[lit-ideas] Sidney Morgenbesser Dies
- From: "Peter D. Junger" <junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Literature and Ideas List <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2004 10:32:45 -0400
The New York Times The New York Times Obituaries
Sidney Morgenbesser, 82, Kibitzing Philosopher, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 4, 2004
S idney Morgenbesser, whose servings of logic, wit and insight as a
Columbia University philosopher for a half-century prompted
comparisons to Socrates - minus the Yiddish accent - died on Sunday at
St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. He was 82.
The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, said
Leonie Haimson, the daughter of his companion, Joann Haimson.
Near the end, Dr. Morgenbesser entertained a stream of bedside
visitors with pronouncements about politics, God and baseball.
Kibitzing, a gift he developed on the Lower East Side, where his
father was a garment worker, was the medium through which Dr.
Morgenbesser reached the highest of intellectual planes. Colleagues
and former students described a teacher whose power and influence were
felt not so much in a legacy of articles and books (there were
relatively few for a tenured professor of his standing) as through the
deceptively whimsical give-and-take that allowed him to distill the
essence of things, taking kibitzing to the edge of such frontiers as
metaphysics and epistemology. With freewheeling intellectual banter
that many likened to Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of
students, including the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once wrote that
he "majored in Sidney Morgenbesser."
Dr. Morgenbesser first studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and
was ordained as a rabbi, before becoming something of a Columbia
legend at the time of the student uprising in 1968 for being beaten
when he joined a human chain against the police.
"You ought to very carefully observe what transpires," he said to
fellow professors during a riot. "Watch carefully."
Few watched more things more carefully than Dr. Morgenbesser, the John
Dewey professor of philosophy, particularly when it came to essential
meanings. He was once asked if it was unfair that the police hit him
on the head during the riot.
"It was unfair but not unjust," he pronounced.
Why?
"It's unfair to be hit over the head, but it was not unjust since they
hit everybody else over the head."
Dr. Morgenbesser's reputation for questioning other scholars, often in
midsentence with barbed humor, struck fear in the hearts of would-be
sages.
It went like this, according to Arthur Danto, a Columbia philosopher:
"Let me see if I understand you," Dr. Morgenbesser would begin.
"He would restate the thesis, and that would be that," Dr. Danto said.
"It was one of the ordeals you had to go through."
In an interview yesterday, Noam Chomsky, the linguist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agreed with Dr. Morgenbesser
about some things and not others, called him "one of the most
knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern
period."
Dr. Chomsky called him "a philosopher in the old sense - not so much
what's on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion."
Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton,
struggled to define Dr. Morgenbesser's contribution, finally resorting
to metaphor.
"You don't ask what the wind does," he said. "It's just power and
self-sustaining energy."
But it was often energy with a humorous punch line, as Dr.
Morgenbesser earned fame for witticisms. He insisted the jokes were
openings to more substantive philosophic discussions.
An example: in the 1950's, the British philosopher J. L. Austin came
to Columbia to present a paper about the close analysis of language.
He pointed out that although two negatives make a positive, nowhere is
it the case that two positives make a negative. "Yeah, yeah," Dr.
Morgenbesser said.
Another: in the 1970's, a student of Maoist inclination asked him if
he disagreed with Chairman Mao's saying that a proposition can be true
or false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, "I do and I
don't."
Sidney Morgenbesser was born in Manhattan on Sept. 22, 1921. In
addition to his seminary degree, he earned another bachelor's degree
from the City College of New York. He completed his doctorate at the
University of Pennsylvania and, after teaching at Swarthmore College
and the New School of Social Research, joined Columbia's faculty in
1954. In 1968, he was a member of a faculty panel that drafted
proposals to reform the university after the student unrest.
He was a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Philosophy
for most of his career. He wrote more than 50 articles, many with
colleagues, and edited six anthologies.
Dr. Morgenbesser, whose only immediate survivor is Ms. Haimson, never
lost his Talmud-inspired gifts for reasoning. A few weeks before his
death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God.
--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
EMAIL: junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx URL: http://samsara.law.cwru.edu
NOTE: junger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx no longer exists
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