In 1841 Søren Kierkegaard had to write to the King of Denmark for permission to present his dissertation, for a Master of Arts in Theology from the department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, in Danish instead of Latin. I don't know how many dissertations presented there were written in Latin at the time, as opposed to Danish: whether they were almost all in Latin, and a request such as Kierkegaard's was unusual, or whether almost all were written in the vernacular, and the request was little more than a formality and a remnant of earlier times (the university was founded in 1479).
I would guess: neither. I would guess that a fair number of dissertations were written in each language at that time. In any case, Kierkegaard publicly (and successfully) defended the dissertation in Latin disputation on the 29th of September, 1841. Although the main text of the dissertation, Om Begrebet Ironi: Med Stadigt Hensyn Til Socrates, is in Danish, it begins with 12 theses written in Latin. And it contains many citations in Greek, Latin and German.
10 days before Kierkegaard publicly defended his dissertation, on the 19th of September, 1841, the world's first international railway line opened, between Strasbourg and Basel. Today most passenger trains take about 3 1/2 hours to get from Strasbourg to Basel. In 1841, presumably, it took a bit longer.
The first Danish railway would not open until 1844 if you consider Holstein to have been part of Denmark at the time, or 1847 if you do not. The Prussians considered Holstein to be part of Prussia, and after the Second Schleswig War in 1864, Denmark stopped contesting the matter.
In 1841 William Henry Harrison was inaugurated President of the United States on the 4th of March, and died of pneumonia on the 4th of April. Popular legend has it that Harrison contracted his fatal case on pneumonia while delivering an extraordinarily long Inaugural address on the 4th of March; actually, he did not fall ill until the 26th of March.
I do not know what state railroads were in in the USA in 1841. I cannot find any information of great events in the American railroad industry in that year. The first commercial American railroad opened in 1830, and between the 1830's and the 1860's American railways boomed, and replaced canals as the major method of transport. Plans for a great nationwide network of canals were abandoned.
I cannot tell what state the Latin language was in in the US in 1841, but I see signs to suspect that it was worse off there than in Europe. The Classics in America have had the bad luck that some very influential men have been anti-intellectual, and that some influential American intellectuals have been pretty stupid concerning the Classics they had been taught. As an example of the former, I have already in this blog pilloried Tom Paine: Part 1 Part 2
As an example of the latter, Benjamin H Latrobe, who was able to pass for a leading American intellectual at the time, writing in 1798 about the American curriculum, suggested that
"Terence, Phedrus, Ovid and other poets, from whom no one ever learned a single useful fact, should be rejected"
in favor of
"Justin's epitome of the history of Trogus Pompeius, as being an easy and entertaining writer,"
and also Nepos. After that shocking display, I think we can chalk up the fact that Latrobe also recommends some good writers, including Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, Horace and Vergil, to sheer dumb luck. Which Greek author does Latrobe praise above all others? Xenophon. What Greek work does he call the the worst of them all for schoolchildren, against which they must be protected at all costs? The Iliad.
And Paine and Latrobe, who may well have journeyed to America because they had to, because they were laughed out of the entire country of England for saying and writing such things, were and are counted among the best minds of the American Revolution and the early American republic.
That is how much of a chance Classical education had in the US.
Showing posts with label kierkegaard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kierkegaard. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2015
Monday, November 24, 2014
Existentialism and University Philosophy
"the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time"
It's uncommon among philosophers of our time, and it was uncommon among philosophers of their own time. And it's certainly missing from this long, tedious description of existentialism. Obviously, different people take different things from existentialist philosophers. I take from existentialism that there's no reason to be as boring as Steven Crowell, who wrote this very nearly pointless description of it.
I really don't know why there should be this incompatibility between universities and philosophy. Plato founded what was more or less the first university, the Academy, and Aristotle made the second one out of the Lyceum. Both institutions thrived for centuries. But a little while before the man generally counted as the the first existentialist philosopher, Kierkegaard, published his dissertation, Schopenhauer was insisting that real philosophy only existed outside of universities, that universities killed it and that what they called philosophy was no more than a grubby, prosaic jostling for jobs as philosophy professors, which laid much more emphasis on reading and discrediting one's competitors' writings, than on studying the canon of Western philosophy.
After receiving his Doctorate, Schopenhauer made a less than half-hearted attempt to teach philosophy at the University of Berlin, and then spent the rest of his life concentrating on being an author. As for the aforementioned "major existential philosophers," Kierkegaard got his Doctorate and then made no such attempt; and if he had continued in academia it would have been as a theologian and not as a philosopher. Dostoyevsky was a novelist. Nietzsche was awarded an extraordinary Doctorate at the age of 24, and then spent several years teaching at the University of Basel -- but he was teaching Philologie -- Classics, that is. Ancient Greek literature in his case -- and not philosophy. And Sartre and Camus made their livings writing rather than teaching. Heidegger was a professor, but he rejected the label of existentialist. I don't think we need to accept that rejection, but we should note that among the major existentialists, he's the only philosophy professor.
Steven Crowell, who wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on existentialism linked near the beginning of this post, has taught philosophy at the university level for over 30 years and currently chairs the Philosophy department at Rice University. Walter Kaufmann, whom Crowell cites in his article as if he were an authority on existentialism (and indeed he is thought of as such by some, although not by me), taught philosophy at Princeton for over half his life, from 1947 until 1980. Besides what they did and do for a living, what's the difference between Crowell and Kaufmann on the one hand and Kierkegaard, Dostoyesvsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus on the other? For one, the major existentialists were all brilliant writers. Crowell isn't. Kaufmann wasn't. Crowell and Kaufmann are prosaic. Nietzsche cannot have been thinking of people like these two when he said that one must have chaos inside oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star, although academics in other fields seem to fit the bill much better. Einstein and Heidegger come immediately to mind. (Even outside of the philosophy departments, Einstein didn't have a conventional academic career, going from clerk to honorary PhD to professor.) It's difficult, to say the least, to think of Crowell and Kaufmann embodying Nietzsche's dictum about man being a rope stretched across an abyss.
The major existentialists had huge fires in them which burned whole forests of convention to crisps. Crowell and Kaufmann and most philosophy professors are convention itself. Does it matter whether they're consciously conventional and determined to undermine the chaos of the geniuses whose texts they have their students read, or whether they're simply much too dull to understand what I or Camus is talking about? Either way the result is diametrically opposed to the major existentialists.
Heidegger is an exception, a philosophy professor and at the same time a real no foolin' existentialist philosopher. Heidegger is exceptional in several ways, and mysterious and spooky, and that's about all I have to say about him for now.
William H Gass was a professor of philosophy for a very long time, although he's rarely described as a philosopher, although why not, actually? But in his classes given under the auspices of a philosophy department his students read mostly fiction and poetry. Gass has written mostly fiction and literary criticism (although it's unlike any other literary criticism), and then there's his book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, a book I was thinking is in a category all by itself, but then I thought of the 3-volume work on spheres by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk -- who is the chancellor of a university of art & design. The one of them explores human life via a color, the other via a shape. And neither of them fit into any conventional career categories. Just like the major existentialists.
Just like any major artist. A true artist or philosopher or physicist cannot be fit into any categories which exist when they're working, because their work is original. No one else has imagined something like their work, and so no one has yet made a category for it.
It's uncommon among philosophers of our time, and it was uncommon among philosophers of their own time. And it's certainly missing from this long, tedious description of existentialism. Obviously, different people take different things from existentialist philosophers. I take from existentialism that there's no reason to be as boring as Steven Crowell, who wrote this very nearly pointless description of it.
I really don't know why there should be this incompatibility between universities and philosophy. Plato founded what was more or less the first university, the Academy, and Aristotle made the second one out of the Lyceum. Both institutions thrived for centuries. But a little while before the man generally counted as the the first existentialist philosopher, Kierkegaard, published his dissertation, Schopenhauer was insisting that real philosophy only existed outside of universities, that universities killed it and that what they called philosophy was no more than a grubby, prosaic jostling for jobs as philosophy professors, which laid much more emphasis on reading and discrediting one's competitors' writings, than on studying the canon of Western philosophy.
After receiving his Doctorate, Schopenhauer made a less than half-hearted attempt to teach philosophy at the University of Berlin, and then spent the rest of his life concentrating on being an author. As for the aforementioned "major existential philosophers," Kierkegaard got his Doctorate and then made no such attempt; and if he had continued in academia it would have been as a theologian and not as a philosopher. Dostoyevsky was a novelist. Nietzsche was awarded an extraordinary Doctorate at the age of 24, and then spent several years teaching at the University of Basel -- but he was teaching Philologie -- Classics, that is. Ancient Greek literature in his case -- and not philosophy. And Sartre and Camus made their livings writing rather than teaching. Heidegger was a professor, but he rejected the label of existentialist. I don't think we need to accept that rejection, but we should note that among the major existentialists, he's the only philosophy professor.
Steven Crowell, who wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on existentialism linked near the beginning of this post, has taught philosophy at the university level for over 30 years and currently chairs the Philosophy department at Rice University. Walter Kaufmann, whom Crowell cites in his article as if he were an authority on existentialism (and indeed he is thought of as such by some, although not by me), taught philosophy at Princeton for over half his life, from 1947 until 1980. Besides what they did and do for a living, what's the difference between Crowell and Kaufmann on the one hand and Kierkegaard, Dostoyesvsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus on the other? For one, the major existentialists were all brilliant writers. Crowell isn't. Kaufmann wasn't. Crowell and Kaufmann are prosaic. Nietzsche cannot have been thinking of people like these two when he said that one must have chaos inside oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star, although academics in other fields seem to fit the bill much better. Einstein and Heidegger come immediately to mind. (Even outside of the philosophy departments, Einstein didn't have a conventional academic career, going from clerk to honorary PhD to professor.) It's difficult, to say the least, to think of Crowell and Kaufmann embodying Nietzsche's dictum about man being a rope stretched across an abyss.
The major existentialists had huge fires in them which burned whole forests of convention to crisps. Crowell and Kaufmann and most philosophy professors are convention itself. Does it matter whether they're consciously conventional and determined to undermine the chaos of the geniuses whose texts they have their students read, or whether they're simply much too dull to understand what I or Camus is talking about? Either way the result is diametrically opposed to the major existentialists.
Heidegger is an exception, a philosophy professor and at the same time a real no foolin' existentialist philosopher. Heidegger is exceptional in several ways, and mysterious and spooky, and that's about all I have to say about him for now.
William H Gass was a professor of philosophy for a very long time, although he's rarely described as a philosopher, although why not, actually? But in his classes given under the auspices of a philosophy department his students read mostly fiction and poetry. Gass has written mostly fiction and literary criticism (although it's unlike any other literary criticism), and then there's his book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, a book I was thinking is in a category all by itself, but then I thought of the 3-volume work on spheres by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk -- who is the chancellor of a university of art & design. The one of them explores human life via a color, the other via a shape. And neither of them fit into any conventional career categories. Just like the major existentialists.
Just like any major artist. A true artist or philosopher or physicist cannot be fit into any categories which exist when they're working, because their work is original. No one else has imagined something like their work, and so no one has yet made a category for it.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Derek Flood And Søren Kierkegaard
Two theologians, but only one philosopher between them. I thought long and hard about how best to describe Derek Flood here, but it's hard to top his Huffington Post author bio:
A longtime voice in the post-conservative evangelical movement, Derek’s focus is on wrestling with questions of faith and doubt, violence in the Bible, relational theology, and understanding the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice.
Yeah. Stick that in yr pipe and smoke it. In his HP icon Flood's mane of hair looks a bit like Kierkegaard's. Like Kierkegaard in that one portrait of him we all know, Flood stares at you earnestly, but while Kierkegaard has a twinkle in his eye and the hint of of a smile, Flood looks deadly dull. Kierkegaard looks like he might actually be interested in you and what you have to say. Flood looks like he thinks that what he has to say to you is so important that it may not even have occurred to him to listen to you unless it's to see whether or not you've understood him. In every piece I've read by him, Flood can't go for 2 sentences in a row without being unmistakeably Christian. Kierkegaard talks about all sorts of things other than Christianity without constantly distorting them in that theological way we all know and love. Not only does he quote many pre-Christian Greek authors, he clearly also likes them the way they really are. No distortion required. He sometimes goes dozens of pages at a stretch without giving the slightest sign that he's a Christian theologian. This of course is what makes Kierkegaard the most appealing of all Christian theologians: he's the one who least resembles a Christian theologian. All the others have no end of urgent things to tell you, such as how they understand the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice. Kierkegaard's interests are much wider. He's receptive.
Of course, autistics, such as myself, are not receptive so much, that is to say: one of the major ways you can tell we're autistic is that we have a hard time switching from telling everybody what's what, to listening. At least when it comes to face-to-face conversation. We may be good at absorbing written communications -- although there can be problems there too -- but that often breaks down in face-to-face communication. "Face to face" is even a misnomer in some conversations with autistics, because some autistics have a very hard time maintaining normal amounts of eye contact. I pretty much can't do it with most conversation partners. Don't take it personally, I have a problem.
But at least I know that it's a very serious problem. And I know that a lack of eye contact is just one of the ways in which I routinely fail to achieve what most people think of as the normal back-and-forth and give-and-take of conversation.
But that doesn't mean that I don't want to have more give-and-take with you. I doesn't mean I don't care. I realize that it often looks like I don't care, if it doesn't look even worse, as if I'm hostile or something like that. It's a technical problem with the interface. Don't worry, people are working on this.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Fear And Trembling Have Their Place, But Not Before Imaginary Beings
In the course of discussing Genesis 22, wherein God commands Abraham to make a burnt sacrifice of Isaac, and Abraham is going to obey but at the last second God says Never mind, I was only testing you, you passed the test, we're cool, Søren Kierkegaard, and how, in his book Frygt og Bæven, asserted that God's commandment that Abraham kill Isaac and offer him as a sacrifice, and Abraham's decision to comply, cannot be understood rationally. I disagree. The story itself, like all religious stories, is irrational. But like all religious stories and precepts it can be understood rationally, but only from an atheist point of view. Abraham might never have existed, this story of the human sacrifice which almost was clearly sends the message that God must be obeyed, always and unquestioningly. The tale also seems to point to a time in the ancestry of the people telling it when a transition was made from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. This is subject matter for anthropology, not theology. Kierkegaard was brilliant, except when he was Christian, and vice-versa. Thank goodness in a lot of his writing the voodoo does not interfere with the clarity of thought. If only he could've stopped fearfully trembling before That Which Is Not. The story of Abraham can be understood rationally, but not while sharing Abraham's irrational belief in a big meanie in the sky who runs the universe.
I don't think religious beliefs are defensible. That sounds very harsh, but I don't think we should tiptoe around such issues. Thousands of years' worth of tiptoeing has been more than enough. Kierkegaard is much less irrational then many other theologians who claim that belief is rational and produce reams of the most appalling nonsense to buttress that claim, but not quite as rational as his many atheist fans who decline to accept ancient irrationalities.
Of course, it sometimes benefits people -- real, non-imaginary people -- when their fellow humans fear and tremble before an unreal deity. It distracts them from fear and loathing which would make sense -- fear and loathing of powerful rulers who claim to act in the public interest but do not, for example. (Of course, it's much more admirable to stand up to tyrants than to tremble before them, but it's also heroic, and let's face it, the vast majority of people simply aren't heroes. Maybe that sounds harsh too, but it's plainly true.) It's no coincidence that the worst tyrants appear to be very religious, whether they actually are or merely find it useful to have their subjects distracted by an imaginary tyranny. I don't doubt that many rulers sincerely believe in God, when they're told from infancy that they have been selected by God to rule -- for the good of all, of course. Most of us are susceptible to flattery, and the temptation to believe it grows as the flattery grows more constant and extreme, and what could be more flattering than being told your entire life that God has chosen you to be one of the leaders of His creation?
Sincere or cynical, promotion of religion is very practical for rulers. Most of us don't have such an excuse for holding on to religious belief.
I don't think religious beliefs are defensible. That sounds very harsh, but I don't think we should tiptoe around such issues. Thousands of years' worth of tiptoeing has been more than enough. Kierkegaard is much less irrational then many other theologians who claim that belief is rational and produce reams of the most appalling nonsense to buttress that claim, but not quite as rational as his many atheist fans who decline to accept ancient irrationalities.
Of course, it sometimes benefits people -- real, non-imaginary people -- when their fellow humans fear and tremble before an unreal deity. It distracts them from fear and loathing which would make sense -- fear and loathing of powerful rulers who claim to act in the public interest but do not, for example. (Of course, it's much more admirable to stand up to tyrants than to tremble before them, but it's also heroic, and let's face it, the vast majority of people simply aren't heroes. Maybe that sounds harsh too, but it's plainly true.) It's no coincidence that the worst tyrants appear to be very religious, whether they actually are or merely find it useful to have their subjects distracted by an imaginary tyranny. I don't doubt that many rulers sincerely believe in God, when they're told from infancy that they have been selected by God to rule -- for the good of all, of course. Most of us are susceptible to flattery, and the temptation to believe it grows as the flattery grows more constant and extreme, and what could be more flattering than being told your entire life that God has chosen you to be one of the leaders of His creation?
Sincere or cynical, promotion of religion is very practical for rulers. Most of us don't have such an excuse for holding on to religious belief.
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