I have long been fascinated by the contrast between authors who published their most famous works early in their lives and those who published them late. It does not seem that there should be a difference in how we evaluate a writer’s work or influence, but it does make a difference, it seems. When I was in graduate school we had a little joke or game that we played which consisted in filling in the blanks in the following statement: “I am now younger than ____ when he or she wrote _____.” Berkeley and Hume were downers. Berkeley was only 25 when he published The Principles of Human Knowledge and Hume, Lord love us, was a mere 28 when he published volumes One and Two of A Treatise of Human Nature, arguably the greatest piece of philosophy ever written in the English language. On the other hand, we were great fans of Locke and Kant who had the decency to wait until they were in their 50s before publishing their immortal works.
One sees the same contrast in the writings of American
novelists. JD Salinger was a young man when he published Catcher in the Rye and
although he published several books after that, he spent the second half of his
life in isolation publishing nothing at all. Ralph Ellison became immortal
when, at the age of 40, he published Invisible Man but he then published
virtually nothing else until his death 41 years later. Mark Twain, by contrast, kept at it through thick and thin throughout his life.
If I may descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, my
best-known work was written when I was 31 and published five years later. I
wrote or edited something like 15 books in the seven years I taught at Columbia,
more than 50 years ago, but my last published work (leaving aside the seemingly
endless editions of my textbook About Philosophy) appeared 17 years ago.
So I sit here at my desk, looking out at the snow and ice
that fell yesterday on most of North Carolina, feeling that I have somehow let
down the team.
from Tom Lehrer: When Mozart was my age he'd been dead for 10 years.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I think the record holder for continuous years of solid productivity is Gauss. And maybe Picasso? Any other nominees?
ReplyDeleteWhat are the ground rules for this lifetime productivity "competition"?
ReplyDeleteGauss was 77 when he died.... Picasso was 91.
Is there any lifespan requirement?
Henry James, for example, was 72 when he died, and in his later years produced four of the greatest novels in the English language ["Portrait of a Lady," "Wings of the Dove," "The Ambassadors," "The Golden Bowl." Is he a contender?
Ernst Bloch 1885 - 1977
ReplyDeletePrinciple of hope (75 years old)
Traces (75 years old)
Natural law and human dignity (77 years old)
Tübingen Introduction to Philosophy (79 years old)
Atheism in Christianity (83 years old)
Political Measurements (85 years old)
The problem of materialism (87 years old)
Experimentum Mundi (90 years old)
but, these are not the olymic games ? ^^
Robert Frost lived from 1874 to 1963.
ReplyDeleteHe published his last collection of poems, “In The Clearing,” in 1962, at the age of 88.
Recently deceased Stephen Sondheim died at the age of 91.
ReplyDeleteHe wrote his last work for the theater, “Road Show,” in 2008, when he was 78 years old.
John Williams is 90 years old, and still composing, including classical music. He wrote his Second Violin Concerto in 2021. His last film score, other than a Star Wars sequel theme, was for “The Book Thief,” in 2013, when he was 81.
And Arthur Rimbaud never wrote a poem past the age of 21. You are correct, Prof. Woolf, Lord Love Us!
ReplyDeleteI like Marcus Aurelius here
ReplyDelete"Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing."
Or the Buddha
Do not pursue the past
Do not lose yourself in the future
The past no longer is
The future has not yet come
Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now
the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom
We must be diligent today
To wait until tomorrow is too late
In his book on death, Herbert Fingarette considers various metaphors for life and death, and divides them into metaphors that enlighten, and metaphors that deceive. But perhaps there are worse things than self-deception.--Life as a journey; life as a cosmic celebration; life as a gift; life as a dance--surely the worst of all the metaphors, the malign and corrosive one, is life as a competition, with winners and losers.
ReplyDeleteThe Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote what for me is his master work, The Age of Extremes, when he was 77, a work where he was able to analyze critically the fall of Communism, after a life dedicated to that cause. When I speak of critical analysis, I'm not talking about "The God that failed" type of analysis, but a analysis which somehow transcends or at least looks beyond binary cold war postures.
ReplyDeleteHobsbawm continued to publish into his 90's, always lucid, always attentive to details and nuances. The guy never stopped growing intellectually and psychically.
John, you have a real knack for referencing books I’ve never heard of that sound too interesting not to immediately add to my reading list! It’s unfortunate, because that list is already hopelessly long.
ReplyDeleteLet me return the favor by plugging a beautiful-looking book that just arrived on my doorstep. It’s a defense of the right to the freedom from employment, with an admittedly bland title: Self-Realization and Justice, by Julia Maskivker.
@David Zimmerman Well, Gauss had a working life of about 60 years. Picasso somewhat longer. James only about 50. I assume that these days, with modern hygiene and medicine, scientific and artistic working-spans are longer.
ReplyDeleteMichael, thanks for the recommendation. Right now, among other things, I'm working on not working, so I just requested a library loan of Maskivker's book. If you're interested in pursuing the topic, I would strongly recommend Brian O'Connor's book Idleness, wherein O'Connor examines and, so it seems to me, demolishes the great philosophers' prejudices against that conception of freedom.--Fingarette occupied a modest niche at the margins of professional philosophy, out of which he published several outstandingly thoughtful slim books. For me his greatest work was Confucius: The Secular as Sacred which, together with Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good, is among the very few works in philosophy post-1960 the reading of which might change one's life (hopefully for the better).--Many readers of this blog will have seen this, but if not, here's the interview on life and death that Fingarette gave shortly before his death at 97: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/604840/being-97/
ReplyDeleteThe following is an edited version of post from Leiter that I wrote in response to Robert Pasnau who had argued that it is a good idea to do some history of philosophy before rushing into print with ideas of your own on the grounds that few philosophers produce really good work before the age of 35. I have cut out a couple of comments that are not germane to the present discussion, focusing on the factual issue. I have also added some remarks relating to the present discussion.
ReplyDelete‘If you think you have original philosophical thoughts in you, they can wait – indeed, it’s better to let them wait until you’ve had the chance to develop the philosophical breadth and depth to make the most of them.’ This is bad advice in itself but it based a factual claim which betrays an extraordinary ignorance of what Professor Pasnau believes we should all know more about, namely the history of philosophy. I’ll concentrate on the factual claim since once this has been refuted, the advice looks a lot less plausible. According to Professor Pasnau ‘there are a few examples of philosophers who have done important original work in their 20s and early 30s [Hume being the chief], but the list is not long’. Let’s see if we can lengthen that list. Please note that in many cases I don’t have exact dates of birth or exact dates of publication to hand and have assumed that if a book or paper was published in the year that a philosopher turned 25 it was published after his or her 25th birthday. This means that several of the philosophers I mention were even younger than I suggest when they published their ‘original and important ‘ works. Let’s begin with Berkeley. He published most of the works for which he is chiefly remembered - ‘The Principles of Human Knowledge’, ‘Three Dialogues’ and ‘A New Theory of Vision’ – before the age of thirty. Hutcheson’s ‘An Inquiry into the Originals of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue’ was published in 1725 when he was 31. Fichte published ‘Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehrewhen’ he was 32. Schopenhauer published ‘The Fourfold Root’ and the first volume of ‘The World as Will and Representation’ before the age of thirty-one, and, as he himself insists, these works contain the basis of his philosophy. (His later works merely develop and illustrate his earlier ideas.) Kierkegaard published ‘Either/Or’ when he was thirty. By the time he was thirty Marx had published ‘The Holy Family’ and ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’ and had written ‘The German Ideology’ (which I certainly regard as an important work). Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ was published in 1872 when he was twenty-eight. Bradley’s ‘Ethical Studies’ was published in 1876 when he was 30. Moore was thirty in 1903 when ‘Principia Ethica’ was published, though many of the main ideas had been worked out several years earlier. By the time he was thirty, Russell had published ‘German Social Democracy’ (whose critique of Marxism is still worth reading), ‘An Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz’, and ‘An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry’ as well as writing most of ‘The Principles of Mathematics’ and discovering Russell’s Paradox.
By the time he was thirty Wittgenstein had written both the ‘Notes on Logic’ and the ‘Tractatus’, which was published in book form in 1922 when he was thirty-three. All Ramsey’s brilliant works were written before age of twenty-six when he died. Ayer’s ideas were not very original, but such as they were they were developed early, since ‘Language Truth and Logic’ (the only book for which he will be remembered) was published in 1936 when he was twenty-six. Quine’s most important and best article, ‘Truth By Convention’, was published in 1936 when he was 28. Goedel proved the completeness of the predicate calculus when he was 23 and the incompleteness of arithmetic when he was 25. Popper’s ‘Logik der Forschung’ was published in 1934 when he was thirty-two. The Polish version of Tarski’s ‘The Concept of Truth’ was published in 1933 when he too was thirty-two. R.M. Hare’s ‘Imperative Sentences’ came out in 1949 when he was thirty and ‘The Language of Morals’ in 1952 when was 33. PF Strawson published ‘Truth’ and ’On Referring’ when he was thirty-one. Mackie published ‘A Refutation of Morals’, his first manifesto for the error theory, in 1946 when he as twenty-nine. (He would have probably published earlier had it not been for WWII in which he fought. The same is probably true of Hare and Strawson.) Kripke’s work on possible worlds semantics and the completeness proofs for modal logic was done when he was a teenager and his ‘Naming and Necessity’ lectures, which have revolutionized philosophy, were delivered in 1970 when he was 29. They were based on ideas he had developed several years earlier in 1963-1964. David Lewis published ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’ when he was 25, ‘Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic’ when he was 27, ‘Convention’ when he as 28, and ‘Counterfactuals’ when he was 32. Since philosophy has ceased to be an exclusively male preserve, we can now add some girl-wonders to the list of boy-wonders. Ruth Barcan Marcus’s pioneering papers on quantified modal logic were published in 1946 and 1947 when she was about twenty-six. Coming right up to the present, Gillian Russell must have been about thirty (certainly not much older) when she published ‘Truth in Virtue of Meaning’ in 2008 (and if you don’t think this is an important and original work, you don’t know what important and original work is). By the time she was thirty, Carrie Jenkins had published sixteen papers and a book, and they look pretty interesting to me. If I was a little less addicted to the history of philosophy myself and a little more au fait with what it going on now, I could probably add more high-achieving young women to the list. Come to think of it, Elizabeth of Bohemia began her correspondence with Descartes (which kicks off with a devastating criticism to which Descartes responds with mere blather) when she was only 25.
ReplyDeleteJohn
ReplyDeleteI'm curious (this is definitely not snark but a genuine question) about how Murdoch's _The Sovereignty of Good_ changed your life, if it did.
Let me add that there are also plenty of late–bloomers as well as boy or girl wonders in the history of philosophy, that is people who produce nothing much until they are middle-aged or even old but whose subsequent productions vary on upwards from the good to the great. Ruth Millikan provides a case in point. One might also cite Annette Baier, who published nothing at all until the age of 37, published her first book at the age of 56 and published four of her best books after she had retired to down here to Dunedin at the age of 66. Going back in History, Hobbes, Locke and Reid are all obvious examples of late-flowering talents. Hobbes published nothing of consequence until he was 41 and even that was a translation of Thucydides. His philosophical works all date from his fifties, his masterpiece Leviathan being published when he was 63. Locke published all the works for which he is now known after the age of 57 (though we know that some were drafted when he was in his late forties early fifties). Reid published the comparatively slight ‘Essay on Quantity’ when he was 38 but nothing more until the ‘Inquiry’ when he was 54. His greatest works, the two sets of ‘Essays’ were published when he was 75 and 78. Furthermore, at least with respect to the ‘Inquiry’, this was not a matter of sitting on ideas that he had had a lot earlier. Reid’s big conceptual breakthrough seems to have occurred in the summer of 1758 when himself was 48, probably as the result of reading the more epistemological bits of Price’s ‘Review of the Principal Questions of Morals’.
ReplyDeleteLFC, Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good provides a powerful and attractive conception of the ethical life as constitutively involving the exercise of loving attention. Murdoch attacks the then-standard picture of 'the man' of modern moral philosophy offered in writings by A. J. Ayer, R. M. Hare, and particularly Stuart Hampshire. On that picture the moral man is a man of action, someone who 'moves things about in the public world' and thereby changes it for the better. (This picture, Murdoch thinks, is part of a prevailing, more general existentialist-behavourist conception that Murdoch had previously, especially in her early book on Sartre.) Murdoch offers and explores a strongly contrasting picture of ethical life with the example of a mother who feels hostility towards her daughter-in-law. The mother is active, but nothing overt happens; the mother dissolves her hostility in attempting to 'see' the daughter-in-law more accurately, which includes more justly and more lovingly (you'll often find this process taking place in fragmentary ways in Murdoch's novels, where the word 'see' is italicized). It's exposure to this picture of ethical life as constitutively involving loving attention, and not (just) public action, that was life-changing for me (I first read it around age 20, and perhaps a dozen times since then, along with reading the rest of her philosophical work, as well as almost all of her novels).--Of course Murdoch is not responsible for all my subsequent blindnesses, stupidities, and mistakes.
ReplyDeleteJohn R.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I've read a fair amount of Murdoch (not as much as you), including a number of the novels, but didn't discover her work until I was around 30. As has been remarked, there's a lot of emphasis in much of her work on visual art, and more generally, as you say, on 'seeing' in a broader, ethical sense. So I was curious to hear what you had to say. At this point I think I've likely read all the Murdoch I'm going to, since there are too many unread things/authors on my list that I want to try to get to.
What a cool thread!
ReplyDeleteFeminist/care ethics looks great, from what I've seen. My earliest efforts in moral philosophy were waaay too utilitarian: I pretty much insisted that ethics boil down to this abstract, formulaic rule-following, dismissed the bulk of our emotional lives as so much non-rational baggage, and took the only non-utilitarian options to be (some very crude caricatures of) divine command theory and Kantian deontology. I needed something to shake me out of this attitude and make me more "human" again. The pluralism of W.D. Ross gave me a nudge in the right direction, too.
This was one of the things that discouraged me from putting much stock in "my own" philosophizing, at least for the time being. Like many (most?) novices, I was prone to seriously overestimate the quality and originality of my own thought. My attitude now (and indefinitely into the future) is more like, "Sure, you're entitled to your philosophical hunches, but you need to understand that they're just that - hunches. You should prioritize finding out what the greats have already said, and not try to reinvent the wheel just yet."
So, with apologies to Charles Pigden, I'm afraid I'm pretty sympathetic to the Pasnau quote above. The list of youthful geniuses in philosophy is impressive, though - albeit surely dwarfed by the total number of individuals who try their hands at philosophy. But I suppose one can't know until one tries.
P.S. Wasn't Hegel a late-bloomer? ;)
So I watched that short film of H. Fingarette. I'm still pondering my reactions to it. But one thing I can say right off: it certainly doesn't strike me as something that would persuade a viewer that he or she (or they) should want to live to 97. (Or at least, that's my initial reaction.) I had a close relative who lived to almost that age, and I had pretty much the same reaction in that connection. Of course that's easy enough to say, I suppose, when one is still some distance from what might be called extreme old age.
ReplyDeleteTo Michael
ReplyDeleteWasn't Hegel a late-bloomer? Well not really but not a boy-wonder either. His first substantial work is the Phenomenology of spirit which came out in his mid-thirties.
More generally I am inclined ot say that Pasnau's stuff about philosophical maturity is utter bollocks. It is not just the great who often do their best work when young but the merely talented. At 65 I think I can safely say that about half the best ideas that I have ever had or am ever likely to have I had before I was thirty, and I kick myself nowadays for having been so slow and dilatory about writing them up, sometimes sitting on half-finished papers for nearly twenty years. They did not improve (or did not improve much) in the process. Lots of the non-great but talented, good or respectable philosophers of my acquaintance did all or some of their best work when relatively young. The idea that philosophy isn't a young person's game is to my mind simply silly. This is not to say of course that can't also be an old person's game . I'm pretty proud of my sexagenarian productions and I hope to do better still. And I have, of course learned a thing or two in the last forty years. But the only major improvement on my twenty-five year old self is that my style these days is a little less florid and that after long practice I find dense works of philosophical logic a little more easy ot assimilate.
ReplyDeleteDear Karl Pigden,
ReplyDeleteI would like to add only one piece of information to your very interesting comments:
The average life expectancy for men in pre-industrial Europe and North America was well below 50 years of life.
(According to Roser 2016 and Riley 2005)
North America / Europe between 1770 - 1870 approx. 35 years of life.
North America / Europe between 1870 - 1910 approx. 42 life years
North America / Europe between 1940 approx. 57 years of life
So Hegel was an old man when he wrote the Phenomenology.
(There are slight differences between women and men and between Europe and North America).
sorry Charles Pigden
ReplyDeleteThere's definitely something to that, C.P., but I still feel myself waffling. :) What would be a good middle-ground in advising a younger philosopher? Maybe this: "Experiment and test your abilities (even if it just looks like term papers, personal journaling, or informal conversation), but don't be surprised or discouraged if you find that you still have a long way to go; not everyone's up to the task of large-scale, career-defining work before middle-age (or later)."
ReplyDeleteChances are "utter bollocks" (regarding Pasnau) is putting it too strongly, but also, chances are I'm exaggerating how crude and inept a thinker I was in my 20s.
I do happen to have a selective negativity bias in reflecting upon my own past. So, when I think back on my own "philosophical awakenings," I usually end up reimagining a few embarrassing (but probably unavoidable) episodes in which I had to realize I was not only confidently defending a hastily thought-out, sometimes badly mistaken position, but also expressing myself with a really off-putting air of authority and self-assurance. Possibly I lacked mentorship; possibly I'm projecting onto young people in general a sort of vanity and naivete that were more peculiar to myself. But those sort of memories are my go-to, and so it takes an effort for me not to forget some of the advantages I had when I was younger and totally new to philosophy: the excitement and almost existential urgency, the capacity to become passionately immersed in a deeply felt problem - I'd guess that this, more than academic obligation and the urge to "puzzle-solve," conduces to a person's most significant and memorable philosophical work (even if the writing quality is often lower).
Also, some of the names you mentioned (e.g. Hume, Schopenhauer) are interesting not only for doing great, breakthrough work while young, but also for the fact that later in life, they hadn't really altered their opinions so much as their presentations.
Regarding the ages of philosophers making their signature statements at early or later points of life, philosophy has been subject to the publishing industry and editors seeking profits. See research on academic publishing by Professor John Brookshire Thompson, a Cambridge University sociologist specializing in communication and author of Merchants of Culture, and Books in the Digital Age. There is more contingency than any pure rational pattern in publishing philosophy at one age or stage of development of other.
ReplyDeleteTo Charles Pidgen above, I would add Martin Heidegger publishing Being and Time at age 38. Heidegger has now become an absolute publishing monster after his death in 1976, and I am more worried about his "Black Notebooks 1939-1941" published as Ponderings XII-XV, in 2017 (German original appeared in 2014). Damning proof of his anti-Semitism needed to be exposed to the world, but should any philosopher be able to continue to speak like this monster? The Heidegger family and his will had something to do with how these 37 "Black Notebooks" were handled, but I am nauseated by the publishers and their profits from such scandals.
Jurgen Habermas published Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere when he was 33 years old, and has continued to be very productive for 60 years since 1962. Wittgenstein published his Tractatus and then refused to publish anything more in philosophy as if he had said enough with one book. Some of his personal writings were destroyed due to his will or literary executors, perhaps Anscombe guided this non-publishing.
Self-publishing online in various ways, or participating in the so-called "blogosphere" may be displacing the powers of the publishing industry to function as a necessary medium for philosophers to share their work with the world.
Ask a philosopher: would you rather have a million dollars for publishing a book to be sold in the free market or give free access to humanity to what you write because it might do more good being free than behind a paywall blocking the most disadvantaged classes?
Rawls: I am not a digital native, but I was trained by the US Army in military signals and communications, and yet my impoverished liberalism leaves me cold, so we should give free access to help the worst off classes of persons. Nozick: to each according to his choices! Walzer: to each according to his relative community! Cornel West: to each according to his racial lens! Simone de Beauvoir: to each according to her sex or gender, whatever it may be! Jean Paul Sartre: She stole all my lines with her sexier approach to philosophy and then Nelson Algren stole her heart from me! Is there no exit from the absurdity of publishing philosophy?
Aaron Hillel Swartz (1986-2013) had the right approach to academic publishing, but was destroyed by the US government. The "logic of the field" of academic publishing according to John B. Thompson creates many contingencies which separate the publishing of children's books, cookbooks, biographies or philosophy books. The Internet and personal computers have made economic conflicts between the scholarly community and publishers used to being extremely profitable worse. The problem is that free online content impoverishes and exploits some persons for the profit of others, subscription based access excludes or restricts the information-poor from sharing in the good lives of the information-rich, and piracy or uncontrolled copying and scanning of texts along with self-publishing or open source publishing makes the business unprofitable.
To Achim Kriekel.
ReplyDeleteAverage age rates at death can be a bit misleading since throughout most of human history infant mortality has been pretty high but once people have reached their early twenties, their chances of surviving until sixty have been quite considerable.. So although Hegel was not a young man when he produced the Phenomenology, he wasn't that old either. He still had about 24 years to go. So not quite a boy-wonder but not a late bloomer either. (Compare Thomas Red an older contemporary: Nothing till he as 38 with the comparatively slight 'Essay on Quantity', then a long pause until he published the ‘Inquiry’ when he was 54 then another twenty-year pause until he published his greatest works in his mid-to-late seventies. )
As to quality when composing my list I was happy to take the cultural consensus as my guide. I'm not a fan of Fichte or of Hegel, but my point was that if you are, then Fichte (for you) constitutes a counterexample to Pasnau's Few -boy-wonders thesis.
I would be interested in Professor Wolffs views on this. I think some of the work that I did before I was 35 is some of the best that I've ever done or am ever likely to do. How does he feel about his early productions?