. Still, while it won’t work as a career—the table led to only a couple of paying clients—Allen hopes to pursue his “Client-Centered Philosophical Inquiry” as a side project through his website, www.client-centered.com. As the name suggests, Allen is hoping to reemphasize that his work is not about offering answers, but merely helping to look for them.

“The philosophy table idea could be seen as arrogant,” says Allen, who lacks the slightest trace of self-importance. “What nudges it back to more humble orientation is that someone is bringing a complicated position and the two of us work on his puzzle together.”

“What’s To Come For Me?”

As for Allen’s own puzzle—that is, what to do next—at the age of 46, he is starting to rethink his wait-and-see approach. Since abandoning his notion of the “ideal relationship” a couple of years ago, Allen says his own relationship with his wife, Eileen, has been “wonderful.” Now he wonders if abandoning the idea of the “ideal career” might be just as good.

“Great relationships are built, not found,” he notes. “Perhaps one should not be looking for a career role, that will suit one’s current identity as if it’s a pre-ordained match, but rather try to work with a career and build it.”

Now Allen’s rethinking his own fear of specialization. Next month, he’ll start working for a New York hedge fund in its strategic growth department.

“I’ve joked with friends that I’m going through a reverse mid-life crisis. I’ve been thinking about the meaning of life for 20 years, and now I want a flannel suit and a corporate job.”

But he won’t stop giving advice. Of course, for newly-graduating seniors trying to decide on a career, Allen isn’t totally sure what to say.

“One can always reexamine the balance” between intellectual satisfaction and practical need, he says. “You can always say, ‘For the next 12 months I’m going to go in the exploratory, impractical, let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom direction. And then you can try something else.”

—Staff writer Alex L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu.