[Republican Senate candidate Tom Campbell’s] brains and demeanor could collide with the prevailing political winds this year as no other. A consummate and genteel academic who holds degrees from two of the nation’s top universities, he is seeking election [from California] at a time when white-hot anger and verbal flame-throwing is more likely to arouse the GOP primary voters who will decide his fate in June.
At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40, he tweeted again: “It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . .” At 5.41: “. . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . .” At 5.44: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”
Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?’
… [O]n 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. “No, no, no,” he was told. “This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name.” …
… from Norway.
… to be told, and we few, we happy few here at University Diaries, are settling ourselves in to a front seat. Croyez-moi, there’ll be a piece on this in the New York Times in the next few days, one of those arch little numbers observing the French and their ways with description but no comment…
But why wait for that? I’m giving the thing to you here and now. Plus I’m telling you what to think about it. So listen.
The fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Camus is coming up (January 4), and Sarkozy wants his remains transferred to the Panthéon. This article about it in the Irish Times (only English-language piece I’ve seen so far) duly notes l’absurde squabbling about it, right left and center, in Paris.
This Le Monde thing announces that Jean Camus, the man’s son, has in any case refused permission because Camus just wasn’t a Panthéon type…
So why did he accept the Nobel? Nobel yes, Panthéon no? Sartre turned down the Nobel, but Camus didn’t have any trouble… I doubt he would have minded the Panthéon.
But anyway. The spat guarantees plenty of publicity for the writer, and will certainly generate the sort of statements you and I love to make limericks out of.
The Moscow Times:
A debate between philosophers at an international forum ended in a fistfight Monday that left two people slightly injured, Interfax reported.
A woman and man were injured in the fight at the International Philosophical Forum, held in the House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences on Ulitsa Prechistenka.
One suffered a bruise, while the other one was left with a scratched face, a police source told Interfax, without elaborating. It was not immediately clear what prompted the fight. Several squads of police officers were called to restore order.
Readers are welcome to offer their theories about what might have prompted the fight.
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Update, from Russia Today:
[T]he fight had little to do with arguments over the meaning of life. The incident’s instigator turned out to be a former Moscow State University student, who was withdrawn from the Philosophy Department a couple of years ago.
A witness told Interfax that the man attacked the Philosophical Department dean, Vladimir Mironov, during a scientific conference.
He had earlier tried to break into the Philosophy Department office and “argue” with Mironov, the same source said. The source did not elaborate on the reason behind the man’s vitriol towards his former dean.
… responds to the controversy described here [subscription], in which a new book about Heidegger’s Nazism goes beyond intellectual attack and calls for the criminalization of his writings as hate speech.
UD thinks, by the way, that the New York Times, in quoting Richard Wolin about the issue —
Richard Wolin, the author of several books on Heidegger and a close reader of the Faye book, said he is not convinced Heidegger’s thought is as thoroughly tainted by Nazism as Mr. Faye argues. Nonetheless he recognizes how far Heidegger’s ideas have spilled into the larger culture.
“I’m not by any means dismissing any of these fields because of Heidegger’s influence,” he wrote in an e-mail message referring to postmodernism’s influence across the academy. “I’m merely saying that we should know more about the ideological residues and connotations of a thinker like Heidegger before we accept his discourse ready-made or naïvely.”
— should have revealed that he signed a petition in support of the book. He is more partisan than he appears in his remarks to the Times.
Spot of nice writing from a British columnist, who reflects on the special respect in France for intellectuals like Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Yes, Britain has scholars and pundits. But on the intellectual spectrum they enjoy a status somewhere between being and nothingness. France’s “intellos” serve as the moral conscience of their age, speaking freely on the political and social mood. Intellectuals lift the national debate. They fertilise political thought. A country too embarrassed to embrace them is, well, too stupid by half.
… at one hundred years of age. I’ll have more commentary in a moment. Gathering my thoughts about him. I’ve just returned from the beach.
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Here’s the best piece on him so far, full of wonderful British skepticism and humor.
… While Lévi-Strauss’s capacity for creating complex intellectual jigsaws was never in question, it was not always obvious what relation his hypotheses bore to reality. The English anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach drew attention to the Frenchman’s propensity for discovering exactly what he was searching for.
“Any evidence, however dubious,” Leach complained, “is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data runs counter to the theory, Lévi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.”
… The son of a painter, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels on November 28 1908. When the First World War broke out he was sent to Paris to live with his grandfather, a rabbi, in whose household he soon lost his faith.
… After completing his studies, Lévi-Strauss taught in secondary schools. Among his colleagues was Simone de Beauvoir, who remembered him warning his students “in a deadpan voice, and with a deadpan expression, against the folly of the passions”. [And this is coming from de Beauvoir, queen of the ice queens.]
… After the fall of France he escaped to the United States, where he took up a visiting professorship at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In this post he was greatly influenced by Roman Jakobson, who had developed a mathematical view of language which stressed not so much the meaning of individual words as the overall configuration of the grammatical relationships between them. [Three degrees of separation: Jerzy Soltan, UD‘s father-in-law, was a close friend, and a close neighbor in Cambridge, of Roman Jakobson.]
… A work of enormous erudition if, at times, almost ludicrous complexity, [Les Structures Elémentaires de la parenté (1949)] established Lévi-Strauss as one of the foremost anthropologists of his generation.
… [His masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques (1955)]… was an intellectual autobiography concentrated on his pre-war travels in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss described how the book sprang out of depression: “So I said, ‘I had enough, I shall never come to anything, so I can write very freely about whatever passes through my head.’ I wrote without scientific scruples, without worrying whether the result was scientifically sound. The result was a sort of wild fantasy.”
In the book, Lévi-Strauss formulated his distinction between “Nature” and “Culture” based on language and man’s unique ability to see an object not merely as itself, but also as a symbol. It was in this ability to symbolise, a characteristic shared by all humans, no matter how primitive, that he sought the unconscious similarities of the human mind.
These “universal attributes” were the inspiration for Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual quest. But in detecting them, he was also accused of reductionism. Even his severest critics would not deny his importance, however, his immense influence beyond his chosen field, or the sense of intellectual excitement he was able to generate. This lay in his highly original interpretation of data, in the poetic scope of his associations and in his methodology, which was always capable of shedding new light on established facts even if his conclusions were sometimes subject to doubt…
From The Telegraph.
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A good definition of structuralism, from Edward Rothstein:
… Levi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Levi-Strauss’ view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Levi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Levi-Strauss’ “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside…
One hundred years ago this month, Freud
traveled from Europe by steamship with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, the three of them psychoanalyzing one another en route [to the United States]. When they arrived, they spent several days touring Chinatown, Coney Island and other New York sights.
Then Freud went on to Worcester, Mass., where on the morning of Sept. 7 he gave the first of his famous “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” at Clark University.
Emma Goldman and William James were in the cheering section.
Peter D. Kramer makes Freud sound very old-fashioned. He “displayed bad character in the service of bad science.” Rather than, like the leading practitioners featured on University Diaries, using bad science in the service of greed.
… has died.
I’ll have more to say about him in a bit.
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I’ve now sent off a post about Kolakowski – about, in particular, his interest in religion – to Inside Higher Ed.
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The post is now up. Remember that you can use the list over there… over there to your right… now down a little… the one that says LATEST UD BLOGS AT IHE … to read any of my Inside Higher Ed pieces, starting way back in 2007.
… Inside Higher Ed column in response to this, Scott McLemee’s thoughtful discussion of Isaac Rosenfeld, a tragic and compelling figure.
It’s now done, and should appear pretty soon.
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… some of his thoughts about religious tolerance and the state.
Every religion is originally a ‘worldview’ or, in Rawls’s terminology, a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’ also in the sense that it claims the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. Religion must renounce this claim to structure life in a comprehensive way that also includes the community once the life of religious groups becomes differentiated from that of the larger political community within pluralistic societies. …
For the believer who travels with heavy metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right. The validity of the ethos on this assumption depends on the truth of the worldview in which it is embedded. The exclusive validity claims of the underlying worldviews are accordingly bound up with different ethical existential orientations and competing forms of life. As soon as one’s conception of the good life is shaped by religious notions of salvation or metaphysical conceptions of the good, a divine perspective (or a ‘view from nowhere’) opens up from which (or where) other ways of life appear not only different but mistaken. When an alien ethos is not merely evaluated in relative terms, but is judged in terms of truth and falsity, the demand to show every citizen equal respect regardless of his ethical self-understanding and his way of life represents an imposition….
[T]he spread of religious tolerance, which we have already identified as a pacemaker for the emergence of democracies, has also become a stimulus and model for the introduction of further cultural rights within constitutional states.
… said my aunt, “became more and more preoccupied with Big Bang-type questions as he got older. Why is there something? What is nothing? A colleague of his at NIH was a religious Jew, and your father respected this man, and they had long conversations about belief…”
For most of his life, I guess my father had, along with his faith in science, what Richard Rorty means by a religion of art. My father’s two cultures were empirical clarity and aesthetic mystery.
Friedrich von Schelling calls beauty “infinity represented in a finite way.” I suppose my father’s yearnings toward the infinite were no different from anyone else’s. They might have been more intense than other people’s. After all, if he were here he’d probably remind me that the realm of science contains its own soul-enthralling depths.
Given his family background, though, science would always be the great liberation for him, making it impossible for him to invest his yearnings in any creed.
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Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s book about religion, and he quotes Eagleton:
What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? … [Religion’s] subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.
Like Christopher Lasch toward the end of his life, Eagleton represents a man of the left for whom one particular symbolic form — progress, liberal enlightenment — has failed in its promise to encompass human yearnings. What Fish calls “the tragedy and pain of the human condition,” and humanity’s yearning for “a transfigured future” (the phrase is Eagleton’s), is far more compelling to Eagleton at this point than political, as well as scientific, efforts to relieve our pain.
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Update, correction:
A blog is a beautiful thing. I just received an email from a reader in response to my tale of the Czech Torah. The email’s titled They Weren’t Unburied Torahs, and it includes an attachment titled Memorial Scrolls Trust, Westminster Synagogue, Kent House, Rutland Gardens, London.
… Fearful that the deserted synagogues and community buildings would be at the mercy of looters and plunderers, a group of Jews at the Jewish Museum in occupied Prague submitted a plan to the Nazis to save the Jewish ritual and cultural treasures in the vulnerable buildings by bringing them to the museum in Prague so that they could be catalogued and preserved. Why their Nazi overseers accepted the plan is not known. The result was that the Nazi controlled Prague Jewish Community sent out the orders that implemented the plan and permitted the transport companies to carry Jewish goods. With a few exceptions, the Torah Scrolls, other liturgical treasures in gold and silver and ritual textiles were sent to Prague, along with historic archives and thousands of books. The remaining Jews were deported in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and quite a number of these late deportees survived.
… [I]n 1956, the Michle Synagogue, in the suburbs of Prague, became the warehouse at which the hundreds of Torah Scrolls were consolidated from various locations. They had come from the large Prague Jewish community and from the many smaller communities that were scattered across what was left of Bohemia and Moravia, after the Sudetenland had been detached. The Scrolls in the Michle Synagogue did not include Scrolls from Slovakia, which was under a separate administration.
… Eric Estorick, an American art dealer living in London, paid many visits to Prague on business in the early 1960’s and got to know Prague artists, whose work he sold at his Grosvenor Gallery. Being a frequent visitor to Prague, he came to the attention of the authorities, and, on a visit in 1963 he expressed some interest in a catalogue of Hebraica. He was approached by officials from Artia, the state corporation responsible for trade in works of art, and asked if he would be interested in buying some Torah Scrolls.
Unknown to him, the Israelis had been approached previously with a similar offer, but the negotiations had come to nothing. Estorick was taken to the Michle Synagogue were he was faced with wooden racks holding about 1800 Scrolls, in seriously damp conditions. He was asked if he wanted to make an offer. He replied that he knew certain parties in London who might be interested.
On his return to London, he contacted a fellow American, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, of the Westminster Synagogue, one of whose congregants, Ralph Yablon, offered to put up the money to buy the Scrolls. First, Chimen Abramsky, who was to become Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of London, was asked to go to Prague for twelve days in November 1963 to examine the Scrolls and to report on their authenticity and condition. On his return to London, it was decided that Estorick should go to Prague and negotiate a deal, which he did. Two trucks laden with 1564 Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in February and March 1964.
After months of sorting, examining and cataloguing each Scroll, the task of distributing them began, with the aim of getting the Scrolls back into the life of Jewish congregations across the world. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to carry out this task.
UD‘s enormously grateful to her reader for this information.
… that today’s the fiftieth anniversity of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay, she thinks first about her father.
An immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, a first-generation American embarrassed by the peasant religion his Jewish father brought from Minsk, Herbert Rapp was a belligerent empiricist.
While UD‘s mother – herself the daughter of secular Jews in the same generationally rebellious mode as UD‘s father – retained enough faith to send her children to a Reform temple in Bethesda for a few years, UD‘s father was much the stronger influence on UD.
This was in part because of his clear, principled world view, in contrast to his wife’s vague sentimentalism, but it also had to do with the soullessness of that particular temple, a hip epicenter of social justice. (I called my mother’s sister and asked her about it. “That place? The rabbi didn’t believe in God.”)
Once, my mother and my aunt, in memory of their father, decided to buy a Torah for the synagogue. The rabbi told them about some recently unearthed Czech Torahs that had been buried for safekeeping during the war.
“Your mother,” said my aunt, “went to the airport to pick it up when it came in. The next day we took it to the rabbi. He said ‘You didn’t have to bring it in so fast. You could have kept it in your home for awhile.’ Your mother said, ‘No. I didn’t like the ghosts.’ The rabbi looked at both of us and said ‘You’re pagans.'”
I have a memory – who knows if the memory is real – of my father, with great reluctance, attending the installation ceremony at the temple. As the new Torah was carried joyously through the congregation, the person holding it stopped in front of my father, assuming he in particular — after all, his family bought it — would want to kiss it. My father stood stolid and unmoving. (“I don’t remember the ceremony,” says my aunt.)
Yet he didn’t have the materialist disposition you’d think might accompany all this. He was mad for the Romantic poets, and he liked to recite T.S. Eliot. My mother says she fell in love with him because of the classical music she heard pouring out of his frat room at Johns Hopkins. He was a serious and emotional pianist who spent much of his time playing and replaying the Sonata Pathétique. He loved nature intensely — in particular, the Chesapeake Bay, where he had a house and a boat.
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End of first half. Must walk dog. It’s high noon, and even though it’s dreary out there, I guess this is as light and warm as it’s going to get. Ne quittez pas.
