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.
Philosophy 1A—Liberation
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 21st 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 13th 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 38th
parallel into the Republic of South Korea.
By July of 1951 the fighting had been reduced to a stalemate around the
38th
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.