MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE SIXTH INSTALLMENT

Tomorrow begins the new blog on Formal Methods in Political Philosophy. The link is at the end of this post. For some reason, I can no longer insert links. The URL of the new blog is http://robert-wolff.blogspot.com

Little by little, we explored other parts of Manhattan, even venturing as far south as Chinatown. One day, in an epic run, I hit every traffic light right from Canal to 115th and ran the entire island without stopping. My analyst lived only two blocks from the Madison Delicatessen, which had potato latkes to die for, so on occasion we would drive down for a meal. New York of course is the center of America's music world, but Cindy and I had very different tastes in music, so we rarely went to a concert.
Over time, we made connections outside of the Columbia community. One of the most rewarding for me was a friendship with Robert Heilbroner, best known for his incredibly successful book, The Worldly Philosophers. Bob was a genial, round-faced man whose face wore a perpetual smile. He was a democratic socialist and a deeply decent man who managed to combine a commitment to progressive values with a complete absence of ideological fervor. Bob was heir to the Weber and Heilbroner clothing fortune, and he and his wife lived in a fabulous Park Avenue apartment. Cindy and I were invited to a soirée one evening for perhaps thirty people. After a lovely buffet dinner, we were ushered into their large living room, where seats were set up for a concert. Bob had hired a professional concert pianist for the occasion, and we were treated to what can genuinely be called a chamber music concert. It was my one peek at the way the upper crust lived in New York. Barry Moore had given me a view of what might be called Edith Wharton money, old money. Bob was, so to speak, semi-new money, one generation old. I saw what really new money looked like through our rather odd friendship with George and Nedra Robinson. I had known George and Nedra at Harvard during my undergraduate days. George was now making big bucks on Wall Street, and the two of them had set themselves up in one of those vast pre-war Central Park West apartment buildings that John Lennon got shot in front of. Their living room was so huge that Nedra had been forced to furnish it with specially made couches and upholstered chairs that looked as though they had come out of a home on Brobdingnag. I never saw anyone actually sitting in them. George had lingering academic longings, which he indulged by taking up impecunious academics like me. Cindy and I saw Amadeus and Marat/Sade from orchestra seats as their guests.
But far and away the most interesting New York sub-culture of which I was given a glimpse was the Upper West Side intellectual New York Review crowd. Bob Heilbroner knew Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review. Silvers, in turn, knew the people who had organized a series of symposia called The Theater for Ideas, which met in a downtown loft used during the day as a dance studio. Attendance was by invitation only, and the guest list was an A-list of New York intellectuals. I was never a regular, but I did get invited to several of the symposia, most notably one devoted to "The Hidden Philosophy of Sigmund Freud." Sidney was actually on the panel, but for once he was eclipsed by others, including Bruno Bettelheim, the famous Chicago psychoanalyst, Holocaust survivor, and controversial therapist to autistic children. I was sitting in the front row, right in front of the stage. Next to me on the right was the composer William Schuman. Next to him was Sidney Hook. Behind me were Normal Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Sander Vanocer, among others. It was that kind of night.
Bettelheim gave a brilliant talk, one which I have referred to many times over the years in my own lectures on Freud. He said that Freud did not have a "hidden philosophy." Instead, Freud's life had been an endless "quest for the unconscious." The first person to pop up at question time was Hook, pugnacious and hostile as usual. "There is nothing new in what Freud did," Hook said. "Shakespeare could do that. Dostoyevsky could do that." And he sat down, satisfied that he had destroyed Bettelheim. "You are absolutely right," Bettelheim replied. "Shakespeare could do what Freud did. And Dostoyevsky could do what Freud did. But Freud taught us how to do it." Hook grumbled that Bettelheim hadn't responded to his point, but I thought it was the most brilliant rejoinder I had ever heard at a lecture. Then Norman Mailer got up, dressed in a tight-fitting vest and holding himself like a bantam weight boxer, and unloaded a fifteen minute diatribe against his current analyst, who was not in attendance. Things went downhill after that.
Cindy made fast work of her doctoral dissertation, and finished it that first year, but she missed Harvard's deadline for a June degree, and had to be content with receiving her degree the following January. Her dissertation director was the same Harry Levin who had misconstrued Bob Tracy's project. When Cindy had a complete draft, she sent it to Levin, and several weeks later took the train up to Boston to see him. I waited anxiously at Grand Central for her return, to hear how things had gone. Levin had laboriously changed most of her "which's" to "that's" and "that's" to "which's," but he had virtually no substantive criticisms at all, so Cindy sailed through. Meanwhile, she went looking for a job. Queens College offered her an Instructorship, since she did not yet have her degree, and she accepted. Starting in the Fall, we would both be teaching full time. Fortunately, I lived so close to my office that I never needed the car, so she could take it to drive out to Queens.
That first summer, I signed up once again to teach summer school. In those days, Columbia ran two five-days-a-week sessions each summer, and I taught two courses in each session. Cindy had grown rather depressed when she finished her dissertation, and I was very concerned about her. My first thought was to get her out of the city for at least a little while. My uncle Anoch and aunt Rosabelle had a summer home in Brewster, New York, about an hour's drive north of Manhattan which they offered to us for a couple of weeks, so we moved up there with our little cairn terrier, Fergus, and I commuted into the city to teach each day. My classes were scheduled so that I had several hours between the first and the second. I had not yet begun writing the essay I owed Art Danto by the end of the summer, the advance for which had long since been spent, so each day, I would walk over to our apartment, sit down at the old standard non-electric typewriter on which I had taken to doing my writing, and start banging away. The essay was supposed to deal with what was happening at the forefronts of the field, but I didn't actually know where the forefronts of the field were, and cared even less. Since I was pretty sure no one I knew would ever read what I was writing, I decided simply to write my own political philosophy. In several weeks, I had completed an essay of 80 pages or so, which I turned in to Arthur. Five years later, that essay saw the light of day as In Defense of Anarchism.
It seemed clear that Cindy needed psychiatric help as much as I did, so I asked Dr. Rodgers for a referral, and very quickly, it was decided that come September, Cindy would begin a full scale analysis. I was going to have to tap dance pretty fast to keep us from going deeply into debt.
When I accepted the Columbia job, I thought I would teach there until I retired. I had enough self-awareness to know that I had a tendency to shoot my mouth off, and I really did not want to make a bad impression, so I told Cindy that when I went to department meetings that first year, I was going to just sit and listen and get the lay of the land. There would be plenty of occasions later on for me to speak up. I imagine newly appointed Supreme Court Justices have a similar thought. When I went along to my first department meeting, I fully intended to be seen but not heard. As I walked into the seminar room where we met, Justus greeted me warmly. "Well, Bob, it is good to see you here," he said. "Since you are new, I imagine you won't want actually to take an active part in the deliberations for a while, but it is great that you are here to listen." Well, that settled it. I didn't shut up until I left in1971.
Right away, the department was faced with the necessity of making some decision about the future of the junior members. There were three of them: Arthur Collins, Martin Golding, and David Sidorsky. I had not yet gotten to know them very well, of course, but the other senior members of the department had arrived individually or collectively at pretty clear opinions about each of them. Everyone agreed that Collins was the most promising philosopher of the three. Since Arthur was really an able man, Ernest Nagel felt himself free to judge him by the highest possible standards, and what Ernest thought would greatly influence many other votes. Ernest decided that Arthur did not quite come up to snuff for a tenured professorship at a great Ivy League university. That killed Arthur's chances, and the next year he managed to get a job at City College. Martin Golding's field was the philosophy of law, which was one of Ernest's minor sub-specialties. We all waited to hear what Ernest had to say, but was not willing actually to offer an opinion. It seemed to us pretty clear that if Ernest didn't think Arthur made the grade, then he wouldn't think that Martin did either, but Ernest was mum. So it was decided to send Martin's work out to three or four of the most eminent philosophers of law in the English speaking world. Well, you know what happened. Those distinguished gentlemen assumed that we had already decided to promote Martin and were simply going through the motions, so they wrote back puffs, and we were stuck. There was no way we could vote no if all the biggies in the field said he walked on water. Martin got tenure.
That left David. Now, about David there was complete agreement. He was a disaster. The question was not even close. Nobody in the entire department thought David deserved tenure, but David was a nice Jewish boy [well, at least he was Jewish], and there was very serious doubt that he could get another job if we dumped him. The more senior members were actually prepared to keep him around forever simply because they couldn't bring themselves to vote him out. Sidney, Arthur, Jim, and I had lunch, and we agreed that David had to go. There were four of us, and the four no's rule was still in effect. We agreed that we would all vote no when the secret ballots were handed around, and Sidorsky would be history. At the next meeting, we took a vote. When Justus counted the votes, there were three no's and one abstain. Arthur and Jim and I looked at each other and all shook our heads. We had stuck by our agreement. Then we looked at Sidney. He shrugged, with a sweet sad look on his face. That was forty-five years ago. The last I looked, Sidorsky was still a senior professor in the Columbia Philosophy Department.
The year after I joined the department, we faced a full-scale crisis. The Rockefeller Institute, a premier biological research institute founded by John D. in 1901 and situated the east side at York and 63rd, decided to become a University. The first thing it needed, of course, was a Philosophy Department. They didn't have any students or a campus to speak of, but they figured a Philosophy Department would show that they were serious. So they set out to buy themselves one. They called Ernest and offered him a professorship. Now, the year before,
Columbia had created the exalted rank of University Professor, appointing the great physicist Isidor I. Rabi as the first holder of that title. The next year, the great art historian Meyer Schapiro was also elevated to University Professor. [The story is that Schapiro got a really fat offer from Harvard and went to see the Provost, Jacques Barzun, about it. Schapiro had been one of the first Jews to get tenure at Columbia, a fact Barzun was not above playing on. When Schapiro told Barzun the terms of the offer, Barzun said, "Oh, Meyer, I am ashamed of you. How can you think about money? You are a member of the Columbia family." Barzun bought Schapiro off with a University Professorship, and Schapiro went away embarrassed.]
Ernest was a good friend of both Rabi and Schapiro, and he dearly yearned for the status that attached to the sciences. So he went to Barzun and said he wanted a University Professorship like Izzie and Meyer. Barzun said no. Why did Barzun say no? I have always thought it was because he just wasn't willing to populate the ranks of the University Professors with Jews, but I am sure that is a blood libel, so forget it. Anyway, Ernest left in a huff for the East Side.
The department was thunderstruck. Ernest had been at Columbia forever. Ernest was the Columbia Philosophy Department. What were we going to do? Obviously, the only solution was to recruit the biggest name we could find to take Nagel's place, and hope that the department was not summarily downgraded in everyone's private rankings. [What follows repeats and expands on a story I told at the very beginning of this extended Memoir. I apologize to my most faithful readers.] We met to discuss possibilities, and very quickly it became clear that Justus was not on board. Each time a name was mentioned -- Quine, Goodman, Chisholm, Sellars -- Justus objected that he was not good enough for us. After a while, I grew just a trifle exasperated. "Justus," I said, "is there anyone in American philosophy whom you would like to see us hire?" Justus thought about that seriously for a moment, and said, "No." "Okay," I said, "Is there anyone in the world you would like us to hire? Never mind whether he can speak English." "No," said Justus. Beside myself, I came back, "Never mind alive! What about Descartes?" "Too diminished a conception of experience." "Kant?" "Not adequately clear on the nature of being." "Is there anyone in the entire history of philosophy who would be good enough to join us?" Justus gave that some serious thought. Finally, he allowed, "Aristotle, and Whitehead."
But Justus was a good soldier, and if the department voted to make an offer, he was prepared as Chair to represent our collective will. We tried Quine. No soap. Chisholm, Also no. Goodman. No hope there. At one point we tried Kripke, who was then still a very young man. Justus made the call, but as it happened, it was the Sabbath, and Saul refused to come to the phone. Along about then, I began to feel real sympathy for Justus. This being before the big upheaval, there was no question of the graduate students playing any role in the proceedings, but of course they caught wind that something was up, and they came to Jim Walsh, demanding to know why we weren't hiring someone to replace Nagel. Jim called a formal meeting of the graduate students kin the seminar room, and they all crowded in. "All right," Jim said, "we are going to play a game. You tell me whom you would like us to hire, and I will tell you what he said when we called him." The students looked a bit puzzled, but they gave it a go. Every time they came up with a name, Jim would simply repeat what that potential candidate had responded. We had tried them all.
The Rockefeller was in the process of hiring themselves a pretty classy bunch of philosophers. Over the next decade, they rounded up Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, Harry Frankfort, Margaret Wilson, and many others. But the experience of actually being at the Rockefeller was rather soul-numbing. Scientists work in groups in labs, so there is always some socializing and that goes on. But when Nagel showed up, they gave him an office, measured him for a desk, and said, "All right. Welcome. Now think." It drove Ernest nuts. After only one year, he came crawling back, asking to be rehired at Columbia. And now, Columbia made him a University Professor!

GUEST BLOG BY MY SON, TOBIAS BARRINGTON WOLFF

This is a guest blog by my son, now Professor of Law at UPenn and Visiting Professor at NYU Law School.

I forget whether I have ever told you my own story about Zabar's and H&H Bagels. At the beginning of my year with the Whiffenpoofs, you may recall that we spent two weeks on a retreat on Cape Cod, getting to know each other and learning the music. Mid way through, we were given a day off, and I offered to drive a friend of mine to New York so that he could see his girlfriend, who was there for the summer. It was my job during the retreat to shop and cook food for everyone, so I took the occasion to make a trip to Zabar's and H&H. (H&H bagels are indeed singular and transporting -- in part, I think, because they put a fair amount of sugar in them.)

While I was picking up supplies at Zabar's, I noticed the bin of Zabar's Special Blend Coffee amidst the other selections, and I remembered that you had gotten Zabar's Special Blend delivered to our house in Northampton for some years and brewed it in your Chem-Ex carafe -- probably from about the time we first moved there until I was about six or seven years old -- before you gave up and started buying your coffee locally. I decided, purely for reasons of nostalgia, to pick up a pound of the Blend to include among my supplies. The moment that the bin was opened, the smell of that blend of coffee instantly transported me back to Northampton and my six-year-old self with one of the most powerful remembrances of things past that I have ever experienced.

I had been drinking coffee for years at this point. I spent a good part of High School hanging out at the Coffee Connection in Harvard Square (before it was taken over and profaned by Starbucks), I was an inveterate late-night coffee drinker in college -- the taste, scent and culture of coffee had long since suffused my being. At no point before then had the smell of coffee even reminded me of my young life in our kitchen in Northampton. But the distinctive scent of Zabar's Special Blend (to which I had not been exposed since those early years) brought me back. I found it astonishing, and still do, that my six-year-old nose was sensitive enough to discern the specific scent of that blend of coffee, many years before I had ever tasted coffee or even conceived the idea that there were distinctions between different types of beans or blends, and that my young brain had recorded that scent with sufficient precision to give me my own Proustian moment in Zabar's fifteen years later. I am actually now somewhat reticent about going back to Zabar's, because I do not want to cheapen that experience by repeating it too casually.

MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE FIFTH INSTALLMENT

Remember: Starting Wednesday, May 5, my new blog will appear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, called Formal Methods in Political Philosophy. This Memoir will appear on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The new blog can be found at http://robert-wolff.blogspot.com

When I retired and moved to Chapel Hill, NC, I discovered that two of my students from the Columbia days were now senior professors at Duke. Alexander Rosenberg, now Chair of the Duke Philosophy Department, took my Kant course as an undergraduate at CCNY [one of the many extra courses I taught up the way there], and Allan Buchanan studied with me as an undergraduate at Columbia. Needless to say, they both did splendidly. I cannot get used to the fact that they are senior professors, but then Alex assures me that he also cannot get used to the fact that he is no longer an eager, aspiring Assistant Professor.

One of my oddest student encounters happened in '67-'68, when I was spending a visiting year at Rutgers, but also moonlighting both at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center. At CUNY I was teaching a political philosophy seminar to a small group of students, during the course of which I set forth my by then pretty settled anarchist views. One of the students, Sherryl Ann Block, brought in to class a little nineteenth century pamphlet called No Treason by someone named Lysander Spooner, whom I had of course never heard of. She pressed it on me, so I took it home and read it. I was, I must confess, a trifle dismayed to find that Spooner, a lawyer with a deep suspicion of state authority, had anticipated virtually all of my arguments by a century. Anarchism has long been a subterranean counter-theme in Western political theory, and neither I nor Spooner was the first one to figure out that the state has no clothes on.

But surely the most dramatic student I encountered during my Columbia years was the radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson. Ti-Grace had studied philosophy at Penn, and had also done fashion modeling, in addition to spending time as curator of an art gallery, I believe. She came to Columbia at the suggestion of her Penn professors to do graduate study in Philosophy, arriving when I did or a year later. Ti-Grace was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman who was always exquisitely dressed and made up. This was New York, after all, and sixty blocks further south she might have blended in quite well, although I think she would have been noticed in any milieu. But the dress code at Columbia in those days was pretty much academic grunge. We all looked as though we had been colored by the crayons that are left in the box after all the good ones are gone. Ti-Grace stood out as though she was the only one in technicolor. Her special thing was to dress provocatively -- short skirts, low-cut blouses -- and then, when one of the men in the Department responded however subtly to her self-presentation, turn on him and accuse him angrily of treating her differently because she was a woman. Shortly after she arrived, she made the mistake of trying that on Sidney. Sidney was teaching a summer graduate course on metaphysics and Ti-Grace signed up. She showed up to the first class in a very low-cut blouse. Sidney gave no indication that he had noticed. Now the thing you have to know about Sidney, if you never met him, is that he had inherited from his Lower East Side Jewish background a sense of personal space quite different from what was customary in American academic society at that time. When Sidney talked to you, he stood a good deal closer than was usual, or even comfortable. If you backed up, he advanced, until you were up against a wall with Sidney talking rather loudly in your face. Anyway, at the end of the class, Sidney, Ti-Grace, and several other students got into the tiny elevator in Philosophy Hall to ride down to the main floor. As the elevator started, Sidney said to Ti-Grace in a loud voice, standing virtually face to face with her, "So? You think I didn't notice them?" looking down at her cleavage. "What do you want me to do about them?" Ti-Grace was terrorized, and never tried that on Sidney again.

In the late Fall of '67, I ran into Ti-Grace in the basement of Hamilton Hall, where you could get a check cashed. She asked me how I was [a major concession and very great compliment, incidentally, since by then she had declared on ideological grounds that she would not speak to men]. I said excitedly that my wife was pregnant with our first child, and I was very much looking forward becoming a father. Ti-Grace looked disapproving. Calling on Plato's distinction between good and bad pleasures, she said that the desire to be a parent was a debased desire, and ought not to be indulged. "Who should look after the children?" I asked. She said it should be done by professionals with no emotional attachment to the children. And if by chance they should enjoy their work? I asked. What then? They should be discouraged from becoming attached to the children, and should be rotated around before such attachments were engendered.

The last time I talked to Ti-Grace was late at night, when she called to say that she had been arrested and strip-searched and could I help her to find an attorney. I did what I could, but I think I did not run into her again.

What was it like to live in Morningside Heights in those days? The area right around Columbia had the sorts of little shops that you would expect in a academic neighborhood, and of course even then Riverside Drive was a pretty pricey place to live. But the transformation of the Upper West Side was in its early stages. The major Lincoln Center project had been started only a few years before I arrived at Columbia. Little by little, gentrification crept north from 59th street, south from 116th street, and east from Riverside drive to Central Park West, until it had all become Yuppie Heaven.

As a boy, I had been allowed to take the subway alone from Queens to Manhattan for my violin lessons with Mrs. Zacharias, whose big pre-war apartment was at 71st street just off Broadway. Up near Columbia, Broadway and Amsterdam are parallel, but as Broadway heads south, it angles over toward Amsterdam, until the two cross at 71st street. The intersection creates a little triangular park. In the 1940s, this was all safe territory, so my parents weren't being completely reckless in allowing me to travel there by myself. But when Cindy and I moved to Manhattan in 1964, this triangle had come to be known as "needle park" because it was a favorite hangout of drug addicts.

The street life even in Morningside Heights was a trifle exotic. Shortly after I arrived, I was walking with Sidney. On the corner of Broadway and 116th was a phone box long since disabled. The cord connecting the handset to the phone box had been cut, so that it just sat there useless. As Sidney and I approached the intersection, I saw a man in the phone booth. He had the handset to his mouth, and was yelling into it at the top of his lungs. Startled and a trifle unsettled, I said to Sidney, "Look at that." He looked up and said casually, "Oh, yeah. He's a shouter." Apparently New Yorkers had categories of crazies.

The signature institution of the entire area, then as now, was Zabar's. Describing Zabar's as a deli is a bit like describing Angelina Jolie as cute. It would be more accurate to say that Zabar's was the concrete materialization of the lambent spirituality of an entire sub-population of the East Coast. For a number of years, every Sunday I would routinely and ritually drive down from 115th street to 80th street and Broadway for bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon, which I would then carry home, like a marauding Viking sailing north to his fjord. When Cindy and I moved to Western Massachusetts seven years later, I gave serious thought to making periodic forays to Manhattan to stock up.

The clientele was as much a part of the scene as the food. In those days, you stood in line at a counter along one wall, waiting to place your order with the aproned men standing there with their razor sharp knives. During one of my visits, I saw Richard Benjamin and George Segal come in to get their Sunday supplies. The men with the knives were capable of slicing the smoked salmon on the bias paper thin. One Sunday, while I was waiting my turn, a rather over-dressed woman stepped up to the counter, and in an unsuccessful attempt at a refined accent, said "I would like a half pound of stomach lox, please." The deli man looked at her incredulously and, in a voice that could be heard on 82nd street, said, "Belly lox, lady, belly lox. It's belly lox." [The classic story, which I never myself witnessed, has it that an old guy came in and asked for some lox. "How much you want?" the counter man asked. "Just start slicing." So the counterman took a large side of smoked salmon and started slicing. After he had sliced about four pounds, the old man said, "O.K. A quarter pound from there."]

VENUS AND MARS

Idle observation from my morning walk: Women who jog gossip while they run. Men who jog do not.

MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE FOURTH INSTALLMENT

Remember: Starting on Wednesday, May 5, I will be posting on my new blog, Formal Methods in Political Philosophy, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I will be continuing my Memoirs on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The new blog can be found at http://robert-wolff.blogspot.com

Memoir Fourth Installment

The teaching load at Columbia, as we say in the Academy, was "two and two" -- two courses in the Fall and two in the Spring. Since I had been appointed to the Graduate and Undergraduate faculties, that meant an undergraduate course and a graduate course each semester. But I was spending a very large portion of my monthly paycheck on analysis, so I took those numbers as minima rather than as maxima. In 1964-65, my records show, I taught seven courses: four at Columbia, two at Barnard, and one at City College. Thus began a career of moonlighting that would result in my teaching perhaps thirty or more extra courses beyond my mandated load.

I had a total of one hundred fifty three students in those seven courses, and, grading being what it was before the Viet Nam War induced grade inflation of the later sixties and early seventies, I gave out a total of only six grades of A or A+. My favorite student that year, and one of my very favorite graduates students from those years, was a slender, sandy-haired man named Dan Brock. Many of you know Dan, or know of him, for he went on to an extremely distinguished career, first in the Brown University Philosophy Department and now as the head of Harvard Medical School's medical ethics program. I seem to recall that Dan had actually spent some time on Wall Street before coming to Columbia as a Philosophy graduate student. Since I had been hired to cover ethics, I was covering ethics, and Dan was part of the seminar I taught on ethical theory my first semester at Columbia. His seminar paper was really two papers -- a short discussion of social statistics and their significance for ethics, and a longer discussion of moral responsibility, drawing on the writings of Hart and Nowell-Smith. My note to myself says "superb paper, best of the lot." Irena Winston did a bang-up job as official critic. There is a picture of Dan on the Harvard website. His mustache is bigger now.

I taught both an Introduction to Philosophy and a Metaphysics course at Barnard that year [Metaphysics? What on earth was I doing teaching metaphysics?] The best student in either class was a modest, unassuming young woman named Frances Kamm. Frances seems to have done pretty well for herself. She is now a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. I recall her as a young undergraduate, but that was forty-five years ago, so she must be approaching retirement now. How strange is memory and the passage of time.

The third outstanding student from that year is a real mystery. I taught a graduate course on Political Philosophy, in which I unpacked my "Fundamental Problem of Political Philosophy" paper and set forth the argument of what became In Defense of Anarchism. There was a brilliant student in the class who is listed on my hand-written grade sheet simply as D. Hofstadter. He was far and away the best student in the class, and earned an A+. For thirty years, I have thought that student was Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gődel, Escher, Bach. But when I Googled him to check, it turned out that he went to Stanford. What is more, I sent him an email, and he replied that it was definitely not he. So there were apparently two brilliant D. Hofstadters at the same time. Would the real D. Hofstadter please check in?

During that first year, as I have already said, Barrington Moore called me to ask that I write an essay on tolerance so that he, Herbie Marcuse, and I could make a book for Beacon Press. Since I have published twenty-one books during the course of my career, sometimes at the rate of three or four a year, perhaps I should explain to my younger readers, who are having trouble getting their fine scholarly work published, just why it was so easy for me. [I once gave a talk at a college where I was introduced by someone who said "Professor Wolff joined the Book of the Month Club, but he misread the promotional materials and thought he was supposed to publish a book a month, not read a book a month."]

It was really all because of Sputnik. As I have already explained [Volume One, Chapter Five, blog post June 28, 2009], the Russians launched their history making orbital space vehicle on October 4, 1957, while I was doing my regular Army service at Fort Devens, MA. We were inside GI-ing the barracks at about 5 a.m. when it made its first pass over North America, but Sgt. McVicker made us fall out and watch it move sedately over ahead. Sputnik wasn't much of a satellite. It was not even two feet in diameter. But the Russians had beaten us into space, and the reaction in America was explosive. If the Russians could launch even something as small as Sputnik into space, then surely they were not far from testing a usable intercontinental ballistic missile that could be armed with a nuclear warhead, way ahead of anything the Americans could build. John F. Kennedy made this so-called "missile gap" a central issue in the 1960 presidential campaign, despite the assurances by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that our intelligence indicated no such gap. Henry Kissinger, always ready to jump on any passing bandwagon, featured the missile gap in The Necessity for Choice. After Kennedy was elected, McGeorge Bundy quietly acknowledged that there was in fact no missile gap.

One almost immediate consequence of Sputnik was the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which funneled huge amounts of money into graduate education to fight the Red menace. As will happen when enough money is poured into an institution, some of it slopped over into the budgets of university presses around the country. This upped the number of library sales for a scholarly book that a publisher could pretty well count on, and the economics of publishing then being what they were, a publisher could be confident of breaking even on a scholarly book from sales to libraries plus the usual sales to the extended family of the author. If a book actually got some good reviews and did well, the publisher would make a profit.

Pretty soon, publishers were contacting authors to ask whether they had anything in the works that could be published. You could get a contract with a manuscript, part of a manuscript, or even an idea and a table of contents. Between 1963 and 1973, I published fifteen books. Needless to say, I thought my success was a consequence of brains and hard work. The truth is, I was just plumb lucky.

My first attempt at an essay on tolerance was a flop. I read what I had written to Cindy -- one of the few times I did that -- and she confirmed that it didn't seem to have much going on. So I threw that away. Then the thought struck me that I could construe tolerance as the characteristic virtue of a liberal democracy. Immediately, I realized that I could portray courage as the characteristic virtue of a military state, loyalty as the virtue of a monarchy, and so forth. I had my story line, and the rest wrote itself. The essay became a vehicle for criticisms of liberal democratic theory that had been percolating in my mind for several years. I sent the essay off to Beacon Press, and shortly afterward had the little roundtable meeting with Moore, Marcuse, and Tovell that I have already described.

When the book came out, it looked a bit like Mao's little red book, except that it was black. In its first three years, A Critique of Pure Tolerance sold all of 4346 copies. Not bad for a scholarly work, but no barn burner either. Then in '66 a German edition appeared [Kritik der Reiner Toleranz, which made it sound even more like an insider Kant joke], and Rudi Dutschke seized on it. The book flew off the shelves in Germany, encouraging Tovell to reissue it in English in a normal format. In 1969, the new edition sold 26,100 copies. Over the next few years, that little book appeared in Swedish, Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Japanese. Thanks to the dinner at Moore's house, at which I had first met Herbie, I was world famous in Poland. By the time it finally went out of print twenty-seven years later, the book had sold more than 70,000 copies in America, and I shall never know how many around the world.

Over the years, I had many other fine students, of course. Ann Davis, who has been a guest blogger here, was in one of my Barnard classes. Andrew Levine wrote his doctoral dissertation with me on political philosophy [one of the few over the decades who actually did], and went on to a brilliant career first at Madison, Wisconsin and now at College Park, Maryland. Andrew is weirdly famous in some circles for having the ability to repeat backwards what is said to him [not word for word backwards, but sound for sound backwards], and once actually appeared on television -- the Tonight Show, I think -- as Professor Backwards. But my favorite story about him concerns the first class he ever taught. It was during the exciting days of anti-Viet Nam War protests and Columbia building seizures, and Andrew was totally engaged. I ran into him as he was off to teach his first discussion section ever. He explained to me that he was eager to break down the authority structure of the classroom. He was going to ask students to call him by his first name [this is back when no one did that], and would have the students sit in a circle so that he would not be in a superior position standing in front of the class. "Andrew," I said, "these students are not stupid. They know that at the end of the semester, you are going to be the one giving them a grade. You can't pretend not to be an authority when you really are one." "No, no," he protested, "this is going to be different." Several hours later, I saw him again, and he was quite crestfallen. "They treated me like The Professor," he said sadly. "But you are the professor," I said.

Frances Schrag took the Philosophy of the State course in '67, and is now Professor Emerita from Wisconsin-Madison. I guess I just cannot get used to the fact that my students are retired! Eric Steinberg is emeritus from Brooklyn College. Paul Valliere is a Professor of Religion at Butler University, and David Olan is a Professor of Music at CUNY. Hans Bynagle, who wrote a really fine paper on obedience and autonomy, is now a senior professor at Whitworth University, and Barbara Meyerson is the Ethical Humanist Chaplain at Columbia. My notes on her say "a very intelligent paper on my moral theory. Shows genuine talent." I do hope I was not influenced by the fact she wrote about my views. I don't ordinarily much like that.

Andrzej Rapaczynski also took my course on the philosophy of the state, and actually did something that no other student in my fifty years of teaching has done. He made me change my mind. I gave a lecture setting forth a part of my critique of the justification of democratic authority, and Andrzej raised an objection. I fumbled a bit for an answer and promised to give him a full reply in the next class. But when I got home and thought through his argument, I decided he was right and I was wrong, so I rewrote the lecture and at the next class gave the same lecture over again with the emended argument. Andrjez took a doctorate at Columbia, taught at Yale while simultaneously doing a law degree at Yale Law, and ended up as a Professor of Law at Columbia. The last I saw of him, he was teaching a course at Columbia Law on property that began with Locke's theory of property. I wonder what the law students thought of that.

REMINDER

Don't forget: Starting Wednesday, May 5, I launch my new blog: Formal Methods in Political Philosophy. From then on, I will post segments of that discussion on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I will continue my Memoir every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. The new blog will be at http://robert-wolff.blogspot.com

MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE THIRD INSTALLMENT

The relationship among the various members of the department was complex, resembling those of an extended family. The key figure, I very soon learned, was Nagel. Ernest had been the teacher or mentor of Frankel, Morgenbesser, and Danto, among others, as well as of my old protector, Morton White, each of whom he shaped in different ways. Nagel was a small, thin man whose principal published work was in logic and the philosophy of science. The younger members of the department all looked to him as an intellectual leader, but he was diffident about asserting that leadership overtly. Nagel seemed to me to fit perfectly the stereotype of the passive aggressive Jewish intellectual, and for reasons having to do with my relationship to my father, which during those years was being explored in my psychoanalysis, I had very ambivalent feelings about him. When I arrived, he welcomed me more or less as an adoptive nephew, because of his earlier friendship with my father and my uncle. Among the younger men who were his former students. Sidney clearly had the strongest intelligence and the greatest claim to his legacy, but over time, Sidney's failure to publish weakened that claim.

It wasn't that Sidney was short of ideas, heaven knows. If you stopped Sidney in the hallway and asked him a question about virtually anything in philosophy, he would, like as not, give you a beautifully crafted, completely coherent, well-organized answer that could, if transcribed, be published as a brilliant paper. But if you asked him to write it up, he froze. One year, Sidney agreed to speak at the Eastern Division meetings of the APA, and everyone wondered whether he would back out at the last moment. On the appointed day, Sidney showed up, strode to the microphone, put down a thick sheaf of papers on the lectern, and started delivering his paper. "Well," we all thought, "Sidney has come through. He has actually written a paper." Halfway through, as he was carefully setting the pages down on the desk one by one as he finished with them, a gust of wind blew one of the sheets on the floor. It was totally blank.

The relationship between Sidney and Art Danto was especially fascinating. There is an old schlock movie that I blush to admit I love, called Sky High, about a high school levitating in the clouds for teenagers who give evidence of superhero powers. One girl can turn herself into a guinea pig, another boy can hurl flames, a third kid can roar loud enough to knock down walls. At the beginning of Freshman year, Coach has each of them demonstrate his or her power. Since each superhero must have a sidekick [think Batman and Robin], Coach summarily classifies each new student as either a Superhero or a Sidekick, depending on the impressiveness of the power. When I got to Columbia, it was clear that Sidney was the superhero and Arthur was the sidekick. But over time, Arthur started to publish a series of articles and books that earned him a major reputation in the profession and in New York cultural circles. This did not diminish Sidney in any way, but it changed their relationship. It seemed that in life, if not in the movies, a sidekick could grow into a superhero.

Once I knew that I was going to be joining the Columbia Department, I had set about finding an analyst in New York. I had one-hour sessions with two Manhattan psychoanalysts, who consulted with one another and then decided that I ought to go into treatment with Dr. Terry Cloyd Rodgers, whose home and office were on the upper East Side. Rodgers was forty-seven when I went into analysis with him, a slight, sandy-haired dapper man who was quite unlike my stereotypical image of a New York analyst. Apparently the people with whom I consulted had decided that the last thing I needed was an intellectual Jewish analyst -- a Portnoy's Complaint analyst, as it were. I began in September, 1964, and for the next seven years, three or four times a week, I traveled down to West 88th street, just off Madison Avenue, for the sessions.

Rodgers was a native of Arkansas, where he completed his medical education. His office was a part of his apartment, and I once even caught sight of his wife in the hall -- an event that gave me a frisson of primal scene scopophilia. Considering how many hours I spent on the couch in his office -- a thousand or more, by quick calculation -- it is surprising how little I remember of those sessions. Four moments stand out in my mind. One day, I was going on at great length about what a remarkable difference there was between my life and the life my father had led. I was quite self-congratulatory about the distance I had come from the culturally and even geographically circumscribed world of my father, now that I was a senior Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Rodgers, a proper Freudian, did not often speak during the sessions, but as I was getting up to leave, he remarked quietly that he too had come some way. Walking to the bus stop, it suddenly struck me that whereas I had, by dint of heroic efforts and great brilliance, made it all the way from Queens to Manhattan, Rodgers had come from rural Arkansas to the Upper East Side. I think that is what is called transference. Another time I was complaining about the fact that I was paying Rodgers a king's ransom for my treatment, while he was too cheap even to decorate his office nicely, filling it with old and worn furniture. On my way out of the office, I noticed that it had recently been completely redecorated, and that everything in it was quite new.

The funniest moment in my analysis came when I was talking about my extended family, which, as I have already explained [Volume One, Chapter One, blog for June 28, 2009], meant my father's parents and brothers and sisters and their children, my cousins. I made mention of my Italian relatives, Ben and Fan and their kids Cora and Tony. Rodgers coughed gently and said, rather tentatively, "er, I thought you were of Eastern European Jewish extraction." "I am," I said. "Then how can they be Italian?" I was absolutely thunderstruck. I had always thought of them as Italian, but of course, if my father and my uncle Bob and my aunt Rosabelle were all Jews ultimately from somewhere in Poland or Russia, then their brother Ben must also be. Why on earth had I imagined that Ben and Fan and Cora and Tony were Italian? Well, it was really quite simple. My parents and Bob and Rose and Rosabelle and her husband, Anoch, were all rather quiet and intellectual. Ben and Fan were big and fat and cheerful and played musical instruments, and Cora and Tony were the same. When they arrived at a family party, they sat down at the piano played, sang, and made a lot of noise. I figured they were Italian. By the way, "intellectual' is a relative term. Both Ben and Fan were teachers in the New York City school system.

But the moment that really caused my heart to stop came some years into the analysis, when Cindy was also in analysis with a doctor whose office was two blocks north of Rodgers' office. These were the days before voicemail, call waiting, and such innovations, and though it was possible to pay for a telephone answering service [Bells are Ringing, with Judy Holliday], Rodgers did not have one. From time to time the phone would ring during one of our sessions. Rodgers would pick up the phone, say softly "I am busy now," and hang up. Over time, I developed the active fantasy that one day the phone call would be for me. One day, the phone rang, Rodgers picked it up, and after a moment he said, "It's for you." I had taken the bus to my appointment, but Cindy had taken the car, and it wouldn't start. I cut my session short and rushed out to rescue her, but for a brief and rather scary moment, the real world had penetrated the carefully protected space in which I could give voice to my fantasies without fear of their actualization. Who knows how much that set me back?

So, a thousand sessions and twenty-five thousand dollars, which was more than twice my before tax annual salary. What did I get for all of that? There are a lot of complicated answers I could give, and even though these are my memoirs, I cannot imagine that many people would be terribly interested them. But there is one thing I need to say, because it bears so directly on the way in which I conducted the rest of my life. As a boy and as a young man, I was in a perpetual rage of generational conflict. As far back as I can remember, I was engaged in challenges to male authority. At twelve, I challenged the people who ran the Boys Scout Camp over saying the Boy Scout oath ["As I scout, I will be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty. brave, clean, and reverent." I wouldn't say "reverent."] As a teenager, I challenged the authority of the couple who ran the Shaker Village Work Camp, even though I loved that camp more than anyplace else while I was in high school. I challenged Leo Ryan, the Acting Principal of Forest Hills High School, over whether I had to shave my incipient beard [since my father was a fellow high school principal, Ryan took me into the private bathroom in his office and made me shave]. No sooner had I got to Harvard than I published a letter in the Crimson calling for James Bryant Conant to step down as President [see Volume One, Chapter One. Blog post June 28, 2009]. I challenged McGeorge Bundy on Cuba, George Beadle of Chicago on discriminatory housing, and just about any other male authority figure I could find. Interestingly, I have never had any problem with female authority figures, which is why I found it so easy to work under a woman as Department Chair once I joined the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass.

One of the things my analysis clarified for me was my motivation in writing Kant's Theory of Mental Activity. It wasn't hard to figure out that I had fixed on Kant as a suitable father substitute. I had serious issues with my father, whom I viewed as weak and a failure. [This was unfair, but then I was not the first son to have a jaundiced view of his father]. Rodgers pointed out that my relationship to Kant was a bit more complicated than that. I represented him to the world as the greatest philosopher who had ever lived, and the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding as the central portion of his greatest book. But, as Rodgers observed, I also claimed that Kant needed me to make his central argument comprehensible and defensible. In effect, I was not willing to cede primacy of place even to Kant. It was an interesting insight.

Somehow, during the course of my analysis, I went from being an angry, rebellious son to being a generative, supportive father. The arrival first of Patrick in 1968, then of Tobias in 1970, obviously had something to do with it. But I really do believe that without the help of the analysis, I could not have moved smoothly and happily from the generation of the sons to the generation of the fathers. As a consequence of that transition, I became both a loving, supportive father and a generous, supportive teacher. I never lost my suspicion of bureaucratic or political authority, but that ceased to be the dominant modality of my personal relationships.