Eighteen years ago, in the early months of 2004, Susie and I paid off the mortgage on the house we had built for us when we married in 1987. Feeling flush with cash, we made two big expenditures. First, I bought for myself a brand-new flashy Toyota Camry with all the bells and whistles – power doors, power windows, power seats, and cruise control. Then Susie and I bought a tiny 330 square foot apartment on the left bank of Paris just outside Place Maubert. I was a young, vigorous 70-year-old running the doctoral program in Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts.
For all the years since, we have been going to that Paris
pied-ä-terre several times a year, renting it out when we could to cover the
costs of owning it. It was there that I spent four weeks learning the viola
part of Beethoven’s Opus 59 #3, the third Razumovsky quartet. It was while
sitting in a café in Place de la Bastille that I wrote my paper “the Future of
Socialism.” In 2010, in the courtyard outside our apartment, I threw a glorious
80th birthday party for my big sister Barbara. And for years each
morning when I was in Paris I would take a long walk through the fourth, fifth,
or sixth arrondissement, watching the city awaken.
Well, I am no longer young and vigorous but old and creaky and much slowed down by my
Parkinson’s disease. My Camry too is showing its age, although to be honest it
runs now a good deal better than I do. Still and all, the time has come. We
have sold the apartment to a high-powered Paris tax attorney who will take
possession of it in July. Tomorrow morning the Carolina Meadows transportation
folks will drive us to the airport and we will leave for one last trip to
Paris.
We shall dine at our favorite restaurants, see our Paris
friends, sit in the café Le Metro to watch the Parisian world go by, and then,
on June 18, lock the door to our tiny apartment one last time and say goodbye,
perhaps never to see Paris again.
Buying the apartment was a lark, a jeu d’esprit, a mad idea and the best thing we have ever done. We
will indeed always have Paris.
Enjoy your goodbye. I hope you have a smooth trip.
ReplyDeleteBon voyage.
ReplyDeleteI am jealous.
ReplyDeleteSafe travels.
I bet 50 dollars that it's not your last trip to Paris, unless the pandemia resurges for the next few years.
ReplyDeleteSo don't delete the translation app in your phone.
Sir:
ReplyDeleteHaving spent a lot of time over the years living near La Place Maubert on La Rive Gauche (on the La Rue de la Montaine du Cardinal Lemoine for most of it) I can only feel for you on your more-or-less permanent departure from that wonderful Arrondissement of Paris.
May you be able to return to your favourite Parisian haunts often.(I speak as an 80 year old man who has not been in Paris for too long.
Au revoir... bien tot.
Cheers,
David Zimmerman
Prof. Wolff,
ReplyDeleteHave a splendid time in Paris, and enjoy many a glass of fine French wine, as you say to Suzie, "Here's looking at you, kid."
I remember when you and your commentariat were weighing the pros and cons of your creating youtube lectures. And just the other day you were recounting and marveling at the power of youtube to bring your voice and thoughts to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, easily outstripping the numbers made available through your career as a in-person professor.
ReplyDeleteThis particular blog exudes poignancy and grace, a kind of verbal equivalent of Rachmaninoff playing Tchaikovsky's Lullaby. It is also an ode to mad ideas which,not unlike the idea of creating youtube lectures, you have in abundance, still.
I wish you both a good trip and a wonderful stay in Paris, ... both in the real Paris, as in the imaginary.
ReplyDeleteOrder a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at Le Petit Pontoise and savor all your many shared memories!
ReplyDeleteI would love nothing more than to pop up and spend a couple nights with you while you are on the Continent, Professor. We can drink a toast to Paris. Happy to sleep on the couch, or to snuggle in with you and Susie.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOf course I never wrote the second comment. Someone is very good at hacking. Probably Putin.
ReplyDeleteMay be of interest:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thebulwark.com/the-long-history-of-glenn-greenwalds-kissing-up-to-the-kremlin/
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=582114003071112100106005093027116081029032054004040066067031089028071101106089013096122097062099041113051102024086122065115102126050004093022000029104090071089022077022079006113069098069024006031098104082107121118101115001022026003103092103068089124&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/opinion/academic-team-debate.html
ReplyDeleteDear Robert,
ReplyDeleteI have been a grateful tenant at rue Maitre Albert on two occasions which I think back on very fondly. That's how we originally 'met', through the NYRB 'Blue State Special' ad. At that time I little new that you were THE Robert Paul Wolff, whose work on Kant and Marx I was familiar with since undergraduate days. And then had the pleasure meeting you and your wife at the Metro Cafe, and later still, having lunch in Harvard Square with you and Charles Parsons as you swapped stories about the old days. (I think the occasion was the (50th?) anniversary of the Social Studies Program at Harvard.) Been a great fan of your blog ever since.
Dick Moran
Brian Leiter has put on his website an abstract of his paper entitled “Some Realism about Political and Legal Philosophy” in which he distinguishes between Realists and Moralists. In the former category he includes Thucydides, Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, H.L.A. Hart and Michel Foucault. In the Moralist category he includes Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Rawls, Habermas, and Dworkin.
ReplyDeleteHe puts himself in the Realist category and asserts: “indeed, there are no objective moral obligations or duties or other moral requirements, so arguing about them is a scholastic enterprise.”
I’d be interested in learning RPW’s view—particularly the placing of Marx and Kant in different categories.
I put myself pretty much in the Realist category, but, unlike just about every other commentator on this blog, admit to a liking of Rawls.
Leiter holds the Karl Llewellyn chair at the University of Chicago Law School. Llewellyn was one of the pioneers of American Legal Realism in the first half of the 20th Century, perhaps its foremost advocate.
"Realism in political philosophy, unlike in legal philosophy, has been less central to the Western academic canon of the last two centuries, which is infused with moralism, due to the influence of Kant and Hegel in Europe and Rawls in North America, and, perhaps most importantly now, to the fact that political philosophy is written almost exclusively for other academics who earn their living by being favorably assessed by other moralist professors.
ReplyDeleteMoralism in political philosophy is, in my view, pointless: on the one hand--as Nietzsche observes regarding Kant and Hegel--it simply 'press[es] into formulas' 'some large class of given values' (BGE 211); and on the other, these philosophical formulas have no effect on practice, even though their subject is practice....
[Quoting Charles Lindblom: ] 'We have to face, at one extreme, the possibility that the world of the 1940s and 1950s – and today's world, too – would look pretty much as it does had there never been a Plato or Aristotle or their equivalents; never a Hobbes, a Locke, a Weber, or their equivalents.' ...
The enormous academic energy devoted to systematic articulation of our (alleged) moral obligations and duties is an exercise in theoretical onanism: it is serious and intense, but its primary benefit accrues to the producer."
LOL
Love it!
The notion that (so-called) moralist philosophical formulas have no effect on practice seems dubious to me. But it's too late in the evening to elaborate.
ReplyDeleteI also don't esp. think of Rawls as a "moralist" -- or a "realist." For some thinkers these categories are less than illuminating. Still, I shd look at the paper first.
Oh dear.... Another invitation to dive into the thickets of meta-ethics.
ReplyDeleteFor awhile, I'll try to resist.
FWIW: Although I do respect Brian Leiter and read his blog everyday ("get a life, Zimmerman!"), I do think that his thesis in this essay is off the mark. The distinction he draws as applied to ethics and political philosophy is wrong.... But it would take awhile to try to explain why.
David Zimmerman,
ReplyDeleteI don't want to argue over the same metaethical territory with Marc either. It seems like
World War 1.
However, I'd be interested in hearing your differences with Leiter. What you have to say would probably move the debate along to something new instead of the Battle of the Somme metaethical.
Hi S Wallerstein:
ReplyDeleteThank you for the suggestion. I'll try to get to it.
In the meantime, here is the site where the abstract of B Leiter's paper is:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4137804
BTW...what is your first name Mr Wallerstein?.... I can't just call you S.
Cheers,
David Z
And I am sure that Professor Leiter will not mind if I post the abstract here:
ReplyDeleteSome Realism about Political and Legal Philosophy
18 Pages Posted:
Brian Leiter
University of Chicago
Date Written: June 15, 2022
Abstract
There have been two main traditions of theorizing about society, politics, and law in Western thought, but they do not divide up along familiar lines of modern or ancient, Enlightenment or pre-Enlightenment, analytic or Continental, historical or systematic. On one side, we find, for example, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and--to mention more recent thinkers who are mostly on the realist side of the divide—H.L.A. Hart and Michel Foucault. On the other side, we find Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Hegel and—once again, to mention more recent theorists—John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Ronald Dworkin. I treat the former as representing “realism” in political and legal thought, the latter “moralism,” terms whose meaning I explore.
“Realists,” in my non-metaphysical sense, are committed to some or all of the following ideas: (1) human beings, throughout history and across cultures, are motivated primarily by their passions and interests (not by “reason”) (“Humeanism” about motivation); (2) many human passions and interests are anti-social or “immoral” (people are, for example, frequently selfish, cruel, self-aggrandizing, avaricious, self-deceived, envious, etc.) (“Nietzscheanism” about motivation); (3) given what human being are like (either by nature or under existing conditions), theories devoted to articulating and discursively justifying people’s (perhaps rational?) moral obligations and duties, are irrelevant to changing people’s behavior—arguments do not change passions and interests; (4) indeed, there are no objective moral obligations or duties or other moral requirements, so arguing about them is a scholastic exercise; (5) people’s beliefs about their actions and motivations are mostly self-serving and post-hoc, designed to obscure or rationalize what they are really doing and what their real motivations are (philosophers are significant contributors to this obfuscation); (6) theories of society, politics, and law should try to explain what is really going on (e.g., the actual patterns of human behavior, both individual and social); (7) “ordinary opinion,” “common sense” and “folk intuitions” are data to be explained, not resources for genuine explanation; (8) theories of society, politics, and law should never assume that their subject-matter is morally defensible.
Moralists, by contrast, concern themselves, first and foremost, with discursive theories about how individuals and institutions morally ought to act. Moralists do not necessarily sit in judgment, wagging their finger at leaders and citizens who fail to live up to the moralist’s arguments about their obligations: sometimes, as with Hegel (or, in a different tradition, Confucius), they sometimes engage in elaborate rationalizations of the existing state of affairs (or, more precisely, the interests of the dominant class in the existing state of affairs). Often, they simply "press into formulas" (as Nietzsche says) prevailing moral opinions.
I develop both “realism” and “moralism” as ideal types and argue against moralism on both epistemic and practical grounds.
Keywords: realism, moralism, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, Rawls, Dworkin, Hart, legal realism, political realism
David Zimmerman,
ReplyDeleteFeel free to invent a first name for me. A blogger once started to call me "Sam".
David Zimmerman,
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the article yet, haven't had time, but the abstract seems convincing to me.
I'm interested in reading your observations.
S Wallerstein:
ReplyDeleteA little coy, are we, about nomenclature?
A thought did occur to me: Could it be that you are a woman?
Probably not, but it does raise a further question: Are there any regular women readers of "The Philosophers Stone"? I cannot see any reason why not... it is inherently interesting to philosophers. But with all the pseudonyms around here, one never knows.
I have been a regular reader of a couple of audio blogs, Audiogon and the Audio Asylum.... and for awhile there was a regular contributor named "Elizabeth."
Of course, virtually everyone else was (and is) a guy.... because audio is such a guy thing.
But everyone on the sites were in a kind of awe of Elizabeth... not just because she clearly knew as much about audio as any of us, but also for the sheer fact that she was the rare-to-non-existent woman audiophile.
Now, philosophy is not audio.... but.....
Any sisters out there?
I read some of Leiter's paper last night. I think it's important to realize this is written as an address/speech to be delivered at a conference, so it's going to be on the schematic side. I don't think that fully excuses some of what bothers me here though, which I don't have time to go into rt now mostly. On the issue of how certain canonical and other writers dealt w motivation etc, I think he shd read (if he hasn't) Hirschman's _The Passions and the Interests_.
ReplyDeleteDZ
ReplyDeletes.w.'s first name has been mentioned here in the past in exchanges betw him and Marc S. Of course you don't actually need to know his first name, and can refer to him as s.w. if you don't like something more formal.
David Zimmerman,
ReplyDeleteI asked that same question about where all the women were a year or two ago. As I recall, RPW replied that he had also wondered about that and he said it was a source of regret for him that there are no women regularly commenting in the blog discussions (or at least none who identify themselves as such).
I finally read Leiter's paper.
ReplyDeleteI know nothing about legal theory and so I skipped that part.
I generally agree with him, although I'm less of a Marxist than he is.
Otherwise, sure, you have to understand how people's minds function in order to change society.
In my experience, moralizing and sermons generally turn people off unless one is preaching to the choir, as they say. People's minds are rarely changed by abstract arguments, although I don't deny that it ever occurs.
Social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt have studied how people's political opinions are formed and conclude that conscious political opinions are generally rationalizations of deep unconscious or semi-conscious attitudes formed in early childhood, from other life experiences and even have a genetic component.
Successful political campaigns, as far as I have observed, generally play on people's hopes and/or fears. A classic examples is the successful 1988 No campaign in the Chilean plebiscite which put an end to the Pinochet dictatorship. A bunch of smart ad people put together a campaign with catchy music, people dancing in the street, riding bicycles and skateboards, scoring goals in football, partying, all to the tune of "Joy is on the way", mixed with shots of Pinochet's police busting people's heads or of people in extreme poverty. That is, a message of hope and joy. You can see the story in the award winning movie "No", which I haven't seen myself, I admit.
_The trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGOcFPzx1H0
Hello Ssssssssssssssaaaaaaaaammmmmmm:
ReplyDeleteI have downloaded the full version of BL's paper... and shall try to get to it this weekend.
I too dislike moralizing... but I do not think that this is the the real issue that BL succeeds in engaging in his essay.
My impression is that he comes close to embracing a kind of meta-ethical nihilism about the very content and coherence of moral judgments.
It is one thing to claim that making moral judgments in the public sphere is not an effective way to change people's attitudes and behaviour... BL may be right about that... but it is quite another thing to try to come up with a plausible meta-ethical account of what moral judgments are about, and then deny that they are about much of anything at all.
It is understandable that a self-proclaimed Marxist like BL would reject the second project out of hand.... "the poverty of philosophy," and all that. But that dismissal does not in itself render meta-ethics... or normative ethics, come to think of it... irrelevant.
BTW.... Marx himself engaged in a considerable amount of normative ethics... to be sure, not under that description... but what else are his musings about alienation and "species being" in the "1848 Manuscripts" about, not to mention his inveighing against exploitation in "Capital," if not about the immorality of capitalism?
I confess to finding the the anti-moralism of self-proclaimed Marxists pretty tiresome.
(If you are listening, Professor BL, I do respect your views on most matters (e.g. the excesses of some people on the left) but on this one... I think that you are missing a lot about the current dialectic in philosophical ethics.
Cheers,
David Z
David Z,
ReplyDeleteAt least in the paper in question BL does not get into meta-ethics at all. The paper is about realistic thinkers, those who look at human nature as it is and then proceed from there.
I have two of BL's books on Nietzsche and in the second, Moral Psychology with Nietzsche, BL more or less endorses Nietzsche's moral psychology. Nietzsche, according to BL, is a moral subjectivist. However, he certainly has values and in fact, a true philosopher, according to Nietzsche, creates values.
However, if you want BL's opinion on this exchange here, write him and tell him that
we're talking about him here. He reads his emails, I can tell you from personal experience.
I can't say whether BL has missed the current dialectic in philosophical ethics. From his two books on Nietzsche I get the impression that BL is very well read in current ethical theory.
My own interest in this is the opposite of S. Wallerstein’s: I have more interest in the legal realism discussion than the political, though I do have an interest in that too.
ReplyDeleteLeiter is the Karl Llewellyn professor at the U of Chicago Law School. As a first year student at UofC 60-some years ago, I took Lewellyn’s course, Elements of Law. Although I believe I got a decent grade in the course, most of it went over my head at the time. It took several years before I grasped what he was talking about.
I don’t think Hart really grasped what Lewellyn was talking about. In many ways, it was simply an elaboration of Holmes’opening paragraph of The Common Law in 1881:
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”
It's been unusually quiet around here this past fortnight.
ReplyDeleteI dare say, if all it takes for a few of us to be able to have a polite exchange of ideas without any ad hominem diatribes is for RPW to go on holiday, maybe he should do so more often. lol
irony aside, the ad hominem diatribes are RPW's fault only in that he is too lenient when it comes to some of what is allowed to stand in the comments on his blogs. But since he runs the blog unassisted (or so I believe) policing the comments would be an enormous burden. He has several times encouraged constraint and imposed the occasional banishment, all to little avail.
ReplyDeleteIt's also, I suppose, quite corrective of our biasses to be exposed to lunacy coming from political places other than the reactionary right.
When can we expect to hear more sanity from RPW again?