Greenberg on New York in real time

What I quoted from last night was a retrospective interview in 1967. Here he is in October 1947, while the events in question were underway:

“[Hans] Hofmann’s presence in New York has served to raise up a climate of taste among at least fifty people in America that cannot be matched for rigor and correctness in Paris and London. No matter how puzzling and ugly the new and original will appear… the people who inhabit this climate will not fail to perceive and hail it…

Alas, the future of American art depends on them. That it should is fitting but sad. Their isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?”

As the second paragraph already indicates, the first paragraph is not especially motivated by patriotism on Greenberg’s part. As an art critic he was annually bashing the level of shows at the Whitney as being embarrassingly second-rate, and as a Marxist historical critic he was tearing into the American tendency to organize everything along the lines of commercialization and profit.

In short, he seems to have been one of the last people to have expected New York to become a significant city in the arts. Even in this article, despite his praise for the German exile Hofmann’s positive guru effect on the younger New York artists, he was lamenting that America still had nothing to hang its hat on but Jackson Pollock and the sculptor David Smith– and he still viewed Pollock as a problematic Gothic wildman and Smith as often overly Baroque.

Hofmann comes off as an absolutely fascinating character in all of Greenberg’s critical writings. If you look back at the history of philosophy, a number of very powerful teachers stand out– Socrates of course, but also Plato and Aristotle. Albertus Magnus has to rank highly as well, for his ability to inspire superior students.

But I also think Brentano belongs on the list of supremely important teachers in the history of philosophy. Without Brentano it’s highly unlikely that phenomenology would ever have existed, especially since Husserl probably would have stayed with mathematics if not for Brentano’s teacherly inspiration. Without Husserl no Heidegger as we know him, and without Heidegger much else would have been different.

If you want to feel smarter in one week or less, I would recommend that you read Brentano’s PSYCHOLOGY FROM AN EMPIRICAL STANDPOINT, and also (very importantly) read the appendices which contain excerpts from Brentano’s later works and are much more conversational in tone. You can feel yourself in the direct presence of an absolutely exceptional philosophical personality– a somewhat abrasive teacher (he explodes at Husserl at least once in those remarks for accusing him of psychologism) but someone who also raises your entire mental level simply because you are indirectly in his presence as a reader.

I’ve said it before on this blog, but there’s a striking difference between Brentano and Heidegger as teachers. Brentano’s students were clearly somewhat afraid of him, yet he inspired their originality anyway. Heidegger was similarly intimidating to his students, but in a much less fruitful way. When you read Grondin’s biography of Gadamer you gain anew a vivid sense of how Heidegger didn’t just intimidate the people around him, but somehow wore down their morale. It is striking how many of Heidegger’s best students did their most systematic work only after age 60, as if it took them decades to build up enough self-confidence to speak for themselves. There seems to have been something a bit corrosive about his effect on these younger people, whereas Brentano’s disciplinary whip-cracks scared but did not damage his students.

That said, the fact that Brentano is underrated often has the unfortunate effect that Brentano appreciation often turns into an overreaction against the originality of Husserl and Heidegger. People will say that they “stole” Brentano’s ideas, or something along those lines. That would be too much; their debt to him should be understood, not exaggerated.

There are also cases, as with sharp cats like Barry Smith, who view Heidegger as a decadent degeneration into the mystical and the obfuscatory. But this seems more like a negative visceral reaction than like a balanced assessment. There’s plenty of mystical and obfuscatory detritus in Heidegger, but it’s really just bad frosting on a superb cake. Rest assured, Heidegger is one of the greats. We’ve not had anyone at that level since.