When somebody mentions Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx or David Hume, my mind immediately goes to their deepest arguments, with which I have spent much of my life. But when someone mentions Noam Chomsky or Herbert Marcuse or Willard Van Orman Quine or Richard Rorty, my mind goes to my stories of personal interactions with them. Thus it is that when someone mentioned Hubert Dreyfus, I immediately started to think of all my stories about Bert when we were graduate students together.
It was Dreyfus, for example, who forced me to learn how to use chopsticks skillfully. A group of us at Harvard in the middle 1950s would from time to time go out to eat together at a new restaurant called Joyce Chen. We would order a number of dishes and share around, splitting the check equally among us at the end. Although Bert was the smallest and slenderest of the group, he ate a great deal very fast and so I learned that if I did not develop my chopstick skills I would not get my fair share.
It was also Bert, indirectly, through whom I met my first wife. I was in the Army at Fort Devens and Bert had gone to Paris to study with Merlau-Ponty. Bert's girlfriend at that point was a Radcliffe student, Adair Moffat, who lived in Whitman Hall. I caught a lift from Fort Devens one day into Cambridge to visit with her just to have someone to talk to who was not in uniform. When I got to Whitman, I went to the bell desk to let her know I had arrived and there was a lovely young woman sitting there waiting for her date. I was very taken with her and decided to ask her out (later I discovered there was a considerable discussion among the Radcliffe students about their obligation to be nice to the boys in uniform.) One thing led to another, and five years later we were married.
One of the important lessons I learned from Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia and Milton Cantor at UMass was that when all is said and done, friendship is more important than ideology. Somehow, as I approach my 90th year, that lesson has stayed with me.
23 comments:
"friendship is more important than ideology. Somehow, as I approach my 90th year, that lesson has stayed with me."
That's true in theory, but I find it very hard to maintain a close friendship when there is a substantial ideological difference.
I suppose it all depends on how you define "friendship" because there are people whom I'm "friendly" with with whom there are big differences.
However, if there are substantial ideological differences, soon or later, I say something which offends him or her and vice versa. I try to be diplomatic to not emphasize the differences, but they tend to come out.
That's even more true for people like me for whom politics is basically our form of relating to others. I have no interest in sports, I don't watch TV, I don't keep up with fashion, I'm not into technology or cars, I don't see movies, so politics is the one topic I'm into that many others are also into.
For the record, I'm interested in other topics too, psychoanalysis, some philosophical topics, classical music, poetry, but those are very elite.
Thanks for sharing this
When somebody mentions Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx or David Hume, my mind immediately goes to their deepest arguments, with which I have spent much of my life.
I watched about ten minutes of a YouTube video yesterday titled: FAIR Perspectives Ep. 25 - Why America Is Uniquely Stupid w/ Jonathan Haidt
FAIR Perspectives Ep. 25 - Why America Is Uniquely Stupid w/ Jonathan Haidt
At around the 1:30 minute mark, Melissa Chen said that it was Jonathan Haidt that turned her from a Kantian to a Humean.
The video above was about what Jonathan Haidt calls "De-Tot", i.e., "Decentralized Totalitarianism". It's what I've known before as "cancel culture". Here's a partial transcript:
Jonathan Haidt Discusses “De-Tot”: Decentralized Totalitarianism
So, you know, I, perhaps like many in the audience, have lost money. I was going to say investing in cryptocurrencies, but I’ll just say gambling and speculating. And one of the things that’s kind of fun about, it’s just learning about the blockchain and decentralized finance and realizing that the technology makes it possible to have all kinds of things without anybody in charge.
Many have observed this began in 2015. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy with some other social scientists. Some of our members from Eastern Europe were saying, this is just like what we had in the communist countries: the fear of speaking up the witch trials, the purity spirals.
People ever since then have been using his metaphors like what’s happening on campus, what’s happening in the world is somehow like the totalitarian countries. But yet, there was no dictator. There was no totalitarian person or authority or office. I think what we have is you might call “De-Tot” It’s decentralized totalitarianism. The difference between totalitarian and a dictator is that a dictator tells you what he wants, and he’ll kill you if you don’t do it. But totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life. “We’re going to control how you raise your kids what to think the food you eat, the science, everything, control everything.” That’s very hard to do. It’s only been tried a few times, certainly the Russians, the Chinese. Only a few countries have been tried to control everything of your life. And in a way this thing that we call wokeness has elements that are totalitarian, but there’s no person. There’s no authority. So what you have when everybody can record everybody, when everybody can shame everybody, you get human behavior reacting as if you were in a totalitarian country, but yet there’s no totalitarian
Dreyfus was a central and popular teacher in the UC Berkeley philosophy department when I was an undergraduate there in the mid-late 1980s. I had already in the early 80s read and studied his widely circulated xeroxed notes on Heidegger (which would later be published as his commentary on Being in Time). There was always a bit of joking about his take, dubbed (unsurprisingly) 'Drey-degger', along with some ad hominem smirking about his not knowing German. Now, one might think there's a kind of spectrum of academic teachers, marked on one end by brilliant people who didn't write or publish, or whose writings give only a hint of how intelligent and interesting the author is (my personal example was the last surviving member of the Frankfurt Institute, Leo Löwenthal). At the other were the folks whose writings contained all their interesting thoughts, and so seemed in person to be a diminished version of their authorial self . . . In person Dreyfus gave every indication of thinking that anything of intellectual value was in Heidegger. I was once in a graduate seminar on Heidegger and Naziism, and the topic of Pierre Bourdieu's monograph came up (it had not yet been translated). Dreyfus asserted that Bourdieu was a good guy, because he really was Heidegger applied to sociology, just as, so Dreyfus said, Foucault was Heidegger applied to history, and Derrida Heidegger applied to literature. I pointed out that Heidegger played little or no role in Bourdieu's thought, which emerges firstly from an internal criticism of major aspects of French sociology and anthropology as founded by Durkheim and Mauss, then from thinking through the temporal aspects of human practices as a criticism of structuralism, and that Bourdieu himself said of philosophers that he was by far closest to Wittgenstein. Dreyfus immediately turned red, starting sweating profusely, and yelled at me that I didn't know what I was talking about. We went back and forth for a couple of minutes, with large semi-circles of sweat drenching his shirt under the armpits. I finally had had enough of that, reached into my bag, pulled out a copy of Bourdieu's La Ontologie Politique de Martin Heidegger (I'd recently bought and read it in Rome when I ran out of reading material), shoved it at him and said: "You're wrong. Show me where Bourdieu says what you claim he says." He was stunned, but managed to recover quickly and without opening the book continued berating me for being an idiot who didn't know Bourdieu or Heidegger. Finally we moved on, and when the seminar was over he rushed up to me and said: "Who are you?" Me: "Uh, an undergraduate at Berkeley." He: "How do you know so much about Bourdieu?" Me: "General knowledge." He: "Paul Rabinow and I are reading Bourdieu now. Would you come and talk with us about him?" Me: "No, I don't think so." #TrueAcademicTales
Jonathan Haidt needs to read some more history and adjust his rather over-the-top frame of reference.
Over the weekend I watched on YouTube parts of Kathleen Stock's recent appearance at the Oxford Union. No "decentralized totalitarianism" in evidence there.
Rapko,
Criminy. You shd have accepted the invitation. For practical "careerist" reasons if not others.
Thanks for the story Professor.
‘It was also Bert, indirectly, through whom I met my first wife. I was in the Army at Fort Devens and Bert had gone to Paris to study with Merlau-Ponty. Bert's girlfriend at that point was a Radcliffe student, Adair Moffat, who lived in Whitman Hall.’
For me it was at Whitman College that I became familiar with Dreyfus’ work. There was no Whitman ‘Hall’ on campus; but the Philosophy department was in Olin Hall - funded by the Olin Foundation I believe, of Olin Industries which among other things was a manufacture of chemical weapons, it was rumored. All of which is neither here nor there.
Funny that in the first source I read: What Computers Can’t Do, I don’t recall any mention of Heidegger. It was a very powerful conceptual analysis highlighting faulty assumptions and bad thinking about ‘mind’. I still think the primary value (other than in the marketplace, maybe) of the field of AI is to highlight that whatever it is that humans are up to with ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’, it’s quite a bit different from what computers do. For me it was a powerful first experience of how philosophy could weigh in on 'real world' matters, i.e. that these were conceptual issues, not merely a question of inadequately powerful technology. Of course the technologists today seem unaware of Dreyfus, Searle and other critics.
Now if only you had learned to use chopsticks from John Searle…
I don't wish to go on about my Dreyfus story, other than to say I never had any 'careerist' interests, and so never had any 'careerist' reasons for doing anything. I did end up writing a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger (and art), but of course it never occurred to me to ask Dreyfus to be on my committee or to read any of my writing; nor did I ever try to find a job teaching Heidegger.--On the 'career' of being a philosophy professor, and what it entails, here's Alasdair MacIntyre from his Dewey lecture of 2010, 'On Not Knowing Where You Are Going', discussing what he realized after he came to the U.S. in the early 1970s and became a 'philosophy professor'(for me the points about deference and condescension resonate with the Dreyfus kerfuffle): “So I found myself to have become not only a teacher, but also a gate-keeper, deciding together with my colleagues who was to be admitted to advanced study and who excluded, who was worthy of the Ph.D. and who unworthy, who deserved appointment, promotion, and tenure, and who did not. And I gradually became aware of the widely shared background beliefs generally, but often tacitly presupposed in the making of such decisions, beliefs about where the cutting-edge of enquiry in this or that philosophical subdiscipline now is, about which issues are to be treated with great seriousness and which cavalierly, about which individuals and departments are to be treated with deference and which instead may be condescended to, about who is in, out, up or down, the kinds of belief and the kinds of prejudice characteristic of those same drab hierarchical professions of which I had dreaded becoming a member twenty years earlier.”
J Rapko
Fair enough. (And I cd understand why, after that experience, you preferred not to have anything to do with him.)
#whocares
#windbag
Anonymous
Prof Wolff's post recounts personal stories about Dreyfus, and that's what J Rapko basically did, albeit a story of a different sort. I found JR's story interesting and, in view of the OP, very on-topic.
And by the way, Anonymous, if Prof Wolff chooses, as he often does, to write in an autobiographical mode, there's no reason commenters can't use that mode provided the substance is connected, as it is here, to the original post.
I agree with what LFC says above.
There's nothing wrong with a bit of gossip. Jean Paul Sartre says somewhere (I believe in his book-long interview with John Gerassi) that he much prefers to sit in a café and gossip with Simone de Beauvoir about the people who pass by than to argue metaphysics with Raymond Aron. Me too.
s.w.
Not to derail things here, but it was apparently a conversation (before they all became famous and fell out over various things) in a cafe *with Aron* that helped lead Sartre to see he cd write a more 'everyday-focused' sort of philosophy, right? The story is that Aron pointed to the cocktail and said "you could philosophize about that." (That's the gist at any rate.)
Hilary Putnam had (and still has posthumously) a website/blog called Sardonic Comment. He adapted the title from something that Peter Strawson said to him in 1976. Strawson had remarked to Putnam that: "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show.” I think that some of the comments here fit that bill, in spirit and in the letter. I would make one caveat to what I think John Rapko (and MacIntyre) is saying: I’m glad I had some philosophy professors, even if they were doing/teaching philosophy for a living.
Professor Wolff --
As an aside -- I loved Joyce Chen, both the restaurant and the owner. One day in the early 90s I was having lunch there with someone who was rather a fussy eater. They started to complain that the pork in the pork fried rice dish had gone rancid. It tasted fine to me but they called over a waiter and complained. The waiter apologized and said he would alert the chef. About a minute or two later Joyce Chen herself appeared at our table. She picked up a pair of chopsticks and ate two or three pieces of pork from both our plates. "It's good," she said, and walked back into the kitchen. I have been in awe of her ever since.
-- Jim
Dear S.W.,
„Jean Paul Sartre says somewhere (I believe in his book-long interview with John Gerassi) that he much prefers to sit in a café and gossip with Simone de Beauvoir about the people who pass by than to argue metaphysics with Raymond Aron.“
Thank you very much for pointing out this passage by Sartre. I have quoted this sentence so often and could not for the life of me remember where I had read it. I already thought it had sprung from my imagination.
I can very well understand this uneasiness that Sartre expresses there. In contrast to Deleuze, who in "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie" claims that you only need a friend and a glass of wine to start with philosophy, I believe that you need the idea of a friend in your head to whom you can explain philosophy. The problem comes when you meet these friends in the reality of life and only a glass of wine saves your friendship.
Achim,
You're welcome.
I'm fairly sure that the passage comes either from the Gerassi inteview or from an interview found in Situations 10, entitled "Sartre at 70".
Professor Wolff, you say that friendship is more important than ideology. Friendship is certainly closer to home, to what is valuable to us. While you were a Professor at Umass Amherst, what was the value of your friendship with Robert J Ackermann? Did you learn anything of personal and philosophical importance that became a part of how you see our world?
Anonymous
There's a search box in upper left corner (if you're on a phone, click "view web version"). Just type "Chomsky" into the box.
I know there's a search bar, but the vast majority of results are not anecdotes, but comments on some of the interviews, videos, and articles involving Chomsky. A different matter.
Ok. The alternative is to go into RPW's autobiography, archived at the top I think under the heading "my stuff," and search for Chomsky anecdotes there. In terms of blog posts here, I don't recall a lot of personal stories about Chomsky, maybe one or two. I don't really remember the details.
Mom must be late with the milk and cookies—#AnonymousSoCrankums
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