MILESTONES

Just short of six years ago, in August 2016, I began what became a series of nine lectures on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Through the courtesy of the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department, the lectures were delivered in a large lecture room in Caldwell Hall. They were filmed by a young graduate student, Alexander Campbell, who managed the technologically tricky task of posting them on YouTube. Alex, who successfully defended his fine doctoral dissertation last spring, subsequently recorded and posted several more series of lectures that I gave in the same venue.

 

A few moments ago, the YouTube counter of views for that first lecture passed 200,000, and I thought I would take a moment to memorialize the event. It must of course be put in context: when I looked earlier this morning, Michael Sandel’s first lecture on justice at Harvard had racked up 4.5 million views. But 200,000 views of a lecture on the First Critique is nothing to be sneezed at. As with all such series of YouTube lectures, the number of views declines precipitously as one moves through the series. The ninth lecture in the series has been viewed 15,701 times, which I suspect means that more than 14,000 people have watched all nine lectures.

 

Now, I have offered a course on the Critique more than ten times in my half century long career. I imagine that I have taught that great book to a total of 200 or 300 students since I first lectured on it at Harvard in the spring of 1960. But 14,000? 

Judging from the emails I have received over the years, those lectures have been watched in their entirety by people all over the world – by senior professors, by graduate students, by undergraduates, and quite often by people not in the Academy who simply wanted to know something about Kant.

 

As I prepare once more to go into the classroom and teach, I am sadly aware that this may be, if not the last, then very nearly the last course I shall teach in person. But 10 years, 20 years, indeed perhaps even 50 years from now, my series of nine lectures on the first half of the First Critique will still be available on YouTube or some successor to it and, I can hope, will still be attracting viewers interested in Kant’s philosophy.

 

Not immortality, surely. But not nothing, all the same.

 

 

THERE ARE NO WORDS

Eight, nine, ten-year-old children trapped in a classroom with a crazed 18-year-old armed with an assault rifle. Children desperately calling 911 asking for them to send the police. Behind the locked door, nineteen armed police officers standing about for 45 minutes. Their commander decides it would be too dangerous to attempt to get into the room and stop the slaughter.

 

I think if I were the father or grandfather of one of those murdered children, I would make it my life’s work to kill the 19 police officers.

A RESPONSE

My intuition was correct that Jerry Fresia would understand what I was trying inadequately to express. Clearly his experience as an artist is different from mine as a philosopher but at some deeper level I think we are quite similar. There are a number of texts of course that achieve this integration and transcendence, and not at all surprisingly I find some of them in the Dialogues of Plato.  But the single text that seems to me the most perfect expression of what I am trying to capture is the two and a half page preface to Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.  That is a truly astonishing text, so inward, so intense, so perfectly clear and powerful, going on from image to image, metaphor to metaphor, unrelenting, without so much as the relief of an explanatory sub phrase. Kierkegaard must have been in a fugue state when he wrote it.  It is I think pound for pound, word for word, the greatest piece of philosophical writing I have ever read.

 

As for Charles Mills’s observations about Kant, they do not at all change my interpretation of the text but it goes without saying that they have a powerful effect on my judgment of Kant as a human being. Kant was a casual stone cold racist, there is no way around that fact. So in his graceful manner was David Hume. Can we excuse them on the ground that they were writing in the 18^th century? Well, it is striking that that quite insignificant contemporary thinker, James Beattie, who accidentally served as the vital conduit of Hume’s critique of causal inference to Kant, was in fact not a racist but rather quite liberated in his view of the illegitimacy of slavery.

 

As I have on various occasions observed, Karl Marx, the great theorist of exploitation, was himself in a variety of ways an exploiter of those around him.

 

I am glad I did not have the opportunity to meet any of these great thinkers.

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

I have taught countlessly many works of philosophy, politics, sociology, economics, history, literature, and Afro-American studies since I earned my doctorate 65 years ago, but in that long time I have only engaged deeply, seriously, in a sustained fashion with four works: David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and Karl Marx’s Capital. As I have explained in some of my YouTube postings and also, I am sure, at various times on this blog, I have never imagined that my interpretation of any of these books was the only correct interpretation or even by some objective measure better than other, competing interpretations. To use again an analogy to which I frequently recur, just as there are a number of different legitimate ways of playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto as well as countlessly many ways of mis-playing it or playing it badly, so there are always a number of competing and incompatible ways of legitimately reading a great work of philosophy as well as endlessly many ways of simply getting it wrong.

 

One of the reasons that I do not “keep up with the literature” on the books with which I have engaged in this manner is that once I am done struggling with a great book and finding my way to a reading that I consider satisfying and well-grounded in the text, I am in an odd way done with the book.  As the Old Testament says, I have wrestled with it and it has blessed me and that is enough.

 

This kind of activity bears very little relation to what is usually described as “doing research.” It would be simply absurd for an historian or a biologist or an anthropologist to say “I have said what I have to say about the French Revolution or RNA or burial rituals among the Kwakiutl and therefore I shan’t read what other historians or biologists or anthropologists have discovered about those subjects.” But it made perfect sense to me to say, at the end of my series of YouTube lectures on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason: this is the argument I have found in the text after wrestling with it for many years and I am quite comfortable acknowledging that others may have found different arguments, competing arguments, in the same text.

 

I do not really know whether other philosophers conduct their engagements with great works in this way. My suspicion is that they do but are simply somewhat hesitant about saying so openly.  However, since I am near the end of my long life I want to leave behind me not only the results of my struggles with these texts but also some explanation of what I imagined myself to be doing.

 

As I have often remarked, my goal has always been to find in the text an argument that is simple, powerful, elegant, and beautiful, and then to show it to my students or my readers in all of its simplicity, power, elegance, and beauty so that they can appreciate these qualities for themselves.  I imagine that Jerry Fresia, who is by calling and profession an artist, will understand what I am trying to say.

SENIOR MOMENTS

A senior moment is a momentary mental lapse of the sort that people in my age bracket experience all too often. Forgetting where one put the car keys, blanking on the name of someone one has known for years, that sort of thing. It may be, but need not be, a distressing evidence of the onset of dementia. A charming cinematic example is Eli Wallach, in Holiday, who goes out for a walk, forgets where his house is, and has to be guided back by Kate Winslet. 

 

I have for years been troubled by one particular kind of senior moment – totally blanking on a name. I think I have perhaps mentioned that there was a time when I simply could not bring to mind the name of the great operatic soprano, Kathleen Battle. I knew that she had recorded a splendid collection of Baroque arias for soprano and trumpet with Wynton Marsalis. I could visualize her, I could play over in my head in all their musical complexity a number of the arias she sings on the CD, but I simply could not remember her name. I thought if I remembered the initials K. B. that would help, but then I could not remember the initials!  Recently, I was telling over in my mind a story about an experience I had in 1964 when I arrived at Columbia University to take up a professorship there. I could recall in the most minute detail every aspect of the story except for the name of the person involved – Arthur Danto. 

 

Generally speaking, my memory is pretty good. I can remember my landline telephone number, my cell phone telephone number, my wife’s cell phone telephone number, our telephone number in Pelham, Massachusetts, my credit card number, my Social Security number, my wife’s Social Security number, the telephone number of my parents’ house where I live from the time I was six until I was sixteen.  I can even remember the National Guard identification number I was assigned when I went off to Fort Dix in 1957 – NG 21268121. But I am constantly blanking on names.

 

Usually I can use my computer in one way or another to cough up the name, either by going to Google or else by searching the 800 page autobiography that I wrote and posted online. One of the oddities of my senior moments is that when I set off to the computer to track down a name, frequently as I am about use the computer to find it, it pops into my head.

 

I figure there must be some place in the brain where names – but not all this other stuff – get recorded. Otherwise, it would make no sense to me that my senior moments are so precisely defined in their character. There must be a neurologist out there reading this blog – does anybody have an idea what the explanation is?

TRANSLATIONS

Thank you, Stephen Darling, for the accurate translation. Taking all in all, I think we can say that he finds me lame, silly, trifling, otiose, insignificant, uninteresting, trivial, simply not worth paying attention to.  Which calls to mind Pooh-Bah’s remark in The Mikado when he is handed a small bag of coins as a bribe: “another insult, and by the feel of it, a light one.”

 

I was never big in France. Now, Croatia, that is another matter…  Or as the head of the little traveling acting troupe says of himself, in the wonderful old movie To Be or Not to Be, I am “world-famous in Poland”

TRANSLATION

Marc asked for a translation. Here is my feeble effort:

Dear Sir, I have just come from examining a bit your work: it is pretty silly; we do not need silly American thinkers (we already have enough problems with our own thinkers, influenced by the Americans); you can read or reread Tocqueville (and Marx) and leave this country, please, best regards Jean-Pierre Joffrin 

As I say, somewhat less charming in English. Oh well, he gets his wish. We have sold our apartment and our visit in early June may well be our last. In any event, I seem to have made almost no impression on French philosophers so he need not worry.