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An Interview in Starbucks
While I was doing some errands this evening I stopped at a Starbucks in northeast Portland for hot chocolate. I wanted to take some notes before I forgot my ideas, so I sat down with pen and notebook, and as soon as I did I regretted my choice of seat. At the next table were two young women who are talking loudly and animatedly. What is one to do? Listen to their conversation, of course.
The younger of the two was still in high school, and was being interviewed for participation in some program by the older of the two. The younger woman was enthusiastic and full of youthful energy and optimism. She made her high school experience sound quite remarkable, and this made me reflect on my own experiences, now some thirty years old.
I have a great many bad memories of school, but no good memories. I do not say that the school was bad, only that my experience of it was bad. No doubt others who went to the same school at the same time as I did might give a radically different report and a very different evaluation of the experience. But my experience was what it was, and I can neither deny it nor deny that it shaped me.
I wonder if there are others, attending the same public high school that this young woman found to be so filled with inspiring opportunities, who find the experience as profoundly alien as I found the school experience. The conditions of human experience, as well as the temperamental variability of individuals, are constants of the human condition (at least within a single macro-historical division), and therefore human natures are iterated within these parameters.
I find myself thinking of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground again, which Dostoyevsky prefaced with this note:
The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living.
Dostoyevsky might have elaborated, “…one of the representatives of a generation still living, or even of a generation yet to be born…” As Dostoyevsky notes, such individuals not only may exist, but must exist.
Now, for a salto mortale, from Dostoyevsky to Husserl:
Husserl, during his last years, lived during the rise of Nazi power in Germany. As a Jew, he was stripped of his right to teach, his right to lecture, even his right to attend philosophical congresses. Husserl was offered a position at a university in California (imagine Husserl having joined the German expatriate intellectuals in California during the war — it makes for quite an image, Husserl among palm trees, bathed in sunshine) but he chose to stay and to die in Germany.
Of his later years Husserl wrote:
“And we old people remain here. A singular turn of the times: it gives the philosopher—if it does not take away his breath—much to think of. But now: Cogito ergo sum, i.e., I prove sub specie aeterni my right to live, and this, the aeternitas in general, cannot be touched by any earthly powers.”
(quoted in Marvin Farber, Edmund Husserl and the Aims of Phenomenology)
This stands among my favorite philosophical quotes, and I have often meant to write about this in detail, though I have not found my powers yet equal to the task.
But this I will say: so too with the underground man — the underground man not only must exist, but he also proves sub specie aeterni his right to exist. No more than any earthly powers can touch the aeternitas of Husserl’s Apollonian thought can earthly powers touch the aeternitas of the underground man’s perverse thinking.
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