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. 

The theme this week is simple – yet not so simple: All will be well. 

It’s about systemic thinking – how all things rhyme and relate to other things, and how it’s merely a (necessary) convenience to identify “things” in the first place – beginning as infants with our mother’s breast.  

his post is something of an outlier, in that it concerns a member of my family. But it’s also an interesting story about a kind of cultural citizenship: a long-hidden act of witness.   And it fits right in with a theme I’ve pursued (unconsciously it seems, yet it’s a clear red threat) in various essays going back thirty years: the theme of secular resurrection. By that I mean discovering significance in the lives of forgotten people. 

Causality, the domain of thought in which we assign causes and effects in the world, is a an unavoidable morass  – hence its close connection to another of our “gateway concepts,” complexity. Inside the Liberal Arts devotes a chapter to each. But like complexity, causality is a manageable morass, in which we ultimately set the terms and frame the questions. If we follow the contours of nature in doing so, it’s because we have no choice: that’s what we’re dealing with here. And if  answers to these questions are elusive, at least we can understand why they elude us. 

I don’t much care to think or write about objects. The subject seems like an affront to my mindset. I don’t deny their existence – who could? But I’ve never thought of them as the most interesting things in the known universe. 

What can a non-Christian – or a nonbeliever – see in a work of late-Medieval art?  Quite a lot, needless to say.  Great art involves more than ideology, dogma or messaging. But the question crossed my mind recently as I traveled from Strasbourg, where I have distant family ties, to Colmar, in southern Alsace, to see what’s widely considered a masterpiece of Western art: the Issenheim Altarpiece, painted ca. 1512-1516 by the workshop of Matthias Grünewald, with the sculptural elements done by Niclaus of Haguenau.  The Altarpiece, at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, was originally created for a church in Issenheim, some 20 kilometers away. 

This week’s topic – occasioned by a recent evening at a Broadway theater  -- is the (often blurry) boundaries of art.  More specifically, it’s the Broadway musical, a genre notorious for sometimes straddling that boundary. The show in question was a production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The great Stephen Sondheim, whose career began with his lyrics for one of greatest of all musicals, “West Side Story” (1957), with music by Leonard Bernstein. Now that was a work of art. 

Early sailors used maps of the night sky and the known world to find their way, along with other navigational devices: compasses for direction, astrolabes, and later sextants, to determine latitude. While crude or inaccurate by modern standards, those instruments worked well enough for millennia, enabling navigators to guide their ships at sea. (And navigators on American bombers used sextants to cross the Atlantic as recently as World War II). Similarly, the tools of critical inquiry enable us to navigate the natural and symbolic worlds with greater precision and success until better ones come along. And most of the ones we use have served for thousands of years. 

I’ve recently had the pleasure of re-reading two of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Sophist. Reading Plato is always a pleasure. Even when he’s wrong, i.e., when his philosophy is inadequate, he’s never wholly wrong. 

I’ve argued here (see, for example, my June 20, 2023 post “Joined at the Hip”) that liberal learning isn’t just a nice thing; it’s essential to democracy. CHANGE MAG. But such high-minded scribblings beg certain practical questions about how exactly we can achieve the parallel goals of more liberal arts and more democracy. And while we’re at it, let’s add another key ingredient: better media. It takes all three to make the soufflé of democratic culture rise. (As they say at The New Yorker: Block that metaphor!).

There’s a reason why I devote an entire chapter of Inside the Liberal Arts to the idea of complexity. I argue that complexity is one of the foundational “gateway concepts” of liberal learning: an intellectual driver that (as part of the simple-complex axis) explains a lot about how we explain things to ourselves and one another. And it’s hidden in plain sight, so to speak. We can choose to recognize and use it, or not. 

“America, at this moment, is more politically polarized than it has been since the Civil War.”  By and large, I agree with that widespread assumption. But as Mark Twain supposedly said of the weather: everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about it. The questions I have regarding polarization are what it really signifies, whether it’s really polarization, and what we can do about it.  

On April 14th, the New York Mets honored their former pitching star Dwight Gooden by retiring his number 16 in a ceremony at Citi Field.  Gooden’s teammate, outfielder Darryl Strawberry, also had his number 18 retired, in a similar ceremony on June 1st.  Met fans greet these events with joy, appreciation, and a big sigh.