MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE NINTH INSTALLMENT

While I am telling Sidney stories, let me tell one more that may not have made its way into the blogosphere. A few words of explanation are required. One of Columbia's best known professors at that time was the literary scholar Lionel Trilling. Trilling was a New York Jewish boy who actually went to the high school [De Witt Clinton] at which my father taught for a while before spending his entire career at Columbia. Despite his origins, he affected a cultivated manner that, I imagine, he thought would be appropriate in an Oxford Senior Common Room. Trilling was one of a number of Columbia professors who chose to focus their energies in the College rather than the Graduate School. [That was an old rivalry for which I do not have time or space in these memoirs.] One day, Sidney went to a cocktail party, at which he spotted Trilling holding forth in his best Oxonian style. Sidney walked up and said, in a loud voice, "Ah, Lionel. Incognito ergo sum, eh?"

Now, this was pretty clearly a prepared bon mot. Sidney, like Samuel Johnson, was not above lying in bed at night crafting a witticism that he would carry about with him until an occasion arose for delivering it. As an author who does most of his writing in his head, I do not deprecate the practice. Indeed, my favorite Oscar Wilde line is one that he never actually published, and that has come down to us only because someone present on the occasion had the good sense to record it. I am referring, of course, to Wilde's immortal judgment on Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop -- "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

Once the students had been evicted from the buildings, a struggle broke out over whether they should be expelled, Both their supporters, like myself, and cool heads who sought to restore calm and repair the damage to the university, like Carl Hovde, argued for amnesty. The hardliners stood with the administration in demanding expulsion. A debate was organized on the question, at which Peter Gay took the side of the administration and I defended the students. An enormous number of students and faculty gathered to hear us [my memory says one thousand, but I cannot imagine where that would have been, and perhaps, like all political partisans, I am engaging in creative crowd enhancement.] I took my stand on the proposition that we, the faculty, and not the President and his cloud of Vice Presidents, were the university, and that we, not they, had the intellectual authority to decide who should receive a Columbia degree. "Let us issue a document to each student," I cried, " signed by the members of the faculty, stating that in our collective judgment that student has earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Then let Mr. Kirk issue a statement claiming that the student has been denied the degree. We shall see which document graduate schools and law schools and medical schools accept as legitimate." As you might expect, I was cheered to the echo, but I am rather glad Kirk did not take me up on my challenge. I am not as confident as I sounded that the world would have chosen academic authority over bureaucratic endorsement.

The final act of the Spring was the University Commencement. Customarily, this celebratory ritual was staged on the steps of Low Library, with the large green expanse covered with chairs for parents and friends. It is a splendid site, fully as lovely in its way as Harvard Yard, where the Harvard commencements are held. But Grayson Kirk was frightened that we would stage a demonstration in a space that was virtually impossible to close off, so he moved the proceedings to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue at 111th st. Even there, he was too apprehensive to deliver his customary presidential address, and his place was taken by Richard Hofstadter, who should have been with the students. The rest of us took possession of the space Kirk had abandoned, and held a counter-commencement on Low Plaza. Ours was much more fun.

While Columbia was exploding, Cindy was being fired. The semester she had taken off to bear and care for Patrick was the last semester of a three year Instructorship. The enlightened Chair of the Queens College English Department decided that a woman with a new baby could not give adequate attention to her teaching duties, and Cindy was once again on the job market. NYU had an opening, so I drove Cindy down to Washington Square and waited in the car while she went upstairs for an interview. When she came back down, she told me that the Chair of the Department had said, "Well, with your credentials, we would really have to offer you an Assistant Professorship if you were a man, but since you have to stay in the city anyway because of your husband's job, we will give you an Instructorship." Cindy was furious and turned him down on the spot. Fortunately, there was a tenure track Assistant Professorship at Manhattanville College, a Catholic women's college in Westchester, just north of the city. The nuns were delighted by the idea of a new mother on the faculty, and Cindy got the job.

This was not the first time that Cindy had encountered the prejudice against women rampant in the Academy, nor would it be the last. The Women's Movement had adopted as its slogan, "The personal is the political," and in my case this was exactly correct. I did not come to the issue of women's rights from a theoretical analysis of race, class, and gender in a capitalist society. I came to it out of anger at the way the world was treating a woman whom I loved and knew to be a brilliant scholar. I stewed about this for some time, before acting. There was nothing much I could do about the prejudice in English Departments, but I could at least try to do something about my corner of the academic world.

On September 17, 1969 I sent a letter to eleven senior members of the philosophy profession, asking them to serve as co-signers with me on a motion to be presented to the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the APA, calling for the establishment of a Standing Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz [who were husband and wife] came on board, as did Justus Buchler [whose wife taught philosophy], and Sue Larson and Mary Mothersill, both of Barnard. Maurice Mandelbaum, who along with Lewis White Beck had read my Kant manuscript for Harvard, was sympathetic, but pointed out that as the incoming APA president, if he signed he would be in the position of petitioning himself. A good point. The great Classicist Gregory Vlastos also said yes, as did Ruth Marcus, whom I knew from my Chicago days, when she was at Northwestern. Morty White was supportive, but declined to sign for fear that if the motion passed, he would be expected to serve on the committee, something he said he could not do because of writing obligations. That left Jack Rawls, who declined to sign. In retrospect, this does not surprise me. Although Jack was on his way to becoming the world's leading expert on justice, he never seemed to be there when action was needed. I was reminded of the great story [possibly apocryphal] about Karl Marx. whose mother is reputed to have said, "I wish Karl would write less about capital and make some." The motion passed, and my old student, Margaret Wilson, was elected the first Chair of the new Standing Committee.

One brief story about Margaret, to show how widespread the discrimination was. Columbia hired Margaret after she finished her degree at Harvard. I greeted her at the big reception that the department threw each Fall for its faculty, students, and all the other people in New York who considered themselves part of the Columbia philosophy family. Margaret told me that Rod Firth had offered her a terminal three year Instructorship in the Harvard Department, saying, "Of course, if you weren't a woman, we would be able to offer you an Assistant Professorship." I responded with outrage, but Margaret said, "It's all right. I didn't want to stay in Cambridge any way."

The last echo of the Columbia uprising in my life occurred the following Fall. I decided to offer an undergraduate course on the philosophy of education, and many of the students who had been active in SDS signed up. Also in the class was a Barnard student who babysat for Cindy and me from time to time. Cindy was now driving out to Manhattanville three times a week, and her teaching schedule overlapped with mine. By this time we had hired a wonderful woman, Viola Lemley, as our fulltime caregiver, but one day, when Cindy was due to go out to Westchester, Vi called in sick. Since we lived only half a block from the campus, I decided to bring Patrick to class. He was now eight months old, and was fussy from teething. I walked into class with Patrick on my shoulder and a pocket full of teething biscuits, and proceeded to lecture for fifty minutes while walking up and down, patting Patrick to soothe him. A week later, the Barnard student came to babysit, and told me that I had caused a major disruption within SDS by showing up with Patrick that day. Apparently, the students in the class had decided that I was not sufficiently radical [the left always eats its own], and planned to seize my class that day in a show of revolutionary force. But confronted by Patrick, they froze, and the plan fizzled. Despite Paul Kristeller's conviction that the students were Brown Shirts, they were really just nice middle class Jewish boys who knew that you did not make trouble for a man with a baby on his shoulder.

The Margaret Wilson story reminds me that I ought to say something about the larger community of which the Columbia Philosophy Department was the center. In a way quite different from either the Harvard or Chicago departments, the Columbia department had a number of friends who thought of us as their intellectual home, even though they had no official connection either with our department or even with Columbia University. Some were former students who had remained in New York; some were members of the Ethical Culture Society; some were simply New Yorkers with a serious and continuing interest in philosophy. They would all show up at the Fall reception, and would be greeted as old friends by those professors who had been in the department for a long time. The weirdest member of this penumbra was a tall, dark haired rather disturbed man somewhat older than I then was, who was reputed to receive a supporting subvention from his family quarterly. When he was in funds, he would show up, always wearing a long dark overcoat, and attend public philosophy talks. One day, as I was entering Philosophy Hall, he accosted me and told me excitedly that he had discovered a new and revolutionary proof for the existence of God based on the precise distances between the several planets of the Solar System. Ordinarily, when I saw him, we would talk for a bit while he told me his latest mad theories, but that morning I simply did not have time to stop. Not wanting to be rude, I said, "You are right. I was so convinced by the last proof you gave me that I have started going to schul regularly," and I rushed off upstairs. Half an hour later, I received an excited call from a student reporter for the Columbia Spectator. "A man just came into our office," he said, "and told us that he had proved the existence of God to you, and that you have accepted his proof and were now an observant Jew. Is that correct?" I was tempted, I really was, but I thought better of it and told him the truth.

One of my loveliest memories dates from the brief semester when I served as Graduate Program Director in Jim Walsh's absence. I was holding office hours one day when a vision of oriental loveliness floated into my office and introduced herself as a member of the Burmese delegation to the United Nations. She had studied philosophy in Burma, she said, and was interested to know how our program might differ from the one she had gone through. I started telling her about our requirements -- logic, ethics, epistemology, the history of philosophy. She asked at one point whether we had meditation. I allowed as how some of our students, I was sure, meditated [this was the 60's, after all], but that it was not a requirement. When I had concluded my rundown of our program, she rose to leave, pausing at the door to summarize what she had learned. "Philosophy in the United States is very like philosophy in Burma." she said. But then she added, rather sadly, "Except, of course, that you do not require meditation."

When the Philosophy Department of the University of Wisconsin Madison invited me to give the Matchette Lectures, I decided to use the occasion to lay out in some systematic order the thoughts that had been provoked in me by the Columbia uprising. Arnold Tovell agreed to publish them, and once again stealing a great author's title, I called the lectures The Ideal of the University [pace John Cardinal Newman's famous book, The Idea of a University.] The book, when completed, summarized and anatomized my experiences as a university professor over more than a decade. I did not realize when I wrote the book that it revealed the extraordinarily constrained and privileged circumstances in which I had pursued my career to that point. Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia were hardly representative of the academic scene in America as a whole. Only after moving to the University of Massachusetts was I able to get some perspective on my early career.

While in Madison, one member of the department told me a story that I feel I must repeat, even though it is secondhand, on the off chance that it has not made it into the blogosphere. The lecture hall in which I delivered the Matchette Lectures was a rather striking space. The architect had designed it with a parapet running around the wall just below the ceiling, cleverly rigged with indirect lighting to create the illusion that sunlight was pouring in through windows from outside. The legendary Cambridge philosopher of common sense G. E. Moore came to give a lecture one day, and as luck would have it was scheduled for that same room. Now, Moore had famously offered a "proof" of the existence of the external world [a hot topic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] that consisted of holding up first his right hand, then his left, and saying, "Here is one human hand, and here is another. That is two physical objects, which proves the existence of objects in space." This time, he decided somewhat unwisely to change the example, so, pointing to the space below the ceiling, he said, "Obviously there is sunlight shining in from outside, which proves ..." He was startled when the audience burst out laughing.

Analysis or no analysis, I was still a very angry young man. I focused my fund of resentment on the fact that I had not yet been promoted to the rank of full professor. Mind you, I was barely thirty-five, but I would sit in our kitchen tied up in knots at the vast injustice of it all. When the Hunter College Philosophy Department contacted me about the possibility of joining them, I said I would do so if they gave me a promotion and a big raise. They agreed, and I was all set to jump ship, but the President of the college got wind of my activities during the Columbia building seizures and vetoed the appointment because of my politics. This was the first of three occasions on which my politics cost me a job offer, and in all three cases, I was better off for not having secured the offer. Anyway, Columbia promoted me, so as of July 1, 1969, I would be Professor of Philosophy.

That same Spring I helped to organize the first annual meeting of the Socialist Scholars Conference. For this important occasion, we had secured, as our keynote speaker, Isaac Deutscher, whom readers of this memoir have already encountered when he tangled with Zbigniev Brzezinski at lunch in Adams House, Harvard. Deutscher offered to give a talk on "Socialist Man," and for so eminent a speaker, nothing less than four commentators would do. I penciled myself into the program. When the evening arrived on which Deutscher was to launch the Society, the ballroom in a downtown New York hotel was crammed with a thousand people. Another thousand had been accommodated in a nearby space, where they could not see the great man, but could hear the proceedings. Deutscher rose and delivered a fiery peroration that could best be described as a bold theoretical step forward from 1932 to 1933. Dated though his remarks were, he was cheered to the echo. Then it was time the commentators. First to speak was Shane Mage of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Mage was a natural choice, having written his doctoral dissertation at Columbia several years earlier on that hoariest of all marxist chestnuts, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. After a few introductory complimentary remarks, Mage started talking about the importance of "turning on, tuning in, and dropping out," the signature line of Harvard LSD guru Timothy Leary. The audience at first looked stunned, then angry, and finally anxious, for Deutscher was becoming visibly distressed. He probably thought that he had stumbled into some petty bourgeois left deviationist sect. I had prepared some pretty standard comments on Deutscher's paper, which we had been able to read in advance, but I felt that I needed to do something to salvage the situation, so I took out my pen and hastily wrote some sentences excoriating Mage for the utter frivolity and irrelevance of his response to Deutshcer. When my turn came and I read out those sentences, the hall erupted in cheers, and Deutscher breathed a sigh of relief.

After the talk, people rushed up to congratulate me. My body was pumping adrenaline and the haze of cigarette smoke in the room was stifling. As I stepped out of the hotel, the cold air hit me, triggering a violent anxiety attack. I grabbed a cab, gave him my address, and was halfway back to Morningside Heights before I remembered that I had driven to the hotel and parked my car nearby. I told the cabbie to turn around, retrieved my car, and made it home, where I collapsed in a sweat. Cindy melted three Valium tablets in some water and sugar and got me to swallow them., I lay on the bed rigid until the pills took effect and I could relax.

Patrick was now almost a year and a half old, and Cindy and I decided to have a second child. Once again we made careful calculations, and once again Cindy got pregnant as soon as we began to try, so Patrick would have a little brother or sister whose birthday was very close to his own. In anticipation of an expanded family, we began looking about for larger and somewhat less slum-like living quarters, but even though we drove north with real estate agents into Westchester so far that we thought we were on vacation, we could find nothing that was even remotely affordable.

At the same time, I was going through a rather profound change in my conception of myself, a change that would fundamentally alter the entire remainder of my career. Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I chose to leave a tenured professorship at an Ivy League university in a great city like New York for a position on a state university campus in the rural part of Massachusetts. For the most part, I have simply said that I did not want to raise my children in a New York apartment, and there is much truth to that. But something deeper was going on, and I think the time has come for me to try to put it into words.

A STORY OF LAW AND PHILOSOPHY

On September 26-28, 1986, I participated in a conference on Immanuel Kant's Legal Philosophy organized by Columbia Law School. The editors of the Columbia Law Journal asked to publish my paper as part of an entire issue devoted to the proceedings, but after hearing it, they thought better of that and asked me instead to write an overview of the conference. When I got home, my inner satirist took over, and I wrote a "report" that was a send-up of the affair. The editors called me en masse, to ask rather nervously whether I would agree to some revisions. I refused to change a word, but told them it was perfectly all right if they just did not publish it at all. They let out a collective sigh of relief at the happy news that their budding careers would not be blighted by my little jeu d'esprit. Here, twenty-four years later, is the paper, seeing the light of day for the first time. Enjoy.

WHY INDEED?
by
Johannes Climacus
Responsible for publication
Robert Paul Wolff

The Workshop in Kantian Legal Theory, of which the papers reproduced here are a partial record, was a curious event, withal. Nineteen men and one woman, closeted - and cossetted - for three days in Columbia University's Arden House for the avowed purpose of discussing the jurisprudential theories of the greatest philosopher who ever lived, Immanuel Kant. Fifteen hundred dollars plus expenses for the six authors of the papers circulated in advance for discussion, five hundred for those charged with participating in the discussion, the bill to be paid by the right-wing Liberty Fund, whose minatory representative, eerily resembling the Jehovah's Witnesses who every day radiate from their home in Brooklyn Heights to proselytize the faith, attended each session to make sure that the hired hands put in a full day's work.

Five of the nineteen were professional philosophers, four of them Kant scholars who had made their reputations struggling with one or another of Kant's great works. Twelve hours of concentrated discussion on Kant's philosophy was, in Eliza Doolittle's words, mother's milk to them, and Philosophy being what it is, the pay wasn't bad either. But the remaining fourteen
were professors of law - two from Canada, one from England, a lone representative of the German Federal Republic, and the rest from the United States. What, one could not help but wonder, were they doing there? What could Kant possibly have to say to them that would justify three days of unrelenting Kantshtick? The cast of characters itself was more than passingly interesting. Leading the group, the organizer of the conference, diminutive, erect, rather military in bearing, looking like nothing so much as the Major in BEAT THE DEVIL, was George Fletcher, Professor of Law at Columbia University. Kant clearly had a powerful valence for Fletcher, and one felt that the invocation of his name was code for intensely felt hostility to unspecified, but dangerously lax, tendencies in modern legal thinking. He seemed to draw strength from even garbled allusions to significant texts in Kant's ethical writings.

Most voluble of the nineteen was Fletcher's colleague, Bruce Ackerman, brilliant. precocious. enormously - and on occasion. with some justification pleased with himself. Antaeus-like. Ackerman would draw renewed strength from the sound of his own voice, so that launched upon a comment of finite scope. he would be refreshed by his words. and extend his remarks to fill all available space and time. Competing with Ackerman for the floor most
often was the radical philosopher and sometime Kant scholar Robert Paul Wolff. whose face, contorted by a persistent facial tic. showed excitement, disgust, irritation, and exasperation in quick succession. Ackerman and Wolff, like the two youngest boys at a Seder. frequently competed to see who could ask the most questions from a reclining position. both of them manifestly expecting an indulgent Jewish mother to pat them on the head and offer them another piece of cake. Intervening with impassioned criticisms that often outran their target somewhat was newly-tenured Andrzej Rapaczynski, also of Columbia Law School. Rapaczynski. quite possibly the philosophically quickest mind at the conference, had many years earlier been a brilliant student in the Columbia philosophy department, and had studied with Wolff. Now that he is safely tenured, it can perhaps be acknowledged that Rapaczynski is really a philosopher, not a Jurisprude. and in his youthful enthusiasm he was frequently less successful than his fellow philosophers in concealing his dismay at the appallingly low level of understanding of Kant manifested around the table. Across from Ackerman and Wolff sat tall. thin Mary Gregor. bent in a question mark of deference to her neighbor, Douglas Dryer, a long-time Kant scholar from Canada. As the only real expert present on the subject of the conference - she is the author of the major commentary on the VlO1:k under discussion - Gregor was of course almost silent during the three days. Gen- uine technical knowledge was in short supply, and would, if too often displayed, have tended to inhibit the free flow of conversation. Casting something of a pall on the proceedings was Professor Dr. Wolfgang Naucke of Frankfurt University, a Professor of Law and a Judge. For Naucke , it appeared, Kant constitutes the last barrier separating western civilization from barbarism, although whether from the left or from the right remained for a while unclear. Naucke's discussion of Kant was couched in a grammatical mode that might be dubbed the incantatory imperative, in-
spiring in the listener contradictory impulses to cheer and salute. Naucke's true colors were revealed almost by acc ident, midway through the discussion of his paper. Asked directly and flatly whether he considered Kant's jurisprudence incompatible with the welfare state, he replied, laconically, yes. At that, Wolff, who had been dozing, sat bolt upright like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party and confessed himself suddenly to have recaptured an interest in the proceedings. In striking contrast to Naucke, Herbert Morris, Dean of Humanities at UCLA, brought a welcome touch of laid-back California cool to the conference, taking the sting out of the Morningside Heights intensity of Ackerman, Rapaczynski, et al. Morris is well known for his philosophical discussions of the theory of punishment, and had in previous years carried on a debate in the literature on that subject with one of the Kant scholars present,
Jeffrie Murphy of Arizona State. Prompted by a question during the discussion of Murphie's paper, Morris treated the conference to an exquisite illustration of how to expound a systematic philosophical position while appearing merely to reminisce about an experience on a California freeway. Morris' impromptu remarks were one of the few moments of genuine style in an otherwise pedestrian three days.

The non-Canadian North Americans around the table were intermittently chivvied, with ironic deprecation, by crypto-Thomist Ernest Weinrib from the University of Toronto. Weinrib, and his killer rabbit sidekick Peter Benson from McGill, were the only lawyers at the conference who appeared seriously to be interested in the substance of the law. Weinrib's complaint, the internal incoherence of tort law south of his border, and the contrasting beauty and elegance of Canadian tort law, utterly mystified the philosophers around the table, but appeared to be an old familiar tune to the other lawyers.
As Spinoza noted, the self comes to know itself only as it sees itself reflected in others. Hence lovers need the beloved, actors crave audiences, and professors tolerate students. Fletcher, understanding these needs, had, like a good host, provided a symbolic student presence in the form of the editorial board of the Columbia Law Journal. They were of course enjoined from interrupting the heavenly discourses by juvenile interventions, but they were permitted to be present at the proceedings, with the understanding that they would in due course turn over the pages of their journal to the finished products. The relation of the students to the conference participants, peripheral though it was to the main action, offered a lovely example of the sort of ironic misperception of which Jane Austen made such elegant sport. The students were of course perceived by their mentors as adoring acolytes, consumed by academic primal scene scopophilia [a technical term from psychiatry, meaning the obsession to observe one's intellectual parents in rational intercourse]. The students, all of whom had done philosophy either as graduates or as undergraduates, were in a state of shocked dismay, quite well aware of the philosophical shambles unfolding before them, and unable to imagine how they could in good conscience feed the audience of their journal
so thin a gruel.

And there they all were, removed from the distractions of Manhattan, fed and cared for by a silent, efficient Arden House staff, serenaded by a chamber trio on the second evening, and embarked on twelve hours of investigationof the Rechtslehre, Part One of Kant's late, minor work, THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS.
Each two-hour session was devoted to one of the prepared papers, which all conference participants had received in advance. Robert Paul Wolff led off on the first afternoon. Wolff, accustomed to the terse prose style of the philosophical world, and mistakenly expecting to have to read his paper aloud, had been well along in the drafting of eighteen or twenty carefully crafted pages when a chance phone call to Fletcher had revealed that the other participants were producing 'fifty to eighty pages.' Panicked by the potential mortification of showing up with the shortest paper on the block, Wolff discarded his draft and began again. Since the paper was intended for non-philosophers, he reasoned, a fair amount of space could usefully be devoted to teaching them something about Kant. Having written two books on Kant's philosophy, and having taught Kant for thirty years, Wolff found it no great strain to churn out fifty pages in the next four days, and it was this effort that the conferees had all read. [Wolff was inordinately pleased with his effort, and much excited by the prospect of publishing a fifty-page paper in the Columbia Law Journal. The students, not fooled for a moment, spoke many kind words to him but chose not to publish.] The gravamen of Wolff's effort was that just as Kant's moral philosophy has to be read in the light of the deeper doctrines of the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, in which context it becomes clear that there are fundamental contradictions between the two which mortally undermine the moral philosophy, so too Kant's legal philosophy must be interpreted through its relation to Kant's fundamental epistemological teachings. with equally disastrous consequences. The implication of Wolff's remarks was that the Kantian legal philosophy was without defensible foundation. Consequently, although the session was pronounced a great success, and was said to have started the conference off in fine style, Wolff's argument was henceforth completely ignored.

A break for drinks and dinner, and the participants returned, fueled and lubricated, for an evening discussion of Fletcher's 89 page note. Fletcher's paper bearing only a parametric relation to Kant, there was considerable hermeneutical space between object-text and subject-discourse within which an unfettered conversation could develop, and everyone pitched in with enthusiasm. And so it went for two more days. The next morning, Naucke's apocalyptic warnings were followed by Weinrib's animadversions, with Murphy's scholarly and professional addendum to his well-known writings on Kant's retributive theory of punishment preparing the group for the chamber music to follow. The conference was brought to a close with an elegantly evasive defense. by the cultivated Oxford homophobe John Finnis, of his utterly appalling paper. David Richards, a principal target of Finnis' crabbed and ungenerous remarks, conducted himself with a restraint that was made all the more effective by the eloquence of his reply. The Finnis session was graced by the one moment of genuine scholarship: in rebuttal of Finnis' implausible attempt to claim Kant's support for his own sectarian views, Mary Gregor, apparantly from memory, conjured an obscure Kantian text that decisively demonstrated the incorrectness of Finnis' interpretation. Finnis, his hands contorted into twisting claws of emphasis in the characteristic third-generation Wittgensteinian manner, was momentarily reduced to silence.

And so we return to the question that provoked Wolff to a restless quizzing of his fellow conferees: why Kant? What were busy, successful, worldly lawyers [worldly, at the very least. by philosophical standards] doing locked in three days of debate about Kant? Some of the participants suggested that they were looking for a shtick to beat the utilitarianism of the left. Others identified the 'law and economics' of the right as their target. But neither group gave any indication of a serious interest in the arguments with which Kant had sought to establish his arcane and rather paradoxical philosophical theses. Arguments, unlike sticks. not being adaptable to purposes other than those for which they were fashioned. what did anyone at the conference hope to get from Kant? The answer is this: lawyers. unlike serious philosophers [but. in this regard, quite like second-rate philosophers], do not actually seek to demonstrate the positions they defend. Rather, they aim to assimilate issues with which they are concerned to the existing structure of laws and precedents in hopes that courts will construe those issues in ways that favor their clients. For this purpose, lawyers need a large and versatile armamentarium of concepts. categories. distinctions. and argument-fragments with the aid of which they can articulate intuitions. convictions, or interests to which they are already committed. Both utilitarianism and cost/benefit analysis provide just such weapons to advocates of the left or the right, none of whom can be said ever to prove their positions, but all of whom gain argumentative leverage from their ability to embed their advocacy in a preexisting proof structure. Kant's philosophy is a rich resource of arguments, concepts, and distinctions, already elaborated into an architectonic of subordinations and coordinations, incomparably high in intellectual and academic status, and lying entirely within the public domain. Philosophically speaking, it is to utilitarianism, cost/benefit analysis, or Rawls' THEORY OF JUSTICE what a strategic nuclear weapon is to a medium tank. Invocations of the Categorical Imperative or the noumena/phenomena distinction instantaneously confer on the author vast quantities of what teen-age players of Dungeons and Dragons call 'hit points.' In the jargon of the old gangster movies, Kant is the Equalizer. Since lawyers are a combative lot, and good lawyers are winners, three days at Arden House probably seemed like a pretty fair price to pay for a chance at a secret weapon.


Did the Liberty Fund get its money's worth? One hopes not, considering that organization's political orientation. Perhaps the readers of this journal can decide for themselves, having read the best of the papers revised and refined in the light of three days of debate.




After the participants had left for their several homes, the following notes were discovered at the seat that had been occupied by Robert Paul Wolff. Wolff apparently found the Weinrib paper philosophically suggestive and worthy of serious consideration. His fragmentary jottings have been Englished, as editors like to say, and are offered here for what they might be worth.
Comments by Robert Paul Wolff on Ernest Weinrib's Paper
A very interesting piece of work. W. is clearly a Thomist who sees in K.'s notion of an 'Idea of Reason' a modern rationale for the Aristotelian- Thomist conception of the telos or internal purpose of a natural kind. Except that the law, being a human product, can have no other telos than what its makers impute to it. W. seems hesitant to come out from behind Kant's skirts and declare himself. It is difficult. merely from the text. to tell whether he endorses the notion that the unity of the law is an idea of Reason. or merely attributes it to Kant. But the evident passion with which W. advances his views decides clearly for the former. W. is certainly correct in his diagnosis of Fletcher and Calabresi on torts [whatever they are]. but a diagnosis is not yet a condemnation, let alone a refutation. Why shouldn't those two merely grant W's point, and agree that, absent a purposeful God who has set for Mankind the task of articulating an internally coherent Law. our legal institutions quite properly reflect the fundamental disunity of our society? [Probably Calabresi would be more comfortable with that response than Fletcher.] But leaving aside such considerations, which bear merely on the truth of W.'s position, there are serious difficulties with his appropriation of Kant. The problems center on the Critical doctrine of Ideas of Reason. According to Kant. the intellectual powers of the human mind have both a merely logical and a real employment. In their merely logical employment, our rational capacities are used to compare, contrast. order. and systematise such mental contents as they are presented with. from whatever source. So the arrangement of objects of perception by genera and species, the classification of sense-contents into the familiar five senses, the rearrangement of judgments into the form of syllogisms. and so forth, are all instances of the merely logical employment of intelligence. Nothing is created thereby, and the result is no more than a sorting out and neatening up of the materials presented to intelligence.

The real employment, on the other hand. is genuinely creative, resulting in cognitively significant thoughts. or representations, as Kant calls them. that did not exist before. and could not have been arrived at by any process of the comparison. reorganization. or abstraction from presented materials of consciousness. In the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Kant differentiates between two intellectual powers of the mind, which he labels Understanding and Reason. The real use of Understanding, he says, produces the Pure Concepts of Understanding, or, as they are usually referred to, the categories. among which are Substance and Accident. Cause and Effect. Possibility, Necessity, and so forth. Reason, personified by Kant as a purposive agent, is said always to strive to complete the processes of organization and arrangement which it undertakes in its merely logical employment, seeking everywhere for the first cause in the series of causes, for the necessary being on whose existence rests the possibility of contigent beings, the first premise from which all syllogistic reasoning descends, and so forth. Kant calls this the quest for the unconditioned, and he claims that the product of the real employment of reason is the concept of the unconditioned. For reasons of piety, Kant resurrects the Platonic term 'Idea,' and calls the various articulations of the concept of unconditionality 'Ideas of reason.' Kant knows, of course - indeed, he insists - that such Ideas can never find instantiation in experience, for on Kant's own teaching, all experience is conditioned by the mind-dependent constraints under which things can be objects for us in space and time. Hence we can never find a first cause, a free will, a necessary being. or, for the same reasons, a system of law that achieves full inner coherence.
Nevertheless. Kant claims, with absolutely no justification whatsoever, Nature would not instill in us the unconquerable urge to seek the Unconditioned unless She had some useful purpose thereby. So we may conclude that although the search can never be completed. the quest is set us as a task. The search for an internally coherent tort law. like the search for a single unified theoretical foundation for the sciences, or a single set of logical premises from which all true mathematical theorems follow as logical consequences, or a first cause, a free will, a necessary being, is a search dictated by the inner telos of reason, setting for us, as an unattainable goal, an Ideal of Reason. [It is not clear why Wolff reminds himself here of cer-
tain elementary facts about Kant's philosophy with which he would be thoroughly familiar. J. C.] But though Kant talks this way all the time, he offers no argument at all for the repeated invocation of Nature's purposes with which the introductory and less central portions of his writings are filled. In fact. of course, Kant himself, through his devastating refutations of the traditional attempts at proving the existence of God, is, together with David Hume, the
Enlightenment executioner of this way of speaking. It is entirely incompatible with the deeper teaching of the CRITIQUE to speak of the inner coherence of tort law as though its achievement were an objectively necessary task set us by the inner purposes of Reason itself. Rather, we must recognize that ideal for what it is: one ideal among many that lawyers or theorists of law may set for themselves, for their own political, aesthetic, moral, or professional purposes.

So, in the end. W's essay is little more than a cri de coeur, and Fletcher's two-stage process of considerations of right followed by considerations of humanity is as legitimate as any other. W.'s use of Kant here illustrates a more general difficulty with the too-quick appropriation of portions of a philosophy, as though they were bits and pieces of material that could be separated from the main body of theory and bent to purposes of one's own. The philosophy of a great thinker like Kant is an organic unity unfolding from one, or at most a very few, central insights. One's under- standing of every element in that philosophy, however secondary or peripheral, is thoroughly conditioned by one's construal of those central insights. Before we can 'use' the Kantian notion of an idea of reason. for example. we must decide how we understand the revolutionary teaching that concepts are rules for the organization of a diversity of sense contents. and hence have not even problematic application beyond the limits of sense experience. W. cannot escape the necessity of stating, and defending, his aesthetic, moral, political or professional reasons for seeking internal coherence in the tort law, or in any other set of institutional practices. for that matter. But this was simply the message of my opening presentation. I guess it really was the waste of time it seemed.

MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE EIGHTH INSTALLMENT

That Fall, my attention and emotion were really focused on the imminent arrival of the baby, Ti-Grace to the contrary notwithstanding. Tests to determine the sex of the foetus were a good deal less sophisticated in those days, so we worked away at a name for a boy and a name for a girl. Pretty quickly, we came to an agreement that if we had a girl, she would be named Emily Ann, but the search for a boy's name took us longer. The new summer home in Worthington, and our MacDonald's runs to Northampton, led us to consider Jonathan Edward Wolff, since Jonathan Edwards had preached in Northampton during the First Great Awakening in the early 18th century. But that would have made the little boy's initials JEW, so we scotched that idea. Little by little, we narrowed it down to either Michael Gideon Wolff or Patrick Gideon Wolff. On the evening of February 14, 1968, Cindy went into labor, and we drove up to Washington Heights to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. It was a long night -- at one point, a doctor told me it would be a while, and suggested that I go out and get some coffee and a bite to eat. Early the next morning, Cindy gave birth to a baby boy. When I was allowed in to see her [no husbands in the delivery room in those days], she looked up at me, our new son in her arms, and asked, "What is his name?" Without hesitation, I replied, "Patrick Gideon Wolff." I was a father.

We were about as prepared as two highly educated, sensitive, at least partially psychoanalyzed intellectuals could be for the arrival of a baby, which is to say not at all. The little room next to the kitchen had been outfitted as the baby's room, with crib, changing table, cloth diapers, diaper pins, talcum powder, baby oil, bunny suits, and handy wipes. We had read the first several chapters of Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care, which even then was two decades old. Dr. Spock said, right there in the first chapter, that "the newborn baby sleeps twenty hours a day." Unfortunately, that seemed to be a typographical error. Patrick was awake twenty hours a day. In less than a week, we were both totally exhausted.

Desperate for sleep, we hired a night nurse to come to the apartment and look after Patrick while we went to bed. I am sure she was a very nice woman, but she was a stranger in our little apartment, and we both lay in bed all night, rigid, listening for any sound that would suggest Patrick had a need she was failing to attend to. After three days, we thanked her and sent her on her way.

Up to that time, my knowledge of child development had all come from books. As a younger brother, I had not even had the benefit of watching a little brother or sister grow up in my parent's home, and Cindy was an only child. Piaget was interesting, but his observations related to a somewhat later stage of development. David Hume turned out to know more about the cognitive development of infants than even he might have imagined. Still, none of that told me what to do when a three week old baby would not go to sleep. Thus began my real education of the complex relationship between nature and nurture.

Looking back on it all now, from the perspective of four decades, I can see that very significant elements of the personalities of both of my sons were hard-wired, as it were. As a tiny baby, Patrick had enormous difficulty making transitions, from being awake to going to sleep, or from being asleep to waking up. His nervous system, if I can put it this way, seemed extremely inward looking, whereas the nervous system of my second son, Tobias, was outward looking. When I put Patrick down for the night, he would cry inconsolably. At first, I tried patting him gently on the back, but that seemed to make no impression on him whatsoever. I tried patting a bit harder. Eventually, I discovered, with great trepidation, that if I virtually pounded on his back rhythmically, I would break into his nervous system, and he would stop crying. Then I had to very gradually reduce the forcefulness of the patting until, at last, I would stand with my hand simply resting on his back. Very delicately, I would lift my hand way, and he would be asleep. Once asleep, he was out for hours. You could throw a party in his room and he wouldn't wake up.

By the time we were ready to take Patrick out and about, it was almost Spring. The nearest bit of grass and open space was the Columbia campus, so on days when I wasn't in New Brunswick, I would put him in his baby carriage and take him on a turn around Columbia. Everything was peaceful and serene until the beginning of April. Then all hell broke loose.

The story of the Columbia student uprising has been told many times. There is even a documentary of it now, for which I and many others were interviewed [although I have not seen the finished product, and do not know whether I survived the editing process.] For those who do not remember the events, the following link will take them to a site that gives a detailed, chronological account not only of the events themselves but also of what led up to them and what followed. http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/columbia68/time1.htm

Because I was teaching at Rutgers and moonlighting at CUNY and CCNY, and even more because I was a new father, I played a relatively minor role in the events unfolding half a block from our apartment. Borrowing a felicitous phrase from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, you might say that I was "disguised as a second trombone in a wandering band." Nevertheless, I do have some personal stories to tell. More important, the events taught me a very great deal about the inner dynamics of such political upheavals. With the benefit of four decades and more of hindsight, I should like to try to articulate what I learned.

The initial focus of the student actions was Columbia's involvement with the Defense Department during the expansion of America's involvement in Viet Nam. The Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, had begun its protests a year earlier, in February of 1967, over Columbia's involvement with the C. I. A. Eighteen SDS members held a sit-in in Dodge Hall, located at the Broadway and 116th st. entrance to the campus. A number of students were bought up on disciplinary charges and threatened with expulsion. I appeared at the proceedings in support of one of the students, Richard Fiorevanti -- in effect, as his Defense Attorney. I still have my handwritten arguments, carefully laid out in three headings and numerous subheadings. After calling attention to the fact that Fiorevanti had actually wandered into the demonstration by accident, had joined it after it was under way, and though completely in sympathy with its political purposes, had joined it on the spur of the moment, I turned to the larger issues at stake. Here is the final portion of the notes I prepared for the hearing, reproduced without emendation or alteration:

"III. Disciplinary Procedures in Cases of Politically-Motivated Infractions of University Regulations
A. The Traditional Role of the University
1. The university stands in locus parentis.
2. It views students as growing late adolescents, as it were.
3. The parental disciplinary procedures -- which combine firmness with compassion and a concern for the welfare of the students -- are appropriate for dealing with cheating, plagiarism, panty raids, liquor in the dorms, and general youthful hi jinks.
B. Politics in the University
1. We all feel uneasy about treating cases of political protest as though they were no different from panty-raids. The existence of this precedent-breaking panel vividly illustrates that uneasiness.
2. So long as students engage in panty-raids, they deserve to be treated by the university as children -- and it is appropriate for the university to act like a stern, but benevolent parent.
But: When students engage in serious, deliberate, adult political activities, whether legal or illegal, whether in support of the existing political consensus or in opposition tom it, then they earn the right to be treated as adults, and the university loses the right to behave as a parent. New standards, new procedures, are required.
C. Present Disciplinary Procedures.
1. Consider the present situation: the university announces a specification of actions which are violations of university regulations. The university also announces a spectrum of punishments for those violations, ranging from reprimand to dismissal (p. 76 of Columbia College Handbook). Quote p. 76, §5 complete
2. But there is no schedule relating punishments to violations. To this day, there is no way for a student to discover what precisely he risks by embarking, for reasons of conscience, on actions in violation of university regulations. Even now, neither I nor Mr. Fiorevanti has any concrete indication of the maximum severity of punishment which attaches to his admitted commission of what are surely rather less serious violations of university regulations. We have no way of knowing whether the university considers the sit-in more serious, or less serious, than plagiarism, or theft, or the throwing of water bags from windows.
2. [sic] By analogy: Imagine that the State of New York listed a series of acts as crimes, and announced a diversity of punishments from a fine to the death penalty, but did nothing to associate specific ranges of punishment with specific crimes. Someone who chose to engage in civil disobedience would have no way at all to discover what he risked by such action. Suppose further that the records of previous court actions were not available, so that a citizen could not even make an estimate of his risk on the basis of past practice. Such a situation would clearly be outrageously unjust.
3. But that is exactly the situation Mr. Fiorevanti finds himself in.
4. I suggest that the panel, as part of its report to President Kirk, should recommend that there be a regularization of disciplinary procedures designed to remove the manifest injustice of the present system."

As it happens, Columbia dropped the charges against these students, but the issue on which I chose to focus lies, I believe, at the heart of the tectonic changes then taking place in colleges and universities across the country. The traditional conception of the relation of a university [and a university faculty] to its students was based on the premise that the undergraduate years were a protected time, between childhood and adulthood, during which young men and women were allowed to develop their intellectual capacities more or less in isolation from the larger society. It was for this reason, for example, that in Cambridge, MA, the Cambridge Police Department would routinely treat student misbehavior that took place in Harvard Yard, or in the extended area usually referred to as "The Square," as within the purview of the campus police. But the Viet Nam War, combined with the threat of the Draft, thrust young men into the larger political world willy-nilly. They had not suddenly become wiser or more mature, but the war was confronting them with life and death choices that they could not evade. This had long been true of Black students, and now White students found themselves confronted by analogous choices. It was simply no longer appropriate either for the university or for it faculty to construe themselves as acting in loco parentis.

The same rapid changes explain the confusion and even bitterness that a number of faculty experienced. In '68, when the full-scale building seizures occurred, members of the faculty were presented with a challenge to their traditional role, as well as to their identification with the institution in which they had made their lives. At Columbia, there were professors long identified as politically liberal and wildly popular with the students who instinctively stood with the university administration. Overnight, they found themselves reviled by the same students who had idolized them a week earlier. Peter Gay, one of the great European historians of the twentieth century, was so embittered by the hostility of the students that he left Columbia soon after and spent the remainder of his career at Yale. Richard Hofstadter, a radical historian justly famous for his anatomization of "the paranoid style in American politics," chose to deliver the Commencement Address that Grayson Kirk was too frightened to give, while the students with whom he should have been aligned held a counter-commencement on the steps of Low Library. Paul Kristeller, like many of his emigré colleagues, was so deeply alienated by what he perceived as Brown Shirts on the campus that he took to carrying a cane that he did not really need. When he and I happened to step into the tiny Philosophy Hall elevator together, Paul would turn his back to me and refuse to say Hello. Old faculty friendships were shattered. Bob Cummings and David Truman, despite years of co-teaching, ended up on opposite sides of the fight, and they and their wives stopped speaking to one another. Truman lost what was an almost certain appointment as the next Columbia President, and ended his career as the President of Mt. Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

The six days of the occupation of Low Library were quite the most dramatic moments I had seen in the cloistered environs of the Academy, but there were amusing moments as well. After the White students were kicked out of Hamilton Hall by the Black students, whose focus was on the proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park rather than the university's involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses, they seized the office of the President in Low Library. A group of students supporting the administration was formed, and marched on Low. The Ad Hoc Faculty Group, which had been meeting periodically in Philosophy Hall in an attempt to negotiate a peaceful resolution, hastily threw up a picket line around Low to separate the two groups of students and prevent violence. I was standing on the line one day as anti-occupation students yelled taunts at the occupiers, who were hanging out of the second story windows. The students had been in Low for a while and were getting hungry. Supporters brought bags of sandwiches, which they would throw from outside the two lines to the students inside. Someone threw a bag of food which missed the window and fell at my feet. I stooped down, picked it up, and tossed it to a student hanging out of the window above. Dankwart Rustow, a tall Ichabod Crane of a figure who was in charge of the Ad Hoc faculty Group line rushed up to me, furious at this breach of neutrality, and summarily ordered me off the line. Exposed for the partisan I was, I slunk off.

Not funny at all was the behavior of the Tactical Police Force when they were given the go-ahead to roust the students from the buildings. I was down in New Brunswick when that happened, but I heard a good deal about it from my friends. The TPF had the rather nasty habit of carrying blackjacks with which, with a flick of the wrist, they would crack people on the top of the head. The Faculty Group was on the line when the TPF charged, and the next morning, a number of senior members of the faculty, including Sidney, wore bandages on their heads as badges of honor. The Provost and former Dean David Truman called a special meeting of the College faculty several days later to discuss the events. Before he could call the meeting officially to order, I stood up and told him that since there were a number of colleagues sitting in the room who had been beaten by the police and were still wearing their bandages, I thought we could not begin the meeting until the university issued a formal apology to those who had been injured. Truman looked around the room with dead eyes and said, in a flat voice, "Are there any other comments?" I am ashamed to say that no one in the room supported me.

On a lighter note, the beatings were the backdrop for one of Sidney's most famous remarks. I am not the first person to tell this story, but I cannot talk about the events of '68 without repeating it. Some months after the Spring of '68, Sidney was called for jury duty, and as luck would have it, he was tapped for a case involving alleged police brutality. During the voir dire, the Assistant District Attorney assigned to try the case asked Sidney whether he had ever been treated brutally or unfairly by the police. Sidney thought for a moment and said, "Brutally, yes. Unfairly, no." The ADA asked him to explain, and Sidney told the story of the attack by the TPF. "And you didn't think they were acting unfairly?" "No," Sidney said, "they were hitting everybody." Sidney was a genuinely great man.

GUEST POST BY CHARLES PARSONS

Charles Parsons has written his fascinating recollection of how he came to be hired at Columbia, and hass graciously agreed to let me post it. Here it is. Next installment of my Memoir tomorrow.

How I went to Columbia
Charles Parsons


Bob's account in the third installment of volume 2, chapter 2, of his offer of a tenured associate professorship at Columbia was one I was waiting for, since as he said I received a very similar offer not long before. I was not disappointed; his story was fascinating to read and had a lot of overlap with things I remembered. But there's one thing he got importantly wrong: the background and context of their offer to me. That seemed important enough for a public comment, and Bob kindly gave me the opportunity to tell a little bit of my own story.

The main point is that the Columbia department was interested in me because for several years they had been looking for someone in logic. So that's what they wanted me to "cover." I knew that they had had quite serious conversations with Burton Dreben in 1960, when his tenure at Harvard was pending. In December 1962 I had an exchange of letters with Justus Buchler's predecessor as Chairman, Robert Cumming. He began by saying that they had "for a long time been looking for a logician ... sensitive to philosophical issues." It seems I had already been invited to read a paper there, which I did the following March. His letter was not an offer but an invitation to talk about one.

Before finishing my Ph. D. at Harvard I accepted a position at Cornell and was there in 1961-62 but allowed myself to be lured back to an assistant professorship at Harvard, so that when Cumming wrote I was in my first year. I was reluctant to move again so soon and said so. I was not encouraging about the next two years, since I expected to have leave in 1964-65 and thought that Harvard would not decide about my future until the year after that. (I did, however, describe that as "more than usually uncertain.")

Although I agreed to meet with Cumming at the Eastern APA, he and his colleagues evidently took my reply as discouraging them. (I don't recall whether the meeting took place.) Sometime during 1963 they made an offer to Paul Benacerraf, who declined.

That was the background of the conversation at Arnold Koslow's wedding, which I believe was about the end of January 1964. (So it's a slip on Bob's part to say that I came down from Cornell.) I can't verify the details of the conversation, but I think the message they got was that I didn't consider that they had yet made me an offer.

I might add that Arnold and I had become friends during the year that we both spent at King's College, Cambridge, between college and graduate school. As a result I had visited Columbia a few times and got to know Sidney Morgenbesser and had met some others there, in particular Arthur Danto. But in fact my first encounter with Sidney was very similar to what Bob reports about himself. In the fall of 1948 my sister, the late Anne Parsons, was a freshman at Swarthmore College, and I went to visit her. She was taking introductory philosophy with Monroe Beardsley but said that the most interesting teacher was a Mr. Morgenbesser. I'm pretty sure I met Sidney, and I visited a class, but I don't recall if it was his or Beardsley's.

To return to the story, the department must have acted quickly, and Justus Buchler invited me to come down to talk about a job. He didn't say on the phone that they were offering tenure, but when I told Burton Dreben about the call, he remarked, "This could be a serious thing for you." I went to New York and met Justus, and early on he said thy were offering an associate professorship with tenure. I recall nothing else of the conversation, but we must have discussed the obvious things, in particular what I might teach besides logic, and I probably asked if I would have a chance to teach Kant. But I'm sure there was no suggestion that I would be their "Kant man." If they thought of anyone that way, it was probably Paul Kristeller. (In my first year I did teach an undergraduate Kant course, along with two logic courses and Philosophy of Logic.)

I surely talked with others in the department; the memorable encounter was with Richard Taylor, who had just arrived and, I came to think, was an outsider to the philosophical culture of Columbia, but who was then delighted with the place and with the chance to live and keep his bees almost across the street from the department. His enchantment seems to have been brief: he was gone when I arrived on the scene in 1965.

I'm puzzled about what was discussed with Buchler about terms (beyond rank and tenure); it seems, rather curiously, that there was nothing in writing until I sent a conditional acceptance on February 23. They agreed to what was most important to me, postponing my beginning until 1965, so that I could take my Harvard leave.

That seems remarkably quick, even though such things went somewhat faster and were more informal in those days. Was there a Harvard response? Yes, and since Bob has told you something about inner workings of the department in those days, I thought you might find that story of interest. It's curious enough.

When Harvard offered me a job in 1962, I was told that the "Graustein formula" would give the department a tenured opening in 1966, for which I would be a candidate. Graustein was a mathematician who, I think toward the end of the 1930s, designed a formula to allocate tenured slots to various departments. Appointments would not be tied to retirements or other departures, and they should be made at regular intervals. One motive was probably to avoid a skewed age distribution. But it meant that there was no such thing as a "tenure-track" junior appointment. I'm puzzled about how the formula worked, because in 1960-63 the department made four tenured appointments, promoting Albritton and Dreben and adding Rawls and Cavell.

When I got the offer from Columbia, the department did consider whether to propose me for this slot in advance. (I don't know whether they might have tried to have the appointment moved up, or they would just settle in advance who would occupy it.) That didn't make sense to me, particularly since they were already well staffed in logic. Indeed they voted against it, but there were three votes in favor. Soon afterward Rogers Albritton, who had become Chairman that year, explained this to me and said that if I should go to Columbia, I would still be a candidate for this opening. The same was said to Dagfinn Føllesdal, who had become assistant professor that year after two years as instructor but who had a chance to go back to Norway. Albritton and Dreben advised me to accept Columbia, I believe after I had some discussion with Burt about what alternatives might turn up.

I didn't think it likely that I would get the Graustein opening. That I would not was settled before I even left Harvard. One day in April I happened to notice in the department office a c.v. of Hilary Putnam, who was then at MIT. I suspected that something was up, and not long afterward Burt told me that Hilary had approached them asking if there was a possibility, and the department had moved. I thought it would have been crazy to pass up the chance of appointing Hilary because of a vague promise to Dagfinn and me, but I was a little miffed that no one had told me until it was a done deal. But it was a good thing that the possibility of an early return to Harvard was off the table before I even started at Columbia.

I'll comment on Bob's interesting remarks about the "closed loop" of leading graduate departments. I agree that he was wrong to leave out Cornell, which had been a substantial department since the 1890s. I would add that some departments, particularly Harvard and Columbia, which had probably been the top ones before the second world war, were remarkably ingrown. Of the eight senior members at Harvard in 1964, five were Harvard-trained. The exceptions were Rawls and Albritton (Princeton) and White (Columbia). I think Columbia had ten, six Columbia-trained. The exceptions were Kristeller (Heidelberg), Cumming (Chicago), Morgenbesser (Penn), and Taylor (Brown), and as noted above Taylor was only there for two years. The junior faculty at both places was almost entirely their own Ph. D.s. Bob might recall to what extent Chicago was ingrown at the same time.

Dreben was right that Justus Buchler's call might be a serious thing. I was at Columbia for 24 years.

MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER THREE SEVENTH INSTALLMENT

From time to time, the Department would ask someone to give a talk, as they had asked me. One such event stands out in my mind after all these years. Jonathan Cohen was visiting from England, and agreed to present a paper he had been working on. We all gathered in the seminar room one afternoon. As I recall, Cohen was sitting at the north end of the table, and I was slightly to his right, so that I had a pretty good view of the whole department. Sidney was at the south end, next to Tom Nagel, who by then was teaching at Princeton and had taken the train up to attend. Cohen's paper was on the justification of induction, an old and familiar topic. As he began to read his paper, Sidney started gossiping with Tom. Tom was clearly uncomfortable, especially as Sidney's whisper could be heard in the room as a sibilant background to Cohen's voice. Tom stared straight ahead at Cohen, but Sidney kept at it. Cohen finally came to the end of his paper, and when he stopped speaking, Sidney must have sensed a disturbance in the Force, because he looked up and realized it was question time. He proceeded to ask a question, even though it seemed to the rest of us that he could not have heard a word Cohen said. As soon as the words were out of Sidney's mouth, it was obvious to all of us that the question completely destroyed Cohen's argument beyond the possibility of repair. Sidney was mortally embarrassed. He reminded me of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, who, not realizing his own strength, breaks a rabbit's neck when he is petting it. "Well," Sidney said in his trademark nasal drawl, "that is such a stupid question you wouldn't even want to answer it," and he went back to whispering to Tom. The rest of us were left to cough up quasi-questions until the requisite half hour had passed and we could let Cohen go on his way.
In 1962, Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman published the second of their collections of essays on social and political topics with the general title Philosophy, Politics, and Society. Over several decades, these volumes were the locus for some of the most provocative and important work in Anglo-American philosophy. The 1962 volume contains the famous essay, "Justice as Fairness," in which Jack Rawls announced the very first version of the theory that would be given its most elaborate statement in his major book, A Theory of Justice. The essay grew out of Rawls' dissatisfaction with the endless and seemingly irresoluble debates between the proponents of formalist or deontological ethical theories on the one hand, and this or that version of utilitarianism on the other. The stalemate had very much the form of what Kant called an antinomy. Each side was skilled in demonstrating the inadequacies of the other, while neither side was successful in defending itself against those criticisms. Jack's brilliant idea was to try to break the logjam by combining an old tradition, that of the social contract, with some of the very modern work being done by economists and others in the branch of mathematics known as Game Theory, or more broadly, Bargaining Theory. After introducing his now famous two principles and announcing that he intended to exhibit them as the outcome of a process of bargaining among persons situated in something like what used to be called a state of nature, Rawls made an extraordinarily bold claim. "[t]he proposition I seek to establish is a necessary one, that is, it is intended as a theorem." I have always believed, though without direct evidence, that Rawls saw himself as undertaking something akin to what Kenneth Arrow achieved in his great monograph, Social Choice and Individual Values, published a decade earlier.
When I read Jack's essay, my mind was focused on Kant and other things, but from the very first, I was intrigued by the strength of this claim. If Jack could really make good on his claim, it would be a monumental achievement. As I turned the argument over in my mind, however, it became clear to me that the claim could not be sustained, and in fact was false as Jack had stated it. In 1966, I finally got around to writing all of this up in a paper entitled "A Refutation of Professor Rawls' Theorem on Justice," which I published that year in The Journal of Philosophy [the in-house journal of the Columbia Philosophy Department.] The very next year, in the fourth Laslett and Runciman volume, Jack published a new statement of his theory, Distributive Justice, that was dramatically different from his first attempt. The new version of the theory met all of the objections I had made, even though I thought then, and have always believed, that Jack saw the problems on his own, quite independently of my critique. I ran into him in the Smoker at the December Eastern Division APA meetings, and told him that I had recently published a refutation of his theory. His face fell. "But," I said, "your new paper on distributive justice meets all of my objections." "Oh," he said, brightening, "that's all right then."
I say that Anglo-American moral philosophy had arrived at a stalemate, but of course not everyone agreed with that estimation of the situation. Pretty much everyone did agree that old style utilitarianism -- what had come to be called act utilitarianism -- was a non-starter, for all manner of well known reasons. Everyone, that is to say, except Derek Parfitt. Derek showed up at Columbia for a year and asked whether he could sit in on my moral philosophy course. Of course, I said yes. He seemed an energetic and engaging young man. He even wanted to submit a final paper. That was a bit of a reach, but I agreed. The students actually taking the course were required to write a term paper of twenty pages or so, on pretty much any topic in moral philosophy they chose. On the last day, when the papers were due, Derek handed me a one hundred and ten page no holds barred defense of old fashioned act utilitarianism. I shrank back against the blackboard as he presented it to me, but a promise is a promise, so I read the entire thing and covered it with comments. It will come as no surprise to those who know Derek to learn that it was brilliant.
Of the four institutions at which I have spent extended periods of time in the course of my career, Columbia was the only one at which I worked exclusively in the Philosophy Department. At Harvard I had taught history and run Social Studies. At Chicago, I had taught the big Social Sciences survey course and even offered a course in the Political Science Department. At the University of Massachusetts I would start an undergraduate interdisciplinary social theory program, teach economics, and eventually spend the last sixteen years of my career in Afro-American Studies. But at Columbia, all my teaching, including my many, many courses at Barnard, City College, Hunter, and City University, was in Philosophy. Nevertheless, Cindy and I did get to know a number of the people teaching elsewhere in the University.
Carl Hovde, a tall, ironic man in the English Department, was our neighbor, living down 115th street a few doors. He and his wife, Jane, became very good friends. Carl was very much a man of the College. He had come to the English Department in 1960, and took over the Deanship of the College after the events of '68 [of which, much more below]. Carl, who passed away just last September, was a rock solid, decent man who earned the trust of students and faculty alike. He had a charming, puckish sense of humor, and was in every way exactly what I had been brought up to think a university professor ought to be. Through Carl, we met Edward Said, Steve Marcus, Walter Metzger, and many of the other bright lights of the Columbia faculty. I never got to know Ed Said well, although we had shared dinner at Carl and Jane's apartment. Steve Marcus was an odd duck. He was a rather slight man with an impressive Brunhilde of a wife. They had dinner at our home once, but I am afraid the dinner table conversation, which was no doubt scintillating, is not my principal memory of the occasion. Cindy and I were trying hard to put on the dog, with our fancy china and wedding gift silver, so I went down to an upper East Side butcher shop and got a suckling pig, which we roasted with an apple in its mouth. There were eight of us at table that evening, and it seems that one suckling pig does not actually have a great deal of meat on it, so I was forced to carve it with the greatest of care and serve it all up on the first go round. There were no seconds that night.
Both the Hovdes and the Metzgers had summer homes in the Berkshires -- the Hovdes in the town of Plainfield and the Metzgers a bit further south in Worthington. Both towns are in the Berkshire Hills west of the valley created by the Connecticut River as it flows south to Long Island Sound. The river is flanked by Amherst to the east and Northampton to the west, home of Amherst and Smith Colleges. Amherst is also the location of the main campus of the University of Massachusetts and an experimental college, Hampshire, which has become rather famous because of its alumnus, Ken Burns.
Walter sang the praises of Worthington, and both Cindy and I were powerfully attracted by the idea of a summer getaway from the heat of the city. He told us there was a small eighteenth century house on the market on Buffington Hill Road, a short distance from what passed for the center of Worthington. I had been teaching so many courses and publishing so many books that we had actually built up a little reserve, after paying our combined analysts' bills, so we decided to drive up and take a look. We were hooked, paid the $25,000 asking price, took out a mortgage at Nonotuck Savings Bank, and found ourselves the owners of a summer home.
Ever since the appearance of the little collective volume by Marcuse, Moore, and myself, I had been growing more and more concerned about the fact that I did not have a book in the works. Even though my name was now on three volumes, with a fourth under contract, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity was the only real book I had written, leaving to one side The Rhetoric of Deterrence, for which I could not get a publisher. It was my old anxiety, that I would never write again. Arnold Tovell, at Beacon Press, was feeling pretty bullish on the Critique of Pure Tolerance team, what with the success of that book and Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, so I approached him with a proposal that I put together a group of essays on politics. He agreed, and on March 31, 1967, we signed contracts for a book tentatively titled Concepts of Politics. My idea was to take my essay in the joint volume, and add to it new essays on Loyalty, Freedom, Power, and Community. The essay on loyalty would put on paper an analysis I had developed for an upper level General Education course at Harvard. The other essays would make convenient vehicles for ideas I had been thinking about for some time. Pretty quickly, I was able to finish the set of essays. But the title was a bummer. Then I recalled Marx's mordant critique of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty, which he had published under the title The Poverty of Philosophy. Ever willing to steal from the masters, I called my little book The Poverty of Liberalism. Beacon brought the book out in hardcover in '68. The next year, a paperback version appeared, along with a German translation. A Japanese edition was contracted for, but never actually appeared. I was rather pleased with the book, even though it was just a collection of essays, because it staked out my claim to be a critic of liberalism from the left. During its lifetime, it sold about 30,000 copies, which, given its subject, seemed to me pretty good.
That summer of 1967 was noteworthy in another much more important way. Despite both being deep in psychoanalysis, Cindy and I decided to start a family. This was long before maternal leave, paternal leave, or anything remotely resembling them, and we knew that when the baby arrived, Cindy would have to stop teaching at least for a little while. We figured we could survive one semester of her lost salary, so we began to count months. If the baby arrived in February, Cindy could finish the Fall semester, have the baby, take the Spring semester off, and go back to teaching the following Fall. February, January, December, November, October, September, August, July, June. She would have to get pregnant in May. We told our analysts that we had decided to get Cindy pregnant in May. They both broke the analytic silence to express some doubt that we could plan things with that degree of precision, but it had never occurred to us that Cindy would fail to get pregnant the first month we stopped using birth control, so we assured them it would all go as planned. And so it did. When we walked into our new summer home in June of 1967, Cindy was in her first trimester.
We very soon discovered that pregnancy posed certain problems. Cindy suffered from morning sickness, and it seemed that the only thing she could comfortably keep down was a MacDonald's Big Mac, fries, and a coke. Almost every day, we drove the forty-five minutes from Worthington to Northampton to get lunch at MacDonald's. I had grown up in a family with a long tradition of spending summers in the country, so I was enormously enthusiastic about our decision to buy a summer home. However, I neglected to notice that when I was a kid, it was not my responsibility to look after the summer home. I just got the pleasure of visiting. Now, it was I who had to mow the rather sizeable lawn, make, or at least arrange for, the inevitable repairs, and pay the mortgage and taxes and utility bills. What is more, I was really a city mouse, not a country mouse. There was not a great deal to do in Worthington if outdoor sports were not your thing. As a boy, I had spent six summers in summer camps no more than an hour's drive from our new house, but now there were no counselors to arrange activities. Cindy and I did a good deal of decorating, but that lasts only so long. By the end of the first summer, I was beginning to have doubts about Worthington.
In the Spring of '67, the Rutgers University Philosophy Department approached me about visiting at their main New Brunswick campus for a year. I did not really want to move to New Jersey, but they offered me $20,000 a year, which at that point was about $5,000 more than Columbia was paying me. Ever mindful of the analyst bills, I accepted. Rutgers in those days had a genuinely weird class schedule. I would be teaching on Mondays and Thursdays -- early in the morning on Mondays and in the afternoons on Thursdays. One of my courses met on Mondays at 8 a.m. and on Thursdays at 4 p.m. The teaching load was three and three, but we needed the money. I also signed up to teach a course on Kant's ethics at CCNY and a seminar on political philosophy at CUNY that Fall, and another course on Kant -- this one on the Critique --at CCNY in the Spring.
My Fall schedule was a bit manic. On Mondays, I would take a bus to the Port Authority bus terminal on Manhattan's west side, and another bus to New Brunswick, arriving just in time to make it for my 8 a.m. class. [Cindy had a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule and needed the car to get to Queens College]. After teaching three classes, I would catch a bus back to the Port Authority terminal and walk to the CUNY building opposite the New York Public Library, on 42nd street. I had been assigned a small, windowless, airless inner office, which I outfitted with a collapsible cot. I would grab some lunch and lie down for an hour before teaching the graduate seminar. On Thursdays, I took the car, and drove to New Brunswick with the windows tightly rolled up to ward off the industrial stench of the New Jersey Turnpike. The two CCNY courses were squeezed into the schedule. What with my analyst appointments on the East Side, I was pretty constantly on the go. Fortunately, the Spring semester schedule was less hectic, with only one CCNY course in addition to my three Rutgers courses.
My time at Rutgers was little more than a chore, but several moments stand out in my mind. A the end of one meeting of a course that dealt with ethical theory, one of the students came up to my desk and earnestly pressed into my hand a tattered and dog-eared paperback book. If I would promise to read it, he said, he would give it to me. I felt badly taking a book from a student who had a good deal less money than I, but it was obvious that he would be crushed by my refusal. The book was The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. I dutifully read it from cover to cover, discovering, as I anticipated, that it was terminally stupid. Rand claimed to be able to derive all the fundamental principles of what is now called libertarianism from the premise A=A. Needless to say, the proofs did not stand up to scrutiny.
A good deal more important was a conversation with one of the students in my Monday at 8, Thursday at 4 Introduction to Philosophy. For the first time in my life, I had assigned a casebook, which is to say a collection of snippets from the great philosophers, instead of assigning entire works, such as Plato Dialogues. I soldiered on, "covering" the material, until I got to a selection by Hume containing his classic critique of causal inference. This was relatively late in the semester, and I was bored out of my mind. I can say with absolute confidence that I was not doing a good job of teaching. At the end of the next class after we had done Hume, a young man came up to talk to me. He said he had been troubled by Hume. I was astonished. I had done everything in my power to drain the last vestige of power from Hume's words. I asked him how he had handled this distress. "I spoke to my priest," he said, "but he could not help me, so he told me to call the office of the Archdiocese." "What did they say?" I asked, expecting to be given some version of the party line. "A Monsignor answered. When I told him what Hume said, He answered, 'Well, some people say that, but we don't,' and he hung up the phone."
I was genuinely humbled. Despite my best efforts to guarantee that no student would walk away from my class with an original thought, David Hume had reached his hand across two centuries, grabbed that student by the scruff of the neck, and had given him a shaking that bid fair to shake him loose from a lifetime of unthinking obedience to received truth. It was the greatest testimony I have ever personally witnessed to the power of a liberal education .
While I taught my courses and waited for the baby's arrival, I edited a collection of essays on Kant's philosophy for Anchor Books. This was part of a series of little books Anchor was bringing out, all with the title subtitle A Collection of Critical Essays. Editing the book was hardly what I would call scholarship, but I got an advance -- always needed -- and had a chance to anthologize three old friends. Charles Parsons, Ingrid Stadler, and Sam Todes all had essays in the volume. I hunted about for other likely essays, and found a pretty good essay on Kant's ethics by someone named John Silber. It would be another thirteen years before our paths would cross again, with a much less happy outcome.

MASKS, VEILS, AND THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Now that I am posting my Memoirs three times a week, I can use this space on off days to comment on the passing scene. Today, in the NEW YORK TIMES, The Majority Leader in the French National Assembly, Jean-Francois Cope, has an op ed defending his proposal to ban the wearing of the burqa and niqab in public. He offers an argument I had not heard before, and since I think it is deeply flawed, I thought I would comment. So we are clear, the law concerns the full body garment worn by some Muslim women that leaves only a gauze covered eye slit.

First things first. If a young woman wishes to cut and dye her hair a spiked purple and orange, attach body piercings to her ears, nose, tongue, eye lids, nipples, and clitoris, and wear an abbreviated tank top with short shorts, that is in France an acceptable expression of individuality. But if she wishes to wear a burqa, that is an unacceptable attack on the foundations of French liberty.

Pretty clearly, modesty is not the issue.

Cope offers two arguments. The first is that the wearing of the burqa,like the wearing of a mask, poses a security threat, because it makes it impossible for police using security cameras to identify felons in the act of breaking the law. This is no doubt true, but inasmuch as it is also an argument for requiring everyone to wear large print name tags, with penalties for wearing a tag with the wrong name on it, I think we can safely pass over this argument.

Cope's real argument is rather more subtle, and at least to me, surprising. By wearing the burqa, a Muslim woman is refusing to make eye contact with her fellow citizens. The burqa represents "a refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others. The person who wears one is no longer identifiable; she is a shadow among others, lacking individuality, avoiding responsibility."

There are two things wrong with this argument, which is the sum and substance of Cope's case. First, it imposes on everyone in a society [not just Muslim women] the demand that they constantly engage in interactions with others, whether or not they want to. It refuses to permit someone to withdraw into him or herself, to cultivate anonymity or privacy, to decline to put on a party face and be one of the group. In effect, it says that you cannot be a J. D. Salinger, even if you pay your taxes and leave others alone. That is a terrifying image of a society, and I can tell you, as someone who owns a Paris apartment and spends a good deal of time there, it does not in the slightest describe the character of social interactions on Paris streets.

Second, Cope's argument is hopelessly ignorant of the realities of human interactions. I would strongly recommed that he read Erving Goffman's little book, THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE. Does Cope really believe that the public persona presented by Nicholas Sarkozy to the world is any more open, accessible, or authentic than that presented by a woman wearing a burqa?

Despite the superficial sophistication of Cope's argument, it and others like it are simply twenty-first century version of "Coloreds around back" and "no Irish need apply."

NO MEMOIR TODAY

The next installment of my Memoir will appear in this space tomorrow, Thursday, May 6th. Today, visit the launch of my new blog, Formal Methods in Political Philosophy, at http://robert-wolff.blogspot.com