Digressions&Impressions

RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022

In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.

Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.

Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung'  --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.

Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him. 

Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true). 

I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.) 

I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text. 

Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.

But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.

We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I  never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends. 

Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.

In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.

When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.

Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.

I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.

Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)

We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.

The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.

Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.

 

 

RIP: K.M. 'Micha' Schliesser (1938-2018)

My dad was born in the Summer of 1938 in Berlin; he was the only child of a businessman, Hermann Schliesser, and a fashion-designer, Margarete Neumann Schliesser (recall her drawings). After Kristallnacht later that Fall (recall) they left Germany for Holland. Until the age of seven, my dad grew up in Westerbork--first a refugee camp and then a German deportation camp (recall here; and here). After liberation, the family moved to Amsterdam, where, at once, they moved back into the fashion and women's ready-to-wear-business. Next to his bed was a picture of Hilde, a German fellow survivor, who lived near them at Merwedeplein. She became a surrogate mother to him while his parents were hard at work. He cared for another such surrogate, Lini Bunjes Rosenthal to the end of her life.

The stateless family became naturalized Dutch in 1950. The request was promoted and expedited by the Dutch ministry of economics, emphasizing the "international reputation" of the family. After a period in New York City  and Berlin, he joined the family business as fashion designer. In the 1970s, the manufacturing business was sold and he represented foreign women's ready-to-wear-manufacturers in the Netherlands.

When I was young, he did not speak much about his war-time experiences or what it was like being a foreign born native in Amsterdam after the war. But after his retirement, he became increasingly interested in sharing his stories in elementary and high schools. He emphasized the plight and vulnerability of refugees and was adamant about comparing his own family experiences to contemporary events. Last year, during one of his last school visits, he was very moved by his contact with kids who turned out to be Syrian refugees. In recent years, he was especially pleased by the warm welcome he received in Dortmund, Germany, striking up friendships with young people eager to confront Germany's past and pass it in to younger generations. It was in Dortmund that he finally learned the fate of Klausje Weinberg, his childhood friend from Westerbork (recall).

In New York he met my mom, Marleen Krieger. She was the youngest daughter of Abe Krieger, who had been a business associate and family friend of his father in Berlin before the war and Amsterdam after the war. It had been at Abe's suggestion that my dad moved to New York, where he studied at FIT. My mom and dad married in 1970. After the divorce, my younger sister (their only other child), Malka, ended up living with my dad. He raised her alone (with help of his loyal house-cleaner, Mevrouw Quist), and excelled at being Yiddishe mama and papa at once to her. He never remarried. When my sister had kids, -- Eli & Isa -- in turn, with her husband Ralph de Vries, he repeated the performance and became their trusted confidante, chauffeur, and partner in mischief.

My dad is proof that people can change at a later age. After retirement he got involved in various self-help courses, and started to become comfortable sharing his feelings and talking about his experiences. One means toward self-expression were his haunting bronze statues. (He had always regretted that he had not pursued a career in art and had joined the family business--and he encouraged both his kids to follow their passion. ) Briefly, it looked as if he would develop a second career as a sculptor, but one day he simply stopped. I asked him about this recently; and he said that even though he had paid the rent for the studio, he simply felt no need anymore. But he was pleased by the interest of his three grandchildren (Eli, Isa, Avi) in his artwork as they each picked a sculpture to remember him.

While he could have a biting, dry sense of humor, he developed many life-long friendships. Many of these shared his passion for bridge. And through them he stayed in touch with all the news in the kehila. 

He disliked aging; he found his physical fragility fearful -- a bad fall had lead to a hip replacement -- and the increasing lack of mobility annoying. But most of all he loathed the narrowing of his world as loved ones passed away. By the time his final disease was diagnosed, there was nothing that could be done. While my sister, brother-in-law, and I cared for him at home, during the last six weeks he amazed me by his spirit: he enjoyed meeting his friends and sharing memories; he was touched and genuinely surprised by the outpouring of fondness and love he received (and thoroughly enjoyed), including visits from all over the world. He returned this attention with astounding good cheer, tenderness, and mental lucidity, even though his body was visibly faltering.

Yesterday, after smoking a last cigarette, in the presence of my sister and myself, he died peacefully in his sleep.

 

RIP: Johan Cruyff: 1947-2016

De waarheid is nooit precies zoals je denkt dat hij zou zijn. [The truth is never exactly like you think he would be.]--Johan Cruyff.

The first professional soccer (voetbal) match I ever saw in person was at old the Olympic Stadium 7 november 1978. It was a good 30 minute walk from my childhood home, and my mom's friend, Max, took me. Max was the son of a sailor; he and his dad introduced me to sambal--an Indonesian hot sauce that I continue to adore. Unfortunately, Max died rather young.

The match, an arranged exhibit, marked the first official 'retirement' of Johan Cruyff and, simultaneously, ended the first golden age of Dutch football: Ajax of Amsterdam got completely outplayed (0-8) by Beckenbauer's Bayern Munchen. I went home in tears. (I was seven years old.) These days my dad lives next to the (renovated) stadium, although it is now more modest in size and not used for football anymore.

It's hard to explain the role of Johan Cruyff during the 1970s in Amsterdam and Barcelona. One year, my own club (AFC) took all the youth teams to the movies to see a special showing of Nummer 14--a 1973 documentary about Cruyff (see here, too). The title of the film was a reference to his shirt number. It caused a major crisis among my friends: would we go in the Ajax club colors, to honor our idol, or go in (the more stylish) AFC club colors. (I believe I opted for a mixed outfit.)

The documentary is a homage to the greatest club squad ever (the 1972 Ajax team). The best scene in the film is the one in which the annoying musical sound track is halted to show how the squad of my heroes is forced to run up the 'mountain' in het Amsterdamse bos (the Amsterdam forest), which was the huge depression era, man-made forest behind my childhood home. I always think of the scene when I bike by the forest or fly over it when I land at Schiphol.

Cruyff eventually resumed his career as a player, including a successful stint at arch-enemy Feyenoord, and, eventually, a manager. In his 30s, when I saw him play regularly, he had lost speed, but he still combined a velvet touch with on-pitch insight. He could make many much fitter and faster professional players look amateurish.

Like many kids of my generation, I was born 'too late.' We mostly missed out on the 60s and 70s in which Amsterdam was the center of the world (or so we were told); and we certainly missed the golden age of Ajax in the late 60s and early 70s; we spent most of our childhood hearing about the great club and national squads from older friends and relatives. This changed when Cruyff returned to Ajax to coach in the mid 1980s. He inherited a very talented, youthful team including a whole new generation of fantastic players (e.g., Menzo, Rijkaard and Van Basten), but he manifestly improved them, and I loved watching them develop in person. The team was uneven, but on its best days it could dazzle (including a memorable goal by Van Basten). Cruyff took them back to the near-elite of European footbal (including the cup winners cup). Even so, his greatest European managing triumph took place in Barcelona when he managed them to their first European Championship (in 1992).

As the years went by Cruyff became known for his oracular aphorisms uttered during TV interviews or commentary. Cruyff, who spoke in a distinctive Amsterdam working class accent that has now largely disappeared from Amsterdam, could compete with any Ancient sage with his philosophical nuggets. My favorite one has always been, Als ik zou willen dat je het begreep, had ik het wel beter uitgelegd, that is, "If I had wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better." (Another gem is Vaak moet er iets gebeuren voordat er iets gebeurt, "Often something has to happen before something happens.") In Holland, Elk nadeel heb z'n voordeel ("every disadvantage has its advantage") has entered the popular lexicon.

One final thought on the 1974 world cup final (recall also this post). During the last forty years, the Netherlands has fielded astoundingly talented national squads, including four others that had a legitimate shot at winning it all (and here I am leaving aside the most talented one that I saw self-destruct at San Siro in Milan in 1990). Cruyff has loomed so large in the national football imagination, that there has always been an underlying sense that, if Cruyff couldn't do it, it couldn't be done, until, of course, it will be done.  

 

RIP: Patrick Colonel Suppes, 1922–2014, Eulogy and Apologia

[This is a guest-post by Alistair Isaac.--ES]

The facts of Patrick Suppes’ career read like tall-tales of some 17^th century polymath.  In addition to philosophy, he held appointments in psychology, education, and statistics; he also made major contributions in the foundations of physics, linguistics, and the social sciences.  Although best known in philosophy for his work on philosophy of science, he wrote on topics as diverse as free will, liberty, meaning in poetry, corporal punishment, hylomorphism, and virtue ethics.[1]  He was also an entrepreneur, using the business of education—he taught with computers as soon as there were computers, and the internet as soon as there was an internet—to gather data for the science of education.  

Suppes occupied the same office in Ventura Hall for 60 years, eventually taking over the entire building, filling it with his collaborators.  When university expansion threatened it, he had Ventura Hall physically relocated rather than vacate.  When the (Suppes founded) Stanford Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) Online High School took off, there was no longer room for all his collaborators, so he turned architect and designed Nora Suppes Hall next door to house the OHS.  In the 2000s much of Ventura Hall was dedicated to Suppes’ quest to understand computation in the brain.  This project combined physics (physically modeling the impedance of the skull), engineering (he was on the committee of a PhD student who designed new skull contacts for EEG recording), statistics (literally years of subtle data analysis), the psychology of language (developing associationistic semantic models), and, of course, methodology (including an epic defense of the theoretical importance of invariants across EEG and perceptual data.[2]   By 2012, he’d embarked on an ambitious new project to collect EEG signals from couples in therapy, with an eye toward understanding the neuroscience of “insight.”

Suppes’ bibliography includes almost 500 articles and books, averaging 7 per year throughout the 2000s and 4 per year through the 2010s.  His last single-author, peer-reviewed paper appeared in 2014 in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology and proved the conceptual independence of our qualitative notions of probability, uncertainty, and probabilistic independence—demonstrating that no one can be defined in terms of the other two. [3] Whether this result turns out to be significant or not (opinions were divided when Suppes presented it informally to peers at Stanford), it shows Suppes’ commitment until the end to the methods he became known for: the characterization of basic concepts with qualitative axioms, and the proof of precise results about them.

RIP Gordon Tullock (1922- 2014)

"Who is that crazy old man?" I asked. Nodding at a short fellow slowly leaving the seminar room.

"He just gave you a huge compliment."

I was still a PhD student, and I had just given a paper on Adam Smith and Rousseau at the Summer Institute.* I had been nervous because my last few talks to economist-only crowds had been confrontational affairs. But this event seem to have gone fine – the interruptions were respectful, even fruitful, and surprisingly philosophical – that is, until the old guy had started to lecture me.

"Really?" I was pretty sure that I was being made fun of.

"No, really. He stayed for your Q&A, and he was convinced."

"But that rant about Rousseau's children, that was totally off the wall."

"Oh, no, you convinced him that Rousseau on property rights and rents anticipates the Virginia School."

"What do I care…" I paused, "Wait, who was that?"

"That was Gordon Tullock."

'"Tullock?" I almost ran after him.

Gordon Tullock died yesterday. I met him a few more times upon my (almost) annual returns to George Mason, but we never had a real conversation. Tullock had a knack of measuring you up, and he could be very biting (and funny). You got a sense that he did not suffer fools lightly. Tullock's name is attached to theories of rent-seeking and public choice economics more generally. I don't think I insult his memory if I say that his ideas were all fairly simple. (He was a trained lawyer.) His papers were not dressed up with complex mathematics; they would get to the point often with sparse, lean prose. At bottom, it was all about incentives and logical entailment. (I always love that his most famous work, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962), has such a philosophical title.) But he pursued his ideas with relentless focus and utter contempt for fashion and prestige. His work caused economists to stop focusing exclusively on market-failure and to start taking government failure, and institutional design more generally, equally seriously. I thought he deserved some share of the Nobel that Buchanan did win, in part, for their joint work. Buchanan understood his own work as part of a great, long conversation. Tullock also took  ideas seriously – he did attend my talk on the history of political economy, after all --, but he did not feel the need to package them.

Some other time I may write a bit about his editorial stewardship of the journal Public Choice. But because I am on the eve of the PSA (Philosophy of Science association) in Chicago, I close with this: Tullock's work matters to the philosophy of science. In the 1950s and 60s – the age of Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi, etc. --, he paid attention to the philosophers of science. In return in The Organization of Inquiry he created what I, only half-jokingly, call 'public choice philosophy of science;' the core idea is that in reflecting on science, you can't simply assume that scientists are pure truth-seekers. In particular, it is quite possible that economic interests will buy directly or, more subtly, indirectly some scientists to lobby or speak on their behalf. That is to say, the institutional context and social organization of science plays a role in the outcomes that science reports. 

How to theorize about science and/or society while taking one's responses to incentives into account is, in fact, the central theme for analytical egalitarianism. Tullock's work has been pioneering in this respect. During the last few years, I discovered that Mandeville anticipated some of Tullock's best insights. I regret not having shared it with him; I think he would have been quite pleased to ditch Rousseau for the sharp, unsparing, but ultimately humane wit of Mandeville.

Can an Atheist be Virtuous? (On Smith on Hume with echoes of Bayle and Spinoza)

Thus died out most excellent, and never to be forgotten friend [David Hume--ES]; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion."—Adam Smith on David Hume, "Letter to Strahan," 9 November 1776.

After portraying Hume's magnanimity and cheerfulness on his deathbed reading Lucian's Dialogues with the Dead, Smith ads the sentence above. It links Hume's life to worthy ("excellent"), posthumous fame ("never to be forgotten"). In doing so, Smith distinguishes sharply between Hume's "character" and Hume's "philosophical opinions." Apparently consensus is possible in judgments of character—this fits Smith's moral theory more generally --, while according to Smith (enduring) consensus it is not possible in judgments of philosophical doctrine.

The primary, enduring significance of Smith's claim is not so much his unwillingness to condemn Hume's philosophical doctrines – many of which were inimical to the natural religion and physico-theology of even the moderate religious establishment of their time, but rather that in Smith's presentation an irreligious (reading Lucian not the Bible), mitigated skeptic can lead a moral life; in Smith's hand, Hume's life, then, vindicates Bayle's scandalous idea (modeled on Spinoza's life) that unbelievers could be moral and, thus, form a political union. By contrast, Hume, too, thought that individuals were capable of virtue without religion, but one need not rely on this; one simply ought to design institutions in the right way: "It is…a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave:" He added that "at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact." (Of the Independency of Parliament).

Behind every eminent Philosophical Woman, Stands a Man?

Peter Geach, who has died aged 97, was a formidable logician and happened to be married to one of the 20th century’s leading English-language philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe.

In a way this meant he was overshadowed. He did, though, have a strong philosophical life of his own, and without the thousands of hours of discussion that Elizabeth Anscombe had with him, her philosophy would not have attained the eminence it did.--The Telegraph

The quoted passage above are the first lines of an unsigned obituary of Peter Geach. It makes a remarkable claim: that his presence was decisive in her achievements. It's possible to read it as a sociological point: Geach was needed for Anscombe's status in the profession. But the more likely intended reading is that talking to him made her a much better philosopher. It's offered without evidence. Even if Anscombe says something as much somewhere, the counterfactual is hard to evaluate.* In addition, the obituary also offers an unflattering comparison between Geach and Anscombe: "Unlike the dense, unsignposted [sic] prose of Anscombe, Geach’s style was a pleasure to read." It does not occur to the author that, perhaps, on the whole, Anscombe was struggling to make genuinely original points on unwieldy topics, while Geach was working with a lot more self-imposed constraints.

In a curious lack of symmetry, the obituary does not assign Anscombe any responsibility for Geach's eminence or achievements. I am not an expert on the thought of either, but if one claims that Geach is a "honorary founder of the philosophical school that called itself “analytical Thomism,”" why not mention Anscombe at all? So, it's quite possible, of course, that Geach improved her philosophy, but we can't rule out the possibility that either his ideas sometimes made hers worse or that his presence was a net-zero in her philosopher career (etc.) Perhaps, one day there will be careful dispassionate scholarship on the issue.