The arguing began the instant professor May Sim finished charting “man’s journey from being uneducated to being educated,” as she summed up the philosophical position she had staked out.
Someone asked if she really thought the human soul could come to know Truth, with a capital T? Wouldn’t it blink at the last moment, like an eye blinded by the sun’s radiance? Someone else sputtered that Plato, Sim’s intellectual hero, was just plain wrong about the erotic dimension of learning.
One participant half playfully accused another of being a “neo-atomist” — of regarding reality as being composed of nothing more than tiny bits of soulless matter.
And so it went, until the chair firmly waved off a questioner, saying it was time to hear another professor’s paper. And so it did as well, after his turn on the podium. For the two days of their annual meeting, members of the Metaphysical Society of America peppered each other with arguments proffered and syllogisms parried. In the end, they could only agree to disagree — and to meet to do so again next year — which hardly surprised anyone.
They had gathered at Pennsylvania State University fully aware that the issues they would tackle haven’t been resolved since Parmenides and Plato posed them, 2,500 years ago. You could sense their delight in suspecting that 2,500 years hence their successors still will be wrestling with those questions.
“We attempt to articulate,” noted Vincent Colapietro, in his presidential address, “that which might turn out to be unsayable.”
It was spring break at many of the participants’ own universities. Students had taken off for southern beaches. Of all of America’s academics, only about three dozen had chosen to come to this largely deserted campus to wonder aloud about such enduring puzzles as the nature of Being. Or, mankind’s place in the cosmos.
If other professors were keeping thinking caps on during the school holiday, it was more likely to worry about war with Iraq. Yet the thinness of their own ranks didn’t surprise them, said James Felt, the Metaphysical Society’s secretary. He noted that the one thing metaphysicians know for sure is that other people haven’t the faintest idea what they do or why. A Jesuit priest as well as a professor at Santa Clara University, he carries a kind of non-calling card. On it, he has copied the listing in his local Yellow Pages under “Metaphysics”:
“See: Astrologers, Churches — Non Denominational, Psychic Consulting and Healing Services, Yoga Instruction.”
Metaphysicians are even a source of bewilderment to other philosophers.
Two camps
In a celebrated essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Oxford don Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two camps: those content to know many little facts, and those who yearn for one, overarching truth. On American campuses, this is the season of the fox, it being unfashionable in most disciplines, philosophy included, to ask the big questions. Tenure is won by publishing narrowly focused scholarly articles and monographs with more footnotes than text.
Metaphysicians are the hedgehogs of an ivory tower overrun with foxes.
Francis Coolidge explained why he was at the society’s meetings by noting that logically it’s a 50-50 chance that universe would exist. Since it does, most folks are content to let it go at that.
“We’re the ones who can’t get over a primordial amazement that there is something rather than nothing,” said Coolidge, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
Jorge L. Nobo, a professor at Washburn University in Topeka, observed that the metaphysical compulsion often sets in early and rarely is curable. He recalled a long ago argument with a teenage friend over the issue of free will versus determinism. Years later, half-dozing through a college philosophy course, it dawned on him that he and his friend had been debating a fundamental question of metaphysics.
“The intensity of discovery that an issue like that can be tackled, it’s overwhelming,” Nobo said. “You may not get back to that initial high, but you don’t get over it either.”
Once upon a time, students were encouraged to bring that childhood sense of wonder with them to campus. In the Middle Ages, when the university was born, metaphysics was the centerpiece of higher education. Schools were run by the church, and Christianity backstopped its belief system with a metaphysical theology.
In more recent times, science replaced religion as the powerhouse discipline. Anything that couldn’t be measured and quantified was pushed into a corner.
The subject of this year’s Metaphysical Society’s meeting was “Soul.”
“Soul is anathema in contemporary philosophy departments,” said David Weissman, a member of the philosophy department at the City College of New York. Fittingly, he is the author of a new book, “Lost Souls.”
For many philosophers, he observed, soul smacks too much of the supernatural. It seems too big to get their analytic arms around. They want to be objective, like academic psychologists who ask finite questions about specific mental processes.
“Metaphysics takes over where science leaves off, by saying, OK, so how can we know that the answers we’re given are good ones?” Weissman said. “That’s why our colleagues find us boring.”
But not necessarily the general public, observed Harley Chapman, who teaches at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine. Soul may be taboo in the ivory tower but not in publishing houses.
“In one recent year alone, 600 books were published with `soul’ in the title,” he said.
The reason is easy to see, he added. Philosophers and psychologists may wish to do away with messy and immeasurable categories, but ordinary folks live with them every day of their lives. We all are tormented by fears and haunted by demons. We can be moved to tears by an encounter with beauty.
Some of us can’t help but wonder if there’s more to life than meets the eye. We yearn to escape the prison of our ego. Such can’t be reduced to neat curves on graph paper, which causes scientists to throw up their hands in despair, but for other people that spiritual churning is at the core of their sense of being.
Gregory Recco, who just earned a doctorate from Penn State, added that even dogs can find the hole in the ruling philosophy of today’s ivory tower. He noted that human motivation often is explained on the pleasure principle of learning. We associate certain experiences with fun, others with pain, and make our choices of action accordingly.
Yet consider the dog, Recco said. A dog will greet even an abusive master with a wagging tail and yips of joy. It is as if he had made a judgment call that valued the master’s friendship despite all those encounters with a rolled-up newspaper — and for all that learning theory says he shouldn’t.
“The animal seems to have a faculty of judgment,” Recco said. “In that sense, we can say that the dog is a philosopher.”
Metaphysics’ problem might be that not enough humans want to be philosophers. The Metaphysical Society of America was founded 50 years ago by Paul Weiss, a Yale University professor who already could see the narrowing of many of his colleagues’ intellectual interests. A commanding presence, he announced mankind’s enduring questions in booming cadences and with a pronounced Brooklyn delivery. He had the ability to speak plain English, a rare professorial skill, and was a frequent guest on Dick Cavett’s television show.
“The first time I attended the society’s meetings, hundreds of people showed up,” Weissman recalled. “Weiss made a dramatic entrance surrounded by a phalanx of acolytes.”
Passing the torch?
But Weiss died last year at 101, a milestone marked with a moment of silence at the meeting’s concluding banquet. After heads were unbowed, diners observed that there was no one on the metaphysical horizon to replace him.
“Look around you,” said Sarah Glenn, a young faculty member at the University of Washington in Tacoma. “There is one other person here my age. Beyond that, there is a gap of decades.”
Yet Felt, the Jesuit, wasn’t so pessimistic. He freely conceded the difficulty younger scholars have in getting a toehold in their profession while remaining true to the metaphysical muse.
“Still, I think there always will be others like me,” he said. “I love prowling around in the bowels of Being.”
