Leonard H. Ehrlich, "Fragments of a Philosophical Autobiography," Existenz 5/2 (2010), 7–59 First posted 11-5-2011 Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 ISSN 1932-1066 Fragments Of A Philosophical Autobiography Leonard H. Ehrlich 1924—2011 Abstract: This essay gives a biographical account of the author's experiences during the years leading up to the Anschluß in Austria, his emigration to the United States and life there, and an overview of his personal philosophical reflections. Five of its sections could not be completed due to the author's passing on. Philosophy and philosophizing filled the days and years of my maturity. How did it arise? Reflective articulation of later childhood and into maturity arises from the immediacy of early childhood, and I shall answer that question accordingly.1 Having been preoccupied, for a goodly part of my life, with the theory and practice of Verstehen, I am well aware that the significance of memories, especially the earliest, develops in the haze of passing time. I cannot pinpoint relevant events, impressions and experiences of my early childhood as formative, but in my memory of them they indicate a significant budding and a receptivity for later critical clarification or transcendental grounding. Yet, clear as my memories are, I, in honesty, use the title of Goethe's Autobiography as a disclaimer of historical authenticity: Dichtung und Wahrheit—Poetry and Truth. One of my earliest memories concerns the question of God, or der liebe Gott (the good Lord) as everyone 1 Editorial note: Leonard H. Ehrlich passed away while working on this essay, leaving it incomplete. Several comments have been added to his draft by Carl S. Ehrlich and are being identified as "CSE Comment." The following abbreviations are used: LHE (Leonard H. Ehrlich) and EE (Edith Ehrlich). referred to Him. It was before I entered school, so I must have been five years old when I asked my mother where God is. She may have said, "He is in heaven above." I am sure of her answer to the next question: "What does He do?" She said, "He thinks." I formed the image of a figure of an elderly man in the semi-darkness far away; his forehead is wrinkled, leaning forward he rests his head in his hand and his elbow on his knee. The image of the worriedly watchful God accompanied me through much of my childhood, would stand in contrast to the dreadful events of those times, and much later led me to the phenomenon of the transcendence of thought, the significance of myth and symbol, as well as the philosophy of Transcendence. Beginnings As far back as I can remember, I was left alone with my inner life. After the war (World War I) my parents met, married, and settled in Vienna. There was a housing shortage, and the only apartment available was in a building owned by an uncle. The neighborhood housed mainly impoverished people, proletarians as they were called, most of them good people, but also some ruffians. I spent the four years of elementary school in a class of over thirty pupils, in which I was the only Jew. Also, I stood out by my ready assimilation of what was
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 8 taught, and by my performance in class, without much home preparation. One time, when I was the only one to come up with the right answer to a tricky question of German grammar, Herr Popp, our teacher those four years, had me come to him and held me close, and, counteracting the anti-Semitic remarks he had heard among the pupils, which they no doubt heard at home and in Church, gently told them that Jews are smart and to respect them. In the third or fourth year a boy, who was an orphan and two years older than the rest of us, joined our class, having had to repeat the year twice so far. He lived with his older and newly-wed sister. To his brother-in-law he was an unwelcome burden; he came to school in tatters, sometimes had been beaten, always hungry. To those around him, who were munching their mid-morning snack of the proverbial Viennese bread-and-butter, he would say in Viennese idiom, håst an Håberer? (do you have some oats?), referring to the burlap feed sacks fastened over the snout to the harness of draft horses that still shared the streets with cars in those days. Desperately troubled over such abject misery, and choking with tears, I implored my mother to give me an extra bread-and-butter for him. It is my earliest memory of standing up for others. Soon I would do so in a foolish way. But in time it would develop into a circumspect social conscience. Times were indeed dismal, anything but tranquil times. In crass contrast to the prevailing mood, Popp taught us a German folksong: Schön ist die Jugend bei frohen Zeiten, schön ist die Jugendzeit, sie kommt nicht mehr. So hört' ichs öfter von alten Leuten...sie kommt nicht mehr, kehrt niemals wieder. Youth is beautiful in tranquil times, fair the time of youth, it won't return. I often heard that from old folks... it won't come back, never return. To me this signaled a first consciousness of the passage of time. It was not simply a matter of carpe diem; yet, only much later would it impel me consider how seriously a philosopher I studied recognized human temporality as a fundamental condition for man's being and for realizing truth. There was another small but significant musical phrase I heard. It was in a song my older sister had learned in Gymnasium and sang one time, and it stuck in my mind over the decades: warte nur, warte nur, balde ruhest du auch, (wait, wait a while, soon you too will rest). Only in later years did I realize its meaning. Those are the final words of a short poem by Goethe, set to music by Schubert. Goethe had a little house in the woods near Weimar, to which he wandered, sometimes at night, for respite and rest. He had a craftsman carve the poem on its door. Goethe did not use the place in his later years. Yet, in his mid-seventies he wanted to be taken there once more, and when he read those last words on the door tears welled up: the hike to the little house for the night's rest revealed itself now to be a metaphor for the final passing of time. The neighborhood where I lived in those early years contributed to my isolation from peers and playmates, an isolation in which an inner life was beginning to grow. I read a lot, trying literature beyond my understanding, perused newspapers. I remember my fascination with a page-long newspaper feature on the centenary of Goethe's death; it taught me an appreciation of the greatness of a mind gifted with a wise and sober sprit. There were other influences. In those days religious education was mandatory in Austria. For Jewish children this meant a weekly hour of Bible study and a weekly Sabbath synagogue service arranged especially for youngsters. (In addition, my parents sent me to Hebrew school.) The story of Joseph was my favorite and an inspiration, and would remain so throughout my life. Falling because of his brothers' betrayal, humiliated by Potiphars's wife, Joseph endured all and at the right moment prevailed through his wit and wisdom. I soon associated this story with the first of the following phrases from the "Eighteen Benedictions," the main prayer recited by Jews standing up like free men before God: somekh nophlim ve-rophe holim u-matir assurim Addressing God, it means, "You raise the fallen, and heal the sick, and free those in chains." It seemed odd to me that Joseph's rise from his fallen state should be attributed to God, and I tried to make sense of this. The German proverb Hilf dir selbst, so hilft dir Gott (help yourself, thus God helps you) was too subtle. Again, much later I realized the transcending nature of thought and the idea of partaking—in freedom and within the confines of our temporality—of Transcedence. On a less sublime plane, I read my sister's copy of Robinson Crusoe and was impressed by Crusoe's enduring being cast onto an island and surviving the long ordeal by improvising a way of life: One has to live beyond the desperate present and toward one's salvation.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 9 I attended the Sabbath youth services at the Community synagogue in our District. Its young Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein officiated at those services, though the sermons were sometimes given by rabbinical students. While the latter were better orators and held the attention of the unruly crowd of youngsters by amusing them, the Rabbi never talked down to them. He was earnest—to some of the children forbiddingly so—and while I did not always grasp what he presented, I understood that there was something important to understand. I realized I was in the presence of a scholar, and, while I never wished to become a rabbi, he inspired me to a life of learning and scholarship. I certainly could not have imagined how preoccupied I would be for decades of my later life with the philosophical problems arising from Murmelstein's controversial role during the Holocaust, in connection with which I would meet him again some forty years later.2 My father represented his firm in the Austrian provinces. When he was at home, he told me things that made deep impressions on me. First, he told me some of the more awesome stories of the Bible. I was especially taken with the story that it was as if all generations of Jews stood at Mount Sinai to accept God's teaching as written in the Torah.3 It would lead to my interest in the phenomenon of faith. Second, my father was an opera buff; his favorites were by Wagner—not all, Parsifal and Götterdämmerung were too ponderous, Tristan too boring. He fired my imagination, especially with the Ring's stories of the foibles, the joys and sufferings, and the good and foul deeds of man as represented by "gods" and their all-too-human human offspring. When we got a loudspeaker radio in the mid-1930s, I could not get enough of the opera broadcasts. I gained an appreciation of legends and myths, and of their artistic representation, as well as an early insight into the power—if not as yet the nature—of symbolism and the non-conceptual thought content of ideas. The year I turned ten, 1934, was a year of personal change, and it was the time when the wider world 2 CSE Comment: LHE's magnum opus on the subject, Choices under the Duress of the Holocaust, which he coauthored with EE, is currently (September 2011) being reviewed for publication. 3 CSE Comment: This tradition is found in Rabbinic lore (i.e., in the midrashic literature or oral Torah), which is viewed as part of the biblical tradition in Judaism. obtruded with fury on my childish consciousness, which was filled with ideas, as yet without form or discipline. I applied to the Jewish Gymnasium4 in Vienna with the best grade on the entrance exam, and entered in the fall. The irruption of the unfolding social and political actuality into my life at that tender age was most influential. Earlier, in February, I had been sick at home, and from the window I could see the conservative (Christian-Social) Federal Government troops firing cannons at the row of the housing project for workers in Döbling, about a mile away, to put down the uprising by the Social-Democrats in Vienna, who were trying to install a new regime. A few days later I watched with amazement the passing of open Überfallswagen (razzia buses), filled with arrested workers and under guard of police with rifles at the ready. The Christian-Social regime abrogated the republican constitution of 1919 and promulgated a preliminary constitution based on the social program suggested by the Papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno. Soon after the brutal quashing of the uprising, the Social-Democratic Principal of the primary school, Herr Goriczal, a sweet and kindly man, was replaced by an unsmiling forbidding-looking man with a red beard. A huge placard depicting Chancellor Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss against the red-white-red flag of the Austrian Republic was affixed to the wall of the stairwell; and before instruction began, the pupils had to pray under the leadership of their teacher. I stood respectfully and silently while the rest of the class said the Lord's Prayer and crossed themselves at the phrase "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen." I stood out like a sore thumb. The Social-Democrats (the "Reds") were outlawed by the Christian-Social regime (the "Blacks"). In our predominately red neighborhood new greetings made their rounds: "NER" i.e., nun erst recht, meaning "now more than ever"; and Landgsöchts, meaning "country cured ham," i.e., black on the outside, red on the inside. Ever for the underdog, I designed little triangular red flags out of construction paper, which, folded over, I glued on a pin, to be stuck as an emblem on clothing. They became so popular in my class that boys would come with orders from their parents. The regime 4 The Zwi Perez Chajes Gymnasium, which was reopened and reconstituted as a comprehensive Jewish day school as of 1980. See http://www.zpc.at/gymnasium/g_haupt.html.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 10 initiated ways to gain the approval and loyalty of the youngest generation by associating the new order with patriotism. They portrayed Dollfuss as a hero who saved Austria from turmoil, and staged a pageant depicting the course of Austrian history as rising from a defensive border region of the early Holy Roman Empire and leading to the new (Austro-Fascism, i.e., the semi-Fascist) Christian-Social republic. Though the school year was almost over, they were able to provide the school children with a new, quickly compiled soft-cover history book, culminating in an explanation of the new constitution, which would insure the peace and well-being of all levels of society organized by estates, rather than as workers/capitalists, etc. Between the establishment of the Republic of Austria (in 1918) and its demise with the Anschluss to Germany (1938), the Jewish Community of Vienna distributed to the Jewish children a book about the history of the Jews in Vienna. The front cover depicted a horrific scene, namely an early 16th century woodcut of Jews being burned in a pit, and non-Jews feeding the fire with bundles of wood. The book itself told both the great and the sad stories of almost 1000 years. The reproduction of the woodcut referred to the event of the Vienna Gezerah, i.e., [evil] decree. In 1420-21 the ruling Duke expelled Jews from the places under his rule; some of the remaining Jews of Vienna committed suicide rather than face forced baptism. In the final extinction of the medieval community, the rest lost their lives by being burned alive; students of the recently established University of Vienna were the main instigators. (It was not until a few decades after the Holocaust that an archeological dig laid bare some vestiges of that community, including the foundation of a good-sized synagogue). With horror we Jewish children went to what was and is still called Judenplatz (Jews' Square, the square that was leveled over what had been the center of the medieval community), and read the memorial plaque in archaic German that was affixed a few decades after the event and can still be seen over the portal of the medieval building. In effect it gives a pious Christian justification for the cruel and bloody event. It was puzzling to a thoughtful child's mind that such things could actually have happened. But now it was 500 years later, and, though vaguely aware of what our forebears had to face to uphold their Jewishness, I felt secure in where I was and the times I was in. One heard stories from across the border, however, where the Nazis had already held sway for over a year. On the one hand, they seemed to have matters more firmly in hand, promoting their economic upswing more vigorously. Some young men in Vienna surreptitiously joined the ranks of the Nazi party, thus reviving the postwar idea of joining what was left of Austria after fall of the Empire with mightier Germany. On the other hand, the Nazi regime gave free reign to anti-Jewish policy, and the rabble acted accordingly. Among the Jews of Vienna these reports were received with great alarm; only in retrospect could those early years of the persecution be seen as mild. Not only Jews were beginning to say, "This cannot happen here," i.e., in Austria. Nonetheless, the subliminal anti-Semitism among the Roman Catholic Viennese was beginning to surface, encouraged by these reports from Germany. I was accosted more than once by small gangs of street urchins with the utterly perplexing news that "You Jews killed our Savior!" and with other obscene mockeries I shall not repeat here. One time I was beaten, and when my father saw the black and blue marks on my face, he knew what it was about. Being a Jew was simply natural to me even at that early age, and I found the strength within me to uphold my dignity of being a Jew. Yet, having mastered what is entailed in being a Jew only to the extent of what was in keeping with my tender age, I was puzzled why being a Jew should be a challenge. I began to be frightened at the sight of a cross, and abhorred the, occasionally hideous, display of a crucifix with Jesus hanging on the cross. Already at that early age, the problematic nature of being a Jew in the world that I lived in gave me what would turn out to be a lifelong preoccupation with a problem that defied penetration by thought, no matter how deep. Nazi Germany had hinted at its interest in having Austria join it, but it was then still in the process of establishing its regime as a one-party state with exclusive ruling power. Even though Nazism in Austria was still in its infancy, however, with the German Nazi leadership's silent approval, an amateurish band of Nazis attempted a coup. They were able to enter Chancellor Dollfuss' office and shot him before they were overtaken. The Chancellor died and was declared a martyr. My confrontation with the event gave me a sense of paralyzing helplessness. The illusion was shattered that earthshaking events born out of violence were a matter of ancient history (i.e., ten years before I was born), resulting in the outbreak of the (First) World War, which my father recounted to me a number of times. I began to realize that life was not only what one's parents and milieu provided, but
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 11 what burst unwanted and unexpected into it, beyond one's control, beyond one's will. The attempted coup made a deep impression on me, reinforced by the news, a few weeks later, of the assassination of King Peter I of Yugoslavia on his arrival in Marseilles on a peace mission; the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou received him and was also killed. The murder by one individual of such high-ranking statesmen appalled me. But beyond that, the inevitable and necessary armed means of exercising political power would in time preoccupy me no less than the question of personal freedom in contraposition to political freedom. In September 1934 I began what would turn out to be only four years at the Jewish Gymnasium. A short time after the beginning of the school year, the younger classes were convened in an assembly to listen to Professor Rosler give a commemorative speech in honor of the recently murdered Chancellor Dr. Dollfuss. We children were well aware that the assembly was monitored by a delegate of the regime. I had entered the Jewish Gymnasium with high expectations. And I yearned for friendship and companionship. The expectations were not fulfilled, and the yearnings were frustrated. I remember the thrill of learning the new fields: Latin, Literature, Arithmetic, Geometry, World Geography, and History; in Hebrew we read texts from the Bible in the original. This being Vienna, singing was an important, though not a major, academic field. My voice was soon recognized as being good enough for me to sing in a small choir of fellow students, which performed in small school gatherings at observances or celebrations. A classmate, the scion of two generations of choirmasters at Vienna's Great Synagogue, was installed as choirmaster, and, before the first school year was over, his father had accepted me in the children's section of that choir. I was pleased by the achievement and recognition. The form, the rhythm, the harmony of the different voices, and the capacity of music to express different moods, including both joy and solemnity, made a deep and lasting impression on me, as did the singing in unison, sometimes as accompaniment to the cantor, as well as the responsibility borne by him. In this connection I remember another formative experience: My sister,5 four years older than I, was at mid-teen age and had 5 CSE Comment: Leonore Ehrlich Freiman (Budzów, Poland 1920—Vancouver, B.C. 2004). begun to sing the Schlager (hits) then current in Vienna and among her friends. My father tolerated this with bemused disdain, and I followed suit. I was offended by the casual nature of the compositions and the trivial lyrics; my distance from what in time would be called "pop music" has lasted a lifetime, though I recognized the occasional beauty of songs and their performance. As an early teenager a yearning for serious music arose in me, but that had to wait until America, since my father was an opera buff only. These early impressions concerning music made me aware of standards of taste, performance, and accomplishment, and over the years made me receptive to disparate suggestions that would lead to my realization of the metronothetic of thought, i.e., that metron (measure) is a fundamental phenomenon of thought. For example, when Plato thinks that realities are not full realizations of but merely participate in ideas; or when Plato quotes Protagoras's dictum that man is the measure of all things; but most decisively Jaspers' phenomenology of the spirit as a distinct dimension of thought, and his occasional use of niveau in appraising a person's character, actions, Bildung, or thought. I would also be puzzled that, in his Logic, Hegel, constrained by the discipline of his dialectic progression, imagined measure merely to arise from the synthesis of quality and quantity; it seemed to me that measure can be fundamental to quality as well as quantity (though in each in a different way), and not simply the dialectical reduction of the former to the latter, as in socio-psychological statistics. Measuring temperature, though useful for how we are dressed for prevailing weather conditions, is not about qualities such as hot or cold, but about modern mathematized physics. All such reflections, rooted in the early realization of ideal standards, had to wait for a much later time of life. As regards the academic subjects of the Gymnasium, I experienced failure in contrast to my high expectations. High achievement in primary school was based on my easy absorption of what was taught in class. I simply had not learned to study at home, or even to do assigned homework properly. But Gymnasium, an eight-year university preparatory course, was serious business, requiring a disciplined regimen from the beginning. Also, I was not prepared for and did not take to the mode of teaching in the Gymnasium. Aside from the deference to the authority of teachers, especially those with the professorial title (earned by those who held doctorates), we had to stand in front of the class for reciting as well as for individual
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 12 oral exams. On those occasions the anxiety of standing on the raised podium, painfully aware of some twenty pairs of eyes and ears poised to see and hear me, cost me a goodly part of displaying what I knew and what I could do. My awkwardness did not endear me to the teachers. It turned out that in this atmosphere it was important for students to meet as friends after school and study together. This was not an option for me, since I neither lived within walking distance of others nor in the sort of neighborhood for Jewish youngsters to walk to with a sense of safety. Still, what I heard in class and what I absorbed in cursory homework constituted a good amount of what did not reliably show in exams, but which I carried usefully with me in later life. Edith, who would in time be my wife, was the Prima6 of her class; in later years she would often be amazed by what I remembered of the intricacies of Latin, which she had long forgotten. As to companions, there were a few. Ours was a large classroom, with space in the back, which we used in the ten-minute pause between classes to let off early teen-age steam. After a sheltered early childhood, I was amazed what games and tricks one could play, in which I joined with gusto. The professors took turns walking the halls during the break, and a boy gave a signal whenever he saw a professor approach. It did not always work, and I was usually one of the cut-ups. My reputation in behavior also went down. Sometimes, when no one got caught, the class was asked that the guilty ones stand up. Usually no one stood up, so I would stand up, even if I had not been one of the participants. I was only vaguely aware that it was wrong, but I thought it honorable to stand up for others, since my reputation was tarnished anyway. It was an utterly foolish thing to do. I still had a lot to learn about right and wrong, about what was sound and what was foolish. The second year of Gymnasium was known as particularly difficult. My parents seemed to have no idea of what was involved in succeeding there. They had no experience in supervision of my studies and homework. My father had left Gymnasium because the closest university had a numerus clausus with respect to Jewish applicants, and in any case he was more interested in preparing for a commercial career. All my mother had to offer was her memory of her brother Max, the first in the family and only one among her 6 CSE Comment: the best student in the class. many siblings to go to Gymnasium and on to university, having been capable of studying in a roomful of family members, as if no one else were there. In retrospect I can say that it was no surprise that I flunked the second year and had to repeat it. The last time we met Elisabeth Saner before her untimely death, we talked about my failure. Being a schoolteacher, she asked, "Were you not motivated?" The question surprised me, because my motivation to learn was strong and unabated. My frequent daydreaming in class was not vacuous, because I was preoccupied with my thoughts. And my hurried way of doing homework gave me time to read and study what was of more immediate interest to me. I told Elisabeth that by the time I was 14 or 15, I had read half of Shakespeare's some 30 plays in the Schlegel-Tieck translation. The significance of King Lear and Hamlet were then still too difficult to grasp, Julius Caesar fascinated me because it incarnated history. Somehow Timon of Athens made the deepest impression on me. As I understood it at that time, here was a rich man foolishly bestowing largesse on sycophants, who turned away from and against him once the riches were spent. Instead of contempt for their perfidiousness, Timon turns to self-destructive hatred. I naively thought that an alternative was possible, namely to rise from one's fallenness with head held high, come what may; I would find out, vital though it was, that there are times when this is insufficient. In those years I read many other authors. But, there was always Goethe and his Faust. I read the first part several times. The second part was, at that time of life, too diffuse, but I did read the last act patiently, especially the end. Faust was my preliminary exposure to philosophy. It was not as yet philosophizing; instead, I took from it passages that impressed me, pearls of wisdom, so to say. From Faust's initial declamation I sensed his inner anguish over the fact that after studying all that can be studied, including philosophy and theology, he finds that he is no wiser than before. And yet, he is driven to penetrate "what sustains the world at its inmost core." In contrast thereto is Faust's assistant Wagner, who exits after his intrusion with "I know much, but would know everything." In time I would realize that man in time can at best attain a fundamental principle, upheld not as proven conclusion but in the mode of faith. In entering into his wager with the Devil, Faust is contemptuous of the Devil's wiles and steadfastly maintains that if ever he were content enough to rest,
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 13 or: "if ever I would say to a moment, stay, you are so fair," then the Devil would have won the bet. The term of the wager ties in with Faust's last scene. Blinded by the burden of cares (Heidegger cites this episode in presenting his idea of care: Sorge), Faust is either not aware of his blindness or perceives it as a symbol: "Night descends more deeply, but within me shines bright light." In this light, Faust oscillates between final visions of wisdom and illusions of his accomplishments. As to the latter, he imagines an army of laborers to be building the wall he had designed to hold back the sea, thus providing new land for multitudes. He believes that with this achievement "the trace of [his] earthly existence will not perish for eons." On the other hand, in an ironical twist—which did not escape my childish mind—through his causing an old couple's house to be burned down (and, hence, their deaths) because it stood in the way of the project, Faust realizes "wisdom's ultimate conclusion: to stand in freedom with people that are free." Murder and forced labor here, a free man among free men there. The blind Faust is so taken with his vision that in anticipation of his illusory accomplishment he utters the fateful words: "stay, you are so fair," and dies. The Devil thinks he has won the wager, and to claim Faust's soul he stands before God, Who tells him: Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen. We can redeem him, who ceaselessly strives and labors. God says "can redeem," not "do redeem." Thus the promise of salvation is not a matter of fulfillment in life eternal, but how we labor toward it in our temporal lives. Did I understand all this in my early teens? I doubt it. But I perceived these thoughts to be pregnant with meaning and powerfully expressed in simplicity as only Goethe could. I carried them with me as I grew up, and, in so many ways, I recognized their meaning in later life. Just one example: Jaspers concludes his radio lectures of 1950 (Way to Wisdom) with these words: We have but one actuality: here and now. What we miss by evasion will never return.... Each day is precious: a moment can be everything. We are remiss in our task if we lose ourselves in past or future.... [O]nly by taking hold of time do we get to where all time is extinguished. In those early years of my education and self-education, I encountered many other thoughts and insights which impressed me and made me receptive for their philosophical elaboration in later life. Here only three examples: Bias was one of the seven wise men of Ancient Greece. One time his hometown of Priene (in Asia Minor) was about to be sacked, and the inhabitants began to flee, carrying whatever of their possession they could, all but Bias. The others asked him why he was not carrying his belongings, to which Bias responded (presumably in Greek) omnem meum mecum porto, "all that is mine I carry with me." This story alerted me to the primacy of man's thoughtful inner life. The other two examples taught me again that man is confined to time, that he must die, that what he is and does in temporal life counts, and that the material aspects of life, though indispensable, are not of primary importance. The second story deals with Croesus, the legendarily rich King of Lydia. When Solon visited Lydia, Croesus pointed to his riches and wanted Solon to admit that he was the happiest man on earth, to which Solon responded, "I do not as yet know how you will die." Sometime later Croesus foolishly made war against and was defeated by the Persian King Cyrus, who then him placed on a pyre. Croesus's last words were, "Solon, Solon, Solon…" Finally, I refer to a short story with the title "How much Land does a Man Need?" by Tolstoy. It is the story of a man greedy for land, who upon death only owned a plot six feet by three. Having flunked sixth grade and faced with having to repeat the year, my father wanted to take me out of the Gymnasium and have me prepare for a commercial career, perhaps also to save me from embarrassment. I implored him to let me stay, and he relented. In September, mindful of my failure but with head held high, I entered the class of students one year younger than I. To my astonishment they applauded; evidently I had quite a reputation. I was thinking of somekh nophlim, of a chance to rise again after falling through failure. My first year in the new class (1936/1937) was academically better, mainly because I remembered so much from the previous year. I still had no friend with whom I could study. As to companionship, there was a very bright boy, Theo F., who was a cutup and went so far as to annoy the teachers, a thing I would never do. My interests and capacities expanded. I became keenly interested in biology, a school subject. The teacher, Professor Kann, had us draw familiar biological objects to enhance a sense of observation; I thrived on Miss Kann's special approbation of my performance. I bought myself small booklets on
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 14 astronomy, learned about amazing things that happen in the farthest reaches of the cosmos, and began to take notes on observing the daily change of sundown. Perhaps most telling is a drawing from art class. Professor Löwenfeld assigned us to draw with imagination, and then color subjects with which we were familiar, often biblical themes. I took three of my drawings with me when I emigrated. As I look at them, I realize my sense of observation and my early talent for drawing. The drawing from that year was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. Paradise is to the right; the scene is lush with plants, a pond, and filled with animals—I loved animals, in their diversity, beauty and variety of shapes since very early childhood, when I decided that I would become a veterinarian. To the left is the fallow earth to which Adam has already stepped, while Eve picks up a frond as a souvenir. The two hold each other tenderly by the arm, signaling a loving bond the meaning of which I could not have fathomed at that age. In the spring of 1937 I became bar-mitzvah with Rabbi Murmelstein, and soon after had my first brush with death. I was one of the first in the school to come down with diphtheria. When a few more cases occurred, the school was closed for a while. Even though I was very sick, I remember our physician and two professors of the medical faculty consulting about my case at my bedside. At that time antibiotics had not as yet been developed, and the only thing to do was to hospitalize me. That evening I was picked up by an ambulance, and a huge man carried me down the steps. Like a limp sack I was slung over his shoulder and could see the neighbors watching, their faces betraying extreme concern. I vaguely wondered whether I would ever be back. The first few days at the hospital I was hardly awake, but I do remember interns taking turns examining me. When the crisis passed, they began feeding me. One of the nurses, the blond one, brought me the heel of a loaf of bread covered with a thick layer of butter and a slice of ham. I looked at it and saw that not only was meat and dairy combined, but the meat was pork, as non-kosher as food can be. I told her, I could not eat this. "Why not?" she asked. "For ritual reasons," I replied. She understood and explained that God would want me to get well, and eating this would help. I do not know from where I had strength to fight the disease; rophe holim (You heal the sick) came to mind. After three weeks I was well enough to be dismissed. In preparation, I was to be bathed from head to foot. The blond nurse and another one undressed me. When the latter nurse saw that I was Jewish, she proceeded to vituperate against the Jews; the blond one put a stop to it by saying, Juden sind auch Menschen (Jews are also human beings). Though I was astonished at that attack on me by an adult, especially in my helpless and embarrassing state, I was sufficiently inured against the prevailing anti-Semitism not to let it get me down. I did not even tell my parents about it. But, I never forgot it. It was another puzzle to think about. Within a year that nurse would not have to work with Jewish staff or care for Jewish patients; the former would be dismissed, the latter no longer admitted. The school year 1937/38 would be the last one for most of the students at the Jewish Gymnasium. We were delighted with a new subject, namely English. After the intricate grammars of German, Latin, and Hebrew, English was easy, well worth the price of learning the unusual way of using the alphabet. To those of us who would be fortunate enough to escape what was about to descend on us, that one year of English would prove to be a godsend. In February 1938 Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg was summoned to meet secretly with Adolf Hitler. The latter pressured Schuschnigg to restore the legitimacy of the Nazi Party in Austria. In the following weeks the pressure of the German Nazi regime on the Schuschnigg government mounted. Finally, on March 9, 1938 Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite, in effect asking the Austrian voters whether they preferred an independent Austria to one that would be part of Germany under the Nazi regime. The plebiscite was to take place in four days, on March 13. Schuschnigg was celebrated as heroically standing up to Hitler, and it was evident that the plebiscite would deliver a resounding victory to him and a rejection of Hitler. To meet the challenge, Hitler sent an ultimatum two days later, on Friday, March 11, that the plebiscite be postponed, that Schuschnigg resign, and that a Nazi be installed as Chancellor. The alternative was that the readily poised German army units would enter Austria and, if they met resistance, they would shoot their way in. On Fridays, between 7:00 and 8:00 pm, to herald the coming weekend, Austrian radio would bring a program of light music. Shortly after 7:00, as my family and many other Jewish households were finishing setting the table for the Sabbath meal, an announcer interrupted the broadcast for a special announcement. To the astonishment of the listeners they recognized the voice of Chancellor Schuschnigg, who told them that
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 15 his government was resigning under threat of a German invasion, that they were yielding to force, and that he did not wish "to spill German blood," i.e., that the Austrian army had been ordered not to resist the German forces. Thus Schuschnigg, in effect, abandoned the Jews to the fate that awaited them under Nazi Germany's racial policy, after having successfully solicited the support of the Jewish community. Referring to the allegations broadcast by Germany that Austria was in turmoil, Schuschnigg emphatically called them lies "from A to Z." Thus he took leave of his brief place in history. We were shocked. What would happen now? We began to find out soon enough. To escape the Russian Revolution, Frau Bomse, our poor neighbor, had carried her little deaf-and-mute son on her back and had gone on foot until she reached the Austrian lands. That Saturday morning, March 12, she ventured out on the street and saw that around the corner the rabble had plundered Herr Weinberg's fabric store and beaten him bloody, while the friendly neighborhood policeman stood by without lifting a finger. Frau Bomse was not surprised; she remembered similar behavior by the Russian police during the pogroms. Hitler was expected to enter Austria and proceed to the city of Linz. The old buildings on the central square were decorated with Nazi flags and matching festoon. All but one. The square was filled with people, who were being regaled by a retired Captain Ziebland. The people were taught to shout in unison: Ein Volk, ein Reich! (one people, one country), and soon an enhanced version: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. Fearfully we wondered: How did easygoing Austrians, who traditionally looked with disdain on the ways of "the Prussians," turn overnight into a regimented mass hailing Hitler? But, Hitler took his time. As dusk fell, the windows of the houses facing the square were lit up, all but one. It was the property of a Jew and showed neither flag nor festoon. And here it came: Ziebland said, "We know who our friends are." The howl of the crowd was frightening. Finally, the house displayed flag and festoon, and the lights were turned on. Now the crowd sounded menacing. Shaken, we turned off the broadcast. The question remained: Now what? Self-assured and with inner strength, head held high come what may? Not in this situation, the realities of which would now unfold. On Monday, March 14, 1938 Hitler entered Vienna and proclaimed the Anschluss of Austria to Germany. On Wednesday schools reopened, except the Jewish Gymnasium. A few days later spokesmen of the Jewish Community (the leaders were arrested) managed to gain permission for our school to remain open until the end of the school year. We had new students in our class, who transferred from other schools from which they had been expelled because they were Jews. One boy told us what happened the morning when schools were reopened. One of his fellow students stood up and told the teacher he refused to sit in a class together with a Jew. There were other preliminary persecutions. Jewish men and women were picked up at random to scrub from the pavement slogans in favor of Schuschnigg's plebiscite. My father was one of them. At Hochstädtplatz he acted as if it was the most natural thing to do, even calling to an acquaintance watching from a window, "Nice evening, eh?" However, for most of those who had to scrub, surrounded by a mob of hostile watchers, it was a harrowing and utterly humiliating experience. The postponed plebiscite, now scheduled for April 10, asked the united German people whether they approved of the Anschluss. There ensued a hurry of activity to make sure the former Austrians would unanimously vote in favor. The Jews were removed from the voter lists. One after another of the Nazi big shots came to Vienna to give their rousing speeches. Hitler was scheduled for the day before the plebiscite. In preparation the streets he would travel were lined with huge pylons displaying the Nazi flag and crowned with the swastika symbol. The days of the Anschluss coincided with the Jewish festival of Purim. Its highpoint is the reading of the Scroll of Esther, recounting the saving of the Jews of Susa, the capital of the ancient Persian Empire, from the slaughter planned by King Xerxes's (Heb: Ahashverosh) Prime Minister Haman. Only thanks to the heroic effort of the Jewish Queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai was the danger averted. For children and youngsters a lot of merriment is connected with the festival. For example, at the synagogue reading of the Scroll, the children turn noisy graggers7 at the mention of Haman. All that was cancelled because of the Anschluss. Soon after our school reopened, Professor Löwenfeld gave us an assignment in his art class to 7 CSE Comment: a type of ratchet.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 16 make up for our missing the Purim festivities. It was the scene where the humiliated evil Haman was forced by the King to conduct the horse with the honored Mordecai through the crowd (Esther 6). With what seemed like an unspoken though unmistakable allusion to the pylons being erected, Löwenfeld had us imagine the setting of Mordecai's triumph. In my case, I drew rows of columns, adorned with Jewish symbols and colors, lining the two sides of the avenue. As usual, Löwenfeld walked the aisles to see the progress of our work. When he saw mine, he noticed the Hitler moustache and cowlick over Haman's forehead and silently took my brush to change the style of the moustache, telling me to have Haman sport a beard. Later generations of writers on the Holocaust would regard childish gestures such as mine as a first trace of resistance, a concept whose polar opposite would be posited as characterizing the Jewish victims of the Holocaust going to their death like sheep to slaughter. The terms of the polarity are tenuous, and as such do not account for the different stages of our fear induced by terror—of imposed spiritual as well as bodily impotence. Above all, one had to think of the possible consequences of any show of resistance, for oneself as well as the others. In retrospect I learned to appreciate the wisdom of Löwenfeld's monitoring our efforts, not only artistically but with a view to our new situation, and at the beginning of the persecution that would soon get much worse. If nothing else, Löwenfeld tried to confirm and uphold our self-esteem for us as Jews in the coming times that would test our mettle, young as we were. Experiences The teenage years are when we become adults, begin to think about what to do with our lives, and, above all, enjoy the delights of being young. Under normal circumstances, we gradually slide into this period of life. But, the new situation consequent on the Anschluss thrust me prematurely into that stage as I turned fourteen. Those three features were not absent, but during the phases of the ensuing years they stayed at the periphery of my concerns. In the phase that ended with the school year—and for almost all of us with the end of the school—we became more and more aware of the pall that had descended on us. Though I could hardly imagine it, the realization became inescapable that the members of our class would be distributed all over the world, to places that hitherto were merely names to us. Up to now, the near or the far future, whatever it might turn out to be, would be enacted in the ambience of my age-companions, my family, and the society at large, as well as in the venue of my native country and the city with its culture, its challenges, and the opportunities it offered. But now all that was gone; in a real sense my world had vanished. Would there be a somewhere in the world out there, that could become my world? Once I met Herr Popp on my way home. It was the first time we had met since I left primary school, and the last time ever. He had been a teacher since before World War I, and I was to be the first of his pupils whom he expected to study at the university. He was visibly disappointed, though not surprised, when I responded to his question as to what would happen to me and my family, "We have to emigrate." During our brief encounter he frequently looked around, and I felt he wanted to see whether he was being observed speaking in a friendly way to a Jewish youngster. In later years I recognized the incident as an early sign of the atmosphere of terror with which the regime held its citizens in thrall, while the visible persecution of the Jews served to display how the regime dealt with what it deemed to be its enemies. And, when in later studies I found Heidegger disclosing the phenomenon of anxiety (beyond fear "of something") as the fundamental mood of man's existing in time, I thought that his dwelling in abstractions kept him from recognizing induced or reinforced anxiety as a political tool of control, i.e., beyond specific fears of reprisal, etc. For fundamental anxiety is not subliminal, but takes shape in the various modes of our thinking being, in our apprehension and apperception, thus it may feed fear "of something" and feed on fear. It did not take long for the mood of terror to capture the general population. A few days after the Anschluss, when the anti-Semitic policy of the Nazi regime became clear, Frau Kieweg, our neighbor who lived in a little apartment next to ours with her husband, a long retired police officer, reassured my parents, Für Sie geh' ich durchs Feuer (for you I would go through fire). It did not take long for her to respond only furtively to my greeting when we met in the hall and for her to avoid my parents completely. "We have to emigrate," I told Herr Popp. But how, and whereto? Jews who met in the street shared with each other vague bits of leads, ways to get started, requirements, and procedures. My father had the foresight to go to the United States Consulate and register his family on the waiting list under the
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 17 appropriate quota. It seemed like a futile gesture, especially since we did not know anyone in America, much less a relative who might send us an affidavit of support so that we would not to be a burden on the State. Finally, my mother thought of a family from a village even smaller than the one she had come from in Poland. They had not been able to make a go of it there, and, shortly before World War I, father, mother, and their seven children went to seek their fortunes in America. My mother made inquiries of their whereabouts, wrote to them, and to our great surprise received a positive response. In time they sent us an affidavit; since the offspring were more or less at the beginning of their careers, none had enough assets for a viable affidavit. Several of them took their savings, or some of them, and deposited them in the account of the second youngest, a high school gym teacher in her early thirties. The affidavit was deemed sufficient, and now it was a matter of waiting until it was our turn on the list, and waiting, and waiting. The students at my Gymnasium had quickly learned to be unobtrusive on the street, and to take the safest way to school and home. In the weeks until the end of our last school year, the time in class was the only place they could feel a bit freer from the pall that had settled on the Jews. The teachers, nervous themselves, relaxed the discipline somewhat, and staunchly proceeded with the curriculum to the end. We knew we would never be together again and tried to find a way of saying good-buy. Like some of the others, I went to the store across the street and for 30 pennies bought a pocket notebook, which I passed around for my classmates to sign. Some wrote embarrassing banalities like "Life is a struggle. Win!" Most of the others simply said, "Don't forget your classmate." Our world had vanished, and now the people who filled it would fade away. The class welcomed the news that our popular German teacher, Professor Ornstein, who was married to Mathematics Professor Rabinovics, gave birth to a baby; it was their first child. The class collected some money for a baby gift; even the poorest contributed a few pennies. Professor Ornstein wrote the class a friendly thank-you note, which confirmed that we had done a grown-up deed. The news a few weeks later that the child had died was not only terribly saddening, but was somehow symbolic of the realities of our situation. There was neither celebration nor solemnity for the last graduating class of a dozen eighteen-year-olds; only the Director of the school, Dr. Kellner, spoke briefly to them after he handed them the diploma that would confirm their eligibility to enter the university that was now closed to them. Looking at the red flags with the Nazi swastikas at their centers hanging down the houses across the street, he told the graduates, "I do not know what the future will hold for any of us; but one thing I do know: Shema Yisrael8 will be said much longer than Heil Hitler." A tightening bond could be discerned among the students as the time of parting drew closer. In my case Theo F. became a real pal, and in the summer ahead we met often; when he could no longer be contacted in September, I knew that he and his family were fortunate enough to emigrate. However, there was another classmate with whom I formed a real friendship. Edith Schwarz was the Prima, the academically best in the class. Unlike the other girls in our class, she did not assume the airs by means of which girls that age begin to make themselves noticeable to boys. Earnest but cheerful, she was the ideal friend, by which I meant at that time the one person with whom one could talk about anything. I do not think that the thought entered the mind of either one of us that throughout the vicissitudes of the ensuing times we would stay in touch and that our friendship would grow into a life-long love. At that time Edith was the friend I always yearned for, and to her I was the older brother she never had. As the last school-day ended, I soon found myself at loose ends. It was not a structured vacation time until September, when the next school year would begin. Instead, I was faced with an indeterminate future without structured content. Utterly alone, I fell back on my inner life and my thoughts. I increased my reading. I read three books that I had received for my bar mitzvah several times: two world histories, one by H. G. Wells, the other written for youths by the young art historian Ernst Gombrich9 (here at last were two scholars who were appreciative of the seminal contribution of Judaism to civilization); the third was Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky's novelistic account of the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci. This book 8 The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) is the basic confession of the Jewish faith. It is recited twice daily and is one of the last things one should recite before dying. 9 CSE Comment: In 1936 Gombrich, a Viennese Jew, emigrated to England, where he taught art history at the University of London and achieved renown as Sir Ernst H. Gombrich. LHE's childhood copy of this book is still in the family's possession.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 18 had a lasting influence on me. The "Renaissance" had been a vaunted term for me until then. The book opened up the realities of that turbulent era, rife with age-old superstitions, politically mean and brutal, spiritually and intellectually in ferment, mechanical inventiveness competing with alchemy, and—never having been to an art museum—it introduced me to a time of sublime artistic creation, at its center the strange yet compelling figure of Leonardo. I learned about the rivalry of Michelangelo against Leonardo, and of the deference paid to him by Raphael. And I was astonished at the power and means of the patrons, whether Pope or Prince. Long before I would indulge in my life-long passion for visits to places exhibiting art, whether painting, sculpture or architecture, the book taught me to see, and to envisage standards even as earlier I learned about music. My admiration of Leonardo would in time be matched only by my admiration of Rembrandt. I did not miss a point seemingly made by the concluding chapter of the book. One member of the staff of the mission from Muscovy to the court of King Francis is uncomprehending of though fascinated by Leonardo's half-naked, beardless, and somewhat effeminate depiction of John the Baptist, while another one condemns the painting and all the machines designed by Leonardo as the work of the devil and in contrast to the simple innocence of the Christian faith of the Russian Church. This divergence in judgment gave me pause. Only much later would I recognize it as an early impetus to clarify the nature of Verstehen, where there can be differences in understanding the same thing according to the differing backgrounds and sets of presuppositions determining our reception and interpretation. Secondly, it would in time lead me to think about the problematic encounter of differing religious faiths. In the meantime my readings served as the basis for further reading. A few months later I bought myself a newly republished one-volume copy of Ludwig Huna's Borgia Trilogy, which I read from beginning to end with great fascination. I also read biographies: Merezhkovsky on Napoleon and Guy de Pourtalès on Wagner. At that time, gripped by the idea of philosophy as gaining wisdom by penetrating thinking to the most fundamental truth (see my encounter with Goethe's Faust), I became acquainted with the names of some important philosophers. However, why they were deemed significant remained a matter of labels and "isms." The Central Jewish Community, which now functioned as the regime's means of getting rid of the Jews of Vienna, not only facilitated the difficult emigration effort, but, to help would-be emigrants to be gainfully employable at the hoped-for destination, offered programs or "retraining" in various trades and crafts. Toward the end of summer I joined such a program, namely sheet metal work. At first we had lectures on the making of sheet metal, then began the practicum. I learned to make tins for preserves. I don't remember why I stayed no longer than three weeks. After that it was decided that I would follow my favorite cousin's footsteps and become a weaver and designer of cloths. I attended this course for several weeks and learned the different kinds of fabric, and how to program the threading. This is very tricky and it would be one of the last practical steps in learning the trade. In the meantime I learned how to operate the hand-loom, the sequence of opening the weft by means of stepping on the right pedal, and at the proper moment to move the shuttle. I was making good progress. On November 10, less than an hour after the session began, the Christian concierge, who was well disposed toward us, stuck his head into the workshop and said, "Something is going on, go home one by one." The shop was on the other side of the city center, and my way home took about an hour on foot. I walked through the inner city, past the little street where the Central Community was located, and saw some SS men there, and two young men with bloody heads. Walking across the canal and the Second District10 into the Twentieth,11 I passed the street with the synagogue that my family attended; the street was full of people and—judging from some young men throwing debris out the windows—they were demolishing the synagogue. In that hour I had witnessed some of the pogrom that transpired all over Nazi Germany on the day the Germans sarcastically called Kristallnacht. When I finally reached home, my parents were elated that I made it home unscathed. They were just as lucky. When brown shirts (SA) came to the apartment building in which we lived, they asked the concierge where the Jews lived. She said numbers 12, 22, 24. When they heard "12," the troopers rushed upstairs, and did not hear "22, 24"; ours was no. 22. The family in 10 CSE Comment: The center of Jewish life in pre-war Vienna. EE grew up there. 11 CSE Comment: The district in which LHE lived.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 19 no. 12 was not so lucky. Two weeks later we were thrown out of our apartment (in the house belonging to my uncle!); in that short time we had to sell much of our furniture and moved to a two-room apartment. The weaving shop did not reopen, and again I was at loose ends. I had established contact with Edith, and for the next seven months we would be fast friends. I visited her often. Her parents liked me and trusted me, and permitted us to walk the streets of Vienna, enjoying the urban vistas and magnificent buildings that made the city, which was not ours any more, so admirable. And we talked and talked. More importantly, the necessity to emigrate grew even more pressing. I rejoined the Zionist youth group to which I belonged before the Anschluss. In preparation of being pioneers in building up the Jewish homeland, they had set up a school, which aside from courses in Jewish history, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew, offered informal instruction in some school subjects, now that we were forbidden to attend regular schools. Edith and I attended the school. After Kristallnacht British aid organizations, with permission or cooperation by the government, offered several rescue programs. One provided for men aged up to 45 to come to Britain pending the maturation of their emigration plans to other countries. (Many of the participants would later serve in the British wartime army). Another program was what would be known as Kindertransporte, i.e., the placement of children up to age 17 in private homes or in schools until such time when they could rejoin their parents. (Only about half would see their parents again.) The third program provided for women between the ages of 18 and 52 to be placed in homes as domestic servants. It was my father's desire to keep the family together. But our leaving for the United States continued to be problematic, and reluctantly he let my sister go, and encouraged me to participate in preparing to be a Zionist pioneer. About four months after her eighteenth birthday my sister joined the domestic program, traveling to England as one of the chaperones for young girls on a Kindertransport. Soon after I turned 15, the Zionist group to which I belonged sent us for a month to a formerly Jewish farm, where, under the supervision of a black-uniformed SS man, we labored from early morning to suppertime wherever we were assigned, which was mostly in the fields. While I was there, my parents informed me that Edith would soon be leaving on a Kindertransport. On a ruse I managed to get a few days' furlough so that we could say good-bye. I was now as alone as I had ever been. Without the structure that normally provided content to the passing of time, I, out of my own inner resources, discovered that time cannot simply be a matter of passively and patiently waiting for the future, no matter how it turned out to be (Kierkegaard, I found, speaks of loitering through time); rather to be alive meant that one had to fill life with some substance. I read, I polished my English, and read. Also I became close to two people: I became friends with Kurt, a former classmate. And I spent a lot of time with my uncle Leon, my father's brother, to whom I felt closer than to my father. In time I was sent to another Zionist preparatory program. It was again a farm, this time farther east, and again supervised by an SS man. The work was even harder than at the previous program. We were woken up at 4 am, and were in the field by 6. I worked as if my life depended on it, which it did. At morning reveille about August 20, our leader told me to step forward. My parents and I had received the long awaited appointment at the US Consulate for an examination prior to receiving the immigrant's visa and the "Green Card." When I arrived home, I heard that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact (secretly dividing Poland between them). A week later the Second World War started with the invasion of Poland. We were not only afraid for our relatives in Poland, but that wartime conditions bode ill for the realization of our emigration. A week after the war started my father was arrested by the Gestapo, but, after they examined my sister's letters from England, they released him after a few hours. In mid-September we passed the examination at the US Consulate and were issued the visa that was valid for a limited time. On the very day when Britain and France, allied with Poland, declared war on Germany, a German U-boat sank a passenger ship. Wartime thus forced the retirement of German, French, and British passenger lines for the duration. The only line where we could book passage was the Holland-America Line, and so we quickly reserved a third-class cabin for mid-November. But now we encountered another seemingly insurmountable obstacle. The line would no longer accept German currency, only US dollars, which we did not have and which were unattainable. What to do? In desperation we wired the good people who sent us the affidavit that the passage had to be paid in dollars. And they advanced us the money.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 20 In the last two months in Vienna I spent much time with my uncle. He had spirited his young child to his well-to-do mother-in-law in Warsaw. When war broke out, she took him to the Soviet Union and Siberia, where they survived the war. (My uncle and aunt did not.) Uncle Leon missed his boy and was happy to teach me as he would his own son, who was now beyond reach. Though a medical doctor, Uncle Leon was educated in the humanities and literature. He had me peruse his library, and finally exposed me for the first time to philosophy. It may not have been the traditional way of being introduced to philosophy, but my reading and his talking about Nietzsche's Zarathustra irreversibly kindled my interest. It was not yet philosophy, but it was powerful and provocative. The evening before our departure he gave me the three-volume Nietzsche biography written by his sister, and I have treasured the books all these decades, even after I learned to be highly dubious of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's representation of her brother. The journey to the Dutch border took about 24 hours. The Jewish emigrants sat in a segregated carriage. At Emmerich we had to get off and were placed on a train consisting of two small ancient wagons from which the seats had been removed. While we stood silently next to our luggage, the train slowly creaked across the border. In time we saw Dutch soldiers guarding the track, and we knew we had made it. Spontaneously we broke into uncontrolled laughter. One young man shouted, "Make sad faces so that people will believe what we went through!" We were free! But were we free like the children of Israel, after they crossed the Reed Sea? No. The ancient Egyptians wanted to retain the Israelites as slaves; the Nazi Germans did not even want us as slaves. The Israelites wandered through the desert freely to accept the words of God for all the generations to come. We were free to devote ourselves to the mundane task of starting a new life and making a living, and, if possible, to help rescue some of those we left behind. In Nijmegen we changed to a regular train. As we crossed the bridge over the Rhine, the Dutchman sitting next to us explained that if the Germans ever tried to invade, they would not get farther than the waterlijn, since even this bridge was provided with explosives. My parents and I blanched. The man assured us that it would not be going up right now. Half a year later the Chicago newspapers published the picture of the blown-up Nijmegen Bridge. But the waterlijn did not hold after all. After a few happy days in Rotterdam, we embarked on the old SS Statendam, which took us across the Atlantic in ten days. We arrived in New York harbor on the morning of Saturday, December 2, 1939. As we slowly sailed past the Statue of Liberty, a few of us assembled for a brief Shabbat service. A young man spoke a few words. He did not address our apprehension over starting anew in a strange land but those we left behind. Verlorenes Volk! (a people lost) he cried prophetically. Yes, he cried. America. America was not the Promised Land, but it was the land of promise. For someone my age I brought a considerable burden of experiences and memories with me, which would continue to preoccupy me. I had no idea of how the war and the time immediately following it would incrementally add to the burden, and that most of my relatives would survive only in my memory. On the bus to Chicago I got a glimpse of how vast this land of only 130 million inhabitants was. The people who brought us over told me that every successful man started out selling newspapers. And so, my first job was at a newsstand at rush hour. A young businessman came to buy some of the papers. I asked him, "Vat do you vant?" He seemed offended, and upon my inquiry told me to say, "May I help you?" Clearly, polishing my English had only just begun. The owner gave me a tip of 10 cents, and that was it. Soon I was told to try my luck selling the Sunday Tribune. I reported to the local distribution station, and was given ten copies to sell (at 10 cents each, from which I earned 2 cents) along the alley of some street blocks indicated by the boss. I was advised that the boys walked the alleys yelling, "Sunday paper!!" A well-brought up youngster from Vienna does not do such a thing. So I went up the rear staircases of every 3-story house, knocked at the delivery doors, and wherever someone answered, I would say "Excuse me, but would you like to buy a Sunday paper?" After almost two hours I had sold all ten papers, and reported at the station for another load. I was told that all the other boys had been there several times for a load, and the station was sold out. In any case, I had earned my first 20 cents in America. One other thing I remember from that early winter morning. It was bitter cold; the Windy City earned its sobriquet. I was outgrowing my clothing, and we did not know when our two trunks would arrive. When they finally arrived 8 months after they were dispatched, it was spring, and my clothing they contained no longer fit me.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 21 At the end of January 1940 I was enrolled in the local high school and was assigned to Miss Benjamin's homeroom. As it happened, two other refugees were also starting school. We stuck together and resolved in broken English not to let on that we were new in the country. How stupid could intelligent youngsters be? In my need and desire to blend in, I missed the simple step of transcending to a level of viewing that desire within the background of relevant contexts. The factual context was palpable. Not only was my speech halting and accented, but my clothing differed sharply from that of the others. For example, I wore the only trousers that still fit me, namely the sporty knickerbockers that were so fashionable in Vienna, especially among youngsters. And the eagerness "to stand free with people that are free" was not a matter of moving from Nazi Germany to America, the land of freedom, but an ideal whose realization is a task involving positive and negative choices. Two incidents in my first semester will demonstrate how difficult that task was. I had never imagined that a school could be like Senn High. It was huge, with several stairways, a cafeteria, and a sizable auditorium. Not long after school began, the homeroom teachers took their charges to the auditorium. Principal Davison held a speech extolling the importance of education. As the tall Principal slowly walked out in the center aisle, a hush descended on the 2000 pupils. Then a loudspeaker broadcast a record of popular music, and to a man the students began to clap happily to the rhythm and stomp their feet. I turned pale, and so did the other two refugees. All I could think of was the broadcasts of the Anschluss, with the Austrians in unison shouting "Heil Hitler! heil Hitler! heil Hitler!...." Miss Benjamin, who was sitting sideways and, looking back, saw what was happening and told her class, "Don't!" In the spring I heard that at a barbershop in a German neighborhood one could get haircuts for 15 cents instead of the usual 25 cents. I walked 40 minutes to get there. While waiting, a boy of about 17 or 18 sat next to me, and we exchanged a few words; his German was not native, but good. A month later I walked there again. The wait was longer, and the same fellow approached me again. Before long he told me that he had been over there to see what it was like. He was thrilled by what he saw, joined the movement, and invited me to join as well. I was thunderstruck. I knew that to a casual observer I did not look like a stereotypical Jew (whatever that means), what with my blond hair and blue-gray eyes, which for the most part had kept me safe, and for Edith's parents to permit us to walk the streets of Vienna. An atavistic fury arose in me and I told the fellow that I am not to be had for this and do not wish for him to speak to me again. The barbershop turned out to be a recruiting office for the American Nazi Party! The most lasting experience of my semester at Senn High was my free access to the school library. The librarian—I wish I could remember her name—was happy to feed my interests. From some books I finally learned the intricacies of music making, of composing, of the accepted forms, the instrumentation, the orchestra, and the performance. On top of it, she gave me tickets for the remaining season of the Chicago Symphony concerts for the young. The first one I attended was conducted by the chief conductor, Frederick Stock. Though this friend of Richard Strauss had by then conducted the orchestra for over 40 years, he still had to translate his introductions to the pieces from the German as he spoke; one time he said zwischen instead of "between." The first piece, Beethoven's "Overture to Fidelio," was unforgettable. I don't remember what the other pieces were, then and at the subsequent concerts. But at last I was confronted with serious music. In the summer the orchestra played at the band shell in Grant Park. I was in my element. Over the next two years I often attended the popular Saturday evening performances, which were conducted by Stock. The last one I attended, in the spring of 1942, ended with an orchestral transcription of Bach's C-minor Passacaglia and Fugue. My friends and I had never heard this piece before. They were overwhelmed by it no less than I. It was Frederick Stock's last concert; he died that summer. When I mentioned my interest in philosophy, the librarian gave me a book by John Dewey. I do not remember which book, possibly it was the Dewey-Tufts Ethics. I was delighted to find that America had a philosopher. As I read the book, I soon felt that there was something missing, though I did not know enough to articulate what it was. In the spring of 1940 we were expecting my sister to join us after more than one year as a domestic in England. In anticipation we moved from our one-room apartment with kitchenette to a regular apartment, which we furnished with donated items. That summer I worked as a uniformed Good Humor salesman. There were four levels of sales venues: trucks and tricycles, both of which rode through the neighborhoods, many
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 22 manned by teachers in need of making some extra bucks; then, large four-wheeled pushcarts, and finally small two-wheeled pushcarts. I manned one of the latter at the corner of a small park, frequented mainly by young mothers with pre-school children. It was an eleven-hour day, seven days a week. I got paid by the number of ice-cream bars I sold. My pay averaged about $3.85 a week. A friendly gas station diagonally across from the corner let me come in to sit and eat my sandwich. One evening I would hear there a small portion of a memorable radio broadcast. It was the national convention that nominated Roosevelt for a third term, an eye-opener to politics in my new country. I usually came home at 11 pm for a late supper. I had two more years to go to high school; being in a new neighborhood, I transferred to von Steuben High. I was readily accepted there, enjoyed many friendships. Especially Sam Kweskin would be a friend for life. Sam was largely self-educated, like me. He was an aspiring artist, and his sketches of me, which I treasure to this day, show our love of music and our expectation of military wartime service. We could talk about anything, sometimes for hours on end, standing under the streetlight at the corner. At least one time we stood there until 2 am. Some teachers were excellent, some less so. In the two years of Latin I learned no more than what I had brought with me from Gymnasium. I was taken aback by what was taught in art and in music, and how it was taught. I probably did not succeed in hiding my appraisal well enough not to arouse the respective teachers' resentment. One course that I greatly enjoyed was the "Civics" course; it kindled my interest in constitutional history and in the transcendental foundation of constitutions. During those two years I held various jobs. My father, who in Vienna had been a highly successful businessman who was about to become a partner in his firm and retire to his own home with a garden, bought himself a corner newsstand with money borrowed from one of the Jewish aid societies. In Chicago's sweltering summer heat (with the perfumes of the stockyards permeating much of the city) and the bone-chilling winter cold, he stood at the stand several hours a day. The drugstore at the corner let him come in to cool off or warm up. To get to that corner on the West Side, one had to travel for an hour by streetcars. There was a two-wheeled secondary stand, which I took to the corner of the local church on Sundays from 7 to 11 am, to sell Sunday papers as the people came from attending mass. My father arranged with the owners of the corner drug store to give me a job. I held the job for over a year. It was as chief bottle washer and sometime soda jerk. The hours were from 8 pm to 1 am on weekdays. My schedule was as follows: 8 am to 1 pm: at school; after lunch, 2 pm to 6 pm: sleep; after supper and one hour streetcar ride: 8 pm to 1 am: at work; after one-hour streetcar ride: 2:30 am to 6:30 am: sleep; after breakfast at school. My wages were 25 cents an hour. In addition, the boss treated me to the streetcar fare, and a midnight snack of one of the ice cream concoctions then in vogue. I used the time on the streetcar to read, and to observe the interesting fellow late-night riders. The job at the drug store and the association with the students at the high school contributed much to my Americanization. The last year in high school I worked part-time at a laundry. In those days very few people had access to washing machines; most people had all their laundry picked up and delivered by the laundry. A small fleet of trucks, each with its route, was part of the business. Some customers had all their laundry dried, ironed, and packaged; some had only their white things washed and had their "wet wash" delivered home, where it was hung up to dry, usually on ropes crisscrossing the alley. At first I worked as a "sorter," separating the laundry in the incoming bundles according to white/color, hot/warm, etc., netting and tagging each set. It was the most unpleasant job I ever held. In time I was assigned to the wet-wash table in partnership with another von Steuben student. This job was the most backbreaking. The wet sheets had to be packed into a sack that was washed with the laundry and tied. This could be done only by lifting the sacks a number of times and dropping them. Many of the machine operators were African-Americans who lived on the South Side, in what the sociologist St. Clair Drake called the Black Metropolis. They endured a streetcar ride of over an hour, because it was a steady job that paid well. I was on friendly terms with a few of them, especially two brothers, at a time when this was still frowned upon. I must interject that the business belonged to two Jewish brothers who inherited it when their father, who had established it, was murdered at the shop during a robbery. One time, Randall, one of the African-American brothers with whom I was friendly, made a disparaging remark about the Jewish bosses. I told him that I am Jewish. He responded, "I
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 23 thought you are German." His casual and careless expression of disdain toward his employer because he was a Jew bothered me, though I did not know why. Also, it was the first time that I encountered the fact that America is not a melting pot, but a conglomerate of different peoples. There would be more proof of that in the years that followed. I continued at the job fulltime for most of the summer after high school graduation, in a shop that did not have air conditioning as yet. When I had saved $120, I took a bus to New York. I stayed in a rented room around the corner from where Edith and her family lived; and Edith and I spent twelve unforgettable days together. We had not seen each other for three and a half years; we were grown up now, and in love. What did we talk about? I don't remember, only that one time I told about what my Uncle Leon had taught me about Nietzsche. But we talked and talked. I was reminded of talking openly with Edith and with Sam when years later I heard Jaspers speak of his idea of communication as the way to truth for man in time. Midway in my first year in college President Roosevelt addressed the mothers of America in one of his fireside chats, and told them that he would have to draft the eighteen-year olds into the armed forces. It was around the time when the first reports about the killing of Jews appeared in the West, which my parents read about in the German-language weekly Aufbau, but they decided not to share this grim news with me for the time being. Before the first month of my second college semester was over, I was drafted into the army. Teenage was over. My interest in philosophy had to be put to rest for the duration. I would emerge from the service with more shattering experiences to think about. The army took me to all sorts of places, Kansas, Missouri, Utah, New Jersey, Arkansas, the Texas-Louisiana maneuver area, and I met fellow soldiers from just about every region of the country. Some of them engaged in the curious practice, peculiar to the American vernacular, of lacing their sentences with inappropriate and highly indelicate expressions. Altogether, the thirty-two months in the military constituted the post-graduate phase of the Americanization of this perennial greenhorn. For basic training the army sent me to a camp in Utah, south of Salt Lake City. A few times I was able to spend a few hours in the city. I did not learn much about the Mormons; but I did perceive that they were a staid and ordered society with a superb educational system. On one of my trips to Salt Lake City I appeared in Federal Court to receive my citizenship, which, because of my army service, was granted to me after only three and a half years in the country, instead of the normal five years. The platoon in which I received basic training was headed by two NCO's from the Deep South, Sgt. Moody and Cpl. "Tex." Both of them had never seen a Jew before, much less one with the outlandish name of Ehrlich. Sgt. Moody enriched me by keeping me on his roster as "Enrich" and insisted that I answer to that name. I had no liking for the regimented life in the army—left right, left right, and yes sir, no sir. But knowing how important the service was and having expected to serve since the time I arrived in America as a teenager, I was a good soldier throughout, doing my duty without fail, wherever I was sent to serve. After basic training, and after a training course as a military medical technician, the army sent some qualified among the newest recruits to a "specialized" program of college courses until the time the divisions had to be filled up before being sent to the fronts. The choice was languages or engineering. I chose languages; they sent me to engineering. In January 1944 I had a few days' furlough, and my parents sent for Edith to join us. At that time we became engaged. Soon after the specialized program was disbanded, and I found myself assigned to the medical battalion of an infantry division that was at the Texas-Louisiana maneuver area being readied for combat. While there, my sister got married. I had asked my Captain for a few days' furlough so that I could attend; without really looking at me he only said, "Don't you know there is a war on?" My mother never forgave me for not attending. Some of the fellow soldiers at the specialized training program were now in the same unit as I, including a highly gifted twenty-year old from Oswego, New York, Joseph Frani. We were friends, though we were from very different backgrounds. After maneuvers the division moved to a camp in Kansas for final training before being sent to combat. The staff of my company represented a mix of ethnicities. It was part of an old New York City reserve regiment. The sergeants were the elite. They had joined the reserves during the Depression, because it was their chance to earn a bit more money. Just when the economy seemed to improve, and they could look forward to decent jobs and to quitting the reserves, the regiment was activated. We younger newcomers found
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 24 ourselves in a problematic position. First, some of the sergeants were disdainful of us and would not hesitate to treat us unfairly. But, the main problem was that the sergeants were of different ethnic backgrounds that populated Manhattan, and they were at loggerheads with each other, the Italians vs. the Jews vs. the Poles. Not one was as mean and prejudicial as the youngest among the sergeants, Monteverdi, who was First Sergeant, and as such the highest non-commissioned authority. In May Edith took her suitcase to the last final exam of her college freshman year and immediately after left for a 67-hour bus-ride to Kansas. We were married 60 miles away at Ft. Reilly, an old cavalry camp, where there was the only Jewish Chaplain far and wide. I was granted a leave of a few hours to get married. As a special favor Monteverdi gave me an extra hour to get ready and take an earlier bus to Salina, where Edith was waiting. As I was leaving, Monteverdi informed me that I was scheduled for KP the next day, which meant I had to take the 4 am bus from Salina and report in the kitchen at 6 am for a 13-hour day of onerous work. One evening, sometime later, it was my turn. I was visiting the first barrack, where the sergeants lived, and they were at each other. Monteverdi made hardly veiled anti-Semitic remarks. I had the gumption to speak up and reminded the sergeant that his name meant "Greenberg," which counted as a typically Jewish last name. There was mirth in the galleries; the suddenly silent Greenberg, oops: Monteverdi, simply swallowed it. At War. With this aura of good comradely feeling the medical battalion, together with the rest of the Division was shipped out one day. Edith and I had been married less than three months and we did not have a chance to say good-buy. I found a way to let her know that we were shipped to Boston rather than to San Francisco (and the Far East), and were on the way to Europe, where the invasion was then in its third month. Our Division was on the front about seven months as part of the US Seventh Army. At first we took part in the battle for the Vosges Mountains. We joined the other Allied forces in halting for the winter at the border of Germany proper. Our Division halted where Alsace and Lorraine meet, facing the Saar region of Germany. To drive back the German incursion in the Battle of the Bulge, some troops were withdrawn from the 7th Army, and our Division was strung out facing three German divisions. Fortunately, the Germans did not have the wherewithal to take advantage of this fact, with the exception of the 17th Waffen-SS Panzergrenadier Division, an elite infantry division with tank support. They also had some of the fearsome 88mm anti-aircraft cannon. The regiment to which I was assigned faced that division. After the Battle of the Bulge, as the winter turned quite miserable, the SS division, refitted, engaged us in battle, inflicting some losses, but was unable to make headway. To test the capacity of the division and prepare for the final breakthrough, our frontline troops were sent to "straighten out the line." It was February 15, and the company to which I was assigned was sent a few hundred yards to occupy the hill opposite where we were entrenched before. The resistance of the German unit was minimal, and they let us have the hillside as long as they kept control of the crest. We started to dig foxholes all over the hill. The one my partner and I were digging was unfortunately on stony ground, consisting of fairly small stones tightly embedded in earth. After well over an hour of exhausting labor we had only dug enough for one person to crouch in an embryonic position. He suggested I take this foxhole, while he would join another one that had been dug in softer earth. And I stayed in there for many nights, glad that I wore seven layers of clothing. Another regiment of our division straightened the line near some farmhouses. Late in the evening before the action my friend, Joseph Frani, and another soldier were chatting while looking out through the hole in the roof of a farmhouse. Seeing the starry winter sky, Joe said, "I feel so close to infinity." The next day, one of the Germans was able to take a position as a sniper and wounded one of our soldiers. Joe, who was the medic there, well marked with red crosses, went to give the infantry man first aid. In spite of the marking, the sniper fired at Joe, and hit him in the upper thigh. He fell and was fast loosing blood. Another soldier shouted to him to come into the house. Joe responded, "I can't make it." They were his last words. The SS division was equipped with a few leftover heavy tanks. In the first night on the hill we heard a German tank roll up to the crest, and before it could do any damage, one of our soldiers near the top of the hill was able to chase the tank back by firing a bazooka shell at it. We do not know what damage the tank sustained, but we never heard it again. For the next few nights the Germans fired 88mm shells at us. Their 88 cannons were designed as anti-aircraft weapons. They traveled at high speed, much faster than sound. Their traveling emitted a characteristic high-pitched sound,
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 25 like a whistle, and they impacted with a distinctive metallic sound. If the impact is heard in continuation of the whistle, one had nothing to fear. If the whistle stops before the impact, it is too late to be afraid: chances are good that you are a goner. Being on the front line, one is as such brushed by death. But when an 88 shell lands near you, it is direct. When the shell impacted with a terrible noise less than 15 feet from my hole, it caused a shower of stones and earth to rain all around, including on me. A tiny deviation on the aiming setting saved my life. When things settled down, one of the soldiers in the next foxhole called: "Doc, you OK?" I was a bit stunned, and it took me a while to answer: "I'm OK." After things quieted down, in still nights, crouching in the foxhole, I would look at the starry winter sky, and I was haunted by the end of Abschied (farewell) of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. After the line still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde (my heart is still and awaits its hour), there is a musical phrase led by the violins, beginning softly at low register but in a gradual crescendo heads to high pitch, a phrase I would, much later when I became acquainted with Stroud's book on Jacob Böhme, liken to his expression "sunrise to eternity." The contralto then sings the final words, written by Mahler himself: Die liebe Erde allüberall blüht auf im Lenz und grünt auf's neu. Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen—ewig, ewig... The dear earth everywhere blooms forth in spring, gets green again. Everywhere, eternally far spaces shine blue—forever, ever... Over and over, and night after night I, would hear it in my mind. Somehow, strange to say, it comforted me and reconciled me to my fate, whatever it would turn out to be. On March 18, we broke through the line on a broad front. We were on a plain beyond the hill. Less than a mile away our artillery was raining down its shells, groups of infantry were advancing. It was an exhilarating beginning of the long-yearned-for end. When some soldiers conducted a group of bedraggled German POWs, I could not keep from singing to them the Horst-Wessel song, the anthem of the Nazi Storm Troopers (SA). It was practically the end of the 17th SS Division, although remnants of it were redeployed for another few days. Once the German front was breached, some crack divisions advanced through the lines to spearhead the final assault. Suddenly, we were in the rear. We were able to shed our winter clothes, took our first shower in about six weeks, and were outfitted with fresh clothes. During a few days of rest in an Alsacian village, a USO troop set up a stage to present an entertainment for the regiment. The only artist featured was Marlene Dietrich, who sang her songs ("See what the boys in the backroom...," "Lily Marlene," etc.) and was the butt of the MC's vulgar jokes. At the end our Colonel presented her with a certificate declaring her Daughter of the Regiment. After she changed from her tight-fitting gold colored gown to a GI uniform, she went to the jeep that was at her disposal and mingled with the crowd. Some of my buddies wanted to have their picture taken with Marlene, but were too overawed by her celebrity. I said, "I can do it." And I did; the picture has been a sensation in my family all these decades.12 During the next month we advanced in southwestern Germany. A few vignettes of the many sights I witnessed: One morning a few of us were waiting for orders. It was cold, and to warm up we burned the tires of a blown up car. With blackened faces we rejoined our company and proceeded to the next town, where we liberated a military hospital. Some Russian POWs were employed there. One of them, tall and in an impeccable Soviet uniform, requested that I go with him. With blackened face and bedraggled clothes, though with red crosses showing, I presented a contrast to his dignified appearance, as I accompanied him on a ward-by-ward, bed-by-bed inspection tour, signalizing that he was in charge now. In another town we saw the first liberated inmates, in prison uniforms, from a concentration camp. And then came two GIs in their bedraggled combat uniforms. Between them, towering above them by two heads, their prisoner: An SS-man in black full-dress uniform with a black helmet to match. It was comical. Another town, with a large military hospital, was under Red Cross protection. No combat was permitted within its limits. The town was a spa, with many fine private one-family homes. Where the buildings ended, there was a grove of fairly young trees. It was also the official town limit, though unmarked as such. When our column reached this limit, we received fire from German soldiers hidden among the trees, killing one of our lieutenants. We were ordered to move into the woods with marching fire. When I got to the woods to follow the troop, a young lieutenant who had led the 12 Editorial note: This picture can be seen in Helmut Wautischer, Alan M. Olson, Gregory L. Walters, Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity, New York: Springer Verlag 2012.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 26 first foray against the Germans among the trees, took hold of me to pass on what he discerned as to the size of the enemy troop and other such information. I, on the other hand, tried to help him, as he was seriously, perhaps mortally wounded; a bullet had entered his left eye, and then and there one could not know how deeply it had penetrated. In the din of the marching fire, the man was hysterically trying, before passing out, to do his duty of imparting the intelligence of which he was privy. Our company was furious about the insidiousness of the enemy and about the loss we sustained. A few hundred feet back into town, a German officer tried formally to surrender to our Lieutenant Wilde. Wilde was angry enough to sidestep time-honored military etiquette and took the German's cap off and threw it on the street. The officer was a Major General. In his house I met his twelve year-old son, who right away tried his English on me. In the General's study was a photo of his receiving some decoration from Hitler. In the kitchen were his shaken wife and his mother, who moaned about her son insisting on a military career against her pleading. In the foyer hung another tunic of the General's uniform, with its tasseled gold oak leaf against the crimson background. Though too small for my stature, I tried it on. Looking in the mirror, I said to myself, "That's all it takes?" And I laughed and laughed. At the side of a main road leading to the center of a town, I saw a vehicle that might have been a military personnel carrier. A terrible explosion must have blown the top off. The only person in it was sitting in the driver's seat. There was no head. The torso was exposed, the clothing having been blown off together with his skin; one could see the yellow layer of fat on his front. The explosion must have occurred recently, because there was no sign of decay. Next to the vehicle lay a crumpled letter from a German mother, imploring the recipient to be especially careful, now that the war was winding down. I put it back where I had found it. On April 26, the company to which I was assigned was the first American troop to enter Austria. Next morning, after an artillery barrage, we marched into the valley between two low foothills of the Alps. The assigned job to disable this approach to the Alpenfestung (the Alpine Fortress) was easy. There was nothing aside from one dugout tank trap. Our two columns continued on the north edge of the valley. As we approached a projection of the hill into the valley, we were stopped by the burst of a sub-machine gun from among the trees above. The strung out company hugged the ground behind hillocks and shrubs. As usual I had marched with the headquarters group in the rear. I was called to a nearby soldier. He had been drafted out of high school, and, after six weeks of basic training had recently been sent to Europe as a replacement. He said he could not take this combat. Lying next to him I told him, the war will soon be over, and he would do well to marshal his courage to see it through for a short while longer, as the rest of us were doing. Just then came another call for the medic from up front; our lead scout had been wounded by that submachine gun burst. Evidently, I was given the opportunity to be an example to that scared recruit. I rose with my harnessed bags of aid equipment and ran the 200 yards zigzag past the company of infantry. The wounded scout was lying at the foot of the projection just out of range of the shooter. When I got there, I flung myself down next to him. Just then the shooter burst a series of shots in my direction. At the periphery of my vision I saw the bullets kick up dirt where my body had been literally a split second before. Another brush with death, which I escaped by luck.13 In my fury I yelled a string of indelicate words I did not know I had in me. By means of that burst the shooter had revealed his location. Nothing infuriates the infantry as much as having the non-combatant medic shot at. One of the men did not need my curses to know what to do. He shot his entire fresh clip of eight rounds. I was told the shooter was found in the fork of a tree with seven hits. The siege was over. Some of us went around the bend of the projection, where we found some frightened fifteen-year-old Hitler youths from Munich, who had been ordered for frontline duty the day before. The company rejoined the rest of the troop on the main road supported by two Sherman tanks. There were more child soldiers. In seven months at the front I had seen some horrible sights, but none would haunt me over the decades as the dead boy soldier with incredibly sad eyes, whose legs had been caught by the treads of the tank. In place of his legs there were two trails of blood. Some of our men were interrogating some German POWs. One of them, after inspecting the contents of a wallet, was going to throw it away. Instantly I recognized it for what it was and said, "Give me that!" It was stitched together from a parchment 13 CSE Comment: LHE was awarded the Silver Star for bravery on this account.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 27 strip of a Torah scroll. The contents showed that the POW had most likely witnessed or even participated in the slaughter of a Jewish community in Poland or the Ukraine, and the wallet was a trophy. It would be 26 years before I removed the threads. I saw that the strip was from Ex. 34. I vividly remember tears welling up when I read the verse, "Do not seethe the kid in the milk of its mother," an ancient metaphor for elemental human compassion, of which Jews remind themselves symbolically in their everyday lives by keeping meat from dairy. In later years I wondered whether that German soldier would be haunted by the little corpses of Jewish children lying in the extermination pits with incredibly sad eyes, as did I with respect to the German boy soldier, and whether he would tell his children and grandchildren never to forget what his fellow Germans did to the Jews, as I did mine. The main road would lead us over the Fern Pass to the Inn River Valley. It took several days for us to reach the pass. For the Germans the area was part of the Italian theater of operations. A ceasefire had been negotiated as of midnight April 30/May 1. The German force guarding the pass evidently had not been informed. They blasted two craters in the road close to the pass; no vehicles or tanks, only foot soldiers could reach the pass. We arrived there around midnight; but we were not dressed for the cold at this altitude. At the pass the headquarters group entered a small hotel. German soldiers beyond the hotel started to throw anti-tank shells at it, the only munitions they had. I was near the large window of the foyer, when the first shell fell outside the window, shattering it. Instinctively I crouched and opened my mouth, as I had been taught. Instantly a second shell exploded outside the window. A hot fragment hit the back of my palate, knocking out one front tooth and a good part of a second one. The wound earned me the sobriquet "combat smile Ehrlich."14 The headquarters group went to the cellar, joining the owners, a Ukrainian woman assigned at the hotel as a slave laborer, and a local injured civilian whom I patched up. The shelling went on, without causing damage to our company. At about 2 am we all had to evacuate because the building was burning down above us. We fled to a huge barn near the hotel. In between there was a German munitions deposit, which soon caught fire; for hours the rounds exploded 14 CSE Comment: And resulted in LHE's being awarded a Purple Heart. one by one. Our troops and some German POWs were glad to stand against the very thick stonewall, until the munitions spent themselves as dawn was breaking. At 6 am the German prisoners were lined up to be taken down the mountain. Just then the Germans on the high ground beyond the burned out hotel started throwing their shells at the group. By the time they were neutralized by our men, they had injured about fifty soldiers, mainly German, who were in consternation about being fired on by their own comrades. The next six hours I was busy dressing the wounds. By 12 noon engineers had filled the craters enough for a team of medics to take over. I had not slept, or rested, or eaten for thirty hours, and I was freezing. By the time we reached the Inn valley the war in Europe was over, and we found out that Hitler was finally dead. Very much later I learned that very few of my Jewish family had survived the slaughter. On V-E Day we heard the speeches and celebrations over the radio. Some of us looked forward to demobilization and the resumption of a normal life. For me it was a day of overwhelming stillness in which a life-long reflection began with the primordial question "why?" The pursuit of this question was soon driven by a desperate anger that arose in me from the ground of my being. Interlude: Persistent Problems The division in which I served was one of eight that were withdrawn from Europe early. After a month's furlough we were to be newly outfitted to serve as a "floating reserve" for the invasion of Japan, a fight that was predicted to be bitter, and to cost staggering losses of life on both sides. While Edith and I spent one week at a vacation cabin in the North Woods, the owner knocked at our door one morning, and called "The war is over!" And it was. An atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and after a few days a second one on Nagasaki. President Truman was in the unenviable position of weighing the cost in lives of using the new weapon against the expected cost to both sides of an invasion, the latter determined by the recent horrendous experience on Okinawa. An ex post facto corroboration of the soundness of ending the war by means of the Bomb came to light when official information about the readiness on the part of Emperor Hirohito and of the Japanese Cabinet, as well as the military, for the major and costly battle when the Allies would try to invade the home islands, beginning with Kyushu.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 28 Both, on the one hand the Bomb that brought the war with Japan to a close; on the other the post-war relations between Americans and Germans, and foremost the post-Holocaust relations between Jews and Germans, became for me persistent problems, which I had to meet both in writing and standing on my feet. Because they accompanied me over the decades, I review them before I turn to my apprenticeship and maturity in philosophy. The Bomb. When I taught ethics in later years, I was often confronted by students with the question of the ethical justification of our dropping the Bomb. I told them that I may not be the best person to ask, since I had reason to believe that my standing there teaching was assured by the Bomb. More importantly, I tried to explain that wars take place, and the rules by which they are carried out, as well as the extent to which the enemy can be trusted to abide by them, are severely limited. Beyond those limits, there is an ethical vacuum, in which human-all-too-human beings act and react on the spur of the moment, without having the luxury of reflecting on how it might be appraised in retrospect. Churchill observed that the American Civil War of Secession between the South and the North was the last war fought between gentlemen. As if to underline what is involved, one of my philosophy professors in college told us that when two lined-up armies faced each other during the Seven Years' War, a mounted herald on one side was sent forward to announce, "The gentlemen from Prussia may have the first shot." Yet, so much for the rule of gentlemanliness; after the first shot it was the usual, age-old brutal slaughter. The combatants were fellow human beings, who knew what was ethically proper and morally right. In war ethics and morality are not abolished, but they are suspended. Is this too subtle a distinction? Perhaps, but this was the best I could come up with when I faced a class of happily innocent undergraduates. In a later, major historical-philosophical project on what choices Jewish leaders had and what actions they could undertake under the extreme duress of captivity under the Nazi regime, I came to realize that theirs was a situation in which ethical and moral norms were not merely suspended, but altogether abolished.15 15 CSE Comment: The reference is to Choices under the Duress of the Holocaust, LHE's posthumous 2-volume work that he coauthored with EE. It was different from the college classroom when I faced colleagues from Japan. For them the topic of the war was largely anathema. When it did come up, it was unmistakable that Japanese interlocutors felt that the firebomb air raids and the use of the Bomb constituted a victimization of Japan. Should one rehearse the treachery that led the West into war with Japan? Or how Japanese troops acted in China, or in the Philippines? Yet, that attitude was understandable. For while the regime exercised totalitarian control over what the population was to know and even what to think, those infractions against human decency and niceties of diplomatic relations occurred far from the home grounds. Under the constitutional and political reforms engendered by Japan's postwar alignment with the United States, the truths would in time spread among the people, though it would take decades. Jews and Germans. With respect to Germany and Germans the problematic situation was, for many decades, distinct for a number of reasons, and different from that of Japan. I not only stood on the front lines against Germany but, as a Jew, had experienced some of the persecution and shared some of the post-Holocaust reservations against Germany and Germans with Jews world-wide. I had much to reflect critically about what I could not forget, and to live with what I would not forget. In Germany, unlike Japan, much of the brutal aspects of the Nazi regime took place in city neighborhoods or at least in camps near many a town. While the regime imposed a strict but never entirely successful censorship, especially in wartime, some of the visible persecutions served to settle on the population an atmosphere of terror, engendering a practice of self-censorship among the people, thus, in turn, facilitating the regime's control over them. At the same time employment reached high numbers, fueled by the increasing need for war industries, the people were well fed, and a sense of belonging and of national mission were programmatically fostered. Within these preconditions the regime could embark on its conquests of the nations of Europe, and the military successes were duly celebrated. Most of the killing of the Jews took place outside of the German heartland, some as far away as the conquered area of White Russia (Belarus); but some reports trickled in by furloughed soldiers. The longer the war lasted, the worse it got; through its control the regime insured that the population and the fighting forces endured it all, and through its propaganda machine enforced the view
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 29 that the war was foisted on Germany by its enemies and was being carried on for Germany's survival. The only way all this could be brought to an end was by means of relentless warfare on the part of the Allies. On the way thereto industrial sites were bombed and fronts were "softened up", with a lot of collateral destruction and deaths. The indiscriminate bombing that the Nazi regime visited on Great Britain in 1940 was, to some extent, in turn applied to the German heartland. When the regime's military finally unconditionally surrendered, much of the German cityscape was a pile of rubble. Looking around, much of the population, their early enthusiasm long forgotten and now relieved over being rid of the oppressive and hated regime, saw what the liberating powers had wrought. And, together with gratitude for a new chance of establishing a nation respected among nations, a subliminal conviction settled in the minds of many of having been victimized, not only by the defunct regime but also by the Allies, a conviction that would resurface over the decades. The defunct regime was gone, but everywhere there were unofficial representatives of the Allies who could be confronted with that conviction. Over the decades I was not only the target but also a witness of such confrontations. I start with a trivial example: One very respected citizen of his German city remembered how, as a little boy, he felt humiliated by the fuss made by GIs when they handed out Cadbury chocolates and chewing gum. I did not respond, thinking of how Jewish children were treated by uniformed Germans. The mother of the German wife of a colleague of mine came for her first visit to America. The party in her honor was her opportunity to complain bitterly about the brutal and terrible way the Americans waged their war against Germany, beyond justification and her comprehension. The guests were silent with shock. Finally one of them said, "Remember what Germans did to the Jews." For a moment the lady turned pale and made slight facial gestures that to me signaled that she had to digest that reminder so as determine how it could possibly be pertinent to her righteous complaint. Having indicated some experiences of my early life, it may be understandable that they would become an inexhaustible source of philosophical exemplifications in almost any substantive topic under consideration. So it was in 1985, when I was one of the resource faculty members at an international graduate colloquium in Dubrovnik. In connection with the posed topic (Responsibility) I contributed a paper, in particular on the distinction between the individual as essential carrier of responsibility and the individual as the essential object of responsibility.16 A few of the points I clarified by referring to the controversial matter of the desultory prosecution of perpetrators in Germany. To repeat: In my presentation references to the Holocaust were rare, connected with specific points, and in no way central to my paper. During the coffee break a colleague from Berlin confronted me, furiously telling me, with reference to the prosecution of perpetuators, "Vengeance is Mine!" (Deuteronomy 32:25). I responded that this is a word of God, which neither he nor any other human being can claim for himself; however, of us humans God expects responsibility toward our fellow man. He continued, "How dare you take up matters that are ancient history!" I countered, "How dare you, a German, say to me, a Jew, that the genocide against my people can ever be ancient history?" This was not the end of it. In time I received a long letter from my correspondent, to which I drafted a response that was not mailed to him. Instead, both letters were published in one of my books.17 I summarize two of the many points of his attack and my respective comments. He mentioned that lots of people had to suffer under the Nazi regime, Germans and he himself included, and, "for example, the Jews." But what's past is past and cannot be changed, so why are Jews the only ones claiming entitlement to "revenge?" With regard to the first point, I observed that it is evident that the nihilistic destructiveness of the Nazi regime was also directed at their own people, perhaps no less than at others. Yet, one has to distinguish between letting the furor of the regime prevail over oneself and those we hold dear, and being pounced upon, as in the case of Poland and the Soviet Union. Neither case pertains to the fate of the Jews, with respect to whom the regime, in the name of the German people, set about totally to exterminate them, and the only reason they did not totally succeed (and the German people were relieved of the oppressive regime, as well as the brutalized conquered 16 Leonard H. Ehrlich, "El individuo como portador de la responsibilidad y objeto de la condición de responsible," Folia Humanisitca, Vol XXIV, Barcelona 1986, pp. 121-140. 17 Leonard H Ehrlich, Fraglichkeit der jüdischen Existenz. Philosophische Untersuchungen zum modernen Schicksal der Juden, Freiburg, Munich: Verlag Karl Alber 1993, pp. 299-314. [Henceforth cited as FJE]
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 30 peoples liberated) was the relentless and costly war against Germany. We are not minimizing the suffering of Germans and of conquered peoples by maintaining that the fate of the Jews was incomparable to and not merely an "example" of the suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime on fellow Germans, on my correspondent himself, and on others. To my correspondent "revenge" was tied to my mentioning the German judicial pursuit of Nazi perpetrators. I was astonished and responded as follows: You accuse the Jews of being vengeful. Revenge? You studied Hegel's Philosophy of Right and don't even know the difference between revenge and right? .... Yet something like revenge will no doubt come, because I believe in the nobility of the human being, such as the German. In this way the revenge of the Jews will arise in the form of future generations of Germans who will ask how Germans could have burdened German history and German conscience with the fact of the genocide of the Jews. [FJE 313f.] The correspondent asked, "What does anyone gain from the prosecution of the last guilty grandpa?" My response: Who is "anyone'? A Jew, like me? For me there would be no gain in it; but this is in any case not essential. What is essential is what you as a German after Auschwitz would gain. What you would gain is to be weighed against what you would gain if the last children-father- grandpa-murderer-grandpa would not be brought to court.... I would think that a German in our time would be concerned to prove his worth, vis-à-vis his fellow men (including Jews), among other ways, by his commitment to an unconditional rule of law. [FJE 308f.] One other related (and hair-raising) point made by my correspondent is worth mentioning: "The prosecution of only German war crimes and crimes against humanity is incompatible with equality before the law." My response: You are conceding the validity of the rule of law, though not as unconditionally binding but under the proviso of a quid pro quo, which would be the death of the rule of law. But: How can one trust such a man, especially a German after Auschwitz? It was not clear whose war crimes and crimes against humanity he had in mind. Are the Jews meant? If so, I said, The Nazis tried to label their proceeding against the Jews as a war. But far from having been a "war," it was anything but, because warring means taking each other's measure in a chivalrous way, weapon against weapon. However, the Germans proceeded against the Jews in a criminally illegal and treacherous manner. As regards crimes against humanity, I said: What crimes? Do really believe in the ritual murder accusations, or in the alleged Jewish international communist and financial world conspiracy, or even the murder of the Christian Savior? [What you seem to suggest is not senseless.] The sense is transparent: The German grandpa has to be protected by any means, but the Jew has no right to right. [And if a Jew] raises the question of justice with respect to a German, the Jew is to be branded as vengeful. [FJE 310] Supposing not the Jews were meant but the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity on the part of the Allies, in their war against Nazi Germany. To this I said: This would be even worse, for it means that the crimes against the Jews do not deserve to be unconditionally prosecuted in accordance with the commitment to the rule of law, but may be misused by being held hostage. [FJE 311] From the few excerpts it should be clear that my correspondent not only considered himself, as a German, victimized by what he called the Siegermächte (victorious powers), but by a Jew digging up what to him was "ancient history," interfering with "more important concerns." I mention one other example from an even later time, namely the year after the fall of the communist regimes. A friend of friends of ours in Munich heard I was an American and wanted to speak with me. He was born before the war and raised in Saxony, but his family was able to escape the East German communist regime. During the conversation he soon arrived at what he was aiming at. East Germany, having recently shaken off the communist regime, joined West Germany in a combined nation and was at the beginning stages of building up the neglected cities. The man said, "In that region (Saxony) the Americans have taken out a big mortgage," implying that it was time to pay off. I asked, "Do you mean the bombing of Dresden in January 1945," which he affirmed. I responded, "It is a curious thing. Gorbachev is a decent, intelligent, and courageous man. Nonetheless, when he was invited to speak in East Berlin at the 45th anniversary observance of the bombing of Dresden, he had nothing better to do than to blame the Americans. As a high Kremlin official he surely knew that the Red
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 31 Army had halted east of Dresden, and before proceeding to take the city, they requested, as in other instances, that the Western Allies soften up the expected German resistance by means of a heavy bombardment." The conversation was over; evidently his (and our) friend had inadvertently tricked him into a trap. But I got the message that the Germans were the victims. Our friend must have told him later that I was Jewish. A year later that man took the opportunity to tell me that, like the Jews, he was a victim of the Nazis. In his childhood there was something wrong with his legs, and he was for years under treatment by a devoted physician. He now claimed that if it were not for that physician, the Nazis would have killed him for being "a life not worthy of life." The man made this claim for my benefit. I kept quiet, knowing that that designation did not pertain to him, being intelligent, not moronic or worse, not an unviable cripple, nor psychotic. It did not take much time for me to come to a critical modus operandi with Germans and Germany. To be sure, the thought that occurred to me when I met with Germans my age or older would always be, "What did you do during the Nazi times?" Yet, I decidedly rejected the idea that Germans as such are implicated, and hence to be shunned. The idea of collective German guilt made as little sense to me as the basic assumption of the Nazi extermination policy, namely that the Jew is as such guilty of being a Jew. My critical attitude enabled me to find decent German men and women with whom one could live without doubts or reservations. One whom I need to single out is my friend and colleague, Richard Wisser. Of course, he had two weighty complaints about the Americans. He had been recruited at age sixteen to a flack battery in his hometown of Worms, which exposed him to American carpet-bombing. At the end of hostilities he became a POW, and the Americans, against rules of war, handed him over to the French, who employed him in clearing minefields. His family was Catholic and staunchly anti-Nazi; in the Nazi times their task was to survive them. An uncle, Dr. Friedrich Maria Illert, was the municipal commissioner of the many historic sites of this ancient city of Worms and the city archivist. When the SS wanted to level the famous old Jewish cemetery for use of a sports area, Illert telephoned Himmler himself, explaining how historically important and unique that landmark was. When the Nazis planned the destruction of the twelfth century Rashi synagogue, Illert showed them how to do it, namely placing the explosive in such a way that each of the walls would fall almost intact inward, with the result that after the war this venerable little building would fairly simply be re-erected. He also rescued the old hand-written Mahzor Worms (a high holyday prayer book), which is now deposited in Israel.18 I had invited Wisser to be my German partner in organizing the first international Jaspers conference, convened on the occasion of Jaspers' 100th birthday in 1983. In turn he invited me to participate as resource faculty in the annual international graduate colloquium in Dubrovnik, which he co-directed with Professor Bosniak of Zagreb. Wisser soon perceived how I was smarting under the lasting memory of the Holocaust and my reservations toward Germans. For my sixtieth birthday he brought a poem he composed in my honor, which he read at the farewell dinner of students and faculty at the Mimosa Restaurant. The poem consisted of eight brief eight-liners and ended with a four-liner. Its main theme is that all that stands in the way of peace can be resolved by "God's nearness," the words at the beginning of the poem. Among the many obstacles apostrophized in the poem, I believe one apparently concerned me: der Starrsinn Tiefverletzter, i.e., the obstinacy of those who were profoundly hurt. The poem ends with Nicht ein Gott, der Not God who Abgeschieden, Is hidden, Gottes Nähe God's nearness Ist der Frieden. Is peace. Wisser's sentiment was diametrically counter to that of the other German, represented by my anonymous correspondent. After the section dealing with the latter, I quoted Wisser's poem and added a reply. Upon enumerating the obstacles that would have to be overcome for arriving at the peace of God's nearness, I agree with his sentiment that "Truth is, that God's nearness is the beginning of the cycle of all things and of temporality, a cycle that finds its way back to God's nearness, as is the case with your poem." But: Impatiently you hasten from God's nearness to God's nearness. A Jew knows this impatience: How long, how often, from how many people will You hide Your countenance, a Jew wrangles in this manner with God. How do you treat this Jewish impatience as a Christian and a German? .... God's nearness cannot be conjured.... He directed us from His nearness—not in order to 18 CSE Comment: see http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/worms.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 32 banish us into farness, not to find His nearness in His farness, not in farness impetuously to take His nearness by storm or impatiently to imagine it—but in farness to bring His nearness forth by our effort and labor by means of capacities that we create when we let the resonance of God's nearness sound within us.... God's farness, in which there is whatever and whoever is near to us, is the alphabet entrusted to us with the task of molding it into the speech of God's nearness. What in the farness is next to us, though easily missed and lost, is our only place of creatively offering our temporality so as to attain God's nearness. Our most puny actions are as indispensable as the farness is unavoidable.... What you say is true: "Harmony and discord change constantly" and for God in His nearness they do not count. However, we lose our portion of God's nearness if we do not accept whatever harmony or discord we find ourselves in, as that with respect to which we have to prove ourselves, and precisely in this way let God's nearness descend on us. [FJE 316f.] Through my association with Wisser I met other noteworthy colleagues and friends of our and the next generation, such as Prof. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik and Prof. Ioanna Kuçuradi. From my association with him I also learned much about the meaning and significance of Heidegger, whom Wisser favored. The reservations on the part of Germans against Americans and against Jews, who as such reawaken the disturbing memory of what Germans perpetrated against Jews, had its Jewish counterpart. The reservations of Jews toward Germany, Germans, and anything German, were fully understandable. Yet, such blanket condemnation and ostracism of a whole nation went against my grain. I could not forget that German was my native language, nor the great enlightened humanist philosophers like Kant, nor Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, whose works on tolerance, human hubris and fallibility, and freedom were first spread in Eastern Europe by Jews. But Jews were persecuted by Christians for 1500 years, sometimes in a horribly brutal manner. Or else they were expelled, exploited, at times forcibly converted. And yet, Jews survived; adjusted to the perennial condition under Christianity, sometimes they provided useful services to local princes, who protected them, and at times they produced lasting contributions to their heritage and to the culture of the nations in which they settled. But a comparison with the situation after the Holocaust fails. The Christians did not want the people who supposedly killed their Savior to continue living without repentance and conversion to the true faith. The Nazis wanted Jews to disappear from human society; and the only way thereto was by guile and extermination. And yet, Jews after the Holocaust have to face the fact that there are Germany, Germans, things German. I cannot tell how often I've been asked by family, friends, and others, how can I, as a Jew, go to Germany or associate with Germans? It has been difficult to respond to this without seeming to belittle the understandable pain of the interlocutor. Saying, "I first came to Germany as a soldier of a conquering army, so why not now?" or saying "the Germans" reminds me too painfully of Nazi Germans saying "the Jews." While this worked, it seemed lame to me. "How do you feel as a Jew to come to Germany?" I was amused to hear this question from a German, who was interviewing me for the regional newspaper when I arrived in Kassel as the first appointee to the Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professorship. Apprenticeship Chicago. The war was over. Thanks to the battle stars I had earned and the combat medals I was awarded, I was discharged relatively early, in November 1945. With 180 dollars of discharge money I left for home, which was a small apartment that Edith had rented and furnished when she moved to Chicago earlier that year. I did not have a chance to notify her when I would arrive. When I walked on 52nd Street after I left the train, I caught up with Edith who was walking home after work. We greeted each other right there, and nearby people gasped at the sight of a soldier coming home from the war. For the first time in my life I was my own person. And the question in my mind was, now what? Joe Frani as well as I had been shot at by German snipers while giving first aid, in violation of the Geneva Convention governing warfare. Joe paid with his life, I survived. I was convinced that I had survived for a purpose, that my survival placed me under an obligation. This motivation was intensified when, in the year following the end of the war, I found out, bit by bit, that aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends had been killed in what in time would be called the Holocaust. I was now in great hurry to make up for lost time. With the assurance of a few years of study by means of a fellowship (the GI Bill) granted to veterans, I applied to the University of Chicago, which scheduled exceptional mid-year admissions for returning veterans. I had heard about the serious humanistic undergraduate
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 33 curriculum instituted by President Hutchins, and I looked forward to studying there. I took the entrance exam, qualified, but was told I would not be admitted until the fall. If I wished to do some studying in the meantime, the admissions officer recommended that I apply to a newly founded downtown college. The college, founded at the time President Roosevelt died, was named after him. It was established when the President and the Faculty resigned from YMCA College, in protest against the practice of a racially selective admission policy. The preponderance of students at Roosevelt College consisted of returning veterans, like me. The reason for establishing the college, namely the cause of egalitarianism and social action, affected the student body. While preparing for careers in various fields, an atmosphere prevailed of the need "to make this a better world," a world of peace and social justice, with respect to which each of us would do his part. Other students were younger, having recently graduated from high school. These were largely from ethnic neighborhoods. Most of them were receptive to having that atmosphere suffuse their ambitions. It was an exciting ambience that impacted on the classrooms, provoked discussions, involved some professors, created factions and frictions, and shaped the agenda of student organizations. In my anger over the world I was in and over what I had experienced, I was swept up in those activities. I was elected to the student council and would remain a member throughout my stay at Roosevelt. I was also a leading programming officer and sometime contributor to the Eleanor Roosevelt Forum, a faculty sponsored discussion group. Since the student council functioned without a basic document, I initiated the formation of a group of students, who with the advice and encouragement of some faculty members met for months to write a constitution. It was a heady time, and, instead of entering the University of Chicago in fall 1946, I spent the rest of my undergraduate study at Roosevelt College, and so did Edith. When I entered Roosevelt, with a view toward doing my part of making this a better world, I majored in Chemistry. Two minors were required, for which I chose mathematics and psychology. I became so interested in the latter that at the end of my junior year I decided that a major in psychology would be more conducive to understanding this world and making it better. Most of our professors were excellent. Their enthusiastic sense of pioneering a new idea of a college matched the students' commitment to making a difference in the world. They were accessible. Never before or after did Edith and I have such friendly personal relation with some of the faculty as at Roosevelt. Three names stand out, namely Estelle DeLacy, who taught philosophy, Helmut Hirsch (European History), and Otto Wirth (German Literature). There were a significant number of refugees among the faculty, such as Hirsch and Wirth. At Roosevelt I took my first courses in philosophy. DeLacy taught an introductory course with a concentration on ethics. It did not make an impact on me. The only thing I remember was the following problem posed for discussion: If Bertie McCormick fell into the Chicago River, is it morally incumbent on us to rescue him? McCormick was the owner and Editor of the archconservative Chicago Tribune. I also attended DeLacy's course on Logic. The text by Levi was excellent, covering both formal and informal logic. It would soon be outdated by the introduction of analytic logic. I was interested in the latter when DeLacy mentioned it, but its study would have to wait a few years. I took another course with Professor Marck, a non-Jewish refugee who was expelled from the University of Leipzig because of his leftist leanings. The course was a survey of the History of Philosophy. Unfortunately Marck left the choice of text up to the students, and we chose Russell's book, which had recently been published. Though I was new to philosophy as an academic field, I recognized the superficiality of Russell's treatment, and felt there must be more to those great names. When Jaspers asked me during one of the early interviews whether I had studied any history of philosophy, I mentioned Russell's. Jaspers answered, "er hat sichs leicht gemacht," he made it easy for himself. I was gratified to have Jaspers' corroboration of my uninformed reservations. After graduation we took jobs that would enable us to save money for graduate study in psychology. We knew that we would never be able to afford to do graduate work in the United States on the GI Bill and our savings, and we considered German-speaking universities in Europe. Germany was out, for various reasons. And we were not as yet ready to return to Vienna, our native city. Switzerland remained. We requested the respective descriptions and entrance requirements from Bern, Basel, and Zurich. We heard a lot about Zurich and found it very attractive. However, we could not enter the university until we had lived in Switzerland for at least one year. We decided to spend
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 34 that year at the University of Basel, which had the added attraction of having the famous Carl Gustav Jung on its faculty. At that time we did not know that he had been a Nazi sympathizer, was a closet anti-Semite, and a cult figure among the ladies. In Basel we found that once Jung had been appointed, he lectured for one or two semesters, after which his name in the semester catalogues was followed by the note: "will not lecture." He lent the University his prestigious name, and he attained the coveted professorial title. The exchange rate of the US dollar was then very favorable in Europe. We took $1000 in savings with us, the State of Illinois granted me a veteran's bonus of a few hundred dollars. Both of our fathers died while we were in Switzerland, and Edith's father left her about $500. The GI Bill paid for my fees and tuition at the University and for books, and for eight months of the year granted us a stipend of $105, which fetched Sw.Fr. 450. We felt secure for our stay in Switzerland, but had to be frugal. Basel. The social culture of Basel was then still traditional, and would change gradually in the decades after we left. A small group of patricians and most of the middle class lived in Grossbasel (Greater Basel) on the left bank of the Rhine River. The hoi polloi lived in Kleinbasel (Lesser Basel) on the right bank. Gossip about others was rife. In the vain attempt not to expose oneself to gossip, all that might be judged as ostentation or disorderliness was avoided. Men and women wore plain clothes, and wore them year after year. Women were coifed plainly and appeared without makeup. Housewives would clean their apartment the day before the cleaning woman was expected to come to clean up the apartment. There was disdainfulness not only against the hoi polloi of Kleinbasel but against foreigners. Even native students at the University were reticent to associate with foreigners. Thus it happened that in our first semester our companionship consisted of four foreigners. Aside from the two of us, Jewish refugees from America, there was Heinz from Germany, who was one of the last cadets at Goering's Luftwaffe academy at a time when there were few planes left. The first time he was assigned to combat he jumped over Allied terrain and let the plane crash. Finally, there was H.K., scion of a patrician family of Zurich, whose uncle was on the Basel faculty. Yes, this man from the 60km distant fellow Swiss city was a "foreigner" like us from abroad. But there was the city of Basel. At that time, together with the urban area surrounding it, including across the borders with France and Germany, Basel had fewer than 180,000 inhabitants. Some famous cities readily display their beauty—London in its imperial splendor; Paris with its imposing architecture and spaces subtly juxtaposed over the centuries; Rome's millennial jumble of testimony of man's strife and striving, of universal rule and faith; and Vienna with its monuments to artists, poets, musicians, rulers and heroes, but, above all, in its layout and architecture, to devotion to gentle culture and style. In comparison, Basel can hardly be called beautiful. But it did not take long for Basel to grow on us and captivate us. Some buildings are architecturally noteworthy; but more important is what they bespeak. The location of the city is significant, namely where the upper Rhine River bends north from a westward flow. At the bend is a modern stone bridge that replaced the wooden medieval bridge. For centuries it was the only bridge before the Rhine issued into the sea at the Dutch coast. Because of its location the city was a crossroads since Roman times. From the bridge a short alley leads up the hill to the street that leads to the Minster (cathedral) Square. The alley is named after the eleven thousand virgins who, according to an ancient legend, accompanied St. Ursula when she disembarked at Basel on the way to Rome. On Augustinergasse, on the way to Minster Square, one can see houses dating to the fifteenth century, especially on the riverside of the street. There is also the building that in the nineteenth century was the main University building; presumably that is where Nietzsche met his students, as a young Classics professor. When we were in Basel it was, according to the sign on one side of the entrance, the main building of the Theological Faculty; the other side bore the sign "Begging and peddling strictly forbidden." Past the Natural History and Anthropology Museum on the right, the street narrows as it ends at Minster Square. On the second floor of the corner house was the philosophy seminar during our student years. In the nineteenth century it served as the art history seminar, and the students could watch Jacob Burkhart approaching across the Square with his portfolio of art prints and photographs. The eastern frontage of the square is taken up by a small park of chestnut trees, one of the city's old water fountains, and the cathedral. Across from them are old houses. One of them was in the nineteenth century the Humanistic Gymnasium, where Nietzsche also taught.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 35 Like other cathedrals along the middle Rhine (the three Imperial Domes of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer, as well as the Strasburg Cathedral), the Basel Minster was built of red sandstone. It was rebuilt in the fourteenth century after an earthquake gutted most of it. This part was now built in the early Gothic style. Facing east toward the Rhine, the surviving apse, as well as the nearby portal, is late Romanesque. Flagstones trace the foundation of the early medieval church. One of the few tombs in the Minster holds a woman and her baby, near relatives of Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and established the dynasty that would rule for more than 600 years. Another tomb is that of the famous humanist Erasmus. Going a few steps downhill at the SW corner of the square we pass the little street with the house in which Erasmus lived when he was professor at the recently established University of Basel, and where he died. Our brief walk points to Basel's unique humanistic tradition and its historical focal point. We could go on naming sites associated with events that took place there (e.g., the fifteenth century Church Council), or the notables who resided there briefly or longer (Nicholas of Cusa, Theodor Herzl), or street names of past scholars and artists associated with Basel. Of the latter at least one must be mentioned, namely Hans Holbein the Younger. His prolific output in a relatively short life is scattered all over Europe, especially in England, where at the recommendation of Erasmus he was the portrait painter of the aristocracy, including at the court of Henry VIII. Very few of his paintings are in Basel, his home base. I mention three: first, Holbein's charming portrait of his family; there is no glamour in the depiction of his wife, a hard-working housewife, with their two sweet young children. Another is one of Holbein's several portraits of Erasmus, a poster copy of which hung in my study for fifty years. Then there is a predella depiction of the dead Christ; it is really Jesus who is lying in the tomb, an expired human being, moreover with hardly any sign of the torture of the crucifixion other than the wounds on his hand and chest. Whenever Dostoyevsky stopped at Basel on his way to gambling in nearby Baden-Baden, he would come to gaze at the painting, sometimes for an hour. At the beginning of December 1948, a few weeks after our arrival in Basel, we heard the first of many superb concerts; this one was Bach's Christmas Oratorio. It took place at the Minster, which was full. One could see some students sitting, even dangling under the gothic arches facing the nave. From our seats on the upper tier we could not see the performers. But this heightened the effect of the music, from the first chorus of jubilation to the lections and the lovely arias. In retrospect we learned to be critical of the wild tempos of recent performances. Basel quickly became the stage for the resumption of our humanistic education that was interrupted by the Anschluss, this time filled by unforgettable experiences and with questions to ponder, and the hectic years at Roosevelt receded into a distraction from our true path. Even though the people were not without prejudices, which we would get to feel, Basel seemed like an island of sobriety and sanity, surrounded by a mad world beyond the borders. When the semester finally started, we enrolled in a number of courses of interest to us. In philosophy we attended Professor Herman Friedrich Schmalenbach's seminar and lecture course. The latter was our first class in Basel. Schmalenbach, in his early sixties, shuffled in; he was evidently not well. As he moved toward the podium there arose a great noise, as the students trampled in approving greeting. In other European countries this is accomplished by rapping one's knuckles on the table. Unforgettable are Schmalenbach's first words, uttered in a thin voice: "The eighteenth century ended in 1770, the nineteenth century began in 1830, in between lay the age of Goethe." It made eminent sense, not only politically, the high points of which were the French revolution, the wars of the Napoleonic era, and the treaty of Vienna that established the balance of power among the great nations of Europe. In philosophy it comprised Kant's critical period, the life of Hegel, the earlier Schelling, and the golden age of German literature, with sixty years of Goethe's creativity at its center. For Schmalenbach the course was his contribution to the Goethe-year to come. Unfortunately, Schmalenbach had to stop his courses after a month. Schmalenbach incorporated a historical approach to philosophy. I especially treasured his large book on Leibniz, where he showed the close affinity of Leibniz to the Calvinist-Augustinian theory of Grace and the perennial Western struggle to overcome the Neo-Platonic pantheistic tendency. Over the decades I have thought it a pity that this great work remains unknown. We had enrolled at the university with psychology as our major field of study, which required two minor fields. One of these had to be philosophy, in keeping with the rule in force since philosophical faculties were
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 36 established in the Middle Ages as a "fourth faculty" (after theology, law, and medicine). With Schmalenbach out of the picture, we had to make arrangements with another professor to be our mentor. Upon a fellow student's friendly recommendation I met with Professor Heinrich Barth. No niceties were exchanged. After a few questions, when it became clear that I was American, Barth asked whether I had studied any philosophers more closely. I said, "Russell, Dewey"; unmistakable the subtle smirk of disdain on Barth's face. I continued, "and Nietzsche." That was the end. Barth said, more or less in Basel dialect, as if it were all the same whether or not I understood: "You know, we take philosophy seriously." In later semesters we attended Barth's lectures with great profit. Looking at us, he was pleased to see us there. He evidently was a man of great learning. His delivery was flat, his rhetoric unsparing; whoever was willing to learn from him had to pay untiring and very close attention. From him we learned patiently to devote time to do a close reading of philosophical texts. Every great thinker had his own way of using the elements of his language, as if he had his own language, to which the serious reader must adapt. For philosophy there is no standard language, and especially the translator has to take this into account. In his works, Barth's tightly woven prose presents the reader with its own challenges. Regrettably they are, by and large, forgotten. His historical and systematic explorations—such as of cognition, faith, Existenz, experience—are always guided by Christian theology of faith and reconciliation. There is no transcendental basis for living with the phenomenon of God's generosity in revealing Himself in historically conflicting revelations. With this proviso, occasionally I still consult Barth's works, especially his Erkenntnis der Existenz. Heinrich Barth presented himself as different in every way from his bother, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth. While Heinrich was awkward in speech, Karl's delivery was lively, fluent, sometimes even dramatic, and captivating. Karl gave the impression of a polyhistorian, but he did not hesitate to let his theological neo-orthodoxy shine through, though he proposed it with serious humor. We attended a few of his theological lecture courses, on which the writing of his multi-volume Church Dogmatics was based. He loved music, and when he was invited to the United States, he taught himself English by reading Agatha Christie thrillers. A complex figure, his significance can in a nutshell best be grasped by his consideration of Bach's St. Matthew Passion a failure as an Easter oratorio, in that it dwells only on the death and not on the resurrection of Jesus. Both brothers were orthodox Protestants, and as such took opportunities to criticize Jaspers. Heinrich asked why Jaspers dealt with the gospel of salvation so devoid of love (lieblos), Karl thought Jaspers' talk of "transcendence" to be barren. Jaspers. We enjoyed studying the books we bought at Wepf bookstore next to the entrance to the Alley of the 11,000 Virgins. In the first semester I saw the post-war one-volume edition of Jaspers' Philosophy (900 pages) on the shelf as well as the tome of the recently published first edition of Von der Wahrheit (1050 pages). Many decades ago (1969/1970), in my early memoir of Jaspers, I remembered my reaction to seeing these works, still under the shadow of my post-war anger: "The sheer weight [of these tomes] annoyed me. If there are philosophers today, who are so wise, how does it happen that the world is as it is? Hence all that is prattle and arrogance."19 Well, I had a lot to learn. Surely, nowadays there is a lot of clever but utterly useless prattle produced in the philosophical industry. And surely, the curious combination of humility and arrogance is a phenomenon of free philosophic thought and of great thinkers throughout the ages. Needless to say, I would soon treasure those two main works of Jaspers and would spend considerable effort in the interpretation of them, and on that basis of Jaspers' other works. I also found Jaspers' little paperback on the shelf, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt). I remembered the effect of reading it as follows: On the one hand the book showed me that a philosopher can address the questions of his times, in particular our times; on the other hand it showed me in an exemplary manner how to speak philosophically to the questions of one's time. Even before I knew about Jaspers' suffering under the Nazi regime, in part because of his being married to a Jewish woman, I would also realize the following: The book, written by a German, was to me also a testament of an implacably sober and candid conscientiousness that, in spite of the unforgettable 19 LHE, "Dem lebendigen Geist: Erinnerungen an Karl Jaspers," Erinnerungen an Karl Jaspers, eds. Klaus Piper and Hans Saners, Munich, Zurich 1974, pp. 173-183, here p. 173. [Henceforth cited as DLG]
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 37 guilt with which some Germans burdened the very concept of ‘German', enabled me to say, such a German one can honor, with such a German one can live in brotherhood. [DLG 176] This realization came to me in the course of our first semester with Jaspers. I had first run across Jaspers' name in Gordon Allport's book on the psychology of personality, a text I studied at Roosevelt. Since Schmalenbach and Barth were not available as mentors for our minor in philosophy, we enrolled, in the second semester, in Jaspers' lecture course on philosophy in the late Middle Ages and in his seminar on Nietzsche. In the seminar I enjoyed the papers presented by advanced students, the discussions, and Jaspers' comments. The fact that the level was far above what I brought with me from my teenage exposure to Zarathustra did not matter. I was left with significant and lasting impressions, which I expressed in my early memoir: In Jaspers' Nietzsche Seminar I found the consideration of the ‘relevance' that I was looking for. Even though the focus was not as such on the questions that interested me then, those of freedom, justice, and understanding (verstehen), by virtue of the centrality of the topic "man in time" the seminar came closer to them than the courses of other professors, as well as of Jaspers' lecture course. Jaspers dealt with the given subject matter by means of the interchange of understanding concentration and critical reflection, the search for and ferreting out of limits. With the participants Jaspers dealt with variations of sympathetic earnestness, according to how one presented him or herself: To the dogmatist Jaspers showed his readiness to engage in communication; he was affected by the able critic and let him prevail; the babbler was silenced with humane humor; he rejected the would-be disciple and directed him to think for himself; Jaspers showed irritation only toward an antagonist who would refuse in turn to be open to criticism. [DLG 176] In those years Jaspers' lecture courses, and some of his seminars, were related to his preparation of The Great Philosophers; the first and only volume published in his lifetime appeared in 1956. At Basel the summer semester lasted three months. One third of our first lecture course with Jaspers was taken up with Nicholas of Cusa. I had never heard of Cusanus, and, true to the childhood affliction of beginning philosophy students, especially in our times, I was expecting ‘relevance'. This was one of a number of reasons for my initial reservations about Jaspers; in fact, Jaspers had to struggle to gain my recognition. But this soon changed. I expressed my maturation in an earlier memoir: I was affected by Jaspers' earnest immersion in a given subject matter. It impelled me to base my skeptical reservation against him on an understanding of what there was to understand, with the result that the prima facie reasons for my hesitation to accord him recognition proved to be inadequate and prejudicial. It turned out that the increasing number questions arising in my mind, which became more and more critical, had already been considered by Jaspers. Questions that I thought of in one connection had been taken up by Jaspers, usually in other, more relevant connections, with pointers toward their possible solution. Often, when Jaspers posed a specific problem, he articulated it from a transcendental perspective, and a transcendental problem with respect to its specific consequences: There was no dangling speculation, no phenomenon without understanding its context. It seemed that he provoked the dispute with him in order to cause more effectively the student's immersion in the problem, to think of the possible resolutions, and an understanding of the extent of their relevance. He never said this is so and that is so; whatever he presented was valid within limits, and nothing arrived at certainty. Instead, beyond provoking questions in the student's mind, what was unsettling with Jaspers was that in following his or someone else's thought, the only thing that counted was thinking for oneself. And yet whatever progress I made in my own thinking had something to do with Jaspers' presence, and this deserved to be recognized. The skeptical reservation that was characteristic of my generation was no obstacle, neither for the student nor for Jaspers. In fact, Jaspers seemed to require it. This requirement went hand in hand with another, namely to attain with one's own resources the substance that one can uphold, and by means of one's own capacity to mold the actuality that one can affirm. The challenge which I posed on the basis of my skepticism was now directed toward me, as the result of my direct and indirect mental contention with Jaspers. I realized that the reasons for my reservations were taken seriously and in this way I gained recognition; at the same time I and my generation were confronted with a challenge which one did not meet merely in the critique of the philosophic legacy, no matter how true. This is what I meant when I said that Jaspers had to struggle for recognition: According him recognition was closely connected with being recognized by him by virtue of the challenges the listener to his lectures and seminars could perceive. [DLG 174f, with emendations.] The 200th anniversary of Goethe's birth took place in 1949. Everywhere, especially in German-speaking countries, this was the opportunity to rejuvenate what was set aside during the barbarous Nazi times by invoking the icon of the great "Olympian" Goethe. They
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 38 even brought the old Albert Schweizer to the United States to give a celebratory speech. Symbolically this was in contrast to Schweizer's speech in Frankfurt in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Goethe's death in 1932. At that time he appraised the developing cultural and political situation in Europe as gruselig, dismally frightening. How right he was, more than he or anyone could foresee! Now, an untold number of localities found a reason to celebrate Goethe. On his way to Italy Goethe bypassed the arduous passes across the high Alps and went by way of Styria. This must have been the cue for one of the many radio broadcasts that were scheduled, Goethe und die Steiermark, Goethe and Styria. More importantly, Goethe was celebrated by major speeches in every great city. In Basel the speech was given by Jaspers in the fully packed Minster. And Goethe's plays, especially the first part of Faust, were performed in theaters all over central Europe's map. We attended some of them, not only in Basel but also in Zurich and Vienna. But for us the main event was the spectacularly staged, uncut performance of both parts of Faust at the Goetheanum, the world headquarters of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy movement, to which Goethe was like a prophet. The performance was spread over six days, each with a 3-hour segment. To see and hear the 18-hour performance, we bicycled each day the few miles south of Basel to Dornach in our best clothes. In the following semesters Jaspers continued to present his drafts that in time would be parts of The Great Philosophers. Both his Winter and Summer seminars of 1949/1950 were on Kant. Because of my background in science, Jaspers suggested that I prepare a seminar paper on an article by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, "The Relation of Quantum Mechanics to Kant's Philosophy."20 Weizsäcker's article first appeared during the war, when, as a theoretical and nuclear physicist, he was employed in Nazi Germany's atomic program. At the time we studied in Basel, Weizsäcker had been moving in the direction of philosophy. He was still in his thirties. One time he gave a guest lecture at the University of Basel. He spoke fluently for 75 minutes, without notes or manuscript, and throughout held the interest of the audience. My paper went well, Jaspers was satisfied, and in retrospect I could regard it as my philosophic baptism of fire. Edith was assigned a 20 Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, “Das Verhältnis der Quantenmechanik zur Philosophie Kants“, in Zum Weltbild der Physik, Hirzel Verlag, Zurich 1949, pp. 80-117. difficult topic for a novice, namely the "Paralogisms of Pure Reason," with special reference to a sentence in the "Transcendental Deduction" that had been significant for Jaspers when he characterized the transcendental nature of Existenz: "I do not know myself as I appear to me, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am." Edith also acquitted herself well, although, as she later reminisced, in preparing her paper she sweated blood. Jaspers strictly required that the papers be prepared for a twenty-minute delivery. One Friday evening, at the end of a session of the second Kant-seminar, Jaspers called me and asked whether I would render him "a service of friendship." The next day he was expecting a colleague from America, and he was not sure whether either of them understood the other's language well enough for a conversation. Would I come as interpreter? The guest was Professor Charles W. Hendel, chairman of the Yale Philosophy Department, who was one of the first to lecture about Jaspers in America and to promote the translation of his works. Hendel's main task was to convey to Jaspers Yale's invitation to present the Terry Lectures. Among other reasons for Jaspers' acceptance of the honor was that even a brief appearance in America would promote the translation of his works. Jaspers saw the point, but in the end, with his sincere regrets, had to decline. At that time it was not generally known that Jaspers suffered from a chronic illness, which prevented him from such long and complicated travel. To Hendel Jaspers only hinted at this problem. There followed a memorable discussion about philosophical questions. Hendel brought up questions that did not reflect his own thinking but were meant to represent viewpoints current in American philosophy at that time, which might stand in the way of the reception of Jaspers. I mentioned one as follows: Hendel reported that insofar as Jaspers was known at all among American philosophers, the opinion is current that Jaspers failed to do justice to the importance of the sciences. Jaspers bristled at that. He pointed out that he expected to be recognized as a scientist, that his philosophizing is essentially based on critical reflection on the range and limits of the sciences, and that he regards researching concentration in the sciences to be a presupposition for honest philosophizing. Precisely because of his relation to science his manner of philosophizing should be well received in America. The appraisal of philosophers that Jaspers did not do justice to science is not only inappropriate to his thinking, but a misunderstanding of the nature of science.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 39 A consequence of that conversation was my dissertation about Jaspers' philosophy of science, which I later wrote at Yale, mainly under the direction of Hendel. Hendel often and gladly remembered his encounter with Jaspers, and Jaspers asked about Hendel after many years. [DLG 178] After the meeting with Jaspers, Hendel and I took a walk and we talked. Sitting on a park bench, Hendel asked a few questions about me and took notes. In the meantime, since it was getting late, Edith was getting worried, and, living at that time in a one-room mansard, we had no ready access to a telephone. She finally went to Jaspers' house, where she saw him sitting with his visiting sister, each eating a soft-boiled egg for supper. Jaspers barely suppressed his amusement over a young wife's concern about the husband's whereabouts, and reassured her that most likely Hendel and I were sitting somewhere with some lemonade and chatting. When she returned, I had just come home. After I told her about the afternoon, at her suggestion we called Hendel at the Hotel Euler and invited him for coffee at Cafe Huegenin on Barfüsserplatz and for a walk through old Basel. "I would be delighted!" Hendel said. And he was. Behind the apse of the Minster, looking toward the Rhine, he thought this was the perfect place for thinking. During Winter 1950/1951, our last semester in Basel, Jaspers' seminar was devoted to Kierkegaard. Edith presented a paper on the ‘ethical stage'. The somewhat repressed Swiss swains somehow never believed that we were married ("but you get along so well!"), thinking we were brother and sister. And to hear an attractive young woman speak freely about the relations between the sexes, and marriage, was to them an unprecedented experience. More than ever some tried to make shy advances, one of them actually did, but Edith either did not notice or kept her cool. As to the paper, Edith remembered the following: I remember an episode in Jaspers' Kierkegaard seminar in 1950. I was to hold a Referat on the ethical stage. The relevant pseudonymous literature, the "Or" of Either/Or and the second of the Stages, deals with the relation between the sexes with its focus on marriage, therefore this became the main topic of my paper. In the discussion following my presentation Jaspers asked me, as he was wont to do, whether I would like to present a critical comment, and I expressed what had become very obvious and troublesome to me, namely that it seems to me that in Kierkegaard's view fifty percent of humanity is excluded from the ethical possibility. Jaspers was puzzled and asked me to elaborate, and I pointed out that inasmuch as the ethical is realized with respect to the relation between the sexes, women are the objects of the ethical and never the subjects since it is alleged that they remain within the immediacy of the aesthetic. Even though Jaspers did not buy my—for those days—rather bold interpretation then and there, he did pause to write a brief note to himself. I would like to remind my younger colleagues that in those far-off days women were subsumed, if regarded at all, under the category of man-in-general as in the phrase—considered amusing mainly by men—"man embracing woman", and it took a special willingness to entertain the issue I was raising. Karl Jaspers was willing to listen and perhaps reevaluate somewhat what Kierkegaard said. Possibly my contribution to his copious notes on the emancipation of women, especially in connection with his discussion of Kierkegaard's breakup with Regine Olson and the "ethical stage" in his drafts for what was to be his major treatment of Kierkegaard (drafts that I translated),21 are in part the result of my speaking up half a century before.22 Even before Hendel's visit we tended more toward the study of philosophy than continuing with psychology, but his visit proved to be decisive. While we continued to progress toward the completion of our psychological dissertations, I on leadership, Edith on ideology, our hearts were less and less in it. Our director, Dr. Hans Kunz, was more a phenomenological-philosophical psychologist than empirical, and was never available to us for consultation. In the years at Basel we also studied with other noteworthy professors. Professor Ranke was a superb historical scholar of German language and literature. In ethnology we studied with the old Professor Felix Speiser. Like other European scions of moneyed families, he had been a pioneer field-researcher early in the century of the cultures of New Guinea and the Melanesian islands; one of these researchers became world-famous, namely Bronislav Malinowsky. One can imagine how Edith felt when one time Speiser brought an embalmed and tattooed Maori head and placed it next to her on the table. Professor Adolf Gasser had made a name for himself with his unsparing radio commentaries on the German political 21 See Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, vol. IV, M. Ermarth and LHE, eds., E. Ehrlich, trans.; Harcourt Brace (New York 1994), p. 208ff, p. 261ff. 22 Edith Ehrlich, “Jaspers on Women" in Karl Jaspers' Philosophie: Gegenwärtigkeit und Zukunft / Karl Jaspers's Philosophy: Rooted in the Present, Paradigm for the Future, eds. LHE and Richard Wisser, Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2003, p. 299.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 40 scene during the Nazi times. His lecture course on constitutional history with stress on England was of great interest to me. Gasser wanted me to translate his book into English and have it published; however, I was not ready to undertake such a task. Professor Rudolf Lauer-Belart was an expert on the Roman limes, who, as the curator of antiquities of Augusta Raurica (east of Basel), was responsible for major archeological digs there. Also a scholar of prehistoric cultures, he assigned me to present a paper on the Ipiutaq tribe of Southern Greenland as a contemporary stone-age culture. Professor Edgar Salin was an economist and sociologist, who, like Jaspers, had belonged to the circle around Max Weber, later also to the Stefan George circle. He had Edith prepare a paper on the political economy of the Bloomsbury Group; in later semesters Salin sent students to her to borrow the paper for study. For us the most interesting courses in psychology were Professor John Staehelin's case study demonstrations at the Friedmatt Psychiatric Clinic, whose director he was. It was the clinic where friends brought Nietzsche after his breakdown in Turin. Professor Heinrich Meng, who was a disciple of Freud and had been psychoanalyzed by him, drew a crowd of devotees to his psychoanalytic colloquium, which we attended for several semesters. He tried very hard to be patient listening to my criticisms. All in all, in our Basel years we were privileged to have received a remarkably varied education and incomparable experience in scholarship. And we accumulated a solid core of a superb research library; the high points being Kant's works, Jaspers' available books, and a subscription to the Artemis edition of Goethe's complete works. The GI Bill fellowship was about to run out, and we would have to leave Basel by the time of the start of the summer semester. For the summer Jaspers announced a seminar on the philosophy of myth, in preparation for his contribution to the demythologizing controversy. Though I would not attend the seminar that was of great interest to me, I wrote a paper for it so that Jaspers would have an additional basis for sending a recommendation to Hendel when I would apply to Yale. I wrote it in Göttingen, where we spent three weeks of the March/April recess for a special colloquium on religion in post-war Germany. My paper dealt with Plato. I showed that his thinking was not simply a replacement of mythos by logos, but mythos was retained in its distinct function. A few days before we left Basel we went to bid Jaspers goodbye, at which time I gave him my paper. He asked us to see whether we could translate his General Psychopathology and have it published at a suitable publishing house. If we succeeded, he would share the royalties with us. Jaspers went to his desk and made a note to himself to that effect. In the remaining time we packed and dispatched our two trunks, visited the Art Museum one more time, and took a last walk on the right bank of the Rhine with its incomparable view across the river of the Minster and its surroundings. On the day we left Basel, I called Jaspers, who praised my paper and advised that I have it published. Since in Germany there was not as yet a suitable philosophical journal, he suggested I translate it and publish it in America. We boarded the train, and, as it slowly rolled toward the French border, we wistfully took a last look at the city we have come to love, where we spent the most formative two-and a-half years of our lives, and grew into who we were meant to be. I share one more lasting impression of my experience as a student of Jaspers: The post-war student will not forget the ambience of Jaspers' seminars in his first years in Basel. Students were sitting side by side who had been separated by the abyss of the recent past. It was not only a matter of being veterans of the two sides of the late battlefronts. The rifts were more profound, especially the one between German and Austrian students and the Jewish students, including such as had survived or escaped the catastrophe. The wounds were ever present, the anguish not yet defined, the anger as yet undirected. In this situation they ostensibly engaged in the critical study at hand, propelled by seething questions which were never far from the surface, and thusly engaged they were prodded to learn the arduous combat for the truth by means of the arsenal of communicative reason, forgoing the destruction of the other, and requiring the clarification, the commitment and the testimony of one's own substance. The heroes were neither the ones who agreed too readily nor the dogmatic proponents of their own certainties; the villains were those who were present as critics only, without presenting themselves or their substance for criticism. Many students on both sides of the abyss, having been set adrift from the mainstream of their respective heritages, regained their bearings and their affirmations within them through the orienting discipline of communicative reason.23 23 LHE, "Tolerance and the Prospect of a World Philosophy," in Karl Jaspers Today: Philosophy at the Threshold of the Future, eds. Leonard H. Ehrlich and Richard Wisser, Washington: American University Press 1988, p. 99.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 41 New York. We spent the next three years in or near New York City. The first order of business was to find an interested publisher for a translated version of Jaspers' General Psychopathology. A publisher had us submit a sample translation of a fairly long chapter. He "looked with favor" on our work, but found that he was in no position to publish such a work at that time. (It would be some time before we oriented ourselves in the academic publishing field, especially the university presses). We informed Jaspers of the negative result of our search. Since, in the next few years, we had nothing more to report, Jaspers felt free to commit the task, when the opportunity arose, to collaboration between the University Presses of Manchester, Chicago, and Toronto. The book was the last revision of General Psychopathology, which Jaspers rewrote during the war years. It contains sections that are mainly philosophical (especially in Parts V and VI), marking the limits of the psychological and psychiatric approaches to the question "what is man?" Considering how philosophy had deteriorated in England by the late 1950s, it is no wonder that the translators found no helping guidance for the translation of some vital philosophical words and passages. The translators admitted to this: We have translated the philosophical terms as best we could. We were not able to get much help from translations of Jaspers' philosophical works nor from other writings. These translations have not been consistent nor particularly happy, and, on advice from our colleagues in the University Department of Philosophy, we decided to go our own way, keeping the other translations in mind as much as possible.24 Dr. Hoenig, one of the two translators, reiterated the lack of help from English philosophers of those days, when he spoke at a meeting of the North American Jaspers Society some forty years after the publication of the book. The translators were bewildered by what they thought were Jaspers' coinage of untranslatable new uses of words, such as Verstehen in distinction from Erklären. Some of the examples they gave of Jaspers' formulations demonstrate their lack of understanding, and the absence of useful help: Terms such as "Existenz" (Existence itself), "Dasein" (Existence as such; existence in a world; human existence), "Sein" (Being), "So-Sein" (Being-Thus), "Das 24 "Translators' Preface", in Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1962, pp. viii f. [Henceforth cited as TP] Umgreifende" (that which encompasses, the Encompassing) or "Geist" presented some of our greatest difficulties. The latter we found impossible to render by any single English word. It appears as "mind," "spirit," "culture," according to the context. [TP ix] When we turned to translation late in our life of scholarship, we had learned much from the mistakes of Dr. Hoenig and Miss Hamilton, as well as those of Ralf Manheim and E. B. Ashton. Several of my articles take up the problems of translation.25 In New York I also translated my paper on Plato on Myth. In time I submitted it to International Philosophical Quarterly, who did not want it; and to Paul Weiss' Review of Metaphysics. Weiss thought it publishable, but had a backup of selected articles for several years. I laid it aside; I do not know whether it is still of interest, but I hope to include it in my collected essays on Fundamental Philosophy,26 to document the beginning of my development. Our money ran out, we had no place to live, and we had to find jobs that would tide us over for a while. We spent a few months as house parents in a home for neglected and abandoned children, whose parents could not or would not take care of them, and a few more months in a home for disturbed juvenile delinquents, both in the country near the city. Thanks to our background in psychology, we were successful in raising the level of mental and educational development of the abandoned children. But the work was very hard, and when I lost 15 pounds, we decided to move to the other job. It was amazing the tricks the delinquent teenagers tried to play on me. But before long I earned the sobriquet they devised for me: "the detective" and "hawk-eye Ehrlich." One time one of our charges hit me and knocked out the bridge that repaired my wartime injury. To uphold my authority, I had to do what I never thought I would do. I threw him to the floor and gave him a beating. And went to the 25 LHE, "Jaspers and the Great Philosophers," Massachusetts Review, Vol. X, Amherst 1969, pp. 383-393. LHE, "Jaspers on the Intersection of Philosophy and Psychiatry," Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol 14, 2007, pp. 75-78. LHE, "Translating the Star," in Rosenzeig Jahrbuch/Rosenzweig Yearbook, Vol. 1: Rosenzweig Heute/Rosenzweig Today, Freiburg, Munich: Verlag Alber 2006, pp. 270-279. 26 CSE Comment: Unfortunately, LHE did not have the opportunity to put together this volume.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 42 Director and quit. I gave four weeks notice, during which I expected my bridge to be replaced, and it was. In the city again, we set ourselves up in a small apartment in Queens and took regular jobs. Edith was supervisor in a firm that audited the circulation of trade publications. I worked as a claims adjuster in a large ocean marine insurance company in the Wall Street district. The employment agent, who telephoned the company to see whether they were interested, described me as tall and blond; I understood: not Jewish. And when I was hired, I met dozens of the hundreds of employees, none of them Jewish. There was one known Jew, the treasurer of the company. One time Tom, my friend there, intelligent and educated, went down the elevator with me for our lunch break. The elevator was operated by an Irishman, past fifty, who still spoke with a brogue. As we neared the lower floors, the treasurer left the elevator, and the operator said, "He is a Jew, they did not fight in the war." I thought I would go through the roof, and just when I was going to say that the Irish survived the war under the protection of the British navy, while refusing to let the British have an airbase that would extend the air force range against German U-boats by two days. But before I could utter a sound, Tom put his hand over my mouth and pushed me out of the opened elevator door. In spite of the cloud of anti-Semitism I did quite well, what with my ability to decipher damage surveys in different languages. Fairly soon I was promoted from third desk second row to third desk window row. I was fascinated by the ocean marine contract under whose provisions many of the claims were settled. The idea was that owners of cargo share in the loss if one or only some cargoes were damaged or lost. The practice of shared risk arose in the ancient Greek maritime trade, especially when stormy conditions required dumping some cargo overboard, or pirates forcefully took possession of it. This practice was later adopted by Roman trade shippers and, it is said, much later by Arab traders. This is called "general average." In time insurance companies, especially Lloyd's of London, took the risk for a fee and caused the practice to be codified. Interestingly, the modern contract consists of the basic codification of some centuries ago, which functions as a preamble for the many clauses that, in effect, modify the provisions of the preamble to the extent of abrogating it. When, after two some years I gave notice to enter Yale, I was assigned to spend the last month unraveling and settling a general average claim that had lain in the files for sixteen years and that no one wanted to touch. The maritime contract and how it came to be was to me a noteworthy example of concrete practice evoking a guiding idea, whose progressive definition is achieved, over generations and ages, through realization in practice. Yet, ideas never present themselves for final definition because we do not confront ideas as objects, but we move within ideas. This stands in contrast to Hegel, when he gave in to the temptation of applying the Christian theological idea of supersession (whereby the Old Testament was superseded by the New Testament) to the dialectic of the Spirit's concretion in time, where the later sublates the prior. This feature of Hegel's philosophy of the spirit gave rise to historicism. In New York we presented ourselves at the Columbia University Philosophy Department for possible admission to the graduate program. Chairman Professor Irwin Edman and Professor James Gutmann, one of the last American traditional scholars of German philosophy, were satisfied with our credentials and ready to recommend our admission. We were not ready to submit formal applications, since we wanted to see how things would work out with Yale, once we were financially ready to apply there. In the meantime we both took seminars, one with Professor Jacob Loewenberg on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the other with Gutmann on Nietzsche. Loewenberg had recently come from the University of California, Berkeley; it was the time of Senator McCarthy's wild witch hunting, and California required all professors to sign a loyalty oath. Loewenberg refused, because he viewed it as a step toward fascism. Gutmann was in the process of writing a tract on Nietzsche, and seemed upset with our presenting papers that were a step ahead of him. He never wrote the tract. He was also miffed that we did not apply to Columbia, and went to Yale. We liked Gutmann, and, glad that he was interested in our studying there, we felt sorry to have disappointed him. I also took two seminars with Fr. Daniel Walsh, one on Thomas Aquinas, the other on Duns Scotus. The only place I know of where Walsh is mentioned in print is in The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. Walsh was Merton's teacher, as well as advisor and friend. A learned scholar, Walsh was kindly and retiring. He supported my application to Yale with an excellent reference.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 43 Even though I had a GI Bill stipend that took me through college and graduate study in Basel, we were not aware of the benefits of scholarships and fellowships. After three years of saving the money that would enable us to finish graduate study, I entered Yale in 1954, Edith one year later. In 1953 Hendel had invited us to New Haven, where he explained what is involved in the graduate program leading to a PhD. Two foreign language exams have to be passed in the first semester. A certain number of seminars normally spread over three years, with at most one year's credit for graduate work at another university. To qualify for writing a doctoral dissertation one has to complete and pass four four-hour preliminary exams (History of Philosophy; Logic and Philosophy of Science; Metaphysics and Epistemology; Ethics and Aesthetics). At that time I also met the Graduate Program Director Frederic Brenton Fitch, who was Professor of Logic, and who had devised a new way of structuring modern analytic logic. In preparation of entering the program, I studied Fitch's book on his system of logic and brushed up on my French. Yale turned out to be my bridge from apprenticeship to maturity. During my two years at Yale, I began to take critical looks at then current philosophical orientations. These critiques would prove to be seminal for the development of my own thinking. Maturity Yale. We moved to New Haven into a low-rent small apartment reserved for married veterans. It was in a Quonset hut settlement near the Yale football field, which was built during the war to house soldiers in an army program at Yale. The housing was primitive, but never again would we live in such an exclusive neighborhood of professionals. When I entered Yale, I was surprised and gratified to learn that I had been granted a University Fellowship or Scholarship; I have forgotten which. However, even with the stipend, with savings, and with Edith commuting to her job in New York for another year, I had to take a part-time job in the Yale library. I carried a full load of courses, and additionally I audited some. Soon I found out the makeup of the Department that Hendel had built after he came from McGill University in 1940. As he told me, his hiring policy was not to duplicate the orientation of any other faculty member. Thus it happened that some of the movements that began to flourish in the 1950's were represented in the department. Carl Hempel and Arthur Pap represented what came to be known as logical positivism. Hempel had been associated with the Berlin Group before he had to emigrate to the US. The much younger Pap leaned more toward the—by then—defunct Vienna Circle. I audited both their courses. Their movement denied the meaningfulness of metaphysics, by virtue of the (metaphysical!) principle according to which the only meaningful knowledge was analytical logic applied to empirical givens. Pap was very friendly toward me, even when he perceived that I could not follow his orientation. In America positivists went so far as to begin the publication of an encyclopedia of the unified sciences. Because of its nature the project had to remain unfinished. The results achieved in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) are neither absolute nor final. As I learned from Jaspers, and as later in part propounded by scholars such as Thomas Kuhn, results in science are achieved relative to presupposed paradigms. When anomalies occur in the course of research, the scientist has to invent other paradigms. For me the most cogent example of this was the shift in the eighteenth century from the phlogiston theory of chemistry to Antoine Lavoisier's theory that matter consists of elements, that these are distinguished by weight, and that in changes of state, matter is preserved. Rulon Wells represented what would be known as analytic philosophy and language analysis. Leibniz, who as the inventor of the calculus was a favored historical philosopher for the analytically oriented thinkers, was the subject of a seminar I attended the first year. Wells conducted the seminar without stressing his own orientation, and the students were able to treat Leibniz simply as a great historical figure. The somewhat long paper I presented was influenced by Schmalenbach's book and was favorably received by Wells. In a seminar on Wittgenstein, Wells had the Blue Book and the Brown Book mimeographed (ahead of their publication in 1958) and distributed copies to the students. I audited the seminar; I must confess that Wittgenstein bewildered me. The Tractatus I understood, not so the tracts on language games. The devotees of Wittgenstein may have missed the implication of his Tractatus. Where Wittgenstein suggests, under the positivistic presupposition, that only "propositions of natural science" can be meaningfully said, then propositions of metaphysics are devoid of meaning (6.53); metaphysics is relegated to the "mystical" (6.522), about which "one must keep
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 44 silent" (7). Pears and McGuinness show a gross misunderstanding of the phrase "darüber muß man schweigen," which they translate as "we must pass over in silence." Unlike the Pears-McGuinness rendering, the correct translation is clearly personal, i.e., directed to the reader who duly followed the tortuous ways and byways of the Tractatus. The reader of the Tractatus surely wonders how one can say that one has to keep silent about the mystical without talking about the mystical, though here negatively. Indeed, almost all that Wittgenstein says from 6.41 to that last sentence is a matter of speaking whereof one cannot speak. I am assuming that the printed word is a kind of speaking, even as speaking is the linguistic articulation of thought. And, if one really were to speak of what according to Wittgenstein proposes to keep silent about, one would shut down the elemental means of man's conversing about what becomes clarified mainly by critique and communication. With few exceptions, most of the laconic declarations of those final sentences cry out for elaboration, about which libraries amassed untold volumes over the centuries. Who can say that the imagery of ideas is not equally fundamental to man's being in time, as is the conceptual articulation of experience that is the sine qua non of scientific inquiry and theorizing? And is not the formation of theories a matter of transcendental reflection? Furthermore, what is the status of the transcendental presupposition that only propositions of natural science can be meaningfully said? I would be puzzling over this, which would lead me to try to disclose the fundamental phenomena of thought. I began to formulate this soon after graduating Yale. Aside from some sketches and notes, the duties of my academic career kept me from working things out until retirement. Professor Fitch (at that time the director of graduate studies) was the main proponent of analytic logic. He had devised his own method of unfolding the system of logic (the introduction-eliminations method). In preparation of studying at Yale, I studied Fitch's Logic on the subway rides to and from my insurance job. Modern logic fascinated me, and with my preparation I enrolled in Fitch's Intermediate as well as Advanced Logic courses. After a few weeks Fitch advised me to drop the latter for the time being, which I did. I started to apply what I had learned. One time, when I had difficulties with formalizing a certain dialectical practice of Duns Scotus (I have forgotten which), I consulted Fitch, and, from what he said, I gathered that I went the wrong way and to succeed I would have to start differently. Thus, near the beginning of my preoccupation with analytic logic, it dawned on me that while analysis provides the opportunity for fascinating games, it is a waste of precious time to apply it to something that one understands philosophically. This insight stood me in good stead to survive later on, when analytic "philosophy" descended on the Department in which I held a position. Keeping Jaspers' response to Hendel's provocative report about how in America colleagues thought he did not regard the importance of science, I tended toward writing a doctoral dissertation on Jaspers' philosophy of science. In preparation I wanted to inform myself about the current treatment of the philosophy of science in America. To that end I audited Professor Henry Margenau's course. Though not a regular enrollee, I participated frequently, one time even correcting Margenau's reading of Kant. At that time the debate about the rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union in producing arsenals of atomic weapons reached a highpoint. Margenau maintained that this is not a matter for politicians (or philosophers) but for scientists. I expressed doubt about this. There was a certain rapport between us in and out of class. When we were at a social gathering together, I regaled his wife (who was also German) with jokes about the different Austrian linguistic usage from that of northern Germany. One time Margenau called me to his office and offered me a fellowship, if I were to write a doctoral dissertation under his direction on the philosophical foundations of the calculus. This was an honor and a welcome recognition of my promise; besides, who would refuse such an offer of a generous fellowship, especially by one still at the limit between poverty and barely getting by? But I did decline, for reasons of my already formed plan. Another professor invited me to write a dissertation under his direction, namely John E. Smith. Smith was one of the younger members of the faculty. I took a course with him on Ethics. I liked his youthful enthusiasm and wrote a lengthy term paper for him on four paradoxes of ethics in Kant and Max Weber. Smith thought that my systematic approach would be an excellent basis for writing a dissertation. Having other plans, I did not respond to his kind invitation, reserving the project for a later time, which regrettably never came. Smith's book on Royce's social infinite alerted me to Royce. Actually, I had heard about Royce at
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 45 Columbia in the Hegel seminar that was taught by Loewenberg, who was Royce's student. I became interested in Royce's thinking about the problem of evil, about his struggle, both with maintaining what used to be called objective idealism and with the transcendent source of ideas. Closely associated with Smith's metaphysical orientation was Professor Paul Weiss. Weiss became well known when in partnership with Charles Hartshorne he edited the collected papers of Charles Sanders Pierce for publication. I audited some courses with Weiss and participated like a regular enrollee. His style of teaching was unlike that of any other professor. He was physically active, rushing from one end of the front of the lecture hall to the other, and when he spoke he did so elaborately. It was refreshing. I visited him in his office a number of times and soon realized that he was somewhat suspicious of me. He told me of his academic tourism to Germany, an activity in vogue with budding philosophers since William James and Royce. Only the latter stayed long enough to study for a year. Weiss told of visiting Husserl, who told him that philosophical study must be based on thorough study of German philosophy. I knew that Husserl himself was contemptuous, for example, of Schelling, but silently I thought what Husserl said made sense to me. The accusatory tone in which Weiss told about Husserl, and my unflinchingly keeping silent, signaled that he associated me with that German haughtiness. The last time we encountered each other at an annual meeting of the APA/East he grudgingly responded to my greeting with something like a grumble. I was critical of Weiss' preoccupation with ontology and system building; I asked myself how can a mere human, bound in time and his own temporality, capture in thought all there is. Weiss spent many years writing his main work in ontology under the title Modes of Being. It was structured almost like a modern version of Spinoza's Ethics with numbered items from the presuppositions to the conclusion. He had a preliminary draft bound in paperback, which he sold to the students in a seminar devoted to the book. Edith took it for credit. One time when she spoke up, she said, "It seems to me, Professor Weiss, that in your book you are taking a God's eye view of the world. Since you, too, live in this world and are part of it, it seems to me that you are in no position to see it from the perspective of someone outside [the world]. Only God can do that." Weiss' response was to wave her off. She was now persona non grata. I felt indebted to Weiss for introducing me to Bradley's Logic, which he used as a text. The book was a vain attempt of providing a logic of dealing with spiritual ideas, at a time when positivism in connection with the reception of Whitehead and Russell's Principia were laying the foundation for a natural science-oriented formalism that would prove to be a philosophic wasteland. There were two professors who were experts on Whitehead, Christian and Nathaniel Lawrence. Regrettably I did not have a chance to study Whitehead, then or later, though I dabbled in some of his major works with great interest. Another professor whom I audited was F.C.S. Northrup. It was as difficult as it was fascinating to listen to his extempore presentations. The reason was that he thought within the framework of an idiosyncratic fundamental theory developed over decades and reflected in his voluminous output. His students, myself included, did not know the structure or the fine-points of that epistemological-metaphysical theory fully to appreciate his presentations. One thing that gave me pause was his taking particular credit for having discovered and identified a universal consciousness of a fundamental perception of an "undifferentiated continuum," as exemplified in the biblical Tohu-vaVohu and Eastern ideas such as the Indian Atman-Brahman. I thought that while the respective functions of the identified ideas are different, one could regard them as modes of transcendence. Robert S. Brumbough taught a seminar surveying Aristotle's corpus of writings. It fell to me to report on the History of Animals, a compilation of observations (many by Aristotle) interspersed by reports of hear-say (some bizarre). I had one hour to report on what, with 800 pages in the standard Oxford edition, is surely one of the longest books of ancient Greece, and certainly of Aristotle. The young George Lindbeck taught a seminar on Medieval Philosophy. While I did not take this for credit, I decided to brush up on what I had learned at Basel and Columbia, and presented a paper on Duns Scotus' De prima Principia. With Professor George Schrader I continued my study of Hegel's Phenomenology. Though an auditor, I presented a paper on Kierkegaard and Hegel, not my best effort, but fortunately Schrader was not prepared to discuss the comparison. Schrader and I hit it off well. The last time I saw him was in 1989, at the conference held at Yale in commemoration of Heidegger's 100th birthday.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 46 Professor Brand Blanchard, one of the seniors in the Department, taught two very useful seminars, on metaphysics and on ethics. Everybody knew that he was in charge of the metaphysics portion of the big exam. I audited the metaphysics seminar; Edith enrolled in the ethics seminar, in which Blanchard critically examined the different kinds of ethical theory. Edith took copious notes, which would soon come in very handy. Blanchard was an impeccable gentleman, a soft spoken spokesman for reason. His thinking was driven by a kind of idealism, whose vision changed over the decades. Yet, unlike Weiss', his teaching was never explicitly doctrinal. He kept his debates about matters concerning his philosophy out of the classroom and restricted them to colleagues in Britain and the United States, starting with G.E. Moore. It seemed he knew every philosopher who was somebody. In his youth he made the mandatory trek to Germany, which left him with a genteel animus against German mentality and philosophy, though he admitted some influence by Hegel. He never berated anybody; instead his polemical tools included subtle sarcasm and restrained name-calling. (He referred to Hitler as the dervish from Berchtesgaden.) A fellow student, who was about to spend a semester in Germany, was admonished to have chip on his shoulder when it comes to the likes of Heidegger. With reference to Kant's idea of freedom in its relevance to the categorical imperative, I remember him saying, "Isn't it odd that the founder of modern indeterminism is named 'I can't'?" In a private conversation with Blanchard I mentioned Jaspers. With reference to "Existenz" Blanchard responded wondering how the emotive can occupy a place in philosophical thought. (Weiss understood Existenz to mean what Bergson referred to as élan vital, which as such should be included in his ontology.) What summarized Nietzsche's philosophy for Blanchard was "might makes right." It seemed that the ignorance, out of which English-speaking philosophers were disdainful of German philosophy, was worse than the not inconsiderable knowledge of English-written philosophy on the part of German philosophers led them to its dismissal. Blanchard was an utterly lovable man, and Edith and I met him occasionally in later years. But there was an incident when Blanchard's own thinking broke through, which left us bewildered: in which universe was he at home? Referring to the cruelty perpetrated in the Nazi camps, Blanchard said, if only I could have spoken to the camp guard, I would have convinced him that his activity does not accord with reason. Professor Hendel, who had brought us to Yale, was like a friend. He monitored our progress, not only as departmental Chairman. We did not take any of his courses. One time I visited his undergraduate course on Existential Philosophies, when the topic was Jaspers. When he saw me, he was discernibly uncomfortable; I did not attend again. In his youth Hendel liked what Princeton President Woodrow Wilson had done with the curriculum. When Hendel arrived, Wilson had been elected Governor of New Jersey. Hendel was on both sides of the Atlantic a highly respected interpreter of Hume. He was honored with the donation of one of the remaining stone steps leading to Hume's home. And he was appointed to give the Gifford Lectures spread over two years. They were never published, regrettably, since we would have liked to have read them. Hendel was to our knowledge the only professor at Yale to have studied and promoted the study of German philosophy past and present. He arranged for a three-year appointment for Ernst Cassirer to be able to come to the US. There was some hesitation. Some members of the Yale faculty went to New York City to interview his daughter. They were concerned over the reputed Kapazitätsbewußtsein (consciousness of one's authority) of German professors. Somewhat exasperated the women said, "I came to America ready to sell stockings, I never thought I would have to sell my father." It was high time when the deal finally came through. Cassierer was on the last trip of a Swedish passenger liner before war broke out between the US and the Axis powers. While Cassirer was at Yale, Hendel arranged with the Yale Press to undertake the translation by Ralph Manheim of Cassirer's three-volume work The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The work was published with a learned 65-page "Introduction" by Hendel in 1953, eight years after Cassirer died. While at Yale Cassirer also wrote An Essay on Man and began to write The Myth of the State. The latter work, which was his last, was finished while Cassirer was at Columbia, where he died the day after President Roosevelt's death and about three weeks before the surrender of Nazi Germany. How seriously Hendel pursued openness to German culture and thought was displayed at one of several occasions when we were invited to his home. Mrs. Hendel was an exemplary hostess. By means of a push button by her seat she was able to keep the uniformed maid discretely busy. The other couple at
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 47 the table was Amelie and Richard Rorty. When we talked about music, I admitted that for my taste some of the then contemporary German music used dissonance excessively. Mrs. Hendel asked what about Beethoven's late quartets? I knew that Beethoven's use of dissonance was not excessive, but thought it better not to demur. In the living room Mrs. Hendel played for us a recent recording of Strauss' Arabella. Neither Edith nor I had heard that opera, and listened to this cheerful music with enjoyment. But poor Amelie! For her music stopped with Bach, and she had to sit for two hours listening to what must have been abhorrent to her. I never knew what was to Richard's taste. At the end of my second year I took my preliminary exams. Four general subjects, each four hours, administered every other day. Somewhat exhausted after the second set, I came home to our cozy Quonset, where Edith served me a refreshing lunch. When I had finished and was beginning to relax from the stress, Edith, sitting across from me, informed me that periodic contractions indicated that our first child was on the way. A call to the doctor assured Edith that at the present rate there was no reason why she could not take her final exam in Blanchard's ethics seminar. When it was time to bring Edith to the exam, another call to the doctor told us to bring her to the hospital instead. Nonetheless baby Carl was not born until the wee hours the next day. I was not prepared to spend a sleepless night, but had the foresight to bring Edith's notes from the ethics seminar to review for the next prelim exam. In those days the modernization of the hospital birthing procedure had advanced far enough to keep husbands in the labor room until the woman was taken to the delivery room. Thus I spent hours following instructions and massaging Edith's back. With the other hand I held the notes, studied them, and between Edith's moans asked her about words I could not read. At 4 am I was sent to the waiting room, and Edith was taken away. Close to 6 am I was roused from a nap and told by Dr. Stuehrmer that I was the father of a very fine boy. Looking out the window, I saw the dawn rising over Yale and New Haven, and I knew a new, as yet unknown, segment of my life was starting, with responsibilities especially to this new earthling. After a while I was shown the tiny baby; his eyes were not open yet, but I could see by the slight movements of the shoulders that he was not wasting time to accommodate to the unaccustomed environment. Soon Edith was set up in her room. When I saw her with the baby on her arm, she looked as if she had naturally been the very image of a mother all along, as if the discomfort and sleeplessness of the previous 20 hours did not happen. We were unspeakably happy and gratified. Nonetheless, both of us needed to sleep. At home I affixed a notice to the Quonset door: "It's a boy. I am going to sleep." Soon our widowed mothers came, one from New York, the other from Chicago. It was evident that they had not changed diapers for decades. Each wanted the child to be named in commemoration of his late grandfather. We named him( םײח לילכklil hayim), meaning a completion of lives. Both names reverberate in his secular name, Carl Stephan. When I met Hendel on the street at Yale, he informed me that I passed the prelims, and I could go ahead with choosing a doctoral dissertation topic and a director. I reminded him of that incident with Jaspers in Basel (which he remembered as well) and of the topic that I would like to pursue under his direction. He informally agreed and told me of some of the criticisms voiced in the committee that read and evaluated the prelims. The most telling was that I had not sufficiently regarded American philosophy, a criticism offered mainly by Smith and Weiss. Hendel assured me that with the prelims behind me, I should simply continue to proceed on my way. He expressed his expectation that I would introduce Jaspers in American philosophy. Soft-spoken as Hendel was, he did not hesitate to criticize, disagree, and correct. He did not go along with some of the professors he brought into the department. Hendel was the ideal chairman and department builder; I measured others in that position against him. None measured up. At mid-century TIME magazine had an annual feature, Goodbye Mr. Chips. When Hendel retired, they wrote that at some time he was referred to as "old honey and iron"—a most fitting sobriquet. When it was time to entrust the baby for a few hours with me, Edith called Blanchard to give the rather unusual reason for missing the final ethics exam. Blanchard arranged for a time to administer the exam at his office. On a Saturday during summer recess the baby and I took Edith there, we waited a while, but no Blanchard, so we went home. In time Blanchard called with effusive understated apologies. He insisted on visiting us at our stately Quonset, to leave the exam for Edith to do at her leisure at home. What a sweet gentleman! We bought a bassinette that one could place on a rack. The baby had a place to sleep for a few months. A neighbor donated a little swing chair, another a
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 48 tabletop electric washing machine in which we could do the diapers. We were poor, but seemed settled for a while. I had the library job for the summer. Assigned to check borrowed books at the exit, I could devote myself to writing my term papers. Sometime in the summer I was given two week's vacation. The Rortys asked whether we would be interested in living in his parent's house in the Poconos; the only obligation on our part would be to keep the place straight. What there was to straighten out (and clean up) will not be mentioned. As the summer went on, we realized that we could not make it with our meager income. Early September, when students began to return for the academic year that would start at mid-month, I went to the Dean of Graduate Studies and, on the basis of my record, requested a full fellowship. I was sure Hendel would support it, but he was still at what he called "places unknown," i.e., his summer home in Vermont. The Dean told me to come back in a few days. When I stepped in the hall, Amelie entered the building and said, "Here is a position you might be interested in." The Philosophy Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst at that time consisted of two faculty members, and, with their plans for an expanding program, they needed a third. Amelie was offered the position, but she thought she should write a dissertation and obtain her PhD before taking an academic post. This was a very wise thing to do. However, Amelie could afford it; I could not. She gave me Professor Clarence Shute's number, and I called him. He asked me a number of questions about my background. To judge by his strong interest, he must have been favorably impressed. Before terminating he told me to get letters of recommendation from some of my Professors and gave me the address where to send them. I first went to Ms. Weld, Hendel's long-time secretary. She was not in a position to reveal Hendel's whereabouts, but, understanding the nature of the matter, she promised right away to forward my request. Shute told me later that Hendel sent a highly positive telegram of 200 words. Next I went to the offices of Smith, Weiss, and Wells, all of whom supported me with letters. With the letters sent, I put the matter out of my mind. Two days later, near summer closing time that was still in effect, Edith called and told me that both of us were expected in Amherst the following Monday. The staff said, "Well, we will not see you here again." Clearly I had a lot of reorientation ahead of me. To prepare for my interview I bought a presentable tweed jacket, and Edith, having slimmed down after her pregnancy, got a new dress and a hat. Our Quonset neighbors, who had never held a baby in their arms, promised to take good care of Carl. Pragmatism. Weiss and Smith, and perhaps others, complained about my not paying sufficient attention to American philosophy. This did not refer specifically to pragmatism and naturalism, which were prominent at that time. While there was no explicit consideration of pragmatism at Yale, it was in the background of those two, as well as of Blanchard. Nonetheless, while at Yale I began my reflection about the nature of pragmatism. It was especially the conception of truth as what pragmatically works that would in time lead me to pose a critical question. In everyday life, its activities and its transactions, the validity of pragmatic tactic may well obtain, even in the mode of compromise, though in a relatively trivial sense. ("Pragmatism" is often used as a concept that, in its liability, tends to carry a heavy load. I use it in a stricter sense, as meaning attention to, and choice of action with respect to pragma, the thing at hand.) Pragmatism becomes invalid when one is faced with choice among more fundamental truths. The compromise with respect to opposed principles does not constitute truth; the truths remain firm for the respective adherents, even though by virtue of the compromise their realization is suspended. A meeting of minds is precluded especially with respect to fundamental faiths, whether religious or secular. This is substantiated by the phenomenon of sectarianism and, at its extreme, by religious wars; or in the secular sphere, e.g., by the clash about the ownership of capital (public vs. private). There is something serious at stake here, namely that there are truths people live by and are prepared to die for—and, as the case may be, to kill for. Such truths are held to be so fundamental that they tend to exclude the validity of other such truths. The pragmatist's solution—ostracism, or forced conversion, or expulsion, or degradation to a lower grade of human status, or worse—is, in its one-sidedness, no solution and not "truth." Jaspers, in confronting the revealed religions from the perspective of his idea of philosophic faith, would suggest that the Christian religions abandon the divinity of Jesus as christos, the hoped-for mashiach (messiah), i.e., anointed redeemer from the house of David, and that the Jews recognize Jesus as one of the prophets. Would such mutual concessions provide a pragmatic rapprochement between the two faiths? What would be left of Christianity devoid of the
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 49 crucified and risen Son of God the Father, or of the Nicene Creed? As to the challenge to the Jews, there is no necessity for adding Jesus to the Biblical canon as a prophet. If one reads the Sermon of the Mount, one can readily recognize the influence of the burgeoning rabbinic Judaism—growing out of the Pharisaic movement that flourished in the countryside, away from the Sadducees surrounding the High Priestly caste in Jerusalem—and especially the teachings of Rabbi Hillel. (The Pharisees were not a prophetic but an exegetic movement that took into consideration the changing conditions in which the Law was to be applied. The Sadducees, too, were not prophetic, but believed the Law recorded in the Pentateuch was complete as written.) And the "Lord's Prayer" can be recognized as an early variant of the ancient Kaddish prayer ("hallowed be your name [which for Jews is ineffable], your kingdom come"), a variant that also reflects the Pharisees' stress on the worth of the individual before God (give [each of] us our daily bread, forgive [each of] us as we forgive others). The worth of the individual as a fundamental principle was the legacy bequeathed by the Pharisees by way of Christianity to the Western religious, philosophical and political consciousness. While Jesus cannot be regarded as a distinct prophet, Jews can recognize him as a fellow Jew. This had occasionally manifested itself in the twentieth century, especially in light of the Holocaust. See, e.g., André Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just. The Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg has dubbed this phenomenon as "bringing Jesus home to the Jewish people." Jaspers knew about the irrevocability of Creed and Canon. Why then the challenge? It was not meant as a watering down what the respective traditions hold, but to provoke adherents of the revealed faiths to maintain their faith in the manner of his idea of philosophical faith. This is not a matter of super-doctrines, in which the respective religious faiths are to find their place. Believing in the manner of philosophic faith means to be open to believers whose faith is other than one's own. The horizon of what is possible for man in time is open. Faith is a matter of fundamental grounding for man in time. God, in His trans-temporal eternity, is generous enough to reveal Himself to man in time in a variety of ways, within the horizon of various historicities. It is an informed philosophical attitude of mutual tolerance. As is usual for Jaspers, he considers limits, and the limit to tolerance is only when it meets with intolerance. To clarify further what is involved, I have been amending Jaspers' point as follows: The challenge of adhering to a fundamental faith in the manner of a philosophic faith is to find in the sources of one's faith the strength and courage to accept, not the validity of the faith of the other, but the validity of the other in his other faith. Jaspers himself speaks of a "solidarity of believers," i.e., a solidarity beyond the faiths that divide them. When I first read Dewey at Senn High, I found him comforting and, as I said, felt there was something missing. When I seriously studied philosophy, I was able to determine the limits of pragmatic strategy regarded as a determinant of truth, which I tried to demonstrate above with respect to the actuality of faith. The pragmatic orientation can prevail in the transactions of everyday life in a political setting such as that of the United States, with the constitutional guarantee of every man's political freedom and equality before the law. This setting is as such secular, i.e., not (directly) mandated by any religious tradition. And, as one can see from (my erstwhile fellow graduate student and sometime friend) Rorty's updated revival of Dewey's pragmatism, being confined to the people protected by that guarantee, we can without constant and explicit regard of it contract or expand our socio-political program as we are inclined. Our day-by-day actions and transactions operate within a pragmatic leeway, but neither raises pragmatism to a level of principle, much less to a criterion of truth. Pertinent truth is a matter of underivable fundamental conviction in the manner of faith, expressed in the preamble of the US Declaration of Independence by the words "we hold these truths to be self-evident." The vocabulary has changed over the past two or so centuries, but the meaning and function remain the same. I do not only criticize pragmatism with respect to faith. How could a government representing the will of the people under the aegis of a constitution such as that of the US face the fact that today we live in a world that is one world, and humanity is no longer a matter of discrete ethnic centers. Some tremendous problems affecting a peaceful and peace-loving nation—genocide, terrorism, vulnerability to terrorist attacks, worldwide economic swings, the international interdependence on materials, technology, manpower, products and trade—will pull a nation out of a tranquil pragmatic life and into the turmoil of challenges it would ignore at its peril and would have to face. The ordinary tactic of pragmatism functions in the United States under an umbrella of unalienable truths. Overarching truths motivate pragmatic actions; actions
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 50 do not produce such truths. The motivating truths survive their pragmatic compromise. An example: I was discussing with a friend and colleague one of the aspects in Jaspers' elaborate theory of truth becoming in human time, namely untruth as a vehicle for the becoming of truth. One of the examples Jaspers discusses (in Von der Wahrheit) was the final speech before voting on the completed draft of the US constitution, which was difficult to arrive at and highly controversial in many respects. Benjamin Franklin urged his fellow delegates to ratify the document, even though much of its content was a compromise. He said that it was a working compromise (between conflicting truth commitments), which leaves it for a later time to modify with respect to comprised truth. According to Jaspers, what was at play was the functioning of reason, with tolerance for the opponent and the fallibility of temporal man engaged in realizing truth within the confines of finitude. However, my friend insisted that what was at play was merely the determination of pragmatic truth: "This is truth," he said. The question of whether or not what was in the originally adopted constitution is truth can be settled by recalling the following facts. First, Franklin was one of those who opposed the enslavement of fellow human beings. However, the delegates from the Southern states, knowing that their rural economy depended on slaves, sought some measure of accommodation. Some of the ensuing compromises can be found in the original constitution. It took around four score years of acrimony and polarization for matters to come to a bloody head, and for pragmatic compromise to be replaced by what really was the truth. The truth was the constitutional guarantee of the presupposition of the "self-evident truth" that "all men are created equal" and endowed with certain "unalienable rights." Jaspers' elaborate theory, written in part in opposition to Heidegger's many ramifications of restricting truth to aletheia, may not be everybody's cup of tea. Referring to the some 1000 pages of Von der Wahrheit, Julian Marías at one time wondered how the question of truth can take up so much space.27 For me, the long critical reflection on pragmatism would confirm for me the integral nature of Jaspers' philosophy, with truth for man in time at its focal point. 27 Marías was brought to Yale by Hendel for the last semester Edith and I were in residence. Edith attended one of Marías' seminars and wrote a paper for him. It is in this sense that I developed my interpretation of Jaspers' theory of truth as an open-ended horizon of encompassing Being, with modes discernible by thought, guided by ideas and the phenomenon of faith. The option of the pragmatic tactic is ubiquitous and serves any motive, regardless of the presence of a motivating truth commitment. It serves the humanist in the effort to advance the perfection of man. And it serves the nihilist. Surely the Nazi regime knew how to devise pragmatic operations to effect their ideological goal of ridding mankind of Jews and of Judaism. Is this truth? It came close to being a factual truth. That it did not entirely succeed, together with other outrages of the Nazi regime, required the bloodiest war ever, involving much of mankind. [Missing] University of Massachusetts: The Early Years Phenomena of Thought for Man in Time. As I proceeded with writing the first (and, as it turned out the only one of the projected three) volume on Jaspers,28 I began thinking about what I later would refer to as "fundamental philosophy" in distinction from foundationalist philosophy. I wondered about the nature of thought, in particular as a phenomenon of man in his temporality. I tried to imagine what in religious teaching based on the Bible was considered to be the thinking of God in His eternity, that is, beyond time. For example, it is written, "God said: Let there be light, and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). As (not "when"!) God says this, He could only say it to Himself. This can only mean that He did not utter this in speech (directed to whom?), but that He thought it. But God does not think in time. If He thinks "light," then this thought does not occur upon the operation of articulation, but resides eternally articulately in God. What, then, does that phrase mean, that is, to us human beings? It means that God creates light by His divine thinking. It does not mean that God causes light to be, either in the manner of a natural occurrence or as the result of the labors of a workman. Perhaps a most telling realization of this tension between the transcendent background of eternity and the demands of thinking in time is the idea of creatio ex nihilo, proposed by some Church Fathers and maintained by scholastics. Another is the question that has been debated with respect to the Holocaust, of whether God has abandoned or has reentered history. 28 CSE Comment: LHE, Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 51 It is against the background of thought in the transcendence of divine eternity that the phenomenology of thought for man in time had to be disclosed. I began with this project in the early 1960s. Though I never abandoned it over the decades, I never accomplished more than notes and modifications of the basic array of phenomena. Throughout I was informed by my study of the history of thought, and of thought about thought. Though I have never seen any integral compilation, much of what I described is not original. I doubt that the array is complete. I surmise that it can be expanded ad infinitum. Since it has preoccupied my philosophical track, I present the present list, whatever its worth may be. This is not to be seen as a list of elements: Thought is integral, these phenomena are aspects of thought, and clearly they interlace Thought is a primal phenomenon Whatever else man can be said to be, we are it thinkingly Thought is a (trans-, re-, de-) scending activity Thought is scendent whether descendent from higher order plenum to determinate content, or transcendent from content to the purview of an open plenum. The scendence of thought is the basis of the hermeneutic circularity. Thought is nomothetic Thought proceeds by rules it posits Thought is antinomous. Thought posits opposing poles, rules and contents. Thought is apperceptive Thought is apperceptive whether of perceptions or of noemata Thought is determinative Personally and historically the reach of thought is limited by means and rules of determination Thought is categorial Thought is fundamentally determinative by means of forms of thought Thought is methodical Thought proceeds by projected design Thought is metronothetic Thought is measured by transcendental standards Thought is value-directed In its realization or actualization thought is driven by subjective and objective values or their suspension Thought is synthetic/analytic Synthesis of elements is the fundamental operation of articulation of thought content. Synthesis is presupposed for analysis. Analysis per se yields no thought content. Thought is imaginative Whether productive or reproductive, imagination is the background of synthetic articulation Thought is conative Thought urges toward its unfolding, realization, actualization [Missing] Last Meetings with Jaspers University of Massachusetts: In Exile. In 1963, soon after returning from my first sabbatical, we enrolled our children at the Smith College Day School in Northampton,29 because we thought the public schools too leveling for gifted children. When Amherst College Philosophy Professor William E. Kennick (who had been Dewey's student) and his wife heard about this, they berated us because they thought it was undemocratic. However, we knew how devastating the education of children can be for those who are bored in school. In November President Kennedy was assassinated. We picked up our children from school, which would be closed until after the funeral, and in the dismal mood that prevailed, we watched the unfolding of events. University classes were also cancelled for those few days. When classes resumed, I guessed the students would like to hear something that deferred to their mourning and encouraged them to resume carrying on with their lives. I ended my remarks with two quotations from Shakespeare. I suggested that this was not the time for Lear's inward fury over the death of his beloved daughter: "Why must a dog have life, and thou no breath at all? Thou will come no more, never, never." Instead, with the drumbeat cadence of the funeral train still ringing in their ears, I directed them to the end of Hamlet and Horatio's words of farewell: "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince and flight of angels sing thee to your rest – why do the drums come hither?" I continued: "Life goes on; we must follow our own drums." It was the first of many times that I gave occasional speeches, and I remember tears in the eyes of even the toughest young men in the class. We then continued where we left off the week before. The sixties were years of upheaval in many ways and in many countries that affected the United States. There were also changes in the offing in the Department. In part upon my recommendation, the combined philosophy faculties of the University and the three other established colleges in the area30 combined in a graduate faculty offering a doctoral program. This venture was spearheaded by Professor Shute. Before long we had a 29 CSE Comment: Today called "The Smith College Campus School." 30 CSE Comment: In addition to the University of Massachusetts, the other colleges in the area included Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College. They were joined in the mid sixties by Hampshire College to form the Five College Consortium.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 52 number of qualified and promising students. Shute had reached the age of sixty and was thinking of retiring from the Chairmanship. He was sorry that I had not finished the book on Jaspers during my first sabbatical, and I would not finish it until the next sabbatical. Shute was looking for possible candidates for his post. In time he came up with two. One was George Nakhnikian, whose outlook was in keeping with a full range of areas and persuasions of philosophy, the other was a younger man, who was strongly recommended by Max Black. I interject a few words about how I perceived Black. I knew he was an internationally known and acclaimed scholar in the philosophy of mathematics, which has a solid but small niche in the corpus of philosophy. (I never failed to include a session dealing with the sections on mathematics when I taught graduate seminars on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason). Anything other than formal areas seemed outside of anything worthy of Black's attention. He referred to this stuff (most of what is ordinarily considered to be philosophy) as "humbug," a word he did not use sparingly. At a small get-together after a talk he gave at Smith College, I listened to the aged Miss Walsh, Professor and long-time Chair of the Smith Philosophy Department, holding forth about Heidegger. It was embarrassingly un- and misinformed; even if I had been inclined to enter a conversation about Heidegger, I would not have lectured the old lady. But Black seemed delighted: "Humbug, humbug, humbug...." Silently I had to agree, though for me "humbug" was not directed toward Heidegger. Black's protégé was invited to give a talk. In keeping with the style of the analytic movement, the talk tried to be casual, even conversational, with amusing phrases or punch lines thrown in, followed by a discrete hesitation in expectation of laughter. I do not remember what the talk was about, only one minor part of it. To make a point the speaker turned funny and, in a tone signaling that his auditors knew what he was talking about, made a remark about a nagging wife. The remark was noticed and evidently not forgotten. Edith gasped, others chuckled. In time we found out that the candidate's wife was his high school sweetheart, who straightened him out from his career as a gang leader and bully, and made sufficiently a Mensch out of him to pursue an academic career worthy of Black's recommendation. (Over the years some of his uncouth ways would at times break through). Nakhnikian was never called. The committee of seven voted 5 to 2 for Black's man. The two "nay" votes came from myself and from Smith College Professor Alice Ambrose-Lazerowitz, a student of Wittgenstein and co-author (with her husband Professor Morris Lazerowitz) of a text of symbolic logic based on Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. The new chairman brought a colleague with him, a very nice person, who was to take over most administrative work, the chair reserving his time to restructuring the department. It is from the new chair that I first heard the expression "continental philosophy" in distinction from Anglo-American philosophy. The distinction puzzled me, and still does. I noticed that in practice the distinction was not merely a way of structuring the course offerings, but a substantive delineation of the one from the other. Most clearly this was expressed in the contraposition of British Empiricism versus Continental Rationalism. I wondered, how does Kant count simply as a rationalist, since his project was to place natural science (physics) on a solid foundation, and fundamental philosophy on a critical foundation. To one of the analytic colleagues this was not an issue, only a question of critical analysis. He said to me, "What did Kant do that Hume did not do better?" Evidently, he never read an interpretation of Hume, like the one by Hendel. I also wondered, how is Kant separable from Hobbes, Berkeley, and Hume? How can Cudworth be aligned with British Empiricism? How are Reid and the Scottish school separable from Kant? How can one bracket out William James's, Royce's, and Dewey's student peregrinations to Germany as the background for the making of American philosophy? Etc. It turned out that none of these questions were of interest. What counted were the path breakers in modern logic, Frege, Russell, et al., and, on the basis of their pioneering work, their ever growing number of epigones who applied their procedures to formal or formalized questions and subjected them to analysis. To the extent that this activity took up matters of arguments and sentences in the traditional philosophical literature, this preoccupation was dubbed "analytic philosophy." Philosophy had a new field. Was it for the better? Hardly. I saw that something was fundamentally wrong. In the twenty-five years I had to live out the rest of my career under that regime, I observed and tried to disclose the suppositions under which that movement operated, and to bring to light what underlay the sense of philosophy that I upheld and that informed my teaching, especially in historical courses.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 53 How seriously the analytic factor of that philosophy was fundamental to its practitioners soon revealed itself by means of some examples, which as such were trivial: The young new chair donated a signed copy of his first book to each member of the department. I started to read it to see what it was about. Fairly early in the book the author took up certain arguments he analytically disproved before going on to subject another argument to the same treatment. Aside from the question whether or not the rejection of those arguments was fruitful, what struck me was that the author referred to his treatment of them as "demolition." Evidently that counted as a significant achievement, deserving due credit. After all, we are not talking about structures made of building blocks that babies delight in throwing over. Another example: In a conversation with the chair I asked what his daughter's religion was and he answered, "She is nothing." Nothing? How can one refer to one's child as being nothing? Later in the conversation, he told me that his wife sent her to Sunday school. What irony! But there were weightier, more telling incidents and aspects. First, soon after the new regime took over, it realized it was stuck with three dissertation writers in a doctoral program utterly foreign to analytic philosophy. As it happened, two candidates were writing on Kantian topics under my direction. The new chair, mindful of the stature of being a full professor ten years after entering graduate school and also departmental chair, thought, probably correctly, that it would be better for the two candidates if they faced the job market directed by him. The trouble was that the requisite capacity in Kant was sorely lacking in him. But he had an idea of how to circumvent this obstacle and called me in and suggested that he take over the directorship of the candidates, while I continued to direct them behind the scenes. I offered to relinquish the directorship to him, but would resign my involvement with the dissertations. Because dissertation directors are freely chosen by the candidates and not bargained over, his suggestion went by the wayside and I continued to council the two candidates. I was systematically excluded from being nominated to sit on the department's annual personnel (evaluation) committee. The proceedings were regarded by the new chair as privileged information, but a procedure to be changed by the Faculty Senate requiring availability to specific faculty members of minutes concerning her or him. During the Star Chamber regime both my book Karl Jaspers: Philosophy as Faith, and my promotion to Professor came before the respective committee. Both cases merited a certain amount of annual salary increment. A friendly committee member informed me of why I merited only the unprecedented half of that amount. The main reason was that one of the colleagues argued that "the book should not have been written or published." The colleague in question was our premier logic instructor. He was a well-regarded researcher in various problems of modern logic, for example, the structure of contextual logic. At that time the list of his publications consisted of a four-page analytic (non-contextual!) criticism of Plato's concept of true opinion and of a review article about an Australian analytic philosopher. The graduate students were taught how to write papers. Philosophical thought was reduced to narrow, isolated topics, and subjected to specific, almost formulaic, formal procedure. The traditional norm, refined and varied over 2500 years, of systematic (not necessarily systemic) and coherent vision of what there is disappeared into an Orwellian memory hole of humbug. The fact that there were millions and millions of fellow human beings to whom some practical as well as fundamental questions were of vital concern dropped from the range of regard on the part of the nihilistic analytic philosophers. In addition to myself, there were four other colleagues at senior rank who found themselves in opposition to these doings. Each had her or his own agenda, which is proper for a functioning philosophy department. Two of the five were, by background, analytic. One had become involved with leftist politics and with feminism. The other came from an orientation that was open to the wide range of philosophy. A third of that group also became involved in leftist politics; for a while his output consisted of photos taken in Nicaragua, A fourth was a noted interpreter of the first part of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason—the epistemological part; his agenda was to establish and administer a special unit of social and (leftist) political thought. And there was I. In time this motley group banded together and succeeded in establishing a graduate subprogram. The main faction spared no effort and maneuvering to squash the program, and they eventually did. Nonetheless, the five of us went our separate ways. We had to endure being considered at least sore spots, often downright enemies, within the department of which we were members like every one else. This
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 54 does not mean that there was no contact or even friendship between individuals of the two factions. This curious cohabitation reminded me of a saying by Cicero, senatores boni viri, senatus autem mala bestia. We watched with alarm, but with impotence, the dismantling of true philosophy. Hand in hand with the political turning of philosophy on a newly swollen head, was the dual politicizing of the philosophical profession. On the one hand was the internal politicizing of the American Philosophical Association, with factions of various orientations turning into mini-organizations. On the other hand was the invasion of the public social and political crosscurrents that were rife in the turbulent times of Vietnam and a failed imperial presidency. Gone was the openness and generosity of mutual encounter and mutual respect. I dropped out of the APA for eleven years until George Pepper urged me to prepare for the observance of Jaspers' 100th birthday at the upcoming XVII World Congress of Philosophy (Montreal 1983) by gathering a group of interested colleagues for that purpose at the next APA meeting. An example of what was happening in our department: Over the decades Shute had developed two undergraduate courses in Asian philosophy: Indian philosophy, and Far Eastern (Chinese and Japanese) philosophy. During his sabbaticals Shute had gone to India or Japan to learn as well as to establish and maintain contacts. Shute was a committed Christian, descended from a long line of New Hampshire clergy. His courses were highly successful and well attended, and the enrolment figures added a good number to the departmental total. When Shute retired a few years after relinquishing his chairmanship, he was assured that these offerings would be continued. Nonetheless, it was amazing to observe the ways in which over the years the new powers-that-be managed to avoid fulfilling that commitment. The last time the matter came up, there was a very promising young candidate, originally from India. The original new chair, who ruled the department behind the younger men whom he placed into the position of figurehead chair, put an end to the matter by saying, "One cannot get along with people who teach that stuff." Another example: The language requirement for graduate students was abolished. I was reminded of the chairman of a Southern school committee, who, when the high school wanted to introduce Russian into the curriculum, squashed the matter by allegedly saying, "If English is good enough for the Good Lord, it's good enough for our children." One of the problems that plagues the analysts is the vocabulary they use. One of these items is that they refer to statements that they choose for their consideration as "propositions." The concentration on statements in their isolation indicates that they were taken out of the hermeneutic circle that accompanies philosophical thought as determinant of meaning. Beyond that, the statement, wrested from its meaning context, is interpreted as being a proposition offered for consideration of the reader. This is a fatal flaw of the procedure, because philosophical prose is mainly confession of personal (historic) thought and least of all proposal for the reader to consider. The readers are invited to interpret the text, possibly so that they enrich, or (positively or negatively) refine their own thinking, or thoughtfully reject what it contains. It is for this reason that mastering the art of methodical interpretation is a sine qua non of philosophy. Modern analysis has proven to be oblivious to this. It has not been so in past innovations of logic, e.g., the medieval ars nova. Another example: A young man, not quite thirty years old, was hired in the department and very soon was given the position of graduate program director, including oversight over the curriculum, and made the sole teacher of the undergraduate introductory course and inspector of graduate students mastering the skills of producing papers. When it became known that his introductory course consisted solely of a sentence-by-sentence analytic-critical reading of Descartes' six Meditations, there was indignation among the outcasts. The man in question had no inkling as to what the hullabaloo was about. The study and interpretation of historical philosophers and the texts they produced has for millennia been the breast milk and the bread-and-butter of people aspiring to inform themselves of disciplined philosophic thought. It is no wonder that the history of philosophy has been the essential mainstay of the philosophic curriculum. What has happened to this academic sub-field? Some times I was placed on the subcommittee evaluating doctoral candidates' performance on the history part of the qualifying exams. One time a student's performance consisted of no more than a discussion of a contemporary criticism of Anselm's Proslogion proof of the existence of God. Conveniently, he translated Anselm's "the Being than which none
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 55 greater can be thought" into "the greatest conceivable being." I was appalled by this inane bowdlerization of a jewel of Western thought. In our discussion I asked, "What about section 15 of the Proslogion, where Anselm clearly states that God is greater than can be thought?" I was overruled on the basis of: "This is history of philosophy," and hence supposedly not relevant to the discussion. An isolated incident? No! Another candidate dealt with an article about a point made by a historical figure. He did not need to be bothered by actually studying historical texts, only papers about selected claims in texts, predigested critically without regard to relevant contexts. I found that highly questionable, only to be told in a manner of a Machtwort that that article "is history of philosophy." The ruling in question was made by a person who knew better. We had been friends since the time when we were both graduate students at Yale. I will not expatiate on the organized though subtle corruption that took place with respect to the staffing of academic committees with junior yes-men, who had to go along with their analytic seniors. Another kind of corruption proceeded in the same way in committees dealing with personnel actions. It seems that the nihilistic destruction of philosophy that for decades crept into the academic profession by way of analytic philosophy had reached its high-water mark toward the end of the twentieth century. In retrospect, I feel that it will be regarded as a temporary invasion by the general malaise of the times, and that more sober, more thoughtfully penetrating, and above all better educated more learned teachers and students will establish a tradition upholding honest standards, who will be able to profess philosophy without being met with derision. Hans Saner reports that the evening before he died, Jaspers uttered to him perhaps the last word from his lips: Die Philosophen haben sich nie verstanden—Philosophers have never understood each other. There is much truth to this. But it does not pertain to what I reported here. While one can understand the deleteriousness of the analysts quite well, it takes two genuine philosophers to fail to understand each other. I survived in a manner of speaking, and no doubt many others at various places did too. Perhaps the nightmare of those decades will deservedly be forgotten. To me it is important to testify to those times. Did I have no function left in that department? I did. I taught certain undergraduate courses that drew a consistently large number of students. While this was very gratifying to me, in this way I added to the department's cumulative annual enrolment total. This total was important because the available additional faculty positions assigned to departments were few, and assignments were based on cumulative enrolment figures. Thus, I also contributed to the further deterioration of the department's right to carry the traditional title philosophy, a title which graduates in the humanities have carried since the establishment of the Western universities in the high Middle Ages. Aside from that, over the years I had many loyal and capable students on the both the undergraduate and graduate level. I was very appreciative of that, and had reason to be fulfilled in my mission to transmit philosophical thought, properly so-called, to some outstanding members of the young generation. Another feature of those years was my establishing contacts with German philosophers, partly as a result of my appointments as guest professor in Freiburg, as Fulbright Senior Guest Professor in Mainz, and as the first regular incumbent of the Rosenzweig Guest Professorship, which Prof. Wolf-Dietrich Schmied-Kowarzik established in Kassel. He also retrieved Rosenzweig to his place as one of the most seminal recent Jewish philosophers in Germany. I presented papers at several of the conferences of the International Rosenzweig Society, of which I am a Founding and Honorary Member. To the initial issue of the Rosenzweig Yearbook I contributed, by invitation, a review of a new translation of The Star of Redemption. In my last lecture before retirement I again wore the tweed jacket I had bought 35 years earlier to face my first class. To explain my wearing of a garment with a threadbare spot on one of the sleeves, I revealed the symbolic meaning of the jacket. The class, some of them outstanding minds, expressed their sentiments. One of the two top students said, "A professor like you should never retire." In a way that counted for more than what Mr. Chips got. Retire? In a way I never have. At the end of my last class I took off the jacket and disposed of it in the circular file next to the desk. Being a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts, I often asked myself, what am I doing there, and came up with the answer: "I represent philosophia perennis in its exile in my department." [Missing] Jaspers Societies and Conferences [Missing] Problems of the Holocaust [Missing] Judaic Studies
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 56 Old Age. Here I come to the end of my story and let poets, wise men, and philosophers speak for me, albeit not without my interpretation and commentary. Owe war sint verswunden alliu miniu jar! ist mir min leben getroumet, oder ist ez war? daz ich ie wande ez waere, war daz allez nichts? dar nach han ich geslafen und enweiz es nicht. Woe! where did all my years go! Did I dream my life, or is it true? Whatever I thought that it was, was it all something? then I slept and do not realize it. Walther von der Vogelweide, ca. 1170-ca. 1230 Profound questions are raised in these famous beginning verses of a long poem by the celebrated minnesinger Walther. For many generations, thinkers would struggle for dream-proof reality. In Calderon's La vida es sueño, this struggle is a means of manipulating the lives of others; however, the victim comes forth as a man gifted with human dignity. For Descartes it was a stage in his methodical skepticism on the way to arguing for something indubitable. At this point Descartes hits upon the fundamental existential certainty of "I am thinkingly," i.e., the distinct phenomena of self-consciousness and of becoming thinkingly in time. The latter would await identification by Kant and especially Kierkegaard, and self-consciousness would have to await Hegel's elaboration. However, I need neither argument nor phenomenology to be assured that my life was no dream. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson's refutation of Berkeley's esse est percipi; stumbling in an inebriated state over a stone, he said, "Thus I confute the man."31 And the memory of what I have lived through could not possibly have been a mere dream with nightmares 31 As to Berkeley's reduction of the being of beings to their being perceived, I agree that (sensible) perception is a phenomenon of thought. But it is a mode of apperception; we also apperceive noemata, thinking which does not as such differ from thinking what we perceive. Is the actuality of all that there is vouchsafed by God's all encompassing perception? Only under the assumption that what is meant by divine perception is like human perception. When I think of my aunts Berta, Eleonora, Rosa, and the other of the eight sisters of my mother who were killed by the Nazis, does that mean that God withdrew His perception of them, or even that the Nazis had the power to cause God's withdrawal? In the end, Sam Johnson's quaint refutation stands: I cannot experience pain by stubbing my toes over a stone that exists by being perceived. and unforgettable joys. The very objects and people that populate my dreams are the result of my being informed by a wakeful life, though my responses to them in my dreams, such as fright or nostalgia, can more plausibly be ascribed to a history of inner apperception. In my childhood I heard a proverb: "Memory is a paradise from which we cannot be driven." If meant as a promise of life yet to be lived, it was sorely untrue. My life has been positively-spent time experiencing, reacting, deciding, failing, and fulfilling, as well as remembering and reflecting. "Was it all something?" Over time, with shifting contexts, my memories may have been given different hues, but they have not receded into mere dreams. They were assuredly "something." I may be the only one to vouch for the reality of what I remember, but what, in my self-consciousness, I am today is sufficient testimony thereto. If "where did all my years go" is separated from "dream or truth," I can readily agree with Walther. The decades of time have fleetingly gone by, and I am strongly conscious of it; I can reach back to this or that moment in my time only in memory. That consciousness comes with old age, accompanied by regrets, nostalgia, or a smile. "I had no youth," my mother said to me in her very old age. I responded, perhaps with indelicate sobriety, "Well, who did?"—being aware that the concept applied to her in a different sense than to me. An entirely different take on reflecting on a long life can be read in Goethe's Faust. The embodied shadow of Care (Sorge) asks Faust: Hast du die Sorge nie gekannt? Have you never known care? In a sudden surge of realization and self-confession Faust responds, Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt! Ein jed Gelüst ergriff ich bei den Haaren.... Ich habe nur begehrt und nur vollbracht Und...so mit Macht mein Leben durchgestürmt I simply ran through the world! Every passion I grabbed by the hair.... I merely desired and merely fulfilled. Thus...with might I stormed through life In vain repentance he adds: ...nun aber geht es weise, geht bedächtig.... ..but now I proceed wisely, thoughtfully.... This from a man who entered the scene with the claim to have "fervently studied philosophy and theology"?
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 57 To be sure, his study resulted in Faust's anguish when he realized that "one cannot know anything." Does Faust also realize that it is precisely this fundamental ignorance that is the point of departure for the pursuit of wisdom for man in time? No. Instead he appeals to magic; he invokes spirits and gets the devil's gift of a few additional decades of manly vigor to "storm through life" in pursuit of purely earthly success, regardless of standards of conduct and scrupulous consideration of others. At the very end Faust finally utters words of wisdom, which, taken out of context, are beautiful in their simplicity: Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss: Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der täglich sie erobern muss! This is wisdom's final conclusion: Only he merits freedom and life itself, Who has to win them, day by day! and Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn! To stand on free ground among free people! But, aside from Faust's squandering such wisdom on vain visions of illusionary accomplishments, it is too late, and he dies. The risk of wisdom in our fundamental ignorance guides and molds our entire temporal life; if it breaks into consciousness only at its end, it is vacuous. Among Hölderlin's last poems we find this famous quatrain: Das Angenehme dieser Welt hab ich genossen, Die Jugendstunden sind wie lang! wie lang! verflossen, April und Mai und Julius sind ferne, Ich bin nichts mehr, ich lebe nicht mehr gerne!32 I have savored this world's pleasures, The hours of youth have passed so long! so long! ago, April and May and July are distant, I am but nothing now, no longer care to live! These are disturbing lines. As a psychopathologist Jaspers noticed that the psychotic mentality can extend the realm of artistic and poetic idiom and even of possible metaphysical visions, weaving them into, at times profound, thought fabrics. Aside from their 32 Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag 1961, p. 426. [Henceforth cited as HSW] psychopathological interest, such productions have intrinsic spiritual value. With reference to Hölderlin Jaspers said: Spiritual productions exist, first of all, in themselves; without regard to their origination they are considered as to their quality, their being understandable, and subject to evaluation. This position does not inquire into actualities and their interconnection, but, instead, into the live significance for each person who perceives and assimilates [the work]. Here not even the creator's intention counts; instead, experience has shown that works of art can, for later generations, be effective and valuable in ways different from what was meant by the creator.33 In this sense I restrict myself to listening to what that quatrain says to me, and to how I am responding to it. I still enjoy this world's delights. The springtime of life and the hours of youth are long past. I look back on them with nostalgia and pleasure. I do not evoke them, but leave them in the distant past, just as then I might have left my present life in the hoped-for future. That past formed and informed what I am today: I cannot imagine being "but nothing." For a temporal being, being nothing means being dead. Evidently, one can play the mind-game of being dead while yet alive. But except under unbearable suffering and beyond hope, not to care to live any longer is an appalling thought. Though we know that our time is limited, our being in time is a gift, the gift of our only actual mode of temporal being. One does not have to live through the dismal times and experiences that I have known to appreciate that gift and gratefully to accept it as an obligation to fulfill within it what comes to be through me. Knowing our being mortal does not allow us to abandon our temporality. Instead, we can thoughtfully relinquish our temporal existence, while yet living our time as long as there is time. Another quatrain by Hölderlin [HSW 426] from the same period is also famous and has even been set to music: Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden, Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Grenzen, Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen Mit Harmonien und ewigem Lohn und Frieden. The lines of life are various, As are paths and mountain contours. What we are here, a God can complete there With harmonies, eternal recompense, and peace. 33 Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und Van Gogh, Bremen: Storm Verlag 1949, pp. 123f.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 58 These pious and consoling lines are dedicated to Ernst Zimmer, who took care of Hölderlin in the many years of his mental illness. Whether they reflect Hölderlin's own belief, I do not know. No doubt the completion of "what we are here" refers to the Christian assurance of salvation. One cannot simply relegate the verses to eighteenth century pietism. In the same century Hassidism spread in Eastern Europe, a traditional kind of Jewish pietism that arose in the aftermath of the massacres during the Khmielnitsky (Chmielnicki) uprising. 34 Sussia, one of the masters of Hassidism, charmingly described by Buber,35 was a naively humble and pious man, beloved by the poor and downtrodden people whom he served. In old age he patiently endured many years of illness. As he lay dying, he seemed unusually disturbed. When asked, he said, "In the world to come I will not be asked why I had not been Moses, but why I had missed being Sussia" (BSC 372). This learned but unassuming rabbi saw that passing from time to eternity does not entail the salvific completion of one's fallible and imperfect being. Instead, what counts is what one has become in living out one's temporality, that is, how one has offered the gift of one's temporal existence in becoming oneself. As so often, I am reminded of Jaspers' referring to the popular hope for life eternal at the conclusion of one's life temporal. The last words of his radio lectures, supposedly for a philosophically lay audience, were: The sense of any philosophizing is to be present. We have but one actuality: here and now. What we miss through evasion will never return; but if we squander ourselves, we also lose reality (Sein). Every day is precious, an instant can be everything. We are amiss in our task, if we lose ourselves in past or future. The timeless is accessible only through present actuality: only by taking hold of time do we arrive where all time is extinguished.36 It is noteworthy to read how similarly Jaspers and Rosenzweig see the significance of man's temporality. Like Jaspers, Rosenzweig directs man in so many ways 34 Bogdan Khmielnitsky was the liberator of the Ukrainians from Polish-Lithuanian rule in mid-seventeenth century. 35 Martin Buber, Werke, vol. 3, Schriften zum Chassidismus, Munich: Kösel Verlag and Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider 1963, pp. 103f. [Henceforth cited as BSC] 36 Karl Jaspers, Einführung in die Philosophie, Zurich: Artemis Verlag 1949, p. 136. to being in his present. Like Jaspers, he also does so at the culminating end of his book The Star of Redemption: to walk humbly with your God ... [not] "but first" and "the day after," but wholly Today37....Nothing more is required than wholly present trust.... [Trust] dares at every moment to say "truly" (i.e., "amen") to the truth....[T]he gate out of the mysterious-wondersome radiance of the divine sanctuary, in which no man can remain alive, leads into life [itself].38 The end of Rosenzweig's book is also the conclusion of its third part, which, after the topics of the previous parts (creation and revelation), is devoted to redemption. In the three parts of his work Rosenzweig effected a reorientation of thought about fundamental truth to the perspective of man in his temporality and to mankind in historical time.39 Accordingly, in the part on redemption, the stress being on the present, Rosenzweig, in a forceful hermeneutic of Jewish scriptures and the traditions of their interpretation, does not leave redemption in the miasma of eternity beyond time, but brings it into the present of human temporality in the form of man's anticipation of redemption in his mundane career; thus, redemption is in what man actively realizes. It is also noteworthy to read how Rosenzweig's Jewish vision of the gate out of the, for man in his temporality unbearable, divine presence leading to life itself is philosophically reflected in Jaspers: We dare to assert: Philosophy cannot end as long as human beings live. Philosophy upholds the demand: to gain the meaning of life beyond all purposes in the world,—to bring the meaning that encloses those purposes to manifestation,—to fulfill by actualizing in the present that meaning which lies, as it were, at a right angle to life,—at the same time, through one's 37 Here Rosenzweig adapts Kant's phenomenon of unconditionality, characteristic of moral obligation, to fundamental faith commitment, and does so from the perspective of man's temporality. 38 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1988, pp. 471f. 39 This coincides with Jaspers' deliberate philosophical turn toward reestablishing fundamental thought of the truth of Being as radically tied to man's temporality. See my “Faith, Truth, Reason in Rosenzweig and Jaspers," in Papers of the International Rosenzweig Conference, Jerusalem 2006, Freiburg: Alber Verlag 2009, forthcoming.
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts http://www.existenz.us Volume 5, No 2, Fall 2010 59 own presentness, to serve the future,—and never to degrade mankind or a single human being to a mere means.40 In the early 1950s I heard a radio interview with a physician about geriatrics, then a new branch of medicine. Asked to define old age, he said, "It is the time of life when one does fewer and fewer things for the first time, and more and more things for the last time." In my case the two coincided. It is the first time as well as the last time that I have written an autobiographical sketch. And I did so because I was requested to do so from the perspective of my philosophical development and career as professor and author of philosophy. I have distaste for immodesty, bragging, arousing sympathy, and self-dramatization. I realize that some of the episodes may, depending on the reader, be received as one or the other. But that is in the hands of the interpreter, not my intention. I am quite old now, as old as Jaspers was when he died. I do not know whether I still have an hour, or a year, or more. But, as can be seen from my CV, I am still making plans, I am still writing. While I have spent much time and effort to write, in co-authorship with Edith, about an unspeakably horrible past, some of which we have experienced, I do not lose myself in the past. While I still hope to leave a legacy, I also do not lose myself in the future. Faust's idle vision, Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdentagen nicht in Aeonen untergehn, is not for me. Instead, I am overawed by the miracle of an insignificant little planet circling around a minor star in this vast universe, somehow after eons bringing forth this pitiable creature gifted with thought, spiritual and intellectual, to dream up ideas that led to sublime achievements, self-consciousness, myth, symbol, art, sciences, philosophizing and philosophies, God and gods, service, standards, obligation, tools and instruments, language and its transmission, healing, law, order, the dignity of the individual. I leave it as an incomplete miscellany, because I wish to stress the miracle of the creature gifted with thought. In my view, the primary gift of thought is the phenomenon of trans- and re-scendence, in intellectual as well as spiritual mode, the interplay of the overarching and the specific. In the center of Raphael's The School of Athens appear Plato and Aristotle. Plato is depicted as Leonardo, whom Raphael admired. Plato's 40 Karl Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube Zurich: Artemis-Verlag 1948, p. 144. index finger points upward. The palm of Aristotle's hand faces downward. The painting reflects the traditional view that spiritual thought is up in the clouds, while intellectual thought is down to earth. But this is wrong. Stated in simplified form: Intellectual thought formulates theories in explanation of the concretely given, theories that are significant if they are, in turn, applicable to the respective specific concrete. Spiritual thought envisages or invokes transcendental ideas as guides for actions that are the realization of ideas in human temporality and in historic time. Infinite is my awe before this miracle and its achievements, as is my gratitude for the gift of a lifespan in which to partake of this miracle. One last thing, a matter of personal importance to me: I was quite young when, as one of a few of a very large family who escaped or survived the slaughter, I realized that the duty to reestablish the family devolved on me. Edith and I fulfilled our duty on behalf of her as well as my families. As we regard our children and the spouses they brought into the family, and see what place they occupy in this world, as we see our grandchildren making their places in the world, we can only humbly say what I said at the end of my celebratory remarks on the occasion of our youngest grandson's becoming Bar Mitzvah: When I realized, in the months after the war, what happened to our people, and to our family, I was shattered. In anger and anguish I said ונתבזע המל לא (God, why have you forsaken us?41), and expected this would be the prevailing mood for the rest of my life. [But seeing a new thriving family, scattered over several continents] I cannot deny that the mood of the 22. Psalm has receded into the shadow of the 23rd. And while I cannot as yet say רסחא אל יער הוהי (God is my shepherd, I shall not want [Psalm 23:1]), I can, overwhelmed with joy and gratitude, say, היור יסוכ (my cup runneth over [Psalm 23:5]). One of the things I have yet to do is to revive an old Jewish custom that has fallen into disuse. I must write an ethical will for my immediate progeny and perhaps for a few generations to come.42 41 CSE Comment: an allusion to Psalm 22:2. 42 CSE Comment: To the great regret of his family, LHE did not have the time to do so.