When I was sixteen our family acquired a black-and-white television set and for a while I was spell-bound. With my little sisters I would watch Miss Pam show for children, and shows that featured songs like “Remember the Red River Valley” (“and the cowboy who loved you so true”).
There, on television, is also where I encountered the first of a long series of intellectual prima donnas. Sometimes malgré moi, given their views — I could not help but admire the ways they had to grip their audience.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a handsome, ascetic man, always fully decked out in bishop’s regalia, could lead you with irresistible logic to the conclusion he would expressed with passion and fury.
He would begin calmly, a theology professor amiably addressing a seminar, joking with the audience, getting some good-feeling laughs — segueing into a syllogistically designed argument, and then, when the inevitable conclusion came close, burst out:
But men are not pigs!!
Now I know that this man, the voice of orthodox Catholicism, was the prime Christian anti-Communist crusader in America for some thirty years. But what a speaker! Think of the efficacy of this technique:
the argument, carried out in full rigor, cannot possibly reach the conclusion that is his aim — but just before that conclusion is due, he shouts his value judgment with full demagogic force, with overwhelming conviction, and takes us across the logical gap!
Television lost its appeal for me fairly soon, as I went to college — as it happens, I met Miss Pam there, who was in one of my college classes. We even went for a walk, but was too shy and too scared, I was truly out of my depth. My brush with stardom … Oh well … Anyway, now logic began to shape my critical faculties, and Sheen was quickly forgotten, television lost its glamor. However, philosophy turned out to have its prima donnas too: philosophers who could grip the imagination through intellectual charisma, and whose public persona loomed large on the philosophical scene.
Paul Feyerabend
The first I actually saw in person was Paul Feyerabend, who came to a symposium in Pittsburg when I was a student there. He strode on to the stage, supporting himself with crutch, a Byronic figure with open shirt collar, and a half-cynical, half-challenging smile. The whispers among us students were about a war wound, was it from the battle of Berlin? Fighting in the German army, or perhaps the Hitler Jügend — forbidden glamor, linked to intellectual prowess.
Eventually of course I learned the facts (he was in the army as a young officer, in the retreat from Russia), but to my regret I did not meet Feyerabend very often. He came to Yale in my second year there, on a visit to discuss the department’s attempt to recruit him. As a junior faculty, ready to give my time, I was delegated to show him around the campus and the town center, and generally entertain him between official functions. By this time Feyerabend delighted in his role of philosophy’s enfant terrible. On the world stage he was the Berkeley revolutionaries’ idol. And for many he was what a writer in the ScientificAmerican magazine called him, The Worst Enemy of Science. But for me he was the revolutionary writer on philosophy of quantum mechanics, empiricism, and realism, who had helped to shape the sea change in philosophy of science in the fifties and sixties.
The last time we met was memorable (the photos here are from that occasion). In 1992 we were both in a weeklong conference in the Netherlands, with meetings spread out over several towns. Feyerabend, who had come with his wife Grazia, gave a tremendous lecture in the famous Hooglandse Church in Leiden. For me, who had frankly never escaped from his spell, after all those years still in thrall, that was the exactly right setting.
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Michael Scriven and William F. Buckley Jr.
In an earlier post I described my first meeting with Michael Scriven. A few years later, when I spent a year in Indiana on a visiting appointment, Scriven had already moved to San Francisco. Pinned on the departmental bulletin board was a California newspaper article that mentioned a fashionable party at his mansion. But Scriven was coming back, to debate William Buckley.
Buckley was truly famous, on the national stage, the most important writer and lecturer on the political right. Just a few years before he had debated James Baldwin, and TV was always eager to show his acrimonious but wonderfully witty confrontations with Gore Vidal, the most visible speaker on the left. It was a coup for the University to stage this debate
So in October 1968, shortly after John Barth presented a reading of his recent novel Giles Goatboy, thematizing the university as universe, Convocation Hall hosted the great debate. The evening before we had a party for Scriven in the history and philosophy of science department, everyone excited about this return of a glamorous colleague. Wesley Salmon’s wife, told him “You will love this, Michael, another great chance to project your image!” and Scriven retorted, “Yes, and that needs a very big screen!”.
Certainly, Scriven had dramatic presence on stage. But it paled to insignificance, in my view, when Buckley stood up. With his patrician New England accent, his seemingly choreographed body language as he spoke, his Shakespearean fluency, he projected not simply his own image but the image of a world. Buckley’s logic and rigor could distract you from his unspoken premises, and his conclusion he would throw away, as it were, just turning away from the audience to cast it as an aside … I had never, and would never again, see such debating skill.
In the fifties Buckley had come on the scene with his exposé God and Man at Yale, starting a rightwing revolt against liberal elitism. Looking around us today, we can see that hasn’t run its course yet. In fact, it has migrated down from his patrician, elitist early audience to a large chunk of America.
Detest the song! Yes, but there is no begrudging the sheer, though nonchalant, brilliance of the singer.
The president of the student union, who had presided over the debate, announced that it would be judged by the volume of applause. Michael Scriven, local hero, won hands down. But that was wrong.
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Feyerabend’s Centennial will be celebrated in 2024, preparations are underway. I do not know what philosophy will have turned out to be in the twenty-first century, but the twentieth was a time of heroes.
Enough for now, enough for one post.
Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book 