It’s fun to fool around with history. It’s sort of like playing with a slinky: you can bend it in any direction, twist it, contract or expand it, tie it in a knot, but it never loses its fundamental singularity, its linear metallic structure. There are many ways history could have happened (or so we presume) and many ways of viewing it, which we can never agree upon based on our different perspectives, values, and habits of mind. 

I’m not a great believer in idealizing philosophers or their ideas. For one thing, philosophy is too complicated for any one thinker to get it right – if “right” is even the right word. (Compelling, edifying, or clarifying might be better.) At best, the great philosophers are like the proverbial blind men, each of whom senses just one part of the elephant. Even as a young philosophy student, what struck me about the field was how a few dozen (mostly white, male, European) thinkers could make such compelling arguments for wildly disparate ways of organizing thought and reality.  They couldn’t all be right – yet I also learned that none of them is entirely wrong either. 

I have long disliked the term “liberal arts.” And by “long,” I mean since I first began seriously studying that term and the idea it stands for a dozen or so years ago. My unease is not with what it means, but how it means it. 

The history of the liberal arts, or as I prefer to call it, critical inquiry, is largely the history of books and writing and creative expression. But more than that, it’s the history of the nexus of knowledge and imagination itself, as a civilizational value: of how they are created, stored, and used (or abused). It is a history of curiosity, of openness to the wider world beyond one’s own community or culture. Openness, in other words, to moral and intellectual growth as a human being. 

Irene Vallejo writes in Papyrus, her study of the development of books, that Western poetry began in the Greek oral tradition because “rhythmic language was easiest to remember.” That strikes me as sensible and obvious. She goes on to say that she can remember poems she learned to recite in school “with extraordinary clarity.” Unfortunately, I don’t share that talent. I can recall snatches of verse – Whose woods these are … darn it, I think I know…  – but no more. And yet, curiously, I can remember the words to at least several hundred songs.  Somehow music, not rhythm, is the glue that holds things in my memory. This has not diminished the power of poetry for me. But that power comes with an abundance of mystery, confoundment, and trepidation. 

Two small, nearly matching books have stood on my desk for some fifty years, with my name, dating back to college, printed inside. One is the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th edition). It is based on the 26-volume Oxford English Dictionary, and it looks like an ordinary-sized book. I was surprised to open the one-volume dictionary the other day and find that it contains 1,367 pages. The sixth edition, edited by J.B. Sykes in 1976, is based on the original First Edition edited by H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler in 1911. And when I say “edited” in the latter case, I mean the Fowlers did all the work of assembling the dictionary. It took years. 

The distance between Mt. Rainier, in Washington State, and Mt. Adams may not seem like a particularly important question. For reasons that I find inexplicable, you may not be dying to know the answer. It’s just something out there that doesn’t affect your life, or so you may suppose. But to me it’s vital, for reasons I’ll explain. Vital as in important, and vital as in life-giving. 

James Joyce’s “Dubliners,” from 1914, is pretty widely regarded as the greatest collection of short stories in the English Language. I can’t think of a better one, though I’m deeply impressed by the stories of a contemporary Irish author, Claire Keegan. And Joyce’s culminating story, “The Dead,” is the longest, best-known, and possibly the greatest of the group. 

What is leadership? Follow me, and you may or may not find out. The only thing I know for certain about leadership ability is that I don’t have it. But it’s worth considering the role of leadership in the firmament of democratic (or democracy-compatible) ideas. And we begin with two premises: one, leadership clearly isn’t confined to – and did not originate in – the democratic sphere. It began as tyranny, political or religious. Two, it’s not a major focus of study within the liberal arts, except perhaps in certain political science or political psychology courses. 

It may sound odd or even unphilosophical – but that won’t stop me from saying it: a single essay, just under sixteen pages in length, which I first read in the 1970s, has influenced my thinking more than anything else I’ve read in philosophy. And it’s an essay that I return to every few years to get, or to retain, my bearings. 

A recent post by Scotty Hendricks on the Bigthink platform posed four unsolved questions of philosophy. They are not the only unsolved questions, but they are foundational to how we understand the nexus of our minds and the world; and you don’t need to be a philosopher to think about them. (Spoiler alert: I don’t have much in the way of answers).  

A quarter-century ago, I wrote a book titled The Sound Bite Society in which I argued that electronic media (at the time, mainly television and radio) are systemically biased to the right. Not intentionally or maliciously biased, but structurally biased. Not “systematically” biased, according to some rule or law, but systemically biased. The argument was – and remains – that by radically atomizing and simplifying information, these media are naturally conducive to the values and messages of the right and inconducive to the more complex, holistic, and egalitarian messages and values of the left. 

I first encountered Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain about four years ago. Reading the 700-page novel slowly, and in tandem with other books, it took me more than a year to get through it. But when I finally reached the end, I felt an urge unknown in my previous fiction-reading experience: to start the book over again at the beginning. 

My latest streaming binge has been “Yellowstone” on Amazon Prime, the massive, sprawling Dutton family saga written by Taylor Sheridan, executive produced by and starring Kevin Costner. 

In this, my third and (for now) final post about Ludwig Wittgenstein and the liberal arts, I’ll talk about one of his most important contributions to the philosophical study of language: the concept of “family resemblance.” And if ever a philosophical concept radiated relevance across the liberal arts, it’s this one. 

Like a number of my college classmates (and not a few of my relatives) I was a teenage legacy student. Not exactly a werewolf, but close. In fact, I’m a member of the even more incestuous subspecies of double-legacy students. Simply put, around the year 1946 my mother left her wallet in a telephone booth in the college administration building, my father found it, and I was one of the results.

Once considered a “melting pot,” my hometown, the City of New York, is now more of a test tube, and a harbinger of where – for better or worse – the nation is heading.

When my friend and Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Samantha Look contacted me recently about judging for the Vineyard Conservation Society’s Art & Writing Contest, I felt honored and thought I should give it a try. I had never judged a contest before. But I’ve judged and edited a lot of writing; that feels second nature to me.

Recently I’ve been reading the “Barrøy Chronicles,” a wonderful four-novel saga by the Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen. The books are about a woman’s life (and it is a very hard life) on a tiny Norwegian coastal island before, during, and right after World War II.

Although I’m a proud New Yorker and an even prouder Met fan, I also root for the Pittsburgh Pirates (when they aren’t playing the Mets). This isn’t hard to explain; it begins with the fact that, having immigrant grandparents with Brooklyn roots, I instinctually support underdogs on every field of play – other than Citi Field. 

Is this what fascism looks like?

If the question sounds rhetorical or incendiary, it’s because we’re living in incendiary times. Terms such as fascism, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, are important words. Their meanings overlap in complex ways.

I studied the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in college fifty years ago, and though I haven’t read much of Kant since then, I remain a Kantian. And this calls for some explaining.

In my previous post, I introduced you to Ludwig Wittgenstein the man, with a thumbnail biography of his extraordinary life. In this post and the next one, we’ll talk in general terms about his thought and its enormous impact on philosophy in the 20th Century. That impact was mainly because of his focus on the very medium of philosophy: language itself. 

One of the great questions of the humanities – and across the liberal arts – is the connection between a writer, researcher, scientist, or artist and his or her work: between biography and thought. I don’t have an answer, and I’m not sure there is one.  One can certainly appreciate the work of Michelangelo, Mozart, Wittgenstein, of Virginia Woolf, without knowing much about their personal lives. But both the work and the life are products of the same human psyche. 

Within moments of landing in Czechoslovakia (as it was then still called) in the late spring of 1990, I could sense a country in hurried and dramatic transition yet keeping intact a quirky and ironic soul. The currency clerk at the Prague airport seemed befuddled about the correct exchange rate between US dollars and Czech crowns, and he gave me a tiered rate roughly averaging the market rate. An hour later, as I was checking in to my hotel, the same fellow appeared in the lobby, looking even more flustered. He had tracked me down because he needed a few hundred crowns back or would have to pay the difference out of his own pocket. A week later, as I was leaving the country, the same teller exchanged my crowns back into dollars, with a shy smile of recognition. 

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Maybe so; but it can also calm the mind in unpredictable ways that staying home does not. This happened to me once before, when I returned to New York on the eve of 9/11, deeply imprinted by the tranquility I had experienced at a certain untamed garden in the South of France. As fear spread across America that September and in the months that followed, I kept returning in my mind to that garden, and regaining a center. And it happened again on the cusp of Covid-19.

The subject of death has shadowed me lately – not my own, but death more generally. Several acquaintances have recently died or are dying. As I get older, that seems to happen more frequently. It’s a universal human question – and therefore a quintessential liberal arts question: what does death mean? How should we face it?

If one cares about the life of the mind, it helps to have friends who listen, and to whom one listens in turn. I have many thoughtful acquaintances, but for ongoing dialogue, Heidi and Lewis are two such friends for me. And here I’m talking mainly about Lewis, because he isn’t my life partner.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” So said the British writer D.H. Lawrence (who spent some time among us) a century ago, in his provocative and polemical book about our writers, “Studies in Classic American Literature.” Around the same time, the poet William Carlos Williams offered an equally quirky account of American history and literature titled “In the American Grain.” Both are worth considering as we try to figure out who exactly we are. 

A good friend of mine who’s in the middle-of-the-road politically recently asked me if a centrist politician could win the presidency.  My friend lives in Texas, whence comes the saying: “The only thing in the middle of the road is white lines and dead armadillos.” But I take his question seriously; and though I’m not a centrist myself, I wonder about it.