interview

Lee Braver was the first interview in Paul Ennis’s series. I was next.

HERE IS THE INTERVIEW.

For those who wonder what corn detasseling involves, see the photo below. The golden fuzzy thing on the top is the tassel. You can pull it out with a little bit of force; some are harder than others. The reason for detasseling is that these are fields of very special seed corn, and they don’t want it randomly cross-pollinating with just any old corn plant.

The one thing about this photo is that this kid is crazy to be wearing short sleeves, no matter how hot it is (July is detasseling season). Pesticide gets all over your arms. I would always wear not only long sleeves, but also a scarf around my neck. You simply have to accept the heat as part of the job.

Now that I think of it, this kid is also a bit later than usual. You’re not supposed to wait until the tassel is already exposed like that. It grows inside a tight green sheath, and generally you pull out the whole sheath just a few days before the tassels are scheduled to emerge.

Anyway, this is how I earned my first copy of Being and Time. A classic rite of passage for kids in Iowa and other agricultural states. If memory serves, Nick Srnicek even did it in Ontario.

Composition of Philosophy. July 21.

What a (relatively minor) mess. My transition to the hateful, archaic, all-night schedule was completed when I woke up at noon today– a pattern I detest, but which so often happens to me during summertime. My all-night days are over. They don’t bring happiness.

Out of necessity, however, I was preparing for another all-night writing session tonight, but then something happened: a minor administrative crisis requires my presence on campus first thing in the morning. This means that I need to go to sleep right about now, even though I feel like staying up for another 6 or 7 hours and writing.

Downside: today is a complete writeoff on the book.

Upside: this will force me to get back into a reasonable schedule.

These things happen, which is why working close to deadlines is never a good idea. Try to finish weeks ahead of any due date, if possible. If the deadline for this book were July 31 rather than August 31, I would now be in a terrible state of panic.

Schopenhauer

This is from Herzberg too, on Schopenhauer:

“He fled from smallpox at Naples and cholera at Berlin. He always had daggers and loaded pistols at his bedside. He concealed his valuables in the most unlikely places, he made his business notes in English, or if they were particularly important, in Latin or Greek. He was perpetually afraid of being exploited, cheated, or robbed.”

The fleeing from smallpox and cholera part actually sounds reasonable. The rest of the pages make Schopenhauer sound like a more erudite version of Dick Tracy and Phil Spector rolled into one.

Wood in Paraguay

Does he have the most interesting life of anyone I know? He’s at least a good candidate for it.

Graeme Wood in Paraguay, tracing rumors that Martin Bormann died there despite the treatment of the sinister Dr. Mengele.

The Google map of the burial site is a nice touch.

comp. of phil. last for the day

Looks like 51 pages written so far, whereas I’d hoped to be at around page 65 by now, but 51 is approaching the sort of critical mass where the book has a distinctive “voice,” and once you have that, you have all the momentum you need to finish. By 24 hours from now there’s a chance of being pretty close to finished with the draft of the first half of the book.

Calling it a night. That Herzberg was a perfect wind-down, reading about what a psychological mess philosophers have been. Consider the case of Schelling, philosophy’s all-time golden boy in his youth:

“Ten years later [the book] was again announced, but, although the matter had by then become a public scandal, Schelling never allowed the book to appear, any more than the Ages of the World, of which in any case only the first book had ever existed. In fact, after the age of 40, Schelling published practically nothing. He attributed this insurmountable diffidence, this ‘undue anxiety,’ in the matter of publication to dissatisfaction with the products of his mind; they did not reach the standard which he laid down for himself: the inhibitive effect of this dissatisfaction in any case was far above normal intensity. Schelling’s own conjecture was that this anxiety rose out of the states of depression which he repeatedly experienced; the first was connected with the death of Caroline Schlegel’s daughter whom he dearly loved, and it clouded his mind –weighed down already with worry and reproach– to the point of causing him to contemplate suicide. He was then 25 years old.”

addendum on Herzberg’s theory

His strong suit is his ability to digest biographies and grasp the most salient incidents in each life. The chapter giving examples of inhibitions is perhaps the longest in this strangely beautiful book. Rousseau’s are the saddest and hardest to read, and indeed he was surely the most psychotic of this group of 30 philosophers, at least until Nietzsche was hit by whatever hit him at the end.

Herzberg gives a convincing reading of Socrates’ famous “divine sign” as inhibition rather than conscience, since much of what it forbade was not at all unethical.

But the really moving one is his example of Schelling’s repeated failed promises to publish The Ages of the World. It reminded me of the permanent non-publication of the second part of Being and Time.

Incidentally, remember my theory about how everyone “gets away with” certain things that others don’t get away with? Well, I think Heidegger got away with something there. He somehow managed to spin the non-publication of the second part of the book in such a way that it sounds reasonable and we all buy it, rather than treating it as a failure. I thought of this recently because one of the letters to Bultmann had the air about it of: “haha, they all think I’m working on the supposed second half of Being and Time, and it’s a good cover to do whatever I want to do.” Not that I take that tone literally– I actually take this “it’s all deliberate” nonsense as a cover for his anxiety over not being able to finish.

How could someone already at the top of their game suddenly contract a new case of publication anxiety? First of all, remember that for Heidegger it wasn’t really new. He was never really an extensive publisher. The number of books published in his life was relatively small, and Being and Time was published only due to career pressures. Indeed, one of the strangest though not unknown moments in the Bultmann correspondence is the copy of a biographical entry Bultmann agreed to write on Heidegger for some encyclopedia or other. Under the heading “Major Publications” it listed only two (because that’s all there were): the thesis on Duns Scotus, and Being and Time. Talk about apples and oranges! The Marburg period is so rich that it’s easy to forget no one other than his students knew it was happening until much later.

But beyond this, if you want an example of someone who picked up inhibitions late, you need look no further than Schelling, who comes off as quite a miserable figure in middle age in Herzberg’s account, after the most precocious early years of anyone in the history of philosophy.

Kant and the wineglass

A charmingly odd little anecdote from Herzberg’s staggering survey of the inhibitions of the great philosophers:

“When, for example, [Kant’s] servant once broke a wineglass, he asked that the splinters should be buried so that nobody might be cut by them. He did not, however, venture to entrust the task to his servant but asked his guests to perform it. So they went out into the garden and looked for a sufficiently unfrequented spot. Kant, however, objected to every proposal ‘on the ground that someone might hurt himself, until at length a spot was found by the side of an old wall and a deep hole dug in which the splinters were carefully buried in our presence.'”