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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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As Hera Clitus once said from his kitchen,
"Here to the gods are present.
Here to at KZSU the gods are present.
Our studios are located below ground.
And every time I go down the stairs of KZSU to do a new show,
I feel like I'm descending into the catacombs,
where those of us who still read great literature,
probe ideas, and explore the recesses of cultural history,
practice a persecuted religion.
In the neuro-senic world of today,
we are like a dispersed society of secret initiates.
We live covertly as it were,
and it's in special shelters that are reading, thinking,
and exchange of ideas take place.
Maybe someday we'll once again be able to practice our persuasion publicly,
but meanwhile entitled opinions comes to you from the catacombs.
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entitled opinions is back on air, friends.
As promised, and for all of you who took the time to write to us
over the summer from the four corners of the earth,
who expressed your appreciation of the program in a variety of accents,
who made it known that you understand how these shows we've been bringing you
over the past three years are not consumer products,
but intellectual goods that grow the more they are partaken of.
For all of you who urged us to keep the shows coming,
well, this new season, which gets underway today, is for you.
It's true that things would be easier if we were to let in title opinion,
go quietly off the air, but with guests like you at the table,
all the effort it takes to serve up these banquets,
weekend and week out, is more than worthwhile.
To kick off our new season, I have with me in the studio today my friend
and colleague Paul Robinson, who is one of the most eminent intellectual historians
of his generation.
He joined the history department at Stanford back in 1967,
fresh from graduate school at Harvard, and he has since authored several groundbreaking books,
including books on Freud, Opera, and Gay Autobiography.
I have mentioned him on previous occasions, and even quoted him during the Freud program I did
with Cadduccini Duvalzi in the spring of 2007.
We're going to talk to him today about how he understands his discipline,
and the path he followed personally as an intellectual historian.
And I may even ask him whether it is fair to claim that a history of ideas is neither rigorous history nor rigorous philosophy.
Not that I would claim that myself, on my good days, I even think of my own work as an intellectual history of sorts.
Certainly on the philosophical level, I believe that when thought becomes truly thought,
it becomes truly thoughtful, it becomes historical.
By that I mean that it makes history and rethink history.
I would even claim that when history ceases to be rethought or taken up in thought,
history ceases to happen.
It becomes fossilized and replicative rather than regenerative.
The deadest stretches of history in my humble, entitled opinion are also the most thoughtless.
If I may delay our conversation with Paul Robinson for just another moment, I would add that when it comes to a history of ideas,
I find myself oscillating between the opposing visions of two thinkers.
On the one hand, there is John Batista Vico, the 18th century Italian theorist who declared,
I quote, "the order of ideas must proceed from the order of institutions."
Vico believed that ideas arise upon the foundations of the rest,
that is, the laws, social structures, and public polities.
On the other hand, there is Martin Heidegger, who held that the order of ideas, or what he called the fundamental concepts of philosophy,
discloses the horizon of intelligibility of any given historical age, including the forms its institutions take.
Heidegger believed that ideas first break open the path of the future,
and that institutional history subsequently follows along that path.
That is what he meant when he talked about the so-called history of being,
which is not a history of ideas in the conventional sense,
but a history of beings self-disclosure in various historical modes.
I believe that Vico's priority of the order of institutions is as true as Heidegger's priority of the order of ideas.
Nor do I feel a need to reconcile the two thinkers on this score.
After all, why do you have to have only one father?
Why not two fathers, or even several?
That is the generosity of intellectual history.
It puts a great many ancestors up for adoption,
and you can make any number of them your own, provided you re-inherit their thought on your own terms,
and don't just hang their portraits up in a gallery of academic airy addition.
Vico and Heidegger may have pondered the matter differently,
yet they pondered the same matter, and that matter was the ground of history.
They belong therefore to the same family.
Of course, intellectual history as a discipline is a different matter altogether,
and as I welcome Paul Robinson to the program, I would like to ask him how he conceives of his discipline,
how he went about becoming a historian of ideas, and who, if any, his adopted ancestors are,
Paul, welcome to the program.
I'm delighted to be here, Robert.
You're very interesting contrast between Vico and Heidegger is what I tend to articulate in terms of Hegel and Marx,
but I think it's the same issue.
What's the ground, what's the reflection?
Very much so.
And, of course, Vico sometimes has been properly interpreted as a forerunner of a Marxist type of thinking of the ground of history as being
based in class relations, class struggle institutions, and so forth, although he did not believe that the order of ideas was mere ideology on the surface of it,
in the same way, but never the last.
So, going back to the question of what is intellectual history as an institutional discipline given that we're talking about institutions now,
and your experience there, when you were in graduate school in the early 60s, I guess.
Mid 60s.
Mid 60s, that's right.
I was reading from an article that will be forthcoming of yours shortly that you were in a tiny minority at the time when it was social history that was a big rage in the history department's
that correct.
That's right.
Well, it was part of the general phenomenon of the 1960s when people turned to politics and the social order and so forth.
And when I got to graduate school, I've seen all the graduate students that my generation were studying planning to become social historians.
And to be an intellectual historian, his drawing of ideas was a little bit like being a military historian and was considered old-fashioned.
And elitist.
He had a kind of political bad-order.
And for a while, I, you know, for a year, and graduate school, I tried to make myself into a social historian.
And might have, you know, made that as a career, but I recognized that my real passion and my real talent was for ideas.
Actually, I got that mainly out of teaching a course at Harvard as a graduate student in the social studies program where we taught tote, fill, and marks, favor, Freud, and folks like that.
And I realized these are the folks that I really drawn to that I want to have a gift for teaching and so forth.
So I returned to the, against the flow you might say, and decided I was going to be an intellectual historian after all.
It's not that nobody else was doing it, and I had a very fine mentor there who taught European intellectual history and many of Stuart Hughes.
You know, the people who call themselves intellectual historians in my profession have different notions about what you're supposed to do.
Sure.
What the task is.
Of course, it makes a difference that I'm a historian of modern thought.
That is European thought since the 18th century since the Enlightenment.
And I think my first, it was as a pedagogue, and as a writer, you know, I first think of this is this is sort of the mental furniture that we have in our mind.
It's the great ideas that as modern individuals we've inherited from the last two centuries of thinkers.
And coming to terms with that, sorting it out, figuring out its inter logic and how these these intellectual systems or ideas are connected there one another is I think as a particular teacher,
my first responsibility is to get this narrative straight.
And I'm particularly interested in introducing students to the great intellectual figures, the figures who came up with profound novel complex ideas, which mean the people like Marx, like Darwin, like Freud.
A lot of my energy goes into bringing those figures to life for my students.
There's a further responsibility, which you sort of alluded to, and that is one is eager to locate these thinkers within the larger cultural and historical context in which they happen.
After all happened in time, one happens before another, and they are not they do not happen in isolation.
So part of what an intellectual historian does is try to establish what might be called the spirit of the times of the type guys in which a particular set of ideas happen.
It's to me to me a figure factor of what I'm on of great interest for example, that words worth and Hegel and Beethoven are of the same generation and that there are affinities between there or among their creations.
So part of what I try to do in my teaching and in my writing is to explain what is it that connects thinkers and creative artists in a particular time and sometimes in a particular place.
So could one ask would Hegel words worth and Beethoven have been possible without the French Revolution?
Is that the kind of question an intellectual is to have a student and is it fair to say that one would have to say no?
Yes, and I've written along essay on Beethoven and his relation to the French Revolution and showing how he in fact is a product of the French Revolution.
Everybody who's written about words worth of course writes about his the great event in his youth.
What's the experience of the French Revolution and his disillusionment with it and his turn away from politics to the to the inward to the psychological.
So yes, absolutely they couldn't have happened without the French Revolution and it's not that they influence one another, but they speak in a common language.
When you hear a Beethoven symphony, I mean it brings Hegel to mind.
There's this kind of grandiosity that they share and that's also true at the beginning of the 20th century where one is interested in modernist music, modernist art, Joyce, Kafka,
mon, proofed are linked to a figure like Freud by intellectual relationship, intellectual relationship.
So is it part of the discipline of intellectual history to link the cultural forms of expression to historical context or can one also go to intellectual history just to deal with the thinkers and artists themselves on their own terms?
I have two minds about this. A very important tradition within my discipline is what you would might call contextual intellectual history represented above all by the figure of Carl Shorska, who taught it Berkeley in the 60s and then later at Princeton, who insisted that a proper understanding of even the greatest thinkers like Freud requires that you understand them within a context.
In this case, the context of the turn of the century, Vienna.
There's another more, I think of Hegelian tradition which suggests that he's not denying that there are connections of that sort, but that ultimately thinkers or intellectual systems are a bit like works of art. They have an aesthetic dimension.
They are part of the great human achievement and to appreciate them as one would appreciate a work of art is a legitimate and illuminating undertaking.
And part of me is in that, Mark, as a practicing historian, I am interested in how these ideas are located, how they're situated.
Well, I'm curious about whether a student these days who is primarily interested in philosophy in the old conventional sense of someone who is wedded to ideas the way you were in the 60s, the way you were describing it, who finds himself or herself.
Pathetically, it's strange from the discipline of philosophy in many universities where you don't get a grand history of ideas, but instead you get intensive formal analysis of grammatical structures in fact, formal logic and so forth.
Does such a student need to go to history departments in order to do this sort of history of ideas or are there other places within the academy where the history of ideas is being engaged?
Actually, I think a number of philosophy departments are sufficiently accommodating. They will let people do that kind of work. I've known people who did the Stanford philosophy department's for its analytical, even mathematical orientation, but it has a lot of historians of philosophy,
and you can go there and become a neatest dollar.
The historian of philosophy is different than a historian of ideas, because for example Freud will not be properly considered to be a philosopher in a philosophy department, no matter how continental is that philosophy department.
Or Darwin would not necessarily be prepared to be prepared to be prepared.
So in a different sense, it's perfectly appropriate that they should not be part of the philosophical canon.
One of the great virtues from my perspective of intellectual history is its capaciousness, and that it allows you to look at figures who might otherwise be separated in a disciplinary fashion.
And I like that from the beginning.
And you know, when I was an undergraduate, I thought for a while that I might study philosophy.
But I first of all didn't have much of a talent for it. I figured that out.
But also it didn't. I had my reservation about the price of the one that you've articulated that it would limit me to this canonical group of thinkers and their modern heirs.
Whereas I was interested in figures who didn't quite qualify as philosophers, Freud being the classic of Daniel Freud, in fact, is quite anti philosophical in his sentiment.
To me, writes books that engage with important philosophical issues.
Beyond the pleasure principle, for example, is book of 1920.
It is more studied, I think, by philosophers than it is by the Sachuan-Ligah community, with the death, the idea that death instinct is invented.
But basically, his frame of mind is much too concrete to embedded in experience, to be comfortable with the kind of abstraction I think that philosophy demands.
And he writes off of his disdain for philosophers.
Well, and then for example, opera, which we're going to speak about a bit later in our show, is not something that you were going to get in the philosophy department.
Whereas you have made it part of the history of ideas in a very compelling way.
But before we speak about the three main topics that have engaged your career, which, as you define them, have been Freud, Opera, and Sex, another question on the theoretical level about context, or what I would call a historical age.
Because you are somewhat committed to what you call a conventional, or maybe perhaps even old-fashioned notion, that there is such a thing as a cultural and even aesthetic unity to certain periods in history that make it completely legitimate to examine what was going on in the music, in the philosophy, in the arts of that period, and find commonalities.
I don't think that there's anything old-fashioned or certainly not super-annuated about such an idea.
I guess because this is my vikonian heritage where I believe that there is an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men in broad terms.
And within that there are smaller units.
But can you speak to this issue of why you still hold to the idea of these youth?
In what sense you feel that you've had to defend it recently?
Well, within my profession there has been a tradition in the last three or four decades, which I've referred to as the social history of ideas, which is argued that the only legitimate way to study ideas is in terms of how they become popularly embraced, how they kind of filter down.
If they don't enter the minds of large numbers of people and affect the lives of those people, then they are not worth attention.
This position is associated particularly with a very distinguished historian Robert Garten at Princeton who's now the head of the Harvard Library.
And he's staked this out as in the 1960s as a kind of war crime.
And I just as I can't imagine that any of you would ever talk that way about Beethoven, who would ever say that somehow the greatness of Beethoven depends on how many people hear the pieces.
I mean, it's ludicrous. It's not the way it works. Likewise with great works of literature.
And I have a sense that great thinkers who produce these profound and intricate ways of thinking about the human situation are similar.
They're similar to me. They like that, and therefore their product, as it were, they're up.
The thing they create should be given the same kind of attention as we give to works of art.
And the famous example, of course, is always Rousseau's social contract.
This great book would tremendous influence, ultimately, on the French Revolution.
But during the 18th century, it was virtually unread.
And a number of social historians of it, they came along and said, "Why bother with the social contract?
It's an unknown text."
And that is consumption.
The consumption of ideas is important, and it's one way to measure the importance.
The study worthy of the book.
Well, it's one way to measure the social importance of a work of art, but it's not any way to measure the aesthetic.
No, exactly. Or the intellectual character of something.
So I sometimes, you know, the issue doesn't come up because the same person who produces a profound and complex idea is also profoundly influential, like Marx, or like Darwin.
So the argument never happened.
Vico actually has been a case where people have talked a great deal about a figure who was much neglected, who was nonetheless very important.
I mean, he's been read constantly, rediscovered like Croce and so forth.
But there's a long, you know, if you ask somebody around 1800 about Vico, you'd have gotten a long silots.
He's unknown.
No doubt about that.
So the idea of the cultural unity is, or you believe that there is such a thing as a zeitgeist.
Yeah, but one was always recognized that it is an abstraction. It is a construction. It's a way of thinking, you know,
terms like romanticism and modernism, the Enlightenment, all those large categories that we use to organize thought into period concepts.
Are construction, they don't exist out there as realities, but there are constructions of the historian or their own.
Well, sometimes they are invented during the time itself, and the Enlightenment not.
I mean, the Enlightenment is really an invention of the revolutionary generation.
But by saying that Paul, don't you actually repudiate the very notion of a zeitgeist, which is a spirit of the times, which is a spirit is something that pervades, infuses, and inhabits and haunts an era, rather than is something that's constructed as an abstraction in the mind of some historian or philosopher of a view.
And I believe there are these mutual influences and affinities that are real that happen in the time.
But one must be delicate with these kinds, because people can come along and say things like, "Bade of him's not a romantic. He's a classic."
Or he's a classic. I've had students say that. I mean, and I have to say, "Well, you know, it's not that Bade of him is a romantic in some ontological sense."
These remain, there is the spirit of the times, and there is these people sense their connectedness, and that's part of the record.
But nonetheless, these remain constructions, they remain abstractions, and they should be open to criticism and maybe even to a bad, you know, the famous historian, there was an effort in the early 20th century to try to get people to stop talking about romanticism, because romanticism, it was said meant so many different things.
And it meant nothing at all. So it was a useless abstraction.
You know, so, you know, I didn't work, didn't work, didn't work, and it's proved to be a very hardy abstraction.
There's a good question here about whether there's been a term floating about as a kind of trial term for the late 20th century, and they postmodernism.
And, you know, it'll be interesting to see if it sticks, if it's a, you know, rich sororities wanted the term abolished.
It doesn't mean anything.
Well, philosophers are very caught up with meaning.
Concepts like that don't necessarily have to mean something, they just have to function with things.
It'll be, it'll actually be useful.
So, let's move on to these three main domains that have occupied most of your career.
Starting with Freud, if you don't mind, your dissertation was devoted to Freud, or at least to readers of Freud, no?
And I don't know if you called your dissertation the Freudian left, or whether, so the dissertation then got published as a book very shortly after you got your degree.
And I think, also in part to the fact that you had one of the main figures in your dissertation was Herbert Marcusi, who had written a book called "Eros and Civilization" and Marcusi became very famous or infamous at the time, namely 1967-68.
And can you tell us that story and then the fate of this book and what you dealt with in the Freudian left?
Well, I was interested in Freud as a social thinker, primarily as an individual psychologist, and I was interested in arguing against the proposition that he was a deeply conservative, sort of anti-Marx.
That is, the upshot of his social thinking was a very dark, pessimistic, ultimately conservative view of the human situation.
And I looked at a number of thinkers who wanted to argue with that, I looked at three people in particular, who wanted to suggest that there was, with the possibility of a way out of this dark and pessimistic conclusion.
And Marcusi was the foremost of these, who argued in "Eros and Civilization" that at a deeper level, Freud actually was a prophet of a more, well, let's put a less repressed, a more fulfilling, both sexually and politically, world.
And this is very much part of the '60s moment, and it was part of my small contribution as it were to the counterculture.
When I started the book, Marcusi was a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. He became famous while I was writing the dissertation, right after I'd finished it because he was attacked by the right, it went a hiding, in fact.
He was attacked for whatever reason.
For being a dangerous, we would now say terrorist, so that wasn't the language of the day.
Which is crazy because he's a professor of philosophy, and "Eros and Civilization" extremely abstract book, without the Republican congressmen that attacked him couldn't possibly read it.
But I benefited from this hugely because by the time my manuscript was done, there was a market for it, and I immediately got a contract with a commercial publisher, and sold a lot of copies.
So I caught this wave.
And not all my books have been that fortunate, I realized you have to have a certain amount of luck in the writing business.
And I was very lucky, I was very lucky, I was pressing it, I certainly had no idea that this was going to be, I was interested in it, purely from intellectual, and you might take political reasons.
Now there's a second side, of course, to my interest in Freud.
But can I ask before you go to the second side about, when you say that he was trying to be rescued from the conservative reading of him?
Yeah. His being a pessimist doesn't necessarily equate to being a conservative.
Being a cultural, that's a social pessimist, can even be the marks of someone who had radical ideas, but just didn't have any hope that they would ever be incorporated within the society or that part.
But he's especially though in Civilization and it's this intense of 1929, takes on marks of the Marxist and chastises them.
For their failure to understand human nature, namely the perennial aggression and hostility of human beings, and that there are notions about a just society in which if you solve the economic problem, you would solve the human problem.
So that's nonsense. People will still be nasty. And nastiness will not go away when you even when you've done away with economic inequality.
But is there anything you can say that will deny that that is a position that he actually held?
That he held it? Or that it is Freud believed. I mean, he believed what he was saying.
Of course, of course he did. Of course he did. No.
No, the making him into a progressive or radical revolutionary as Mark Uzzid involves reading him against his express.
Right. No question. And what Uzzid says that?
He's looking at the deep logical or conceptual level in the work and trying to show that there's a way out of the kind of conservative politics that he Freud himself embraced.
Now, I was going to say during this is somewhat contradictory, but during the 1960s, when I first read Freud, in the late '50s and 1960s, he actually performed a kind of conservative function for me because as an individual, a psychologist, the individual, what I found those moving in most of the time,
and most thrilling in him, was his insistence that people cannot be remade, that they are sort of stuck with the deep personal characteristics they have.
And I read this in the 1960s, primarily as a gay man who was learning from Freud and from others that you can't do anything about that.
You must learn to embrace that reality. You can't make yourself into a new human being. You can't make yourself into a heterosexual.
You can't make a nasty guy into a nice guy, whatever. And so that's a kind of psychological pessimism in Freud that I found liberating.
So I was probably involved in a kind of contradiction in that at the psychological level I was embracing him as his conservative sensibility, whereas at the level of social thought and politics, I was trying to find a way of reading Freud against the grain as a potentially liberating figure.
You know, 40 years of past tense and I still embrace the psychological conservative, I probably, obviously, much less, sanguine about the political and social story. And I think maybe the people who've assisted it in it like Burke in a deep philosophical sense Freud is a conservative, have a lot on their side, on a lot on their side.
One thing that Markusi proposes as a possible way of getting Freud out of the conservative framework is the notion in Freud of the genital tyranny as a process of normal development.
But that there's a great deal of price to be paid for this development because one loses a polymorphist perversity and so forth. And there I, reading you on Markusi, I'm reminded that Markusi thought that if one can isolate this concept of polymorphist perversity, then this could have potentially liberating effects.
Yeah, well, he thought the idea of politically then psychologically a notion that somehow the Freud's notion that pleasure, sexual pleasure, which is what he means about pleasure, had become confined to the genitals is somehow represent a loss of possibilities.
And Markusi doesn't say how this is going to be brought about. I mean, how you might reverse the process by which sexuality gets situated, actually, first gets situated in the mouth and in the anus and then in the genitals.
But Freud always speaks about genital organization, the genital focus, as well being the fate of adulthood.
I guess what it's about. One of the weaknesses in Markusi doesn't really have much of a strategy or tactics for actually bringing this about. He thinks thinking about the issue and reading philosophers and poets about it is the beginning of a possible change.
But it's not really a blueprint there for how we're going to do it.
I think I also read this critique of genital sexuality and adult genital heterosexuality and Markusi is reading a Freud.
I read that also as kind of a coded celebration or legitimate legitimation of homosexuality.
And in fact, Markusi makes the homosexual, interestingly. It doesn't talk about a lot, but he talks about it as somebody who has resisted the tyranny of genital tyranny.
So again, there was a kind of personal... I didn't recognize this at the time. I didn't acknowledge it at the time, but in retrospect that's clearly part of what was going on.
There was an autobiographical, not just a political dimension to my interest in a figure like Markusi and my interest in Freud.
Well, if one looks at some of Freud's critics in the last decade or two, many of them, and some of them very serious people, social scientists among others, will just laugh or scoff at the idea that one goes through an oral stage and anal stage and the genital stage.
And they think that all this is just a bunch of fictions spun by someone in Vienna who actually snuckered a lot of people for a long time, and that nothing of the corpus or very little of the corpus stands up to any kind of scientific scrutiny if one adopts a certain notion of science as providing empirical evidence for testable hypotheses.
And I have done a two-part show on Freud a year and a half ago in which we address some of the critics, but I also... that's when I quoted from your second book on Freud.
Freud is critics, Freud and his critics. But now that I have you here on air, why don't you tell us...
How do you respond or how did you respond to these people who make a sometimes very compelling case that there's precious little in Freud's theories that can stand up to this kind of pressure?
Well, there's no question that it's not a kind of theory that is scientific in that testable sense.
But the problem of this point that Freud may have misrepresented himself when he insisted that his work was science.
And of course, Freud grew up in this great 19th century German scientific tradition. His heroes were the figures like Helmholtz and Darwin and so forth.
And he wanted very much to be a figure in the history of science. His work is empirical, but not in that quantitative sense.
And it certainly doesn't produce testable propositions. It is, however, not spun out of whole cloth is based on a rich, a lifelong history of patience.
Freud saw patience every day of his life, I think, except Sunday, eight hours a day.
And he started doing that in the 1890s and didn't stop until within months of his death in 1939.
So he saw thousands of patience. He drew on medieval doctors, saw thousands of patience too, but doesn't mean that the theories on which they offer it.
It doesn't make them scientific, but it doesn't put them in the realm of literature.
There's a difference between a novelist who draws information from the newspapers or from his life and fabricates.
And when you read Dickens, you realize it's grounded in reality. But I think there's a difference intellectually, conceptually, methodologically between that and someone who's based on the work based on case histories.
It's never going to satisfy those who want statistical evidence.
Now, I don't feel that the defense of Freud depends on depending every one of his particular psychological doctrines. Many of them have been given up by the Adelific community.
Nobody talks anymore about penis envy. It's been dismissed as a fantasy.
And I don't think Freud's reputation is going to depend on whether or not our anal, oral, and phallic stages of development.
I think the contribution is much more gentle. I think Freud's one of the great interpretations of strategies.
I think what I'm putting up there with Darwin and Marx is having come up with a kind of master code for interpreting not just individuals, but cultural artifacts and so forth.
A big idea that transforms our way of thinking about virtually everything.
And that, I have a hard time thinking in terms of right and wrong, correct, proven or not proven.
It's powerful, it's original, and it's profound.
I'm a friend in sort of acquaintance of the foremost and I think the most sophisticated of these critics, who's Fred Cruz, Fred McCruz, and Berkeley, who, you know,
He wasn't a Freud in himself in his early years and his first book about Hawthorne, he's informed by psychoanalytic ideas.
But who turned on him later on and decided that he was very close to being a fraud.
A lot of the attacks also have to do with personal matters in Freud's life, whether or not he treated his patients shabbily and so on and so forth, all of which I find not very interesting.
But I think the, you know, there's no question that Freud was overvalued, uncritically, value, particularly by Americans in the mid-20th century.
And I, that's when I sort of came of age intellectually.
I obviously, there's been this overreaction in the late 20th century, which was dismissive, and I think he's coming back.
You can reread it and you realize that this is not, can't be dismissed.
This is too great, this is too profound, this is too important.
I feel similarly about Marx has gone the same way you can say in terms of intellectual reputation.
Well, I agree, and in fact, someone like Cutty Tini Duvazie believes that many of his psychological doctrines, especially his work, his early work on trauma, theory and so forth.
Are being redeemed through neurological science and so forth, and that there's actually, the story has yet to be written about how much of the corpus has scientific validity still, and doesn't, she's very optimistic, a lot more of it than one might suspect now.
It does. Can we move on? Now, Paul, if you don't mind, to your work on opera, your second big category, which you have said is the work that you believe that is your most will prove to be your most lasting contribution in the history of ideas.
And you wrote a very important book, came out in 1985 called Opera and Ideas, I believe is the title now.
And recently a new book called Opera, Sex and Other Vital Matters.
One thing about that book is that unlike other more conventional studies which have always focused on the librettos of operas in order to establish connections between operas and, let's say, the philosophy and other things, you actually analyze the music and are very intent on focusing on the
music rather than the librettos. And there you find a great rich kind of connection between opera and historical context and other arts, for example.
You also make a statement in that essay which is forthcoming that any ideas that don't find their expression in music are destined to for oblivion.
In opera.
Yeah.
Because everybody's gone to opera knows the way you experience opera, you experience it primarily as a musical event.
And indeed the words are largely unintelligible, not just because they're in a foreign language, but because they're covered up as it were about the music.
And that's why we have super titles. So we can read along, which of course an invention the last 25 years.
So this is a purely experiential truth. It seems to me that if you go the opera, you know that the way it works on you is through music.
That's the way it carries its emotional. You wouldn't. Nobody would sit through a single one of these librettos as a spoken drama.
Right.
It would not do it. There's nothing there.
So clearly, if you want to say something important about opera and I wanted to relate it to the history of thought, you've got to find a way to make that argument in terms of music.
And that's what that's the gimmick as it were of the book.
Right. And you do that very well with the most canonized operas.
And a lot of it is enlightenment related to the Enlightenment or the disenchantment with the enlightenment and the Rocinis Barbara of Seville versus the marriage of Figaro and so forth.
A lot of great stuff on Wagner and so I have one question. We don't have time to review your history of ideas in opera.
But what happened? What about the great ideas like Freud, you say? Is there a great Freudian opera that's equivalent to a great opera like the marriage of Figaro, which is a great enlightenment.
Feels of opera or something and that sort. Why is it in a very specific period that you have such a intense flourishing of this art form?
Well, I think there are operas and great operas in the early 20th century that can be read as expression to Freudian.
I'm sure.
I like books like Lulu. I think those operas are truly a part of the product of the same cultural media, the same type of guys to view well.
So the fact that I don't have an expressly Freudian reading of a particular of any opera is just I found the ones I wrote about were for operas first of all.
I think I'm very great and very, you know, move me. And I think are illuminated particularly by showing their intellectual connections or intellectual affinity.
So that was what guided me in my choices.
And one of the chapters actually not about opera but about two song cycles by Schubert, which are operatic in their character, which I try to relate to romanticism.
But you know, I know my claim is not that that operas need to be understood intellectually to be properly or fully enjoyed.
I think it adds a level of enjoyment and of illumination.
But I think, you know, if one never thought about an opera's intellectual connection, one could still be profoundly affected.
And it would remain a great experience, a great work of art.
And I, you know, when I listen to opera all the time, I listen to one this morning.
I'm, I'm useless and I'm just like the common listener. I'm listening for beauty. I'm listening for emotional punch.
I'm listening for a particular kind of singing. It's a things which are sort of sub intellectual.
So I don't claim that, I wrote the book from this particular, because that's what I am. I'm in intellectual story.
I've discovered the idea for the book actually, you know, sitting in the opera house, listening to a particular piece of singing of that sort of very similar.
This isn't the same world as that stuff I'm teaching in my lecture course on European thought at Stanford.
I began feeling this connection. And so the book was an attempt to just sort of work out that experience that these things were connected.
Now I, early in my life, I almost became a musician. I don't know, was that true of you? Did you almost become a musician?
But a different guy, a rock musician probably.
No, I almost went off to a concert during the game, played the bass violin.
And I might have made a career as an orchestra musician.
The brutal fact is, though, I was a kind of B+.
Yeah, for a former. And I was much better as, you know, as an analyst, as a thinker than I was as a...
Well, nothing was wrong because you need to know a lot about music in his technical aspects in order to perform the analysis that you do there.
No, I was very... One of the happy things about my career is that I've been able to bring the subjects of my personal and, you know, my private passions into the arena of my work.
Right.
Almost everything I've done has been... I've done nothing just for the sake of intellectual history or the profession.
They've always been inspired by something personal. This is not always a wise career move.
And I have to... You know, you have to think about where is the profession going? Where's the career going?
Because you got to get hired and promote it and so forth.
And sometimes my decisions were, you know, impotent.
I don't agree. I think that those who don't opt with their passions end up, even if they make the right career moves, end up in a very sorry sort of...
Ghost land in academia. I mean, academia can be the most passionate profession on Earth.
It can also be one of the most... No, it can be dead.
No, no, no, no.
And if one surrenders one's passion in advance for career promotional reasons,
and one has to wonder whether those promotions are worth it in my view.
No, I agree. I agree with you. I try to come... One with my students.
I try to tell them there's a good cop bad cop or Yin Yang thing where you must begin with something that you care about.
Otherwise, you'll turn into dead wood. You'll dry up and you'll have psychological troubles.
On the other hand, you must keep an eye out for what's going on in the world that you're entering.
You must know something about how that world is organizing itself, what it's concerned with.
And I did that, you know what I thought about becoming a social historian in the 1960s. I was doing that.
Sure. So I think it's a delicate matter if you tell kids just to do what they're interested in.
That can sometimes be a harmful piece of advice.
I think it's absolutely central to be to have passion for what you work on,
but you got to think about other things as well.
We have a few minutes to turn to your third passion, which is as you've defined it, sex.
Broad terms can we speak about before we talk about this book you wrote on, gay autobiography.
You came out with a book in the mid-70s called the Modernization of Sex.
Earlier you spoke about books needing a bit of luck in order to get noticed the way the Freudian left was a lucky book.
I think the opera was actually a lucky book or a very good book.
But you have said that this book that you published in 1976, the Modernization of Sex, which deals with three different sexologists,
Master in Johnson's being two, counted as one.
This was a very unlucky book because it came out in the same year as the English translation of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.
You had the lack of foresight to write a very negative review for the new Republic of Foucault's book.
That is true.
And that in retrospect, it proved to be an error on your part.
Can you tell us a little bit of what your thesis was in the Modernization of Sex and why Foucault's book kind of eclipsed that book of yours?
Well, it's complicated, but I was interested in how the modern way of thinking about sex was invented.
It's clearly Freud is one of the premier inventors, and I said I wanted to talk about the other figures who had created this modern way of thinking about sex.
And have like Ellis who was as famous as Freud in the first part of the 20th century is clearly one of these figures.
And he was one of the generation of sexologists.
Then I figured that his two most important errors were Alfred Kinsey and William Masses in Virginia Johnson.
So I wanted to show the evolution of this tradition of what I've called the modern way of the end.
And it's in a reaction against Victorianism, against sexual repression, and so forth.
Foucault came, of course, a profound and radical thing.
And he came up with a whole different way of thinking about sexuality, which made that question insufficiently examined.
He wanted to show how in fact what we thought was a modern way of thinking about sex needed to be problematized.
He had to show that these conventions about they used to be repressive and now were liberated were some sort of cliche.
The famous repressive hypothesis.
And Foucault's talk about not being empirically in a Foucault's way to see drops in a fat cure of hair.
And so it irritated the hell out of me that this, he was advancing this argument on the sinus of evidence and most of it seemed to me wrong.
And then again, that's not the way Foucault was to be judged.
That's what the complaint about that I reacted against with regard to Freud.
And I've seen the error of my ways and I've read lots of books about Foucault and I teach him and so forth.
And if I were to write that book again and why the errors of your ways?
Well then I was wrong about why were you wrong?
If you thought he was wrong on the historical factual level, you were probably right that he was wrong.
I thought he was all talk and no substance.
I read the first book which is mis-traffated as madness and civilization and felt a similar sense.
It's all blaver.
He's a tremendous word-smith, tremendous word-smith.
So you get the charms you.
But I felt it was lacking in a kind of groundedness.
And it was the book that actually changed my mind was the book about the prison.
Which is a profound book and a deeply true book.
And then I went, you know, I had this investment in my own book and wanting people to read that as a way to think about sex.
And I was sort of way out of done.
So part of it was just envy, if you will.
So you continue to believe, well, one of Foucault's claims, as I recall it, is that the modern, a confessional regarding intimate sexual secrets or afflictions on the part of the patient was anything but a liberation.
It was actually a new way of controlling all the art.
Everything in modern culture that's characterized as liberatory and by interditional thinking has been in Foucault's view, been shown to be repressive, controlling, disciplining.
So the confession of whether you're confessing to a priest or to a psychoanalyst is a form of submitting your mind and your soul to discipline.
It's not liberation, it's repression all over again.
And there's something to do that.
So I know Foucault's white up there, he's one of the great figures in the history of thought.
And I would treat him, and I do treat him in my teaching in the way that I treat Marx and Freud and Weber before.
Well, I agree.
And a number of the listeners of the show have been clamoring for a show on Foucault and that's in the works of that.
You know who goes a lot about Foucault here is your friend Keith Baker.
Oh good.
No, it's no more about Foucault.
I think of him as the Foucault expert at Stanford.
Well, we'll sign him up.
Yeah.
We have to get him on anyway.
He's written an essay called "F Foucaultian Interpretation of the French Revolution."
Excellent.
Well, in a few, very few minutes remaining Paul, your work on autobiography, gay autobiography in particular, talk about discipline and narratives of liberation that you've studied a number of how many
twelveies that a dozen of them.
Foucault before came in.
Twelve or fourteen in this different autobiography is written by gay men, most of which follow the same sort of narrative pattern of in the closet, out of the closet, repressed, liberated out.
And it's a very interesting history of ideas that you've been there.
Particularly American narratives have that trajectory, which I try to suggest is structurally speaking the narrative that you get in a customs confessions.
Exactly.
With a transformative moment, everything that came before was dark and bad.
Everything since once the truth is told is fulfillment and happiness.
And of course, I'm deeply skeptical of that kind of the story.
I think the black part wasn't so black as they make out and the liberation, not so complete.
You know, my own, I found my, well, you know, as you know, I've written a kind of gay autobiography, at least an essay of my own.
And my experience with the closet, which I was in when I was in a teenager into my twenties, was not one of utter non-being, misery.
And when I think of my adolescence in San Diego, California, it was full of pleasure and good things, good parents, friends, girlfriends, and so forth.
So I came into these stories with a good deal of skepticism about this radical bifurcating of the life.
I mean, I think coming out is a good thing. I think gay marriage is a good thing. I'm not going to get married myself.
But the story of our lives is always more complicated.
The joys and the miseries are more mixed, whether we're in the closet or out.
Well, this is a topic to be continued on another show, Paul, because we've reached the end of our hour.
So I promise we'll get you back in the future and we'll concentrate on some of these issues that have been left suspended.
But in the meantime, thanks a lot for coming on. It's been a real pleasure.
Indeed. It's been a great pleasure. Bye-bye. Thank you now.
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