Meta-Philosophy

At LAX

Philosophers are getting to be rare birds, but I once actually  met one. It was at a place called LAX, which is best described as a huge insight factory on the very edge of the Pacific Rim. People were landing from London and Chicago and Singapore and Rome and Atlanta and Beijing. I myself had been traveling in the East, someplace ancient and fustian--New York, New Hampshire, New Bedford, one of those. I hadn't seen a palm tree in weeks, and at this time of year that always makes me nervous.

Anyway,  this guy was accosting me and everyone else as we headed for the baggage claim, standing in the main concourse with a badge and can.

I put some change in his can and he responded cheerily, ”Rawls you very much.” I pulled up short at that, and asked him what he meant.

“Nobody usually notices when I say that,” he said, “It’s about your contribution to equality of result.”

We chatted for a few minutes about Rawls and philosophy in America. All the while, he was stretching and twisting to place his can in front of people coming down the concourse, on their way to baggage claim.

“Don’t you think that Rawls’s use of the ‘veil of ignorance’ device is a bit counterfactual?” I asked. “The idea that we will choose a fair society if we don’t know anything about where we will fit into that society seems strange to me, maybe even irrational. Wouldn’t most human beings try to look beneath the veil, to pierce it somehow, find out what social percentile they are going to be in, and then design a society which treats everyone well down to that percentile and devil take the rest?"

His eyebrows twitched, and he darted left to stick his can under the gut of a hugely fat man who was waddling down the concourse.

“Obese help me,” he said piteously, and the man gave him some coins.

“And why,” I pressed him, "is a social philosophy which amounts to an arcane thought experiment a good thing? Maybe we should turn our energies to the kind of social philosophy advocated by Raymond Geuss? To careful reflection on the actual givens?" (Geuss was recently quoted by Brian Leiter on his blog  at http://leiterreports.typepad.com/, October 14, 2007.)

The philosopher almost genuflected to get his can under the noses of two very short ladies wearing nun‘s habits.

“Saints besmit you,” he said. Imprisoned and fortified by their vows of poverty, they appeared not to see him at all.

“Well, I’m not really a Rawlsian,” he confessed. “I’m more of a Carthusianite.”

A Carthusianite?

“Yes, I’m hardly a Carthusian—they’re the strictest monastic order in the Catholic Church. Me, I’m drunk much of the time. So I must be a Carthusianite. I don’t deal with the Veil of Ignorance, but I practice the Carthusian spirituality of the 13th Century, which is its source.”

“I thought Kant was Rawls’s source.”

“Not at all. Or not only. Rawls is very close to those Carthusians who believe in the Cloud of Forgetting, behind which you put everything you know about the world—everything but God.”

This was getting interesting, or perhaps weird. I pressed him. “So when Rawls puts everything behind the Veil of Ignorance, that’s like the Cloud of Forgetting—except that while the Carthusians have only the Cloud of Forgetting, Rawls goes behind the veil, or the cloud, and yet retains his conceptual rigor—his own capacity to argue and choose. That’s why he can identify the Veil of Ignorance as a veil of ignorance. Carthusians just call it forgetting, but sometimes forgetting is good.”

“You’re telling me,” he said. “But there’s really nothing rigorous about Rawls, at least in comparison to the Carthusians.” My interlocutor had abandoned his cup wielding and was now standing directly, a little belligerently, in front of me. “The Cloud of Forgetting, which you control, is so to speak behind you. Ahead of you is the Cloud of Unknowing; God is there but behind that cloud, and you can never penetrate it. You have to live with that: that you are between two clouds.

“So it's a little like deconstruction. Logical argumentation and conceptual rigor, to the Carthusians, are just two more idols. And John Rawls,who could not forget them, is just as much a metaphysical fool as Scotus the Dunce!”

I had never heard John Rawls called a dunce before, and I didn’t much like it. If Rawls was a dunce, what was I? After all, Rawls was at Harvard, and I was at LAX. Worse: at LAX talking to this guy. I grew rather indignant.

“But if Rawls were to reject logic and clarity, how could he even be an analytical philosopher?” And the beggar, the weird guy, came right back:

“Is that a good thing to be?” he asked. "I’m not entirely sure. What is analytical philosophy, anyway? If analytical philosophy means careful devotion to clarity and rigor in argumentation, then I am a proud analyst. But if, as I suspect, it means caring only about those things, then I am a proud Continental!

“So beware of me, for I am both Skylla and Charybdis.”

He doffed his cap. The lineaments of his face collected differently around his huge mustache, and I said a quick farewell.

[Author: John McCumber]

Beethoven's score

In the Northwestern University philosophy department, where I taught for 15 years, were two old pieces of furniture: an armoire and a banquette or settee. The armoire stood behind the secretary’s desk, giving a bit of privacy to David Hull—the world famous endowed professor who had given his own office to the graduate students as their lounge, and whose desk was now behind it. The banquette nestled inconspicuously to the right of his desk, at the very rear of the office. They had both belonged to Franz Brentano (1838-1917), a philosopher and forerunner of phenomenology. His early support for the philosophy department was a reminder of Chicago’s German heritage—still strong to this day, but now publicly, even carefully, forgotten. Like so many things in the United States.

The armoire and the banquette had been together long, and had traveled far. But there was, as I discovered, more to their story than that. Like so many other things, it has to do with Beethoven.

Among the personal papers found after Beethoven’s death was an extraordinary letter. Bearing neither address nor date, it is a passionate outpouring to someone identified, then and since, as the “Immortal Beloved” (unsterbliche Geliebte). In places, it is exalted: “My angel, my all, my very self…I can live only wholly with you or not at all.” In places, mundane: “I have learned that letters must be posted very early in the morning on Mondays.” It expresses not only Beethoven's love but his fear of it, in the symbolic form of the tale of a horrifying night journey through a stormy forest.

The letter is the factual basis of the movie “Immortal Beloved.” Because of its mundanity, it was clearly written to a real person--not one of Beethoven's many fantasy lovers. It proves that, if only once, this paranoid, drunken lout was capable of genuine love--and even more surprisingly, that someone else could love him. But who? The question echoed and reechoed through Vienna, but it was not answered for 150 years.

In his 1977 biography of Beethoven, Maynard Solomon probably solved the riddle. In a tour de force of scholarship, he first exposed previous theories as unfounded. He then reconstructed, from the letter itself, a series of requirements for the identity of its intended recipient. Slowly, as he worked through these, a figure emerged--one woman, and one alone, who met every one of his requirements. It is not the person identified in the movie, but the wife of a well known businessman—a woman considered by contemporaries to be beautiful and melancholy, married to a man she esteemed but could not love. Her name was Antonie Brentano.

She was the sister in law of the poet Clemens Brentano and the novelist Bettina Brentano (who introduced her to Beethoven). She was also, then, the aunt of Franz. For according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Franz was the nephew of Clemens and Bettina. Too young to be Antonie's son, he must have been her nephew as well.

The Immortal Beloved lived for more than forty years after her affair with Beethoven, and during that time presumably visited her nephew. Did she hang her coat in that armoire? Did she sit on that banquette?

There are further possibilities, for Franz Brentano was a renegade Catholic priest. At least early on in his career, he was probably without the resources to buy furniture. Could some of it have come from his well-to-do aunt? Were these perhaps her own personal possessions? Did Beethoven score on our settee?

Of course we will never know. These reflections provide, not facts, but a luster of immortality to two old pieces of furniture with several fascinating messages.

One of those messages is for philosophers,though not only for them: History is where you find it, and you will find it everywhere--if you don't forget to look.

[Author: John McCumber]

Academic Freedom at University of Chicago

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

October 10, 2007

Media Contact: Daniel Klimek

T: (773) 817-1291 E: Dpk24g@gmail.com

Web: http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org

Press arrangements please contact:

University of Chicago News Office

T: (773) 702-8356. E: w-harms@uchicago.edu

“IN DEFENSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM”

PROMINENT SCHOLARS TO SPEAK OUT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

12 October 2007 - 2:00pm - 7:00 pm

Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago

October 12 2007 lecture featuring: Tariq Ali, Akeel Bilgrami, Noam Chomsky, Neve Gordon, Tony Judt and John Mearsheimer

CHICAGO, IL – In light of the controversial tenure denials of eminent Middle East scholar Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein and Dr. Mehrene Larudee earlier this year at DePaul University, the most prominent scholars from across the world will come together this Friday, October 12, 2007, at a conference at the University of Chicago to speak lecturing about the threats to academic freedom at universities.

Professors Finkelstein and Larudee were both denied tenure at DePaul last June for political purposes. After not being allowed to teach his terminal year at DePaul, Finkelstein and the university settled on an agreement in September, when Finkelstein resigned and DePaul acknowledged him to be “a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher.” Professor Larudee, who was a strong supporter of both Finkelstein and Palestinian rights, is currently appealing her case at DePaul. Both scholars will also appear as panelists at the October 12 conference.

The event is to be held at the Rockefeller Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. Chicago, IL 60637. Scheduled speakers include:

- Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Heyman Center, Columbia University

- Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

- Dr. Norman Finkelstein, (formerly) Department of Political Science, DePaul University

- Dr. John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

- Dr. Neve Gordon, Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University

- Dr. Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, New York University

- Dr. Mehrene Larudee, International Studies Program, DePaul University

• Hosted by Tariq Ali, Editor of the New Left Review and Verso Books

The Event is Sponsored By:

Primary Sponsors

Diskord Magazine (University of Chicago, RSO), Verso Books (London), and Academic Freedom Committee (DePaul)

Co-Sponsors

University of Chicago: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for International Studies, and International House Global Voices Program*

DePaul University: International Studies Program, Islamic World Studies Program, and Department of Philosophy*

Community Sponsors

Jewish Voice for Peace - Chicago, American Friends Service Committee – Chicago, and Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (CJPIP)

*The University of Chicago and DePaul University are not sponsoring the event, only the listed departments and centers at these Universities.

# # #

www.academicfreedomchicago.org

"The Lives of Others:" a Parable of a Philosopher

This afternoon, my Department sponsored a showing of the remarkable German movie “The Lives of Others.” The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, was there. The movie is about a secret police officer in the unlamented German Democratic Republic—East Germany—who is assigned to spy in an artistic couple—he a playwright, she an actress.

The critical response to this movie in Germany was pretty intense, but as far as I followed it centered largely on just how accurate was its portrayal of life back in the “DDR.” Von Donnersmark’s comments also had a lot to do with that. But I think the movie has other ramifications and goals, and can be read on many levels. One way is as the parable of a philosopher.

The philosopher in question is Immanuel Kant. In his astonishing fore-telling of the Cold War, which I touched on in a long-ago book, Hegel conjures up the picture of a society in which everything is rational, but rationality is located exclusively in the state. In this society, individuals who do not conform to state planning are irrational, and so evil; they are to be crushed, except when they stamp themselves into servants of the state down to the tiniest detail. Since reality is merely something to be crushed when it does not conform to reason, reason is not enriched by experience (as happens in Hegel's own philosophy), and remains abstract.

Somebody has to do the crushing, and in the DDR that job fell to the Stasi, the secret police, whose motto was “know everything” (Alles wissen!). The protagonist of the movie, a man without emotions, is thus an enforcer of abstract state rationality.

Hegel develops his picture of such rationality in explicit connection with Fichte, but it can also hold for Kant. True, Fichte's detailed social "blueprint" was hypertrophic compared to Kant's relatively empty view of civil society. But in Kantian terms, as in Fichte’s, the only force beyond that of reason in human affairs is coercion; Humean sympathy, love in general, or even friendship, has no place. In order to make itself felt in human affairs, then, reason itself must coerce. It does this for Kant by constituting itself as the legal system. It did it in the DDR by constituting itself as the Stasi.

When the law goes beyond the mere categorical imperative and undertakes to flesh out the nature of the Good Life, as it does for Fichte, we get abstract rationality reposing upon sheer force and directed against the individual—the model, von Donnersmark seems to think, for East Germany.

Fichte claimed to develop his philosophy out of the Critique of Judgment, but his blunt opposition of rationality and coercion actually comes from the second Critique, that of Practical Reason. In that book, as Fichte rightly saw, the causality of reason is direct: reason gives us a plan, and reality must—as far as we are able—be made to conform to that plan. So, East Germany.

In the Critique of Judgment, such subsumption is mediated by the imagination, which must sum up or recapitulate the actual given state of affairs before a concept (or plan) is applied to it. Reason thus cannot move directly from formulating the Good to prescribing changes in reality; instead of forcing, it must hesitate, to allow for that intermediate summing-up. The name of the experience of this hesitation is “beauty,” and art is its strongest vehicle.

So when Gerd Wiesler, the Stasi officer, is ordered to spy on a couple of artists, we know from the start that a crisis is building. This gathering crisis (though not the movie as a whole) reaches its climax in a stunning, wordless, scene in which the officer, sitting in the attic of the artists’ apartment building, listens through his earphones to the playwright playing a sonata. I won’t go into further detail, but let us say that after that, Wiesler’s whole life as an agent of the state is over—and his redemption begins. Abstract and coercive rationality is, in true "Third Critique" fashion, undone by beauty.

The undoing of Reason by beauty was also experienced by Kant himself, as he worked on the Critique of Judgment. Intended to save his system from the inner contradiction eating away at its core—the fact that our Reason tells us to think of ourselves as free, while our Understanding tells us that we are determined—the Critique outruns that assignment and begins to supply norms of its own. In the end, as Friedrich Schiller recognized in his Letters on Aesthetic Education, if you have the right account of what beauty means to the soul you don’t need any of Kant’s transcendental apparatus. You don’t need the transcendental Idea of freedom, or the Categorical Imperative, or the Kingdom of Ends to live a good life. All you need is the experience of beauty and the lessons it teaches.

Wiesler gives in to this aesthetic liberation, but Kant—whose own life was even more abstract than Wiesler's—fights it every step of the way; coercion, I guess, was truly dear to him.

Wiesler lives through the Fall of the Wall to a relatively happy ending. Kant's final tragedy is that the scars and missteps of his greatest struggle—the fallacies and confusions that dog the Third Critique— should be seen by today’s philosophical hoi polloi not as the honorable wounds of a gallant but losing battle, but as evidence of senility.

[Author: John McCumber]