Ecstasies of the Spiritual Life:
Recollecting the Life and Words of W. B. "Bill" Macomber
Philosophy Professor
University of California at Santa Barbara

Gregory Desilet

        In 1990, W. B. Macomber’s The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth was included in the Harper Collins volume Masterpieces of World Philosophy. The selections were made by John Roth—Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College. Roth judged Macomber’s work to be one of the most artful and insightful commentaries on Heidegger’s Being and Time. As the oldest of Roth’s three selections on Being and Time, The Anatomy of Disillusion has stood the test of time and remains among the most readable and engaging, despite the enormous number of commentaries on Heidegger in the last several decades. And those who have attempted the study of Heidegger will appreciate that creating a “readable and engaging” commentary on his work is no small achievement. Evidence for the longevity and readability of Macomber’s text can now be found even on internet blogs. One philosophically inclined blogger, author and journalist Dudley Lynch, reported on his encounter with The Anatomy of Disillusion. Having browsed many a dull philosophical tome, Lynch thought Macomber’s book might be similarly mind-numbing and opened it with some hesitation:

This time, unwilling to again risk the onset of numbness so quickly, instead of starting at the front of the book, I went to the back. And found myself reading about Nietzsche, not Heidegger. Macomber, himself a philosopher, has a nice style. I suspect I could have a conversation with him about phenomenology and not come away thinking I’m mentally deficient. He explained, for example, that Nietzsche prescribed not partial nihilism but “complete nihilism” as needed to purge Western society of the damage done to it by its history. “There is no curing cancer with Noxema,” writes Macomber. Now, I strongly suspect that this is one of the few instances in the history of philosophical writing that the word “Noxema” has appeared in a scholarly work, and perhaps the only time. And I just find that phenomenological! (http://www.braintechnologies.com/blog/archives/archive-102006.htm  October 25, 2006).

Macomber had a way of translating arcane concepts with metaphors any guy on the street could grasp. Like a Tom Wolfe for philosophers, he ventured into the maze of discourse and came out with a report that made clear and luminous much of what transpired in these impenetrable nether-regions. He taught philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1965 to 1973. For reasons touched upon below, he failed to get tenure in 1973 and thereafter disappeared from academic life. Having published only one book (but a great one), classroom instruction emerged as his most outstanding talent. He could mesmerize an audience like few in the field and made an unforgettable impression on many students—including me.

Historical Background--UCSB, Isla Vista, and Activism

Macomber’s interrupted career in academics may seem tragic. And in at least one sense it truly is. The fact that he never returned to teaching or writing (aside from, as he put it, “thousands of letters to which he received few replies”), turned out to be a great loss for the academic community in general. But his brief academic career remains remarkable in that it shines so brightly through his teaching years at UCSB. That a life is difficult to understand apart from the circumstances in which it is lived—while surely a cliché—is especially true in the case of Macomber. He stood out in the milieu of competing voices and distractions at UCSB where, as it turned out, circumstances shaped and drew out his unique talents and pressed others toward the answers and challenges he offered. While much of what Macomber had to say remains relevant precisely because it appreciably transcends place and time, his impact on the campus community and his students can be most fully understood and valued against the backdrop of the unusual place and time in which he taught—the UCSB campus and adjoining Isla Vista community of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A brief description of this place and time offers perspective on the backdrop of extremes within which Macomber shaped the quality, style, and tone of what he liked to call his philosophical “digressions.” 

UCSB and its stepchild, the unincorporated commercial and residential community of Isla Vista, sit alone together ten miles north of Santa Barbara on a rise of sandstone called Goleta Point that juts out into the Pacific like the corner of a football field. Hemmed in by the ocean, the Devereaux and Goleta Sloughs, and the University, Isla Vista filled a confined corner, a corner that by 1967 became home for over 11,000 residents—mostly students.  

            Owing to its confined geography, population density, substandard housing, and proximity to affluent Santa Barbara and suburbs, Isla Vista garnered the tag line: “one square mile of reality surrounded by paradise.” Its growth came rapidly along with the University expansion in the late ‘50s. As the University and its dorm housing project failed to keep up with increasing enrollment, enterprising and mostly unscrupulous developers built apartments in Isla Vista for students. Since the area was unincorporated, it fell outside city building codes. Consequently slapdash construction proliferated. Within a few years of use, along with little maintenance, most of the housing acquired the run-down aspect of a ghetto—but a ghetto on land that looked and felt like a resort playground.

            By the late ‘60s Isla Vista had become a demographically unique community with few adults over twenty-five. The students who lived there—most of them living away from home for the first time—experienced a sudden and exceptional degree of social freedom. But this social freedom did not translate into political power. Many students felt mostly powerless in the face of laws and political issues that directly affected them. On campus they had little or no voice in administration policies and decision-making. In Isla Vista they had no voice in community issues, because, being unincorporated, Isla Vista fell under county commissioner oversight. Male students under 21 years of age were subject to a military draft even though not yet old enough to vote (voting age didn’t lower to 18 until Amendment 26 was ratified in July of 1971). Last but not least, most students were still dependent on someone else—parents or banks—for financial support. 

Despite being liberated from the family in the sense of having their own place for the first time, students were disenfranchised in every way that mattered politically. While tasting freedom, they continued to feel the pinch of Mother Hubbard’s shoe. Constrained by a system that defined them as dependents, students were sensitive to every sign of repression on the local and national horizon. Consequently, the circumstances were ripe for political activism. And, of course, the Vietnam War and the institution of the draft served to magnify this activism in extraordinary ways. It could be said with little exaggeration that UCSB of the late ‘60s was among the better public liberal arts universities in the country. But it offered these assets to a student body that largely abandoned the traditional curriculum in favor of a more pressing interest in radical change on political landscapes ranging from the local to the national.

            Like many among the freshmen class, I was initiated into this stew of political and cultural contradictions in the fall of 1968. Adrift in the milieu, I was wandering down a corridor in South Hall one afternoon when I heard a voice coming from an open doorway. It was the voice of a man talking to a class, but it wasn’t really talk. It was more like oration—but not the pompous, overblown kind. The voice stopped me but the words pulled me in.

I had caught Bill Macomber in the middle of his class on the history of philosophy for which, as I found out later, the only text was Plato’s Symposium. I had never heard philosophy spoken with so little effort yet so much involvement. I stood outside the doorway listening for a few minutes, then, hooked by what he was saying as well as the way he was saying it, I slipped into the back of the room and took a seat for what was left of the hour. After class I asked to audit the course for the rest of the quarter. Persuaded by my interest, Macomber agreed.

        In the next class he took up where he had left off, dressed the same as before: brown tweed sport coat with elbow patches, beige cotton shirt with open collar, and forest green corduroy pants—all bearing the wrinkles of consecutive days use. His unkempt, curly, brown hair had the look of a man who had just gotten out of bed. Today he commented that he had not found time to shave—which, he digressed, brought to mind a story from a colleague about a friend who had sent Einstein an electric shaver as a gift. At a loss for what to make of it, Einstein finally had to phone his friend to ask him what he was supposed to do with it. Anecdotes like this, slipped into the stream of metaphysical narrative, contributed to Macomber’s infectious popularity despite the challenges of the subject matter and his other-worldly demeanor. Unlike Einstein, Macomber kept up enough of a connection with the mundane to know what an electric shaver was. He just didn’t concern himself sufficiently with cosmetic details to make regular use of one. But contradicting the professor stereotype of detached appearance were the eyes. Far from absent-minded, Macomber’s eyes were always unmistakably present and alert, probing the room from face to face as he spoke.

        He generally started off with a comment or two then fielded questions from students. But before long, a word would trigger a network of associations and he was off and running, swept away in the elaboration of a theme, speaking in spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness style without notes of any kind. He belonged to the soul brotherhood of jazz musicians—especially, I imagined, saxophone jazz musicians. Class was a jam session in which he rose to become the soloist. He would respond to suggestive notes tossed out by others and then just blow. Familiar riffs, a network of associations, would pop up again and again, but the way he would mix and weave these threads always produced subtle new variations. His voice resonated like a well-worn instrument—sonorous with instinctive inflection and emphasis. Combined with rhythm and timing, he exuded a hypnotic and infectious pathos. As the hour progressed the questions fell off and everyone laid back and took in the music.

The Symposium—Love and Culture 

On that particular afternoon in South Hall, the words spiraled with deepening focus on the first speech of Plato’s Symposium—the speech given by Phaedrus, the youngest in the group.

…a central theme of the West—if you’re not prepared to die for something you’re not living. And this is the theme in the first speech of the Symposium. Phaedrus is concerned about the role he is to play in life. He looks upon himself as an actor and acting involves the projection of a façade—an image with the form of the ideal.

 

In von Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde, Isolde is not a heroine but rather a façade, a stimulus. Romantic love in this tradition involves the projection of the façade, the false front. For Tristan, Isolde is as much a fabric of the imagination as a real person. But the façade may operate in a genuine rather than illusory sense if it opens up even as it conceals, motivates even as it misleads.

 

Sartre revives a part of this Romanticism when he argues that life is role-playing and we can never become the role. If we think we do, then we’re involved in self-deception, mauvais foi. The closer we get to death, the closer we get to actualizing the role. There is no possible resolution of Romantic love. But the tension of unfulfillment promotes creativity.

 

The projection of a façade begins in adolescence, bringing with it subjectivity, secrecy, and isolation. We now have secrets, particularly a secret. We love to play at it as children, but it’s like clomping around in high-heels. Behind the façade we’re nothing—obscene in the literal sense. Reaching for an ideal separates and isolates us in subjectivity with feelings of shame and guilt. This is the theme of Genesis: the apple—symbol of reaching, of ambition; the fig leaf—of privacy, subjectivity, exposure.

 

Romanticism involves organizing our entire life around a single focal point—the one-and-only, which is ultimately unattainable, purely ideal. The one-and-only, the beloved, totally transforms everything, especially the lover. The one-and-only is revolutionary and the Romantic lover provides us with the symptomatology of revolutionary consciousness and behavior.

 

Embracing the ideal, the Romantic lover cannot be part of the established community and especially the family. In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment murder may be taken to symbolize any activity that consumes the whole of our efforts in a way that leads to utter isolation from society. Raskolnikov is a thoroughly Romantic figure embodying the hallmark of Romanticism as the tyranny of the ideal reduced to love of the one-and-only.

 

The façade, the imaginary projection of Phaedrus’ love, creates the ideal, the hero. Family does not permit the hero in that it appropriates everything into the communal, the traditional, the familiar. In an act of separation and individuation the hero takes up an aggressive, transformative role and enters into “battle.” “Battle” may be seen as a symbol of concentration and intensity—which, combined, generate enormous ambition and undreamed of power.

 

Concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of others also drives invention and innovation. This is a signature mark of Western culture, which moves from one revolution, one astonishing transformation, to another: Protestant, American, French, Russian, Industrial, technological—Quo Vadis?

 

The Romantic hero concentrates: that’s his genius. Like focusing sunlight through a glass upon a single point which then bursts into flame. And that flame is, in the case of Einstein, E=mc². In this sense artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists are as much warriors in the heat of battle as soldiers, revolutionaries, and even terrorists. The effect of this awesome power of singular focus and concentration, while always emerging with a radicality akin to violence, does not always appear as ethical or constructive violence. This singular focus and concentration of the West creates vast power which tends to flatten other cultures it confronts. 

 

Western religions in particular feature exclusive focus on the one-and-only as central in the tradition. This Romanticism can be seen through one prominent interpretation of the Christian Trinity: the Father is the ideal, the beloved; the Son is the aggressive power, the active agent, the lover; and the Holy Ghost is the spirit, the agency, the white heat of concentration.

 

This Trinity supplants the Greek Trinity of the Old Man, the Young Man, and the Woman. With the rising significance of the Virgin Mary in the fifth century, the status of woman reappears with closer proximity to this Greek Trinity. But a virgin is not quite a woman. Virginity symbolizes self-control, traditionally a masculine trait. The Western tradition, north of the Alps at least, turns away from the feminine in thinking. In sunny Italy, however, the feminine retains life in devotion to Mary such that it becomes the principal objection of the Protestant north that she has usurped the position of the Son.

 

Phaedrus’ speech may also be taken to represent an Oedipal moment in Western tradition. When the one-and-only enters, the father is forgotten and swept aside. The adolescent experience is figured by the symbolic death of the father, the movement out of the family into another life. This leads to a second birth as a wholly individual, largely spiritual being. As in Romantic love, the lover often directly precipitates the death of the beloved (and sometimes vice versa). The formerly beloved father is killed by what was once the loving son.

 

But in the Oedipal myth, Oedipus kills his father by mistake. Taking the Greek myth seriously, what might this slaying betoken? In conclusion, this suggests a haunting question: Is the individuality, so prominent and admired in Western culture, a mistake or a necessary but tragic progression?

At the time they were spoken, these words brought a sense of perspective into adolescent worlds swirling in motives of self-assertion and self-sacrifice set amidst a growing storm system of radical politics and war. Bob Dylan—reluctant icon of the ‘60s—exemplified the preoccupation of young imaginations with thoughts of passionate commitment and self-sacrifice in one recollection of his life as a teenager in the late '50s. 

When I’d begin to listen to the radio I’d begin to get bored with being there (in Hibbing, Minnesota). I thought about going to military school but the school I envisioned myself going to I really couldn’t get in—which was West Point. I could always envision myself dying in some heroic battle somewhere—but maybe those times, that era, is… has gone.

            But Dylan may have been wrong to think the “era” had past him by. On the one hand, as Macomber suggests, the distancing from the local, the ordinary, the familiar in favor of wholesale abandonment to “heroic battle” for a cause may, to one degree or another, belong to the rites of passage of every generation, aspects of which may evolve into positive lifelong traits. On the other hand, the era of heroic battle Dylan suspects is “gone” seemed to emerge again, but with a counter-cultural twist, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The youth of the country mobilized in heroic battle against what appeared to be a very unheroic battle taking place in Vietnam.

            This unpopular and, as some would have it, immoral war, together with a military draft hovering over the student body of the nation like a Sword of Damocles, created incendiary conditions for a youthful social movement. Harnessed to a commitment equal to the Phaedrean passion for the one-and-only, criticism of national war policy—which under other circumstances might have fallen short of producing change—succeeded in bringing an end to the war. For a time, anti-war sentiment and an ideal of social and international justice rose to the status of a one-and-only devotion.

            Ironically, however, the stimulus that gave rise to this movement, the Vietnam War, emerged as a focal point of controversy in large measure as a result of an equal, if not greater, unswerving attachment to a one-and-only placed before the youth of North Vietnam. This "cause," defined by Ho Chi Minh, became one for which many teenage warriors gave their lives in unquestioning suicidal fashion. But, to be clear, the American exit from Vietnam exposed differing national attitudes toward civil division and competing ideals of social justice and its implementation. In the American case deep civil divisions in views about the war were worked out largely through non-violent negotiation by marching in the streets. In the case of Vietnam civil divisions were worked out through non-negotiable dictates at the barrel of a gun. Ho Chi Minh was no Gandhi.

            Bob Dylan’s choice of rebellious style exemplified the cultural difference. Dylan may, at an early age, have imagined himself going to West Point to learn to wage war with bullets. But in later years he found himself conducting the “revolution” with words and melodies. However, in the case of Dylan, it must be noted that his “revolution” was culturally much broader than anti-war sentiment and extended to battles with a variety of cultural and personal “dragons” in realms well beyond current politics.

            There may be different paths to different ends—and different values in the balance—but the Phaedrean passion, as Macomber labored to point out, must never be underestimated. And while Macomber emphasized the importance of the Romantic element in Western culture, the same developmental processes and motives are by no means absent in the East.

Through an obscure speech in an often overlooked Platonic dialogue Macomber identified the defining elements of Romanticism: love, death, and revolution—all especially ascendant in adolescence. Perhaps Plato was onto something in the Symposium. Macomber pushed further and, inspired by the views of the German philosopher Gerhardt Krüger, opened the Symposium to an extraordinary interpretation. He portrayed it as a cultural/historical map of the Western soul and tradition and then handed that map to a host of students looking for directions. 

In future classes Macomber went on to discuss other speeches in the Symposium, showing how each speech corresponds to a series of personal and collective developmental stages or “faiths.” The first, Romanticism (Age of Myth, premodern) represented by Phaedrus; the second, Rationalism (Age of Reason, early modern) represented by Pausanias; the third, Empiricism (Age of Science, modern) represented by Eryximachus; the fourth, Existentialism (Age of Disillusionment, late modern) represented by Aristophanes; the fifth, Phenomenalism (Age of the Return to Lived Experience, twilight modern) represented by Agathon.  

Macomber did not assign names to the last two “faiths,” corresponding to the last two speeches. Culturally, these two stages were and still are in the process of unfolding and have not acquired a clear consensus of label. However, in a general sense, Macomber finds Socrates playing a role analogous to Hegel—seeing order in the epochs of the history of philosophy rather than introducing a new philosophy. The Hegelian metanarrative, consistent with modernism, introduces an appreciation for the significance of context but also anticipates the more radical postmodernist preoccupation with context.  

My own attempt at labeling provides one possible and by no means indisputable continuation of the sequence: the sixth, Contextualism (Age of Relativity, postmodern) represented by Socrates, and consisting of a recognition of the relativity of stages where one stage does not so much refute another as displace it; and the seventh, Quasi-Transcendentalism (Age of Return) signaling a return to Plato’s Cave after a brief exit (or near exit) in the attempt to bring accumulated wisdom back to the body, to life, to day-to-day living, and to the next generation. 

This last stage is dramatized in the Symposium when Socrates’ speech is broken off by Alcibiades’ entrance, in a state of intoxication, and his subsequent speech on Socrates. The tension between Socrates and Alcibiades reflects the tension between older and younger generations at every stage of history and life. Socrates fails to persuade Alcibiades to follow the path of reason and inquiry Socrates himself embodies. This failure suggests not only the difficulty of passing from one generation to the next the knowledge and practices that are the basis of institutions but also the difficulty of passing on the questioning attitude that must accompany the operations of institutions if they are to be kept alive and adapted to new circumstances.   

For Macomber, Plato’s Symposium prefigures and might be said to predict the decisive moments in the history of Western culture—along with many of the problems inherent in that culture. History becomes cyclical, turning in spirals of repetition and innovation, sameness and difference, in such a way that the similarity of progression enables a culture to take bearings on where it is and what might be expected next. Further, the developmental cycle Plato outlines also applies to individual lives. It marks out a series which precludes jumping over any particular stage. Some may dwell longer than others at certain stages but all experience a similar sequence if they live long enough. 

At the level of an individual life at any particular time in history the sequence can be described in a way that more directly emphasizes the topic of “love”—which is the overt theme of the Symposium. For an individual, the different stages divide into naturally evolving responses to the call of Eros. The progression unfolds as a sequential logic of possibilities in reaction to problems posed by the demands of romantic attachment and human relations in general.

1) First, the awakening at puberty (first love) initiating sensual attraction to, combined with admiration for and idealization of, another person

2) followed by rejection, betrayal, or disillusionment (first burn) resulting in a wounding and hardening, which instills a cautious, barter and exchange approach to relationships

3) leading eventually to a retreat from human relations in favor of passionate immersion in an occupation (second love) involving creative, practical activities such as science and commerce, which provide greater predictability and control

4)  culminating in further disillusionment (second burn), a falling out with career and loss of faith in rational and pragmatic programs along with the suspicion that these are ultimately barren and futile pursuits

5) giving rise to a renewed fascination with (third love) the part of life that was formerly mere surface and appearance along with a more ironic and complex understanding of “the beautiful”

6) followed by the stability/flexibility of a perceptive grasp of the series of past experiences and the value of their corresponding insights

7) reaching then a broader sense of self-worth and love of life making (pro)creation more than a physical desire

The way in which the interpretation of these seven stages grows out of the Symposium serves as the subject matter of Macomber’s unpublished book Love and Culture (excerpts of which will appear at a future time on this web site).  

Whether the speeches in the Symposium are rightly and adequately interpreted in the way Macomber describes is a matter of debate. The more important point, however, consists of the degree to which this way of seeing the progression of self and culture improves the sense of self and the ability to make sense of life. Understood as an aid to perception rather than any manner of ultimate truth (about the Symposium or about life), Plato’s cycle provides at least a rough map by which it becomes possible to sort out some of the confusion of any current time, including the bewildering array of beliefs and values, motivations and choices, confronting every generation.

In the next few years I took other classes from Macomber and got to know him better. In 1971 the Philosophy Department assigned him the task of teaching the Philosophy 1A Introductory Course. This course was traditionally one of the most popular courses because it fulfilled a basic requirement for many majors and consisted primarily of freshmen. Consequently, it was held in Campbell Hall, the largest auditorium on campus, seating approximately 900. (Love and Culture became a text for this course while Macomber was teaching it in 1972 and 1973).  

            While sitting in the back row of Campbell Hall one morning, listening in on his lecture, I heard him slip into a different gear of monologue. Then he casually inserted an announcement that reverberated through the auditorium and eventually throughout the administration, the faculty, and the entire campus. 

––I’ll be talking a lot about Women’s Lib. 
I want to liberate whole segments of the population. 
In fact, all of us need to be liberated in some way. 
So I’ll be talking of Women’s Lib,
And little old maiden-ladies, and blacks, and fags.
(Pause.) 
I’m a “fag.” 
That’s why I’m interested in liberation. 
I’ve never confessed it publicly before 900 people!          

            I remember the round of applause that welled up from the students in Campbell Hall. Not expecting it, Macomber appreciated the response.

            But this announcement did not sit well with the administration. Many in the administration may have thought of themselves as liberal, but proclaiming oneself a “fag” in front of a large assembly of freshmen attending the philosophy 1A flagship course exceeded the boundaries of liberal practice and propriety in the early ‘70s. The fact that Macomber had made the announcement and used the word “fag” to illustrate a point (about the need for varieties of liberation on the one hand and about how choice of words define what is named on the other), in no way mitigated the resulting controversy—of which only rumors filtered down to students.

            In an autobiographical account written during the years at UCSB and available to only a few students, Macomber explained, indeed “confessed,” what it had been like for him as he attempted to work through the fact of his homosexuality from within the framework of the attitudes and values of the time. And, while I was not gay, I could identify with aspects of his alienation—as could many other students working through varieties of adolescent angst and identity crises. His account also casts light on the shadows of homophobia and fears about what it takes to be a “real man.”

When I first came to Santa Barbara I was paying half my salary for psychotherapy (three days a week), and feeling imprisoned behind a mask, struggling to claw my way out, and writhing on my bed in the Angst-ridden thought that I, philosophically speaking, was nothing—Heidegger’s Nichts, Sartre's néant, Camus’ absurd man. I was wrestling with words like “deviant,” “pervert,” and “fag.” I simply couldn’t accept myself if those were the terms which ultimately best described me. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a “fag”; it meant I ought to wear purple pants and affect a limp wrist.  I thought I was “no man,” in Falstaff’s terms—or not a “real man,” as we would say today.

           

I was not a man—not a real man. I was no good at all in bed and battle, which I took to be the two criteria of real manhood. I was sterile, for some reason I couldn’t understand, and cowardly—utterly spineless—for a “reason” I could understand all too well, but couldn’t honor: I was extremely sensitive to pain, “effeminate” as it’s often called, and always shrank from body-contact.

             

So I was no good in bed and battle, the two places where one ordinarily proves one’s manliness, proves oneself a “real man.” I knew I was a cowardly pervert, and could not believe I’d ever be a “real man,” or that life would offer me any satisfaction or fulfillment. How could a cowardly pervert ever be a real man or know the satisfaction I was after? I had it all worked out apodictically, with mathematical necessity: it could never be. That was why I was writhing on my bed, and furiously studying Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, seeing how three of the greatest minds that ever lived approached the ultimate questions of reality, without the vaguest hope that all that purely speculative, abstract, Ivory Tower stuff could ever alter or transform my life—in the way that it now has.

             

I wanted desperately to marry and be like other people—or at least seem like other people. I never worried much about the cowardice—though it bothered me—but I was outraged and grief-stricken that I would never know physical or sexual satisfaction—or, as I put it to myself then, would never know love. “Love” only meant what religion said it meant, particularly Christianity, which I had nearly lost my belief in anyway. “Love” was something grounded in sensuality or sexuality and really possible only between a man and a woman. This love was something from which I found myself excluded, like Cyrano de Bergerac, for reasons I couldn’t understand. I wanted to be married, wanted desperately to be married, feeling I could not know real fulfillment in life in any other way.

           

I never really minded being different from other people, only I was afraid I was hung-up, deficient in some very serious way—at the very least, biased and infantile—with my “unnatural desires.” I was afraid that I was ill, and that I would never be able to see clearly through my deviant, deficient spectacles. At the very least I would always see life from a point of view the vast majority of men did not share, which I could hardly imagine anyone sharing. As James Baldwin might be taken to be writing not of love generally, but only of homosexual love, “the love that dare not speak its name” in the words of Lord Alfred Douglas. All the influences working on me, from Freud and the poets to the mass media and popular songs, all told me that I was simply missing it.  And, in the first instance, we all take ourselves to be what society takes us to be. This was the terror posed by my homosexuality, which had me writhing on my bed—when I had a bit of spare time—and paying half my salary to be “cured,” straightened out, made like other people—conked, as blacks say.

           
        Macomber had been raised Catholic and in his lectures he often addressed Christianity, since it constituted a major part of the intellectual history of Western culture. Having been raised Catholic myself, I knew Catholicism counted homosexuality as sin and perversion. It was not surprising, then, that “having nearly lost his faith in Christianity” Macomber became a critic of Christianity. But, despite his criticisms, he also pointed out positive aspects of the Christian tradition. He challenged the faith without completely dismissing it. Nevertheless, the points of criticism, many of which coincided with Nietzsche’s views, were significant and related to issues of sexuality, misogyny, and other-worldliness. Macomber’s affinity with certain of Nietzsche’s views also positioned him, along with Nietzsche, as a precursor to postmodernism.                    

In a lecture styled as a “critique of the Critiques”—an examination of the work of Immanuel Kant—Macomber revealed one of the ways in which he anticipated a postmodern theme regarding interpretation. While insisting on the great merit of many of Kant’s insights, Macomber went straight to the heart of the problem in Kant’s analysis by directing attention to the aporia of judgment (Urteilskraft). The aporia of judgment becomes most evident in the difficulty associated not with the formulation of rules but in the application of rules. The necessity for judgment (as opposed to mere calculation) and thereby the need for cultivated judgment in the application of rules is one of the more pronounced conclusions extending from postmodern insights, even if the ultimate identity of the “judge”—as individual subject, collective construction, or unfathomable mix of the two—remains in doubt. And, in some contexts, cultivated judgment may take the form of strategically suspended judgment. Macomber’s commentary/critique on Kant, echoing a contrast used by Heidegger, began with the difference between the instrument and the work of art.

Consider the difference between an instrument and a work of art—often too readily lumped together as species of artifact. The instrument is useful or purposive, points to the future and what you can do with it. A lawnmower, a bicycle, a typewriter. In the performance of its function, it disappears. You’re not supposed to notice it. You’re conscious of the “damn” thing chiefly when it malfunctions. The work of art, on the other hand, announces its own purpose, points to itself, vainly, and says, “Look at me!  Look what color can be! What wood, sound, or words can be!” 

 

We see this split, between the instrument and the work of art, in the philosophy of Kant. Kant is torn between morality and aesthetics, between impersonal laws and personal judgment. The stern moralist is the archetypal foe of the aesthete. John Wayne and Oscar Wilde. The difference between powerful commitment and detached, ephemeral vision. This conflict pervades Kant’s entire thinking in the competition of law and judgment in the second Critique. In the third, in keeping with Christian tradition, Kant finally sides with morality. He refuses to recognize any sphere of cultivated judgment beyond the dictates of the law.

 

So having sharply distinguished these two worlds in his first two Critiques, it is Kant’s final task to reunite the two. But the absolute status he ascribes to morality, and within morality to rules, makes it impossible for him to undertake the project of integration. He doesn’t see why aesthetics and morality penetrate each other to the core.

 

The problem goes like this: Rules have to be applied in concrete situations, situations which are more complex than the abstractions involved in rules. But there can be no ultimate rules for the application of rules.  And the rules don’t apply themselves. The application of the rules is a matter of judgment—judgment which must recognize the full range of rules and their ultimate limitations, the cases in which they no longer apply, cases in which their true spirit may be negated.

 

Kant’s ideal of man is not the judge but the Judge-Penitent. Constantly striving, bound to his life activity and to others by an eternal sense of obligation. And what are we to do, after all, when we’ve been told for as long as we can remember to produce, achieve, assume responsibility and fulfill obligations? Then find ourselves going to work for IBM and living in a split-level ranch-style bungalow in a world now extraordinarily adjusted to all our needs and desires?

 

There is an inversion here, and it drives Kant virtually to despair in history. He has made the categorical imperative the cornerstone of meaning in life. And then he shudders at the prospect of a technologically transformed world that challenges its relevance. 

 

What is so ironic is that the same tradition that leaves us with the strong sense of sacrifice and obligation—Christianity, followed by Kantian morality—brings us, through the marvel of science, to a place of greatly reduced scope for its exercise—placid, modern suburbia, with all its material abundance.

 

Lyndon Johnson serves as the tragic symbol of this dilemma. His desire to live for others, especially after achieving the goal for which he had always longed, the Presidency, drove him to lead America inexorably to Vietnam. There we escalate the war as we continue to fight with one arm behind our back and demilitarized zones. Given his orientation toward action, obligation, and self-justification, what else might be expected? What Mr. Johnson needed was more culture, more cultivated judgment, not a greater sense of rigid moral principle and obligation.

 

With this framework one senses a different need, a need for relaxation of principles, for greater appreciation of immediacy, context, and experience, and for more genuine enjoyment of life—all the things which figure so prominently in art and which Kant stresses in The Critique of Judgment.

 

But Kant, despite the counsel of his own fundamental assumptions, ultimately fails to give personal cultivated judgment the weight it deserves. This failure is the challenge bequeathed to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

            Macomber’s comments on Lyndon Johnson seemed to fly in the face of the chant that came from the streets in marches against the war. Activists protested that Vietnam was an immoral war waged by immoral men driven by the greed of corporate military-industrial types who desired little more than to live for themselves and pursue short-term gain at whatever cost to others. How may such men to be seen to be driven by “rigid moral principle and obligation” when that’s precisely what they were being criticized for lacking?

            Nevertheless, Macomber’s point was valid—as the historical record later revealed through the release of White House tapes from Johnson’s presidency. Johnson passionately believed he was doing the “right thing” in Vietnam. But when it became clear that it was not the right thing and that most people no longer supported him, the shock of disillusionment alongside his “true believer” commitment essentially destroyed him. He decided not to run for another term, retreated to his Texas ranch, and died a few years later. Johnson needed more “cultivated judgment” not only in the “cut of his suits,” as Macomber once commented, but also in the cut of his war policies. Attunement to the unique challenges and complexities of foreign policy exceeded his powers of judgment and the framework of his rigid moral compass—a compass that guided decisions that, from other perspectives, ironically traduced moral judgment.    

            A crisis of cultivated judgment continued and continues among American political leaders. While there appears to be a distinct lack of “rigid moral principle” in repeated scandals of corruption in politics, this has manifested itself alongside an escalation in the polarization of political conflicts between parties and factions—a polarization that reflects a growing adherence to a rigid moralizing of positions. As with the Johnson administration, the more rigid the moral stance, the more polarizing the rhetoric accompanying it and the greater the potential for immoral outcomes and violence. The Clinton administration appeared to have been an exception to the extent that it explored ways to overcome polarization of factions, both in foreign and domestic arenas. Clinton generally showed a more nuanced appreciation of opposing views and oppositional tensions than had been exhibited in previous administrations. However, the Monica Lewinsky affair demonstrated, in its own spectacular way, a distinct lapse of “cultivated judgment.” 

After the Clinton administration, the Bush White House became involved in another war that many compare to the entanglement of Vietnam—a war which was also justified, if not required, given a set of rigid moral principles. Although the situation was extraordinarily complex, Bush quickly transformed conflict into a war between “good and evil” in which the “evildoers” must be neutralized or destroyed. And while great differences exist between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam, a striking similarity in administration rhetoric and attitude has not gone unnoticed by many commentators on American foreign policy. If the Vietnam war taught the American public anything, it could be hoped that it taught that if war is to be waged it must be undertaken with adequate reality assessment—including especially an effort to avoid convenient and reductionistic understandings of the enemy—and unflinching honesty in communication to the people. Given the historical record of events to date, Macomber’s “critique of judgment” remains as relevant to the socio/political scene of the early 21^st century as it was to that of the last century.

           

Macomber Brief Chronology:

            William Barnes Macomber was born on July, 13, 1929. This was Friday the 13^th of the inaugural year of the Great Depression—a portentous point of departure as Bill liked to point out years later. He was born to Harold Stacy and Anne Macomber in a middle class neighborhood in the comfortable southern California town of Redlands, about sixty miles east of Los Angeles. 

            He was the youngest of four children, two brothers and a sister, all separated by four years in age. Had his father not died when he was four, Bill believed he would have had a younger brother or sister in line with the next four-year interval. Harold was a veteran of World War I and contracted a lung condition from the trenches in France that eventually caught up with him.

            Following his older brother Robert’s departure to private high school, Bill lived alone with his mother. With growing tensions in Europe, neighbors gathered at the Macomber residence during the evening hours to listen to the BBC and Winston Churchill. Following the broadcasts and in response to the adult lament, “What does it all mean?” the precocious young Bill became the center of attention as he interpreted the social and political significance of the speeches and news reports.

            Armed with a growing ability to understand and interpret current events, Bill attended the Jesuit Loyola High School in Los Angeles where he received extensive training in the classics. Having begun high school under the cloud of World War II in 1943, he emerged on the other side of the war in 1946 with a high school diploma and new prospects in a war-free nation. 

            That same year he began studies at the University of Santa Clara, which in later years he affectionately described as “high school with ash trays.” Nevertheless, by 1950 Santa Clara had prepared him sufficiently to gain entrance into the University of Toronto where he began work on a PhD in philosophy at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies.

            In 1951 his education was interrupted by the military draft brought on by the Korean War. The war began June 25, 1950 when the Soviet equipped North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38^th parallel into the Republic of South Korea. By July of 1951 the fighting had been reduced to a stalemate around the 38^th parallel and negotiations for an armistice commenced. These negotiations reached an impasse and continued with little progress for another two years until a breakthrough led to the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953. During the war Bill was stationed in Japan doing military clerical work. After the armistice he commenced work again on the Ph.D. But rather than returning directly to Toronto, he studied for a year (1954-1955) at the University of Heidelberg and then spent another year (1955-1956) at the Institut Catholique in Paris. 

            With newly acquired German and French language skills, Bill returned to the University of Toronto in 1956 to continue work toward the doctorate. In 1963 he completed his dissertation entitled “The Phenomenological Notion of Truth in Hegel and Heidegger” and then returned to Germany for post-doctoral research (1963-1965) at the University of Munich. Here he re-wrote the dissertation into a book on Heidegger alone.  It was the first book length study of Heidegger in Northwestern University’s Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and was eventually published in 1967 with the title “The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth.”

            On his return from Munich in 1965, indeed on the day he boarded ship to return to the United States, Bill’s mother died. After arriving in New York, he learned of her passing when he called his sister to get directions for a visit to her in Washington D. C. Consequently, he missed the memorial services. Later that year he returned to California to live for a time in Riverside while applying for teaching positions at various universities.

            Bill accepted a position in the philosophy department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and began teaching German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche in the fall of 1965. At UCSB Bill initially lived alone but began living with former students in 1970. These included Mike Lawson from 1970 to 1971 and Rick Long from 1971 to 1973. 

            Bill taught at UCSB until 1973 when he was not granted tenure (for reasons outlined in the text above). At the end of the academic year in late June, he left Santa Barbara for Berkeley where he lived with Tom Chance, a former UCSB grad student in philosophy who was then studying classics at Berkeley. Here Bill met and became friends with Andy Burnham, who at the time was a street artist selling jewelry on Telegraph Avenue. According to Andy, Bill responded to an invitation from some friends in British Columbia and moved to Vancouver in 1974. While in Canada he joined a theater company and played a part in several performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Andy provides details of what happened next:

During Bill’s Vancouver chapter, he and I corresponded, and around the middle of 1975, I suggested that he come back to Berkeley and move into a house with Tom, me, and two other former UCSB grads, George Cannon and Jane Rogan. The plan was to start a kind of intellectual gathering place, which Bill jokingly referred to as Utopian University—U.U.! I rented a run-down brown shingle house on Hillegass Avenue, a few blocks south of People’s Park, and sent Bill money to cover a train ticket down from Vancouver. A few days later, he arrived at the station in Oakland, where we picked him up and drove him to Berkeley to begin our great adventure together.

 

Unfortunately, utopia never really materialized. There were some incredible conversations—talking about Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and of course Plato. Also, Tom and George were both in the classics department—Tom studying the Greeks, and George the Romans—so we spent a great deal of time discussing those eras as well.

 

But before too many months had passed, arguments rather than conversations became a regular part of the household. The relational chemistry of the house began breaking down and Bill became increasingly upset with the situation. Tensions grew until all of us felt like we were walking through a minefield, hoping to avoid an unpleasant explosion.

 

One night in January of 1976 Bill became very upset with the situation in the house, and soon afterwards, I left, hitch-hiking across country (a wee bit brisk in January), then hopping a cheap charter flight to Germany, where I knew a German girl who eventually became my wife. I later learned that U.U. had continued in meltdown-mode after I left, with everyone soon parting ways. To the best of my knowledge, Bill survived on government help and food stamps and lived in several locations around Berkeley from 1976 to 1986.

   

            As the years passed, the window of opportunity for Bill’s possible return to teaching and academic life narrowed to nearly nothing. The bitterness following the failure to get tenure at UCSB, combined with the ensuing complications for his personal and financial life, took a toll on Bill’s teaching ambitions—which remained lukewarm in the wake of the UCSB experience. He eventually moved to Oakland and lived alone in an apartment there until 2001 when he was forced to leave by the sale and renovation plan for the apartment building. Completing a grand circle, he moved into a residence for seniors in his home town of Redlands in 2001, where he continues to reside today.