Sidney Morgenbesser

[MinorityOfOne]

Saw this article ("Remembering Sidney Morgenbesser"), and thought I'd pass on some of it. There are funny quips which are worth recording, but there's also a serious horror file item. I'll give you the good stuff first.

"'Sidney stories' are legion. The Knickerbocker will list a few more: asked about Mao Tse Tung’s view of the law of non-contradiction, Morgenbesser replied, 'I do and do not agree.' Asked why there is something rather than nothing, he replied, 'Even if there were nothing, you’d still be complaining!' Asked to prove a questioner’s existence, Morgenbesser shot back, 'Who’s asking?' He also once cracked a joke about wanting to teach a class on the philosophy of engineering called, 'The Abstract and the Concrete.'

The most celebrated Morgenbesser anecdote involved visiting Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, who noted that it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, 'Yeah, yeah…' "

Now the bad news -- funny as he may have been, he was also an utterly awful ethicist, and he practiced what he preached.

"Mr. Silver told how at a gathering in Morgenbesser’s apartment, the latter admired Mr. Silver’s shirt. Mr. Silver took it off, and went shirtless during the party. 'He accepted my gift quietly, and did not later speak of it. Gradually, I became irritated, indeed annoyed. I had performed a prototypic act of generosity, of love — without a calculative or selfish impulse in mind or heart — and I got no moral credit for it.'

After many years, Morgenbesser said he had not spoken of it lest Mr. Silver feel offended that he rewarded Mr. Silver with gratitude for so selfless an act. Mr. Silver said Morgenbesser thereby taught him something about self-regard and self-absorption.

Mr. Silver recalled how he and Morgenbesser 'were first drawn together in the crisis of the ’60s.'

During those troubled times on campus, Morgenbesser intervened between the protesters and the police and got 'a good hit on the head.' Later asked, when questioned for jury duty, whether the police had ever treated him unjustly or unfairly. 'Unfairly yes, unjustly no,' Morgenbesser replied. 'The police hit me unfairly, but since they hit everyone else unfairly, it was not unjust,' Mr. Silver recalled Morgenbesser’s response. "

He sounds like a more charming version of Ellsworth Toohey.

All this from http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailf...8/03&ID=Ar01400