Article from the Chicago Reader, July 6, 2001.

The Search for Intelligent Life
         Students at the back-room
Philosophy Institute get  in deep.

By Harold Henderson

During the day the upstairs back room at Damen and Division is the office
of the youth literacy program Young Chicago Authors. At night, twice a
week, the philosophers come out. On this Sunday evening in April, five
people sitting on metal folding chairs around a long gray table are
immersed in a discussion about freedom.

"Sartre thinks that we really are free to move beyond our upbringing and
our past," J.P. Rosensweig tells the rest of us around the table. "His
claim might seem a little overdone. He holds that we choose not only our
actions but our character as well."

Janet has absorbed this week's reading-ten pages of Mary Warnock's The
Philosophy of Sartre-better than I have. I'm still contemplating the
extravagance of Sartre's claim as she breaks in to agree with it. "Think
about Sisyphus," the mythical figure we'd discussed in an earlier session.
"He was condemned forever to roll a huge stone up a hill, watch it roll
down, and then roll it up again. But he was still free in his mind. You're
still free to make choices."

Rosensweig smiles. "You're putting forth a well-stated Sartrean view. I'm
going to put forth an objection. Let's think about a young woman with
anorexia. She's pressed by her family and by the magazines she sees to be
pretty and thin, so she diets all the time. Now she's actually emaciated,
but when she looks in the mirror she thinks she's fat. Are you telling her,
'You're free to start eating'?"

Rosensweig may be the only freelance philosopher in the country. A graduate
student on leave from the philosophy department at the University of
Chicago, he founded the Philosophy Institute in January 2000 and has been
running reading-and-discussion groups ever since under the rubric "Bringing
Ideas to Life." A typical group consists of up to 12 people who meet for
two hours once a week for eight weeks. Participants have taken up
"Exploring the Possibility of Genuine Community" (winter 2000 and again
this summer), "Self-Knowledge, Self-Deception, Authenticity" (spring 2000),
and "Confronting Central Ethical Questions" (fall 2000). This evening is
our eighth and final session on "Meaning in Life, Mortality, Freedom, and
Other Issues in Existentialism."

Rosensweig charges $120 per person for the sessions (a sliding scale is
available). The Philosophy Institute is growing, he says, but it has yet to
produce enough income for him to live on-he makes ends meet by belt
tightening and by tutoring high school students in basic math and English.
So far he has marketed his classes only through word of mouth, flyers in
Wicker Park hangouts, a small mailing list, and
www.thephilosophyinstitute.org . Neither the fee nor the somewhat imposing
topics have prevented dozens of people from finding him and signing up.

"It's a funny thing in a big city," says Bryan Brickner, a copy editor and
former high school teacher who took the class on ethics with his wife,
Dianna. "There are so many people around, but it's hard to have good
conversations." Dianna, who's in business training and development, had
never studied philosophy before, and she was pleasantly surprised. "It's
more a conversation than a class," she says, "and for someone who's been in
a business world, that's refreshing." Software designer Paul Caswell, who'd
also had little contact with philosophy before taking an institute class,
says he appreciates the chance to be "in an environment where people will
listen to everyone's opinion. It's amazing the shared understanding you can
pick up. As a mathematician, it was always lock yourself in a room and try
to think it out."

"Yes, she is free." Mike chimes in, defending Sartre against Rosensweig's
challenge. "Free to begin the journey."

"You took the words right out of my mouth," says Rosensweig. "That does
seem to be the most convincing interpretation of Sartre. It's not realistic
to tell a Vietnam vet just to stop being afraid of loud noises, but it is
credible to say that he has the power to start changing."

"I believe we all have that potential," says Mike.

Jim is mildly exasperated. "But what is the <i>mechanism</i> by which this
could come about?"

Janet refers back to the example of the anorexic young woman: "She's the
only one who can do it."

"Jim's question is central," says Rosensweig. "If she is free, she's not
necessarily free to feel good about herself right away tomorrow. This gets
back to the question of 'practices.' I want to play the guitar, but I'm a
rightie. My left hand is weak. I have to strengthen it and that takes time.
It's not a one-shot deal."

Mike says, "I think the mechanism occurs on the spot, when she knows
that she's free."

Jim is still puzzled. "How do you get to that place?"

Rosensweig says, "This is really good. Existentialism in general, and
Sartre in particular, both think there is a mechanism to accomplish what
Paul is saying. It's the moment of angst, of earth-shattering realization,
like when you really personally realize that you are going to die.
Heidegger would say that that realization shakes you out of what he calls
the 'they' [the way everyone routinely does things] and throws you back
'into the abyss.' In other words, the confrontation with death jolts you
out of your everyday rut and makes you see everything differently."

Rosensweig is in his mid-30s-old enough that his shoulder-length hair is
thinning, and young enough that his family still hasn't become reconciled
to its length. It took both a pull and a push to get him to act on his
beliefs and form the Philosophy Institute.

The pull came from occasional encounters at family gatherings, parties, and
other nonphilosophical affairs. "It wasn't unusual for someone to take me
aside, or just in the course of conversation ask me some sort of deep
philosophical question," he says. "For instance, 'Is there a real right and
wrong?' or 'I'm working six days a week, 14 hours a day. How do I decide
whether to leave this securities firm? Why are things organized this way
anyhow?'

"I'd say a little bit in general about how a person can get some sense of
their identity, and how other cultures view work differently from
Americans-maybe give them some conceptual tools. I had a sense they
appreciated it. This happened a lot." It wasn't so much that they wanted
advice from a guru-though Rosensweig is easy to talk to-they just seemed to
miss having the opportunity for something more than a casual conversation
on a casual topic. What he said was more likely to help them think more
clearly about their plans than to drastically alter them.

If the people he met at random wanted to talk, many of his colleagues in
academic philosophy didn't. That helped push him away. "In major university
philosophy departments today," he says, "80 percent or more of the emphasis
is on acquiring information and becoming an expert in the field." His
University of Chicago colleague Matt Schwartz describes that process as the
systematic examination of "hundreds of articles. You look at the text,
schematize the argument, see if the argument is valid [do the conclusions
follow from the premises?], and then see if the premises are true. It's a
kind of game you're playing."
Rosensweig appreciated the value of the game, but he wanted more. "There's
little or no emphasis on relating what you're studying to your own
life-it's not institutionally encouraged. I was baffled and flabbergasted
by this. I knew experts on ethics who were unethical in their own lives. I
knew people who were very knowledgeable about theories of meaning in life
who seemed to have a deep emptiness within." Rosensweig wasn't asking for
perfection or pat answers; he was asking for a commitment professors rarely
have to make, for an acknowledgment that philosophy should affect our
personal lives.

In his own life, he recalls being startled by Heidegger's statement that
being an authentic person involves constantly questioning and being
unsettled. "To me that was completely counterintuitive," he says. "I
thought that once I figured out who I was, I'd at least be settled inside.
I wouldn't be anxious anymore. But Heidegger said that you're always only
partly at home." Over time, Heidegger's view helped Rosensweig live with
his own inevitably incomplete plans. The idea of learning to live with
uncertainty and contradiction turns up surprisingly often among his
students, including a woman debating whether she should take time off
between jobs to pursue a personal dream and Paul Caswell, who concluded
after one class, "Nobody knows what you should do, so you might as
well do what you can."

"Now we're getting down to the meat," says Rosensweig. "How the heck do
people change?" The moment of angst may shake you up, but according to
Sartre another mechanism is more important. "How does Sartre think this
anorexic woman gets there? Let's look at page 113. I'll read a little bit
and then say a few words about it: 'If I am very cold it might be thought
that the cold was my motive for getting up to put more on the fire. But the
cold itself cannot lead me to any action at all, only to a passive
acceptance of it. What constitutes my motive for acting is my apprehension
of the cold as something to be overcome, as something which I can change.'"

He stops reading. "In other words, as conscious beings we have an
imagination. We can imagine stuff that is not actually going on in this
room right now. Sartre thinks this is crucial. We're not constrained in our
thoughts by the way stuff is happening right here and now. That's why he
puts it so strongly-we're all necessarily free because we're all
necessarily conscious.

"Now let's put this into practice. As we read, a state of affairs cannot be
a motive. Being cold in itself cannot lead me to do anything. It's how I
take the cold. I have to see it as something I can do something
about.

"So if this anorexic woman follows Sartre's view-in my reconstruction of
Sartre-she can't change tomorrow. She does have psychologically ingrained
behavior, but she has the potential to imagine herself free of anorexia. As
soon as she adopts the viewpoint that it's not insurmountable, that is the
beginning of change. Now, people can say Sartre's ideas are just a load of
shit, but this is a way to see them as something wise."

Rick Furtak, a PhD student at the University of Chicago who met Rosensweig
a couple of years ago in a university course on Henry David Thoreau, likes
his approach. Unlike basket weaving or nuclear physics, Furtak says,
philosophy isn't optional-we all do it, whether we know it or not. What is
right and wrong? What is fair and unfair, just and unjust? How should we
spend our time? How do we know we're living in the best way? We all have
some sort of answer to these philosophical questions, even if it's just an
attitude that we take for granted. To paraphrase economist John Maynard
Keynes's famous saying, practical people who imagine they are free of such
questions are usually in thrall to some defunct philosopher.

"The Philosophy Institute is a bit like a dance class," says Furtak.
"Everybody moves their bodies. A dance teacher can help people do so more
gracefully, but it's something they're going to be doing in any case. J.P.
is giving people a kind of grace and poise in what they were doing clumsily
already." One student says she was motivated to take a class when she found
herself in a leadership position on the job. "People were looking to me for
answers, they were following my example. That was scary. It makes you want
to be the best person you can be. Without a class like this, people just
don't stop to ask the big questions."

I'm not quite willing to accept Sartre as wise just yet, so I put in a
question. "What if our imagining some nonexistent possibility is itself
determined by factors beyond our control? Suppose you think you have chosen
your lifestyle freely. And then somebody comes along who knew your
grandfather well, and says, 'You know, you walk and talk just exactly like
he did.' Things you thought you had chosen were evidently already
programmed in there. You thought you were free, but you were determined by
genes and example."

Rosensweig says, "Well, there's a whole school, including Hegel and in some
ways Nietzsche, which says that that's not a problem. Free will doesn't
contradict determinism. It's just the way the world is-one state of affairs
is caused by a prior state of affairs. Freedom isn't just randomness or
arbitrariness, and the fact that your behavior is caused doesn't mean you
didn't have choices.

"I don't think Sartre is saying that everything's determined and that's OK.
At times he seems to think there is something in the very nature of
consciousness that opens up a gap [in causation]."

At this point, a more academic discourse might well zero in on the odd
notion that consciousness can open up a gap in causation without being
random or arbitrary. But neither Rosensweig nor the class members want to
get that technical. Mike says, "Determinism versus freedom may be a tough
philosophical question, but how's it going to affect how you live your
life? Freedom-I take freedom."
Rosensweig says, "Indeed. Even determinists can't really believe they have
no role at all in leading their own lives. Prominent figures have thought
that we need to believe we're free, need to go on as if we are
free-although that's different from what Sartre is saying."

He goes on, "This has been a good conversation because people kept pushing
the question. Not just saying, 'Oh wow, consciousness, freedom-great.' The
question is not just what Sartre said about this, but what of it can I take
with me after I leave this room? It's a really important question to
continue to push philosophy and philosophers on. If philosophy questions
everything, one of the most important questions is how we do the
questioning."

Practical-minded Americans have long taken a certain pleasure in prodding
academics to do more than merely think. But even people who would defend
academic philosophy can hardly be pleased by what passes for deep
reflection in popular culture. "There has to be something between Oprah and
Wittgenstein," says Jonathan Ellsworth, a U. of C. philosophy graduate
student. If there isn't, philosophers may succeed in making their arguments
very precise, but they'll seem irrelevant to most people. In Rosensweig's
view-which echoes Socrates and the ancient Hellenistic schools of the
Stoics and Epicureans-the way to bridge the gap is for professional
philosophers to acknowledge that they have a greater obligation than
professional chemists or professional literary critics. They should at
least try to apply their careful thought to their own lives and their
students' lives.

For the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, this is a radical idea. It
was radical when Thoreau said it in Walden in 1854, and it remains
so today. "To be a philosopher," he wrote in a passage Rosensweig likes to
quote, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school,
but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of
simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.... There are nowadays
professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to
profess because it was once admirable to live."

Copyright (c) 2001 Chicago
Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.

Used with permission.