Genealogies of Philosophy: Mariëtte Willemsen

Mariëtte Willemsen lectures in philosophy at Amsterdam University College. In this interview, Mariëtte discusses her philosophical roots, how she sees the relationship between literature and philosophy, what it means to take a stance on a philosopher, and how a commitment to compassion unifies her work. The interview begins with Amsterdam in the late 1970s & 1980s, moves through Tübingen, then the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar, and returns to present day Amsterdam with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil as intellectual companions.

From Language Games to Compassion

Sidra: You studied linguistics and philosophy in Amsterdam during an important time for the city.  How did you become a philosopher?

Mariëtte: I started with Dutch literature and linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Deep down inside I wanted to be a novelist, or perhaps even more so, a poet. To achieve that I felt I needed to study the technique of my language. 

I studied linguistics at a time when Chomsky’s generative linguistics was in its heyday here in the Netherlands. I, however, became part of a camp that wanted to move away from structural concerns with language to semantics and pragmatics, the content of language, if you will.  We would discuss the meaning of particles, focusing on words like “however,” “there,” or “thus,” compiling sentences from the real world (especially from radio interviews) instead of using the type of sentences we were used to seeing in textbooks. We wanted to see how these words figured in daily language.

Sidra: What was Amsterdam like in those days? 

Mariëtte: That was in the late 70s and 80s. It was an amazing time and place — politically volatile, with the crowning of Queen Beatrix in 1980 and the squatter’s movement gaining ground.  The city was different from what it looks like now, uglier, I would say, but in a cozy way, with less tourism and gentrification, and with people smoking pot in the streets and in the parks rather than staring at their phones. 

I used to live in the southern part of Amsterdam together with my best friend. We would talk late into the evening, about the world, politics, but mostly about novels and poems. We shared our discoveries. 

About those “particles,” though:  My MA thesis was about the conjunction “en” or “and.” It was immensely enjoyable to work with sentences from the radio, but also with poems, in order to get a full sense of what the word “en” can really do in a text. I was especially interested in poems and advertisement slogans beginning with “en,” since they, as I learned, presuppose a series of events having taken place at an earlier stage. 

It was also at this time that the postmodernists were gaining prominence among the linguists here, and, for a time, I was interested in Derrida and Lyotard, going back to Saussure as well. As a beginner in academia, I couldn’t see the full extent of the importance (and limits) of postmodernism, as an attack on a dogmatic, one-sided way of doing science and being in the world, but I felt attracted to it because of its focus on language. 

So, there was this conjunction between language and philosophy in the air which marked my entry into philosophy. I saw that philosophy can also be about meaning and content but in a different way than in linguistics.  I received a grant to study in Tübingen. It was here in Tübingen that I thought: philosophy is where I want to be. 

Sidra: What happened in Tübingen?

Mariëtte:  It was in Tübingen, a small university city which is famous for its strong philosophical history, that I encountered Nietzsche. 

I had, in fact, started reading Hölderlin’s poems while I was in Tübingen.  However, it was a 10-month seminar on Nietzsche that especially affected me. In Nietzsche I found my love for literature and philosophy combined. Reading Nietzsche for the first time, I could sense that here is a philosopher working with the history of Western philosophy but expressing it in a uniquely poetic, even evangelical way. Incidentally, this also eventually made me ambivalent towards Nietzsche.

In Tübingen, I became interested in the chapter “On the Vision and Riddle” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  I started working on readings of the eternal recurrence of the same. And I began exploring how the riddle-chapter, with its focus on the idea of a transformation towards an affirmative life-style, is the center of the book from which to understand the other parts. 

 “And this slow-moving spider, crawling in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things– must we not all have been here before?

– and must come again and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long and dreadful lane– must we not eternally come back again? – […]”

“No longer shepherd, no longer human – one transformed, illumined, who laughed! Never yet on earth had a human being laughed as he laughed!”

~ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 136 and p.138

In a sense, I was explaining what many Nietzsche-interpreters already knew.  Nowadays from very early on, students are expected to find a “research gap” and to offer an original contribution. Back then, this wasn’t the format. You could do an in-depth and close reading of texts, working with literature from Nietzsche studies.  “Originality” came from the selection of materials and the shaping of your perspective on them.

I went on in my doctoral work to consider connections between the life and the works of Nietzsche.  I explored his letters, poems, and philosophical works as well as his more autobiographical, Ecce Homo. 

I especially wanted to show how Nietzsche’s philosophical work falls apart when, in the end, he does not live up to his own standards.  I focused on one of his last poems from Dionysian-Dithyrambs called “Amid Birds of Prey.”  There, I argued that Nietzsche reflects on his own philosophical hubris, his harshness, and suffers from his solitude as a consequence.   He knew that his reevaluation of values was doomed to fail.  This perspective, marvelously spelled out in the poem, needed attention. 

Sidra: I was just thinking of what is supposed to be Nietzsche’s last, sane act.  He apparently threw his arms around a horse that was being flogged, then descended into madness once and for all.  … What was insightful about looking at Nietzsche’s work through his life?

Mariëtte:  Yes, you are right. This is a strong image, embracing a horse as a final act of compassion. The image is almost too perfect and it wasn’t too pivotal for my reading. However, I found it intriguing that the scene with the horse took place near the university building, his life as a professor nearby his life as a wanderer… .

I was raised in an exegetical tradition that focuses on the text. But with Nietzsche, I came to see that reading his other work – including his letters – and connecting them to his philosophical work would be in line with his perspectivism.  All of these sources illuminate his standpoint.  Reading his letters, for example, helped me to see what a compassionate person he was, a disposition from which he suffered.  In fact, you could say that Nietzsche sought to go against this “weakness” through his philosophy.

One of the most wonderful moments of my philosophical career was when I went to the Nietzsche archives in Weimar. I was there early in the morning, and I saw Nietzsche’s school notebook, right there on the table. Here I was holding the school notebook of Nietzsche!  There was a wonderful poem in it about two larks, one that wanted to ascend and the other that wanted to fly low.  

Nietzsche had made a little drawing in his notebook next to his poem:

As you can see, I was very much into close reading, textual and argumentative analysis, and so on.  But around this time, I asked myself, 

“How do I myself stand with relation to his work?  I’m not sure that Nietzsche’s works are about what I think matters, besides being a challenge for analysis.” 

My main concern was his philosophical, not personal, rejection of compassion.  There is harshness in Nietzsche that I do not find convincing and that is not helpful for the times we are living in today, although I can sense the value of the project in the 19^th century context of Christian culture and its hypocrisies. 

Increasingly, I felt that I should take a more personal stance toward Nietzsche’s philosophy instead of merely interpreting it.   The way I came to see Nietzsche more critically is through my friend, Theo, a psychiatrist who was around 80 years old when I met him.  I was in my 30s. My friendship with Theo was formative for my work. Theo helped me take a stance on Nietzsche. We used to go the theater and opera together.  He was critical, direct, and compassionate.  In fact, I wrote the final part of my study with Theo in mind.

Murdoch Beyond Nietzsche: “Un-selfing”

Sidra: So where did you go from there?

Mariëtte: I had started reading Iris Murdoch novels at some point during my studies.  There are 27 of them, but for decades, I decided not to read the 27^th, because there would then be no more to look forward to!  (Two years ago, I finally read the last one of them, The Red and the Green).

I knew Iris Murdoch as a literary figure and only later as a philosopher (thankfully she did not cite philosophers in her literary works; I frankly detest it when novelists do that; write a treatise, if you must!).  When I turned to Murdoch’s philosophical work, I realised that her philosophical ideas were there all along, layered and hidden in her novels.  

Murdoch’s philosophical work is a joy to read. Together with Marije Hannah Altorf, I translated three of Murdoch’s essays in Dutch. This was one of the most wonderful things I have done in my career: working on a translation, savoring every word and discussing translation decisions with a dear colleague-friend.  Spending time on translating a philosopher is an exercise in humility.

Sidra: What did you find compelling about Murdoch’s novels?

There is a conjunction of the mysterious and the ordinary in Iris Murdoch’s work, what one could call, a deepening of the ordinary:  someone getting lost in the woods; someone going for a swim, the coldness of the sea; someone losing themselves in a painting at the National Gallery. Her novels show how the mystical in the everyday deepens and renews life. 

For example, in the first novel of Murdoch’s that I read, The Bell, a man is attracted to a young boy.  Late one evening, this man sees the boy’s face blinded by the headlights of a car. It is as if he sees the boy for the first time.  The boy is seen in his reality, so to speak, without projections.

This type of selfless attention is what Murdoch wants.  As human beings, she explains, we tend to be selfish, but there are moments of un-selfing, often triggered by nature or by works of art.

In this vein, an intriguing passage in her novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine comes to mind, where one of the protagonists goes to the National Portrait Gallery and looks at a painting by Giorgione.  She notices a detail that she had never really seen before: 

There was a tree in the middle background which she had never properly attended to before. Of course she had seen it, since she had often looked at the picture, but she had never before felt its significance, though what that significance was, she could not say. There it was in the middle of clarity, in the middle of bright darkness, in the middle of sultry yellow air, in the middle of nowhere at all with distant clouds creeping by behind it, linking the two saints yet also separating them and also being itself and nothing to do with them at all […] 

~ Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine, p. 53.

Sidra: This side of you that reads Murdoch is not one I considered before.  I was aware, instead, of your interest in Schopenhauer.  How do these sides fit together?

Mariëtte:  Schopenhauer made room for compassion. Murdoch called Schopenhauer a “cheerful pessimist” – an apt way of describing his work. His work is a sort of opposite of Nietzsche’s…

Sidra: Gloomy optimism?

Mariëtte: Yes, that’s a great phrase. Nietzschean gloomy optimism versus Schopenhaeurian cheerful pessimism!

Sidra: What kind of ethics did you find in Schopenhauer’s work?

Mariëtte: There’s a later essay, “On the Basis of Morality” where he sums up his ethics in a sentence:

Hurt no-one, and help everyone as much as you can. 

In Schopenhauer’s ethics, compassion is central.  Although Schopenhauer’s maxim might be a simplification of the complexities of ethical life, what he says is basically right. 

Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the virtues of kindness and compassion resonates with virtue ethics. At the same time the imperative to do no harm and to help others also points loosely to deontological ethics. But it is difficult to place his work tidily within the context of one of the grand normative theories.

In the first degree, by counteracting egoistic and malicious motives, compassion prevents me from causing suffering to another and hence from becoming myself the cause of another’s pain…. In the second place…compassion works positively and incites me to active help. Schopenhauer, “On the Basis of Morality,” p. 148

Sidra: Compassion and kindness are affective and embodied, too.

Mariëtte: Yes, that’s right. Despite the conceptual emphasis of his work, Schopenhauer gives an important place to the body.  The world of will underlies the world of representation. They are two sides of the same coin. Schopenhauer sees the world in itself as a flux of forces whereas the world as we perceive it, the world of representation, is ordered and structured spatio-temporally and through causality. Schopenhauer says at some point that it is through our bodies, we can sense the world as will or energy. For Schopenhauer, it is in the body that these two separate worlds meet.

You can recognize this distinction in what Nietzsche, under Schopenhauer’s spell, will coin as the Dionysian (will) and the Apollonian (representation).

Sidra:   You offer a course in comparative philosophy, which I also think requires something like exegetical compassion. Tell us about this course and your approach to it.

Mariette:  Offering the course is part of a broader trend at Amsterdam University College to open up the curriculum. We are still somewhat narrow in what we offer. In philosophy programmes, by philosophy we often mean European-American philosophy, predominantly written by white, male persons. 

We can’t change this overnight, but we need to work on it. Luckily there are young philosophers in the world who have the expertise that most philosophers of my generation do not have. But we as older philosophers could in any case try to make a start or at least support new developments. 

An interesting approach, I feel, is to work with certain topics, such as “the self,” “beauty,” “evil,” “nature,” and then to look at them from several philosophical traditions. This is what André van Braak and I do in our Comparative Philosophy course at Amsterdam University College. 

It’s great to teach with André – he’s very resourceful, calm, an excellent listener, too.  It is helpful that both André and I have worked on Nietzsche, but he also has a background in Zen Buddhism. This gives him a certain knack for non-Western thought, and by this, I mean to say that he has techniques for being open to reading forms of thought that are not in the Western tradition, that don’t fall back on the Western framework.  For example, last week, we read about Japanese aesthetics at the same time as we talked about notions of beauty in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. 

The first three weeks of the course are focused on a textbook, Doing Philosophy Comparatively written by Tim Connolly. We discuss things like whether, when we compare two traditions, we should be looking for commonalities and consensus or difference and plurality. We also consider how to tackle incommensurability problems of language and of translation.  One of the student groups recently explored connections between Schopenhauer’s notion of the Will and the Navajo concept of wind. 

Sidra: Can we talk about administrative work? How do you bring meaning to work that may at times be dull, and how do you find ways to relate to it compassionately?

Mariëtte: I have had moments feeling overwhelmed. What I do is try to keep staff and students in mind. The admin work supports and helps create a good teaching program. The things I do and have to do are directed at making this program work for teachers and students alike. When the connection to this meaningful dimension is lost, some desperation can arise. 

Even when it comes to something like an excel sheet, filling out how many members of staff are in the Humanities, etc. it’s important to remember that numbers refer to people. But if we end up only talking about the numbers, forgetting to whom they refer, well, again, there’s reason to despair. 

The quality of the courses, the people behind the courses who are making them possible, their lives, and their careers – all these matter. Amsterdam University College is not an immense institution; it is possible to keep the people involved in view.

Sidra: You will soon step down from being Head of Studies in the Humanities for half a decade and after a longer period of taking on administrative tasks. What will you do next?

Mariëtte: Looking back at my own philosophical career, I find there is still so much to do! I taught a course on Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace recently, in part to get a better sense of how she influenced Murdoch.  I was interested in the connection Weil draws between mysticism and activism.  How did she connect the two? 

Here was a thinker – very much opposed to Nietzsche – for whom compassion (as for Schopenhauer) was pivotal. Her concept of attention had an immense effect on Murdoch.  Weil drafted a document on obligations as an alternative to a declaration of human rights! She liaised with trade unions and fought in the Spanish Civil war.  She worked in a car factory and did agricultural labor …

Sidra:  … She deepened the ordinary through compassionate action.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.