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B.F. Skinner, Categorical Imperative, cleverness, Columbia University, comedic, comedy, epistemology, ethics, General Philosophy, Heidegger, humor, Immanuel Kant, irony, J.L. Austin, jokes, Kant, lecture, Moses, Noam Chomsky, philosophy of science, police, political philosophy, psychology, Robert Nozick, Sidney Morganbesser, wit
Sidney Morgenbesser was a prominent figure at Columbia University throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. As the University’s John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, he taught classes on epistemology and the philosophy of science which were consistently packed with students eager to hear him lecture — but not because of his academic prestige or reputation as a generous grader.
Morgenbesser was widely known as one of the wittiest men of his age. His caustic irreverence and razor-sharp tongue produced an unmistakable — and inimitable — sense of humor. Through freewheeling intellectual banter that could be compared to sportive Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of students, among them the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once claimed that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.”
Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, struggled to find the words to describe Morgenbesser, resorting to an image from nature: “You don’t ask what the wind does. It’s just power and self-sustaining energy.”
Noam Chomsky called him, “One of the most knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern period… a philosopher in the old sense — not so much what’s on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion.”
The New York Times called him, “Socrates with a Yiddish accent”; I suggest Groucho Marx with a PhD in philosophy.
Here are some of his most famous rejoinders:
- In the early 1950′s, the esteemed Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the structural analysis of language. He pointed out that, in English, although a double negative implies a positive meaning (i.e. “I’m not unlike my father…”), there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. “Yeah, yeah,” scoffed Morgenbesser from the back of the auditorium.
- 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 and false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, “I do and I don’t.”
- Morgenbesser became something of a legend at the time of the 1968 student uprising for being beaten up when he joined a human chain protesting the police. When confronted about the incident, Morgenbesser was asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. His response: “It was unjust, but not unfair. It’s unjust to hit me over the head, but it’s not unfair because everyone else was hit over the head, too.”
- Once during a heady philosophy lecture, Morgenbesser was asked to prove a questioner’s existence. He shot back, “Who’s asking?”
- A colleague once challenged Morgenbesser’s tenure at Columbia, saying he had not published enough material to deserve a tenured position. Morgenbesser responded: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”
- Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn’t lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Due to his accent, the word “Kant” was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser was hauled off to the police station. He won his freedom only after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the unamused cops.
- In response to Heidegger’s ontological query “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser answered “If there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
- A central subject of Morganbesser’s investigations was the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Once while ordering dessert, Morgenbesser was told by the waitress that he could choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He ordered the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress came back and said that cherry pie was also an option; Morgenbesser responded: “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”
- When asked his opinion of the philosophy of pragmatism, Morgenbesser said, “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”
__________
I found several of these quips and many other gems in Jim Holt’s stunningly clever and often very funny book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
navigator1965 said:
I could not help but laugh at his witty rejoinders.
john said:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, an obvious genius. This blog is always an interesting delight!
babso2you said:
Great post! And, I just wanted to send you a quick not of thanks for signing up to follow my blog! I hope that you will enjoy my posts! – B
Silverheels said:
What great fun!!
George Englebretsen said:
Morgenbesser speaking of Hilary Putnam: “He’s a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time.”
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steven59jones said:
I studied with Morgenbesser in the 1980’s. I had very little interaction with Sydney at Columbia, but all of it was entirely negative. He seemed to be deeply paranoid. He once came up to me and accused me of being antagonistic. I had no idea what he was talking about. After that, I tried to go out of my way to be nicer to him. This made him even angrier, and he then accused me of “sucking up” to him. You couldn’t win with Sydney when he was playing his silly, destructive games. No matter what you did, he’d bully you around.
Sydney was extremely irresponsible. It was well-known that he almost never did any work, whether it was preparing for classes or writing philosophy articles. His research output was as skimpy as his class preparation was deficient. He also had a dreadful habit of borrowing lots of books from people and never returning them. His idea of being a professor was to take, take, take, and give back as little as possible. He didn’t come around the Department much, and when he did, he was there just to amuse himself, often at some unfortunate student’s expense. At the end of class, he usually jumped right up and left the building immediately so that no one would have a chance to ask him anything. The two minutes or so of time that professors typically devote to students immediately after class concerning such matters as term papers, etc., were more than he could bear. I don’t think he read any of the students’ papers anyway. You’d get a grade, but you’d never get comments. He probably assigned grades by flipping a coin: ‘B-‘ for heads, and ‘C+’ for tails. He was like Leona Helmsley, who notoriously said, “Only little people pay taxes.” Sydney seemed to think that “Only untenured faculty members read students’ papers and prepare for classes.”
Sydney had the manner of a person who had never worked a day in his life, and had no intention of ever doing so. He must, however, have done some work a few decades before I met him, as he did have a PhD, as well as some vague notions about the dominant philosophical movements that had been in fashion during the first half of the 20th Century, long before I began my studies at Columbia. There was nothing clear, systematic or orderly about his class presentations on these movements. No matter what topic was under discussion, it was obvious that he never took it the least bit seriously. That was my chief objection to Sydney. If I had only been interested in learning how to crack jokes, I would have taken up stand-up comedy rather than philosophy. I could have apprenticed myself to Louis C.K., or at least studied his jokes carefully, rather than the works of William James. If I had enrolled in a physics program, I wouldn’t have been satisfied if a professor in that program had only discussed astrology in his classes.
I can recall a few of Sydney’s inconsequential remarks in class. He drew a distinction between “tender-minded” and “tough-minded” philosophers, and seemed to think this was a distinction of great significance. In fact, it merely expresses the difference between incompetent philosophers and competent ones. He also pointed out, in his witty style, that contemporary anti-realism, as articulated by Putnam and Dummett, illustrated the point that “If you live long enough, you’ll see everything come back into fashion.” (British Idealism had been popular in the early 20th Century, but had become unpopular there and in the U.S. by the 1950’s. By the 1980’s, a different form of anti-realism was becoming fashionable again.) These comments were typical of Sydney’s teaching, which largely consisted of avoiding the hard work of carefully articulating philosophical positions and closely examining the arguments for and against them. I found his class to be an unusually dumbed-down version of a genuine philosophy class. It was something like a “Physics for Poets” class in which you use the minimum possible amount of math., or even no math. at all. Sydney’s class was more for poetry students than philosophy students–he used the minimum possible amount of rigorous, organized thinking about the arguments for and against philosophical points of view. For me, the class was a complete waste of time. His class might have worked well for college freshmen (or freshpeople!), however, and it’s easy to imagine a person like Robert Nozick–who, as an undergraduate at Columbia, studied with Sydney–finding Sydney’s classes stimulating. My class with Sydney, however, was for PhD students, and it shouldn’t have been taught as if it were for college freshmen.
While I was at Columbia, the graduate program admitted quite a few Israelis, who had previously studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sydney was rather fond of them and enjoyed talking with them. I personally found them loud and obnoxious. They talked a lot, but all I ever heard come out of their mouths was an endless stream of incoherent babbling. There was one, however, who was fairly quiet and who actually thought about what she said before she said it. She ended up as a full professor in the University of California system. I never saw her wasting her time talking to Sydney while she was at Columbia.
I personally found Sydney to be a very nasty guy. I couldn’t see what others saw in him, and it took me by surprise to come across accounts of him written after his death by people who were very fond of him. As far as I was concerned, Sydney was quite worthless as a person, as a teacher, and as a researcher. It is hard for me to understand how he could have held an endowed chair at Columbia–he was the “John Dewey Professor of Philosophy” there–and even harder to understand how Columbia could have created an endowed chair in his honor after he died, the “Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy.” A few clever jokes don’t strike me as a sufficient justification for all those honors and accolades.
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