Eugene Kelly has been Professor of Philosophy at the New York Institute of Technology for forty years. He received his Ph.D. from New York University, and spent two years doing research as a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service at the F.U. Berlin and the University of Cologne. Among his research interests is German phenomenology, and he has published many essays in this field in both English and German. Three books may be mentioned: Max Scheler (Boston: Twayne, 1977), Structure and Diversity (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), and Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann (Springer: Phaenomenologica 203, 2011). More recently, de Gruyter published Nicolai Hartmann’s Aesthetics, translated with an introduction by Kelly (2014). For many years he has been the co-editor (with Tziporah Kasachkoff) of the Newsletter on Teaching, which is published by the American Philosophical Association.
What excites you about philosophy?What is the favorite thing you have written?
These questions require a brief story. Quite a few years ago a book appeared that attempted to answer one of the first questions asked of philosophers contributing to the APA Blog: Why did you go into philosophy? The book was Falling in Love with Wisdom. American Philosophers Talk about Their Calling, edited by David D. Karnos and Robert G. Shoemaker (Oxford U. Press, 1993). I reviewed it for the APA Newsletter on Teaching (95:1, Fall 1995), and that little essay is perhaps a favorite piece of my own writing.
What surprised me about theses narratives was that many more philosophers attributed their calling to a “great book” rather than to a great teacher. It seemed to me that the impulse to philosophy, more than other academic study, comes from persons who exemplify the philosophic sprit in their own person, who possesses the “radiant virtue” (Nietzsche: Die schenkende Tugend) that attracts participation in the struggle to clarify the grandest ideas, and who put themselves entirely in the service of those ideas while making them available to younger men and women. So, no doubt, Socrates was to Plato and Alcibiades and Plato to Aristotle. Of course I had persons of radiant virtue behind me in my youth who led me into the philosophical life of the mind.
I began my review with a criticism of those of the book’s contributors who thought that institutionalized philosophy was too corrupt to make a happy home in it. One of the authors, Joel Feinberg, quotes Santayana to the effect that the proper place for a philosopher would be “tending the umbrellas in some unfrequented museum.” With due respect to Santayana, the idea is nonsense: we philosophers need the company of others in order to do philosophy (Yes, I recall the case of Spinoza who wrote his philosophy as a lens-grinder, but he had an extensive correspondence with thinkers throughout northern Europe). These authors are looking in the wrong direction for the value of philosophy: toward the institution in which they teach rather than toward the life we lucky few who are given professorships are able to live in our classrooms and with our fellows.
If I am going to be a teacher of this subject, I said to myself as a young man, I have to make the philosophical life of the mind visible in me, and not just analyze dispassionately ideas in the texts I assign. But my aspirations were much more limited than Plato’s. I thought of myself as a future teacher in terms of a metaphor taken from the final Lied in Schubert’s Winterreise). My humble image of what I could be in class is that of Schubert’s hurdy-gurdy man, who plays his songs behind a village where only a few of the villagers ever pass, and those that do hardly notice him at all. He is barefoot upon the wintry ice, his beggar’s cup is empty, and even the passing dogs growl at him. A wandering lovelorn philosopher – let us say Plato, or Descartes, or even Nietzsche at the most uncertain periods of his life – sees him there and asks, bitterly, if the fellow would not like to play his songs on the hurdy-gurdy. Let’s add to the story that the old man falls in love with the philosopher-poet and his wisdom, and he plays, perhaps in a way that often does little justice to them, the songs his master gives him to play. He speaks in a voice that is his own, of course, and may even contribute a new song now and then. If he eventually gets to sing these at a college or university, we may hope the experience will not corrupt him.
What are my favorite book(s) of all time?
To answer, I made a list of the books have I read more than once, for that may be a hint to what my favorites are. (I leave out books in philosophy.) They include The Divine Comedy (in Sinclair’s prose translation), the greatest poetic and metaphysical adventure; The Brothers Karamazov;War and Peace and Anna Karenina; Faust; The Magic Mountain; of Shakespeare Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear; Don Quixote.
What books are currently on your “to read” list? 5. What books have changed your life? In what ways?
If I have enough time ahead of me, I will read a second timeIn Search of Lost Time, preferably in the original language. I got through Du coté de chez Swann and part of A l’ombre des Jeunes Filles en fleursbefore turning to the English edition out of fear that I would be dead before I finished the French edition. Proust gave me the sense that one’s calling in life and one’s fate across time, if pondered and poeticized, manifests a cathedral-like structure. Elements of one’s loves and friendships, one’s enthusiasms and interests, all recur in new ways as life proceeds. Life, as some existentialists say, may be absurd and meaningless in the long run, but one can sense a meaningful structure in one’s own life and that of others if one has the guidance from one such as Proust to seek it out. Each human life is a cosmos.
What am I reading now?
Julius Caesar; Turgenev:Fumée
What am I working on just now (in philosophy)?
Further work on a new course in the philosophy of love and sex; the phenomenology of free will for a conference in Cologne, Germany; the question, stated by Scheler and Hartmann in their own peculiar ways, about what they called the “intimate person:” In what phenomena does such a thing manifest itself?
Some of the other questions asked here are more personal, but here goes, briefly.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
That I’ve managed to keep my wife Zuzana (happily) married to me for fifty-one years, and that I’ve helped raise our daughter, who is now a mother and a professor in microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
What is your favorite place you have travelled and why?
I’m happy to have travelled so much – wandering about China, Russia, South America, alone or with friends; a photo-safari through East Africa; hitchhiking across Afghanistan; teaching and/or lecturing in such places as Nanjing, Tokyo, Helsinki, Prague, and Liechtenstein.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
