BACK TO WORK

I have started reading Rawls' last book, Justice As Fairness: A Restatement, in preparation for the Reading Group I shall be leading for some doctoral students in the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department this semester.  I am only 40 pages into the book, but I find it simply eerie -- one of the strangest books of philosophy I have ever read.  It is filled with passive constructions and ritual phrases -- at one point, I started underlining the word "reasonable" and its cognates in order to see how many times Rawls uses them on a single page.  All of the excitement and drama of the original version has evaporated.  Every time Rawls approaches a point at which he might appear to be arguing for some substantive claim that might provoke an argument, he tiptoes away into euphemisms. 

My son, Professor Tobias Barrington Wolff of the UPenn Law School, put it to me perfectly this way in an e-mail:

"It almost sounds like he's writing in the voice of Her Majesty the Queen of England. More to the point, he treats his own past work as a natural phenomenon that has great significance merely by existing and needs to be understood and interrogated and interpreted -- the project of the "Restatement" -- instead of a piece of work like any other that rises or falls on its merits. He came to believe in his own deification."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Long-time readers of this blog may recall that five years ago I threw a gala eightieth birthday party in Paris for my big sister, Barbara.  Many members of the extended family made the trip, with two of Barbara's Washington D. C. friends.  We were joined by our two Parisian cousins, retired science professors André and Jacqueline Zarembowich, and their daughter.  After a cocktail party in the interior courtyard of our apartment, with elegant hors d'oeuvres by Parisian caterer Gérard Mulot. we all boarded a river boat and took a dinner cruise on the Seine.

Well, time passes, and on Saturday, I threw another party for Barbara to celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday, this time at the San Francisco home of my son and daughter-in-law Patrick and Diana.  Many of the Paris party attendees were there, together with our Cousin Mimi and others.  It was a truly multi-generational gathering.  On the plane home last night, I did a little calculation, and discovered that there were people at the party who had been born in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's.

Barbara is a remarkably accomplished woman, and was a remarkable girl as well.  In my little speech [you knew I gave a speech!], I did my best to evoke her as that girl, long before most of the people at the party met her.

Once again, I was able to say to my big sister, "Happy Birthday, Barbara!"

OFF TO THE LEFT COAST

I shall leave at 5:30 tomorrow morning for the airport, to attend the party I am throwing for my sister's eighty-fifth birthday.  I return late Sunday night, so no more posts until Monday at the earliest.  I shall miss the Republican debate tonight -- too late for me.  I trust it will be a shambles.

AN ANNIVERSARY WORTH REMEMBERING

Seventy years ago today, when I was eleven and the Second World War was winding down, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Three days later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.  The two bombs caused the deaths several hundred thousand people.  As American politicians debate the wisdom of the agreement negotiated with Iran, and issue hysterical warnings of the unimaginable dangers that would result were Iran to develop nuclear weapons, two elementary facts are worth keeping in mind:  First, the United States, which arrogates to itself the role of world moral arbiter, annually issuing a list of "terrorist" nations, is the only nation in the history of the world ever to kill someone with a nuclear weapon;  and Second, despite the calls to keep the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, Israel is in fact already in possession of a fully functional arsenal of two hundred or more nuclear weapons, some of which, capable of being launched at Iran, are carried on diesel powered submarines patrolling Middle Eastern waters.

THOSE, THOSE WERE THE DAYS

At the crack of dawn on Friday, we fly off to San Francisco for my sister's eighty-fifth birthday party, which I am hosting.  Naturally, I shall make a speech.  I plan to read a few passages from the hundreds of letters Barbara wrote home to our parents from Swarthmore College, where she matriculated in the Fall of 1948.  Re-reading those letters evokes some feeling for what a first-class college education could be back then.  I don't wish entirely to tip my hand [my sister sometimes reads my blog], but this line caught my attention.  It is from her junior year, dated Nov. 6, 1950: 

"Guess what?  T. S. Eliot is coming to speak here.  I may go to hear him.  What with Russell [Bertrand], and Sandburg [Carl], and the madrigal concerts and Alexander Schneider [a great classical violinist] and the [William] Saroyan reading I've been doing, I feel quite intellectual and artistic."

A REPLY TO PROFESSOR ARVAN

Professor Marcus Arvan of the University of Tampa Philosophy Department, who originally posted under the webname One Philosopher's Musings, offers a quite interesting response to the rather pugnacious series of questions I posed as a response to his original comment.  His response is too long to reproduce here -- I urge you to read it -- but one paragraph raises a question that I find quite interesting, and to which I have given a good deal of thought.  Let me explain.  Here is the paragraph:

"First, I want to suggest that one should [not ed.] interpret all of a person's work in terms of the very first thing they published. Authors change their minds and revise their views (heaven knows I have!), and one should respect that in interpretation. Since, at every point after "Justice as Fairness", in all of his subsequent work, [Rawls] uses the veil, appeals to a sense of justice, etc., he should be interpreted as such. It's only fair to interpret authors according to their considered views, not their earliest ones that they have come to refine or reject."

This immediately strikes one as measured, sensible, and, to use a word that Rawls favored, fair.  It is also completely antithetical to the way in which I read a philosophical work, and I should like to explain why.  

I never conceive myself as awarding prizes or rankings when I read a philosophical work.  I am not weighing a candidate's chances for tenure, or determining who should get published, or choosing which thinkers deserve to join the Pantheon of the Immortals.  I read a philosophical work for only one reason:  because I have an intuition, a feeling, perhaps even a hope that I will find in it something powerful, suggestive, even important for my own philosophical concerns.  I do not actually read very much, but what I do read, I read with great intensity.  As the Good Book says of Jacob, I wrestle with the text and will not let it go except it bless me.

Now whether a text seizes one, and what in it seizes one, is an entirely subjective matter.  For example, I find Jean-Jacques Rousseau's great work, Of The Social Contract, a powerful and provocative text, and I have wrestled mightily with it, but there are long stretches of it that interest me not at all, even though I imagine they were quite important to Rousseau.  I do not think of myself as being unfair to Rousseau when I ignore them.  Good Lord!  He does not need my approbation to secure his place in the Heaven of our discipline.

Professor Arvan says that we ought not to interpret all of a person's work in terms of the very first thing he or she published, and that is certainly good advice on occasion.  To cite just one famous example, it would never occur to me to insist that the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 was Kant's most important statement of his philosophical views, and that we should ignore the First Critique where it deviates from the Dissertation position.  But I would not describe such a view as unfair, simply as philosophically uninteresting, and as I readily agree, even insist, interestingness is in the eye of the beholder.  I can still recall the uproarious arguments the late Samuel Todes and I had in our Kant Discussion Group in 1955-56, in which I off-handedly rejected Kant's elaborate Architectonic as mere philosophical thumb-twiddling while Sam defended it as the key to understanding everything in the text.  Neither of us was right, nor was either of us being unfair.  We were just giving boisterous youthful expression to two totally different ways of finding inspiration in the greatest work of philosophy ever written.

When it comes to Rawls, as I have already explained, what I find dramatically interesting in his work is the brilliant attempt to derive substantive principles of distributive justice from barren quasi-formal premises grounded in Social Contract Theory and Game Theory.  The rest of what he wrote -- which is of course most of it -- bores me.  Is this unfair?  Of course not.  I am not handing out prizes, posthumously or otherwise.  Could someone else read the same book and find something quite different to focus on and think about?  Professor Arvan demonstrates that the answer is patently yes.

IMHO

I have several times remarked that blogging is an odd activity.  It consists essentially in expressing opinions.  There is nothing remarkable about having an opinion.  Knowing something is often an accomplishment, resulting from hard work.  And of course actually doing something is harder even than simply knowing something, as Karl Marx pointed out in his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.  But merely having an opinion is scarcely worthy of note. 

For as long as I can recall, I have had opinions.  When I was twelve, I was of the opinion that Paul Pavelides was the best handball player in P. S. 117.  I was also of the opinion that the New York Yankees were a collection of stuck-up jerks.  Several years later, I formed the opinion that Susie Shaeffer, the girl who sat just in front of me in home room at Forest Hills High School, was a real doll.  That opinion stuck with me, and thirty-nine years later I acted on it, asking her to marry me.  That was one of my better opinions.

The people who write Op Ed columns get paid a good deal of money simply to express their opinions.   [Op Ed = "OPposite the EDitorial page," by the way.]  There are lots of really comfortable high-paying jobs in America -- Philosophy Professor comes to mind -- but being an Op Ed columnist strikes me as unusually cushy.  And it can't be very hard.  I mean, look who does it! 

I wonder how you go about getting one of those jobs.