A MARVELOUS LINK

My son, Patrick, sent me this link to a 1978 Brian McGee interview with Herbert Marcuse.  I just watched it and it is so perfect for my purposes that I will assign it in my course. It was great fun seeing Herbert again. If you read along the text at the bottom of the picture you can see all the places where they get his words wrong, which fits perfectly with the story I will tell of the first time I met him.

MORE COURSE PREP

I am now almost halfway through One – Dimensional Man and the experience of re-reading it is fascinating for me. It is very dense, rather obscure, quite difficult, and will be an extraordinary challenge for my students. I am not sure when I read it the first time, but I rather think it was shortly after 1964, when it appeared. I can tell us both by the nature of my comments and by the nature of my handwriting which was then very small and very precise. A second set of comments in a much thicker pen and larger handwriting is scattered throughout the book. The first set are skeptical, even mocking, and were clearly written at a time when I was quite unsympathetic to what Marcuse was saying.  I am not going to conceal these comments from the students – I am going to read them to the students and then explain how my understanding of Marcuse evolved. What is most striking to me is the difference between the world as it was when he wrote the book and the world as it is now almost 60 years later.

 

If you include the work of Adam Smith, which I will talk about in my third lecture together with that of David Ricardo, the works and ideas discussed in the course span almost 250 years.  This will give me an opportunity to show the students the relationship between what an  author think and the way the world is when he or she is writing. This is not, by and large, something that philosophers talk about very much but it is essential in understanding their works and nowhere more so than in the books we shall be reading. (Needless to say, this is true not only of Smith and Ricardo and Marx and Freud and Marcuse but also of me.)

 

When I thought up this course it was something of a jeu d’esprit but I now realize that I have some very serious things that I want to try to communicate to the students. Will I succeed? That has been a question with which I have wrestled my entire life. I hope so.

WELL, SO WE WON'T ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

Tomorrow morning, at 3 AM (9 AM Paris time) our Paris apartment will be sold to a tax lawyer and his wife. It has been a wonderful 18 years, and I have countless happy memories of early morning walks around old Paris, of marvelous meals in restaurants on the left bank, of dishes I prepared in our little kitchen and of the friends we made there.

We bought the tiny apartment (330 ft.²) on a lark and it was the best thing we ever did. It only remains to turn now to the next stage in my life.

BUCKET LIST

 I am old and not long for this world. There are a few things I would very much like to see before I shuffle off and one of them is Donald Trump being led away in handcuffs to prison. It is not too much to ask, is it?

COURSE PREP

I have been rereading Herbert Marcuse’s One – Dimensional Man in preparation for teaching it in my upcoming course at UNC Chapel Hill. I have not read it in many decades and had forgotten how difficult it is, how obscure. At the same time, I believe I can see why it was so appealing to young radical students in the late 60s and early 70s. My job is going to be to make it relevant to students some of whose parents had not yet been born when it was published in 1964.

 

This promises to be a very challenging experience and I am looking forward to it. 

😉

I should like to thank the many commentators who had kind things to say about me in response to my recent post. Perhaps it would be ungracious of me to note that I was speaking wryly, puckishly, self-deprecatingly, I might even dare to say ironically.  The web seems well suited to pontification, anger, burlesque, and the more obvious forms of comedy, but not so much to gentler efforts at humor. Perhaps a judicious scattering of appropriate emojis would help.

PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS

 I am about to start preparing the fourth lecture in the course I will teach this fall, and I am uncertain which of three alternative ways I should choose of introducing students to the opening pages of CAPITAL.  I have at one time or another used all three with varying degrees of success.

The first way requires that students be familiar with the novels of Jane Austen and in particular with Pride and Prejudice.  The second way requires that students know who Fred Astaire was. And the third way requires that students know what the miracle of transubstantiation in the Catholic mass is.

I am so old and my students are so young but I have not really a clue whether I can count on them to know any of these things, and having to explain them along the way sort of robs the intro of its force.

Perhaps I really have, as they say in the dairy aisle at the supermarket, passed my sell-by date.