What are you Kant's Nephew?

The McCourt thing has got me thinking about education, teachers and such. That, and I'm a little health-updated out, so pardon the interruption

I've had the pleasure of studying with two singular educator/raconteurs: Frank McCourt, and Sidney Morgenbesser. Though better known these days for his second act as a best-selling author, McCourt's first act as a teacher of lord knows how many thousands of budding writers no doubt built the fan base for his future success. Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia who despite very thin publishing credits, was revered as one of the great wiseacres and skewerers of pomposity in the western world. Mention to any philosopher, economist or political scientist that you studied with Sidney, and you will be greeted with a smile and a story about something Sidney said at a conference that broke up the room in laughter, while completely changing the way everybody thought about the subject at hand.

I have two vivid memories of something each of them said in class that have stayed with me all these years. I've come to realize that these very brief interludes informed nearly everything I've done in my working and intellectual life. It's kind of hard to process the notion that one sentence each by a philosopher and a creative writing teacher would matter to someone who has spent very little time at either of those endeavors, but facts is facts.

One day in creative writing class, McCourt began reading an assignment of mine aloud (I don't remember exactly what it was) that started off with the word "basically," as in "basically, what I mean to say is blah blah blah." He proceeded to tell me exactly why it was a bad idea to start a sentence with an modifier, or dangle one in any other fashion, and extended this to a mini lesson in applied sentence parsing. Never before had grammar or the mechanics of writing made any sense to me. Forever after, I understood that if you want someone to understand what you are trying to say, you have to say it clearly, succinctly, with a minimum of distraction from your point, and without ambiguity. That insight has enabled me to get my meager ideas across with enough success that I am reasonably frequently told that I am a good writer (which I am not, but mainly because of the meagerness of my ideas).

My great Sidney moment happened in a seminar on philosophy, economics, and Marxism he team taught with a fascinating figure named Alexander Ehrlich. Actually, the moment I'm going to tell you about was my second great Sidney moment. The first happened on the first day of class when he explained what the seminar was going to cover and how it was going to work, making liberal use of such technical philosophical terminology as "mishegas" "megillah" "famisht" "shmegegge" and "farblunget". In the middle of this, he stopped and announced to the class "by the way, a working knowledge of Yiddish is a requirement for this course". The next week (in time for the drop deadline) the herd had been culled of every blonde head.

OK actually, that was my second great Sidney moment. My first great Sidney moment came after in my first semester of CC (Columbia's core survey of western thought course) when I started giving serious thought to majoring in philosophy. I was talking about this with my father (an economist with Sidney stories), who simply told me "go talk to Sidney." I managed to find Sidney in his office, introduced myself as Peter Albin's son, and told him that I wanted to study philosophy. He asked me why, and I told him that I liked CC, had started reading some philosophy in high school and was interested in getting into the questions I had encountered more deeply. He asked me what I had read in high school and I said "oh you know, Carlos Casteneda, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Dancing Wu li Masters ..." Sidney smiled and said "so how's your dad?"

OK so my third great Sidney moment came when Sidney started talking about how Marx's only real important works were those that dealt with practical critiques and analyses of politics, society, and economies; that the early stuff was all fuzzy headed noodling; that as a grand scheme theorist there wasn't really that much to talk about. This was circa 1983, when there still was such a thing as communism, critical theory and post structuralism were at something of a zenith, everybody walked around with a copy of the Marx-Engels Reader, and the 1848 Manuscripts were being viewed as his Marx's deepest work.

So I said to Sidney, "what about alienation? Isn't that a deep idea? Doesn't it all hang off that?" Sidney said "Alienation schmalienation. What the hell is that? Can you define it?" And I couldn't (at least not in non-circular, non-mish-mosh terms), despite having read thousands of pages on the subject and written a number of A papers that claimed to talk about it. At that moment, I realized that it was possible to regurgitate jargon that either meant nothing or which you absolutely didn't understand without anyone being the wiser. Philosophy became pretty much a dead subject to me after that, which was a bit of a problem because I was maybe 20 credits into a 30 credit major. However, I have discovered that there is perhaps no better management tool than asking people to define their terms and explain in plain English why what they are saying is important.

Now if I could only figure out what the meshuganah Derrida was talking about ...