I begin today a series of posts that will preserve on my blog a
large number of papers I have written over the past 60 years that have never
been published. Since I have heard literally no call for such a project, it
might be well for me to explain it before I begin.
As I look back over the arc of my life I see a number of
activities to which I have committed my energies and in which I have engaged
for years or even for decades, activities which I enjoyed at the time and which
completely absorbed my attention, but which after time I brought to an end. For
example, for 23 years I ran a scholarship organization that I set up to support
poor black students going to historically black universities in South Africa.
For 10 years I worked very hard to improve my skills on the viola and played
quartets with an amateur group in Amherst Massachusetts. For 16 wonderful years I was a Professor of Afro-American Studies and for the last 12 of those years I ran
a revolutionary doctoral program in the department. All of these and many more activities I threw
myself into enthusiasm, enjoyed enormously while they were going on, but did not
really regret seeing them end.
The one thing that has never stopped during the course of
the past 70 years and more of my life are the thoughts in my mind, my ceaseless
engagement with difficult and challenging ideas which I have sought to clarify
until I could explain them as simply as I could explain a fairytale, until I
could show the ideas to my readers or to my students in all of their beauty and
simplicity.
To make these ideas available to others, I wrote or edited
21 books that were published in the old-fashioned way along with dozens of
articles in journals of various sorts, and I wrote several more books which
appeared in one form or another on this blog. But particularly after I left
Columbia in 1971 and moved to the University of Massachusetts, I frequently
wrote essays to clarify an argument or sort out my ideas which I then did not
bother to publish. Some of them I delivered as talks at universities and
colleges or elsewhere, others I gave to my students as part of the material for
courses I was teaching. Still others never saw the light of day. I simply put
them away in a file drawer and moved on.
These ideas have been my life and I feel a strong desire to make them all publicly available so that anyone in the world who wishes may read what I have said about them. I have no illusions about the importance of such an undertaking. Even if I am, as S. Wallerstein once observed, “almost famous,” the world has had more than enough of me, I expect. So if this project does not engage you, talk among yourselves as you have been doing all these years on this blog.
Go for it, Bob!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great project. I look forward to reading much of it. Go for it, dear Professor.
ReplyDeleteProfessor, please release any material you wish to share. You have a willing audience and I'm sure it will spark much thought.
ReplyDelete"Almost famous" is the title of a 2000 movie about a rock band and a very young rock writer.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQXh_AaJXaM
I understand and certainly share the point about the constant buzz of one's mental activity, which I regard, as the kind of philosopher that I am (namely, a Fodorian philosopher), an entirely normal occurrence, in one way or another, for everyone. There may be no mental vacuum in human cognition is what I am getting at, though many, if not most, mental processes are probably unconscious.
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't understand, and do not share, is the need or desire to teach, or explain to others, what I have managed to work out, or claim to have worked out, in my mind - and I have been teaching for over 10 years now. As an academic, I have always regarded working out a problem in my mind as the true intellectual accomplishment, with writing it all up an ancillary phenomenon, mostly to be done in order to be published, a necessity in today's academia. Having said that, writing down one's ideas can often be very useful in order to clarify the underlying thought, make it more explicit, or even remember it to begin with, but that doesn't mean that there is also a need to share any of it with anyone. Chomsky famously wrote his The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory in 1955 with no intention to publish it at all (it was only published in 1975), but simply to keep a record of what he had achieved.
In fact, I have always found the opposite view - roughly the position described in this post, with all that stuff about 'show(ing) the ideas to my readers or to my students in all of their beauty and simplicity' - quite pretentious and perhaps even unwarranted. What makes one think that they ought to be lecturing and teaching others to begin with? What justifies it precisely? This issue could make for a good post, I think.
Responding to DJL -
ReplyDeleteInteresting points; I'm not sure what response would be best, but I'm very much inclined to try to defend the person who wants to show beautiful ideas to other people. But it also seems undeniable that intellectual egotism is a real thing (and an ugly thing)! Anyway, an initial stab...
At their best, ideas (or thoughts, whatever) are simply good to have, and their discovery is good to experience: They are, or approach the status of, intrinsically valuable. (There's the old story of the sign above the entrance to Plato's Academy, "Let no one enter who is ignorant of geometry," etc.)
Or, if ideas aren't valuable in this way, they can assist us in pointing the way to things that perhaps are intrinsically valuable; e.g., a scientific discovery (otherwise uninteresting, suppose) might pave the way to a piece of technology that alleviates suffering or inconvenience.
Either way, some ideas are good to have. It doesn't seem much of a leap from there to "Some ideas are good to share." In addition, there seems to be an important difference between the desire to share ideas and the desire to share "my" ideas - it might be interesting to flesh this suggestion out, but I think I'm at my word limit for the time being. :)
(Sorry, I might've mixed up my Plato anecdotes. Unfortunately I can't remember the details of this one, but I think the more appropriate anecdote has some Academy figure admonish a student who asks about the "point" or "use" of philosophy: Doesn't he give the student a coin (given his preoccupation with things "merely useful") and send him on his way?)
ReplyDeleteMichael,
ReplyDeleteLet me be bit contrarian, as usual.
What is wrong with intellectual egotism?
I want recognition from others for my ideas. That's my game. I don't expect recognition from others for how good-looking I am or how well I play baseball, because fairly early in life I realized that I was better at ideas than at baseball, etc.
However, as far as I can see, everyone seeks recognition for something: it's part of the human condition or human nature, some for how good-looking they are, some for how well they play baseball, some for how much money they donate to charity, some for how much money they have, some for their ideas.
That's the way we are. What's wrong with that?
Michael,
ReplyDeleteAgreed that "someone whose self-esteem is so fragile that they'd have to despise themselves if it happened that someone else unfairly belittled or overlooked them" is not a good model to emulate but you and DJL above seem to suggest that there is something wrong (you call it "ugly", DJL says it's "unwarranted") with someone like that.
I don't see anything wrong with that. It's just likely to make your life more miserable than it would be otherwise.
As for finding philosophy interesting, first of all, I'm not a philosopher, but to be honest, I'm not at all sure if I would find it interesting if I couldn't use it to gain recognition from others. If I were condemned to live the rest of my life among grossly anti-intellectual people and there was no exit, would I bother to read philosophy?
George Orwell has a merited reputation for honesty. I quote from his essay, "Why I write"
"Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after your death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snobbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive and a strong one".
Orwell goes up to list other motives, including some which are considered more noble, for example, "political purpose", but first on his list is "sheer egoism" (Orwell's words).
Thank you for your self-publication project and sharing these thoughts and their history or context in which they developed. Your blog The Philosopher's Stone is much more valuable or will become much more valuable to scholars in the future as they try to understand the great decline and fall of American empire/power politics. I have not been following the blog due to Hurricane Fiona aftermath and after not having electricity for 13 days. My 75 students in two different classes are in a state of shock, and I do not know how this semester will finish as the faculty union is also moving into strike or lockout position legally speaking. The blog format allows me to go back over things when my schedule allows rational thought.
ReplyDeleteBlogging is a newer way to do philosophy and as an experimental method of argument, it should be studied and used by philosophers seeking to spread truth and expose lies. But it is also a great burden to create such a dialectical space and maintain it, and hence it is appropriate to think that this blog is a philosopher's stone and burden. Being a creator, you impose on yourself the burden of creating and responding to the reactions to your work.
I am teaching Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra right now and ran into a wonderful passage that speaks ironically to this art of the blogger out of time. It is from Book 3, "On the Vision and the Riddle" section (W. Kaufmann translation), narrated by the fake prophet:
"Striding silently over the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the rock that made it slip, my foot forced its way upward. Upward--defying the spirit that drew it downward toward the abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and archenemy. Upward--although he sat on me, half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain. "O Zarathustra," he whispered mockingly, syllable by syllable, "you philosopher's stone! You threw yourself up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall. O Zarathustra, you philosopher's stone, you slingstone, you star-crusher! You threw yourself up so high; but every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to yourself and to your own stoning--O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself." (TSZ, p 156).
To overcome the spirit of gravity and the hard cage of being locked into time, one needs the raw courage of the stand up comedian, not the analytical skills of stubbornly bourgeois philosophers and their abstract ideal of purity of heart.
Thank you so much for those words, Tony. I think that is the first comment on my blog in a very long time that actually speaks to me and to what I am trying to do here. Your current situation sounds simply awful. I am quite protected here at Carolina Meadows and every so often it is made clear to me how important that is!
ReplyDelete