PHILOSOPHY & PRAXIS

2000-2001

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ACTUALIZING PHILOSOPHY

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This e-mook is for the philosophical reflexion and praxis of the actual problems of our livings.

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Die Aufgaben der Philosophie - Ein Gespräch mit Gernot Böhme

The pros and cons of email counseling   by PETER B.  RAABE

Is philosophy useless?   by MICHAEL RUSE

A Literature From Below by GÜNTER GRASS and PIERRE BOURDIEU

Peter Koestenbaum, clinical philosopher by PETER B. RAABE

The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin by STEPHEN SCHWARTZ

Die Aufgaben der Philosophie

Ein Gespräch mit Gernot Böhme

Herr Böhme, wie sollte die Ausbildung von Philosophinnen und Philosophen an der Universität idealerweise aussehen?

Ich unterscheide drei Weisen des Philosophierens: Philosophie als Weltweisheit, Philosophie als Lebensform und Philosophie als Wissenschaft. Leider ist Philosophie als Wissenschaft die einzige Weise, die an der Universität betrieben wird. Traditionell gehören die beiden anderen Zweige auch hinzu. Bei der Philosophie als Lebensform geht es darum, sich selber als Mensch auszubilden und eine philosophische Lebensform zu führen. Der akademische Betrieb bietet natürlich nicht den Rahmen, eine Ausbildung des Menschen als Menschen zu gewährleisten. Das liegt an der Verwissenschaftlichung dieser Institution. Aber man kann darüber nachdenken, was zu tun ist, damit dieses Moment in die Ausbildung mit hineinkommt.

Mit Philosophie als Weltweisheit knüpfe ich an Kant an. Kant hat Philosophie als Weltweisheit unterschieden von Philosophie im Schulsinne und erstere definiert als diejenige Philosophie, die sich mit dem beschäftigt, was jedermann interessiert und das sind heute die allgemeinen, die öffentlichen, die gesellschaftlichen Fragen. Diese Weise des Philosophierens ist leichter in die Universität hineinzubringen als die der Philosophie als Lebensform. Die Probleme, die man behandelt, dürfen jedoch nicht aus dem philosophischen, sondern müssen aus dem öffentlichen Diskurs kommen. Bei der akademischen Philosophie ist das, infolge ihrer Verwissenschaftlichung, in der Regel nicht der Fall. Das, was Philosophen in der Regel behandeln, sind die Meinungen anderer Philosophen.

Damit würden Sie dem Studium der Klassiker nicht mehr die Bedeutung beilegen, die dieses in der gegenwärtigen Ausbildung hat?

Nicht mehr diese Bedeutung. Aber deren Studium ist natürlich unerläßlich. Die Klassiker haben paradigmatische Bedeutung; an ihnen kann man lernen, was Philosophie überhaupt ist. Außerdem spielen die Klassiker deshalb eine große Rolle, weil sie unsere Denkformen geprägt haben. Beispielsweise Platon: Die Begriffe und Denkformen, mit denen man die Gegenwartsprobleme behandelt, sind mitbestimmt durch Denkformen, die unter anderem durch Platon geprägt sind. Aber man sollte sich im klaren sein, daß man Platon studiert, um dessen Gedankenwelt mit unseren Problemen zu konfrontieren.

Auch was die wissenschaftliche Philosophie betrifft, ist die Ausbildung zu kritisieren. Obgleich die akademische Philosophie sich als wissenschaftlich gebärdet, wird sie als Schulphilosophie betrieben. Die analytischen Philosophen lehren nur analytische Philosophie und glauben und schwören darauf, und die anderen machen eben z.B. Phänomenologie. Wenn man das ernst nimmt, daß Philosophie als akademische Philosophie wissenschaftlich ist, ist für den Unterricht zu verlangen, daß pluralistisch philosophische Methoden erlernt werden, also sprachanalytische, hermeneutische, phänomenologische Methoden und daß der Student diese als gleichwertig nebeneinander kennen- und beherrschen lernt.

Aber kann man dazu noch zusätzlich diese von Ihnen eingangs genannten drei Formen des Philosophierens in der Universität zusammenbringen?

Das ist sicher sehr schwierig. Man kommt nicht darum herum, das weiterhin dominant zu lassen, was gegenwärtig dominant ist, nämlich die wissenschaftliche Philosophie, aber gleichzeitig die Durchsetzung des Pluralismus und die Erlernung einer Mannigfaltigkeit von Methoden zu fordern, um dann von daher selbst Probleme angehen zu können. Dies wäre eine Brücke zur Philosophie als Weltweisheit. Die Probleme allerdings, die man dann damit angeht, sollten nicht von der Philosophie selbst, sondern von außerhalb stammen.

Würde dies nicht zu einer Überforderung des Studiums führen?

Die Methoden lernt man an charakteristischen Fällen, man braucht also nicht für jede Methode ein halbes Studium. Was man leider gegenwärtig im akademischen Betrieb findet, ist das, was ich "Positionalismus" nenne, daß man eine Position bezieht und dann versucht, diese stark zu machen...

Aber Sie vertreten doch auch eine bestimmte Position und versuchen diese stark zu machen. Und von dieser Position aus werden die anderen betrachtet und bewertet...

Da möchte ich mich doch von einigen Kollegen unterscheiden. Es gibt Leute, die etwa einen metaphysischen Realismus oder einen Konstruktivismus vertreten. Ich vertrete nicht, sondern arbeite an Problemen.

Wie aber können etwa "Lebensformen" in den Philosophieunterricht integriert werden?

Das halte ich für besonders schwierig. Die Universität ist von der Institution her nicht der Ort, viel weniger als beispielsweise die Schule. Letzere hat durch die feste Zuordnung von relevanten Bezugspersonen eine viel größere Chance einer Menschenbildung als dies an der Universität der Fall sein kann. Aber man könnte dies partiell versuchen. Ich habe hier in Darmstadt die Lehrform der "Übung" eingeführt, was in der Philosophie relativ unbekannt ist. Man kennt dies allenfalls im Sektor Logik. Ich biete etwa Übungen zur Leibphilosophie an. Dazu gehört, daß wir zusammen in den Wald gehen und bestimmte Leiberfahrungen gewinnen. Das geht über das reine Zur-Kenntnis-Nehmen von Thesen und Argumentieren hinaus.

Aber kann man da eine klare Abgrenzung zur Selbsterfahrung und auch zur Esoterik vornehmen?

Zur Esoterik ganz sicher. Was hier vermittelt wird, ist Selbsterfahrung und dies halte ich auch für philosophisch sehr wichtig: Es gibt viele Erfahrungen, die nur in der Selbsterfahrung gewonnen werden können, nämlich das, was der Kieler Philosoph Hermann Schmitz die subjektiven Tatsachen nennt und wo die leibliche Betroffenheit ganz zentral ist.

Esoterik wiederum ist die Absicht, sogenanntes "höheres Wissen" zu verkaufen und darum geht es überhaupt nicht. Es geht hier eher um "niederes Wissen", um ganz elementare Dinge. Eine andere Übung, die ich gemacht habe, heißt "Anschauen und Wahrnehmen". Unsere technische Zivilisation vermittelt uns eine ganz eingeschränkte Leiberfahrung, und als Philosophen müßten wir uns eigentlich darum kümmern, ganz andere Leiberfahrungen zurückzugewinnen.

Unser technisch geprägte Welt trainiert uns in bestimmten Wahrnehmungsweisen, und dem kann man durch ganz bestimmte Übungen gegensteuern und "Sehen lernen" durchaus im philosophischen Unterricht vermitteln.

Aber ist das Ziel dieser Übungen nicht dasselbe wie bei der Esoterik, daß man nämlich mit sich und der Natur ein harmonisches Leben führt?

Das kann durchaus sein, daß es hier Überschneidungen gibt. Deshalb empfinde ich auch eine Art Konkurrenz zur Esoterik. Nur meine ich, daß die Philosophie hier auf ihrer traditionellen Linie, wie sie durch das große Vorbild Sokrates bestimmt ist, bleiben muß. Aber das Ziel als "harmonisches Leben" zu beschreiben, das sehe ich anders. Ein guter Mensch zu sein ist nicht dasselbe wie glücklich sein. Harmonie anzustreben ist aus meiner Sicht eine esoterische Ideologie. Damit würde man Widersprüche in unserem Leben zudecken, die zuzudecken nicht Sache des Philosophen ist.

Der Leib als die Natur ist uns keinesfalls selbstverständlich. Auch hier kann die Naturerfahrung nur gegen Widerstände und Verdeckungen zurückgewonnen werden. Deshalb sehe ich es als einen Bestandteil philosophischer Lebensführung an, Künste zu erlernen, um natürlich zu sein.

Hat diese Einführung der Lebenserfahrung in die Universität nicht etwas Paradoxes an sich? Man nimmt doch gemeinhin Lebenserfahrung als etwas Privates an, und nun wird diese Einübung in Lebensformen institutionalisiert?

Das Persönliche an Lebensformen ist die persönliche Betroffenheit. Aber die Sache kann doch allgemein sein. Was man erfährt, also der Inhalt, kann allgemein sein, während nicht allgemein ist, daß ich es jeweils bin, der es erfährt und um den es dabei geht. Entscheidend an meiner Subjektivität ist nicht, daß ich ganz anders empfinde als andere, sondern entscheidend ist, daß ich es jeweils bin, der davon betroffen ist. Trauer können wir der Sache nach miteinander teilen, aber Sie oder ich bin es, der davon betroffen ist.

Das heißt, daß bei diesen Übungen mehr die Reflexion über die Selbsterfahrung im Vordergrund steht als die Selbsterfahrung selber?

Das möchte ich so nicht sagen. Im universitären Betrieb ist dies von vornherein etwas Marginales und von daher dominiert die Reflexion, zumal man nachher im Seminar zusammenkommt und darüber redet. Aber Sie haben insofern recht, als die Verbalisierung der Erfahrung dominant ist. Dennoch kann man in bestimmten Situationen Erfahrungen, die vorsprachlicher Art sind, machen und vermitteln. Daß unser normales Wahrnehmen eben auch ein Verdecken ist, darauf muß man erst kommen.

Sie versuchen dies ja auch an die Wissenschaft heranzutragen: daß deren Art, gewisse Dinge zu sehen, nicht nur ein Entdecken, sondern auch ein Verdecken ist.

Die Wissenschaft ist ein kollektives Unternehmen und ist insofern ist dies nicht ganz vergleichbar. Die Mechanismen, die zur Verdeckung führen, spielen bei den Wissenschaften eher eine gesellschaftliche Rolle. Die Wissenschaft hat auch bestimmte Interessen und hinter ihr stehen ökonomische Interessen, die dazu führen, daß bestimmte mögliche Sichtweisen auf die Realität nicht zum Zuge kommen.

Dann sollte das Verhältnis der Philosophie zur Wissenschaft das der Kritik sein?

Das Verhältnis der Philosophie zur Wissenschaft begreift man in klassischer Weise als das der Begründung. Seit Platon besteht die Auffassung, daß die Wissenschaften mit Grundaxiomen und Hypothesen anfangen, aber in ihrem Vorgehen selber nicht begründet sind. Die Philosophie hat danach die Aufgabe, diese Begründungsarbeit zu leisten. Aber heute muß man das weiter sehen, zur Aufgabe der Philosophie gehört auch die Reflexion über die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Wissenschaft, dazu gehört auch die Reflexion darüber, daß Wissenschaften immer eine spezifische Sichtweise über ihren Gegenstand darstellen. Dazu gehört aber auch die Begriffsarbeit, in der die Reflexion auf Grundbegriffe geleistet wird und damit auch ein kritisches Potential gegenüber der wissenschaftlichen Begriffsleistung aufgebaut wird.

Und wie kann sich die Philosophie gegenüber der Übermacht der Naturwissenschaften behaupten, die traditionelle Gebiete der Philosophie für sich beanspruchen?

Faktisch sieht das anders aus: Die Naturwissenschaften gehen zurück und die Philosophie wächst. Hier in Darmstadt sind wir das am meisten ausgelastete Fach, überall wird gespart, nur wir bekommen noch eine Professur dazu. Institutionell haben wir kein Problem, uns zu behaupten, wir brauchen uns nicht einmal inhaltlich zu legitimieren, die Legitimierung durch den Studentenandrang genügt schon.

Und woran liegt das?

Die gesellschaftliche Bedeutung des naturwissenschaftlichen Bereiches schwindet. Eine Rolle spielt dabei der Abbau des Rüstungssektors, aber auch die Computerisierung von Arbeitsabläufen bei den Ingenieuren, beides Faktoren, die zur Einsparung von Arbeitsplätzen führen. Umgekehrt hat die Philosophie im Moment einen gesellschaftlichen Auftrieb, sie wird insbesondere als Ethik gesellschaftlich nachgefragt, aber auch als Orientierung. Der Erfolg etwa von Sofies Welt hat mit dazu geführt, daß die Philosophie einer breiteren Bevölkerungsschicht bekannt ist und manche sich sagen, nun will ich das Fach auch studieren.

Muß sich die Philosophie diesem öffentlichen Bedürfnis anpassen?

Nein, man muß die Philosophie dem nicht anpassen. Aber es könnte auch eine gesellschaftliche Chance für die Philosophie sein. Denn sie entspricht diesem Bedürfnis noch unzureichend, weshalb es sich lohnen könnte, wenn sich die Philosophie in gewisser Weise wandeln würde. Innerhalb des Universitätssystems hat die Philosophie ihr Überleben vor allem dadurch gesichert, daß sie sich den wissenschaftlichen Methoden angepaßt hat. Das hat zu dieser science-community-Orientierung geführt: sehr viele Philosophen entnehmen ihre Probleme den Aufsätzen ihrer Kollegen und fragen nicht danach, wo die Philosophie eigentlich gefragt wäre.

Sollte man vielleicht die Philosophie aus der Universität ausgliedern und sie direkt dort ansiedeln, wo diese Bedürfnisse vorhanden sind?

Als zusätzliche Wirkungsmöglichkeit für die Philosophie wäre das sehr gut. Aber sie von der Universität abzukoppeln hieße, die Philosophie weitgehend von ihrer eigenen Geschichte zu trennen, und das hätte schlimme Folgen.

Sie meinen also, Philosophie ist per se ein Expertenwissen und nicht ein lebensweltliches Wissen?

Nein, das wollte ich nicht sagen. Insofern die Philosophie ihr prinzipielles Ziel der Suche nach Weisheit weiter verfolgt, ist sie sicher auch eine Steigerung von lebensweltlichem Wissen. Daß die Philosophie selber einen Zug zum Elitismus hat, liegt daran, daß sie sich mit den herrschenden Üblichkeiten in der Regel nicht abfindet.

Und nicht etwa an der Schwierigkeit der Inhalte oder der besonderen Art der abstrakten Beschäftigung?

Das kommt sicher hinzu, aber das ist nicht essentiell.

Was kann denn die Philosophie im öffentlichen Diskurs leisten?

Die Philosophie kann einen bestimmten Typ von Theorie entwickeln, der die Wirklichkeit unter der Perspektive vernünftiger Zustände beschreibt. Der kritische Blick ist etwas, das eine spezifisch theoretische Sichtweise der Realität enthält.

Die Aufgabe der Philosophie ist heute, oppositionell und kritisch zu sein. Daß heißt, daß sie auf Seiten der schwächeren Bataillone steht.

Aber damit, den Unterdrückten das Wort zu reden, kann es doch nicht getan sein, die Philosophie muß doch ein Ziel haben...

Kritische Theorie hat allerdings die Aufgabe, immer wieder gegen Unterdrückung zu arbeiten. Dazu gehört auch, die gesellschaftliche Dominanz der Wissenschaft in Frage zu stellen. Ich bin skeptisch genug, um zu sehen, daß man das Gewicht in der Gesellschaft nicht einfach umdrehen kann. Aber das ist kein Anlaß zur Resignation.

Wie kann hier die Philosophie eingreifen - etwa im Bereich der Gentechnik?

Die verfassungsrechtliche Festlegung der Wissenschaft entstand aus der Notwendigkeit der Sicherung der Freiheit von Lehre und Forschung. Das ist ein essentieller Punkt der liberalen Gesellschaft, an den man nicht rühren darf. Andererseits ist es aber so, daß von diesem Hintergrund her Wissenschaft als Sache des einzelnen Wissenschaftlers gesehen wird. Die Freiheit, die da garantiert wird, ist eigentlich die Freiheit des individuellen Wissenschaftlers zu forschen, was er will. Und das geht an der realen Tatsache der organisierten Wissenschaft und der öffentlichen Finanzierung von Wissenschaft völlig vorbei. Unsere grundgesetzliche Regelung der Stellung der Wissenschaft stammt aus dem 18. bzw. frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Deshalb bin ich der Meinung, daß es hier neue Regelungen geben müßte, die zwar die individuelle Freiheit des einzelnen bewahren, aber andererseits Wissenschaft als kollektives Wissensunternehmen doch gesellschaftlichen Regelungen unterwirft.

Das würde dann von Seiten der Gesellschaft her erfolgen?

Ja. Es gibt ja da bereits Anfänge. Ich denke an die Forschung an menschlichen Keimen, die in Deutschland im Embryonenschutzgesetz und in der Schweiz sogar in der Verfassung bereits eingeschränkt ist. Eine Einsicht ist inzwischen da, daß die individuelle Forschungsfreiheit nicht der einzige Gesichtspunkt sein kann, sondern daß das gesellschaftliche Interesse.

Und Sie sehen hier die Gesetzgebung als ein gutes Mittel, der Forschung Schranken zu setzen?

Es ist ein Mittel, leider nicht hinreichend, es löst das Problem nicht wirklich. Man muß zudem versuchen, die nationalen Gesetze international zu erweitern, über die EU, die UNO, die UNESCO usw. - das ist ja auch im Gange. Man versucht etwa durch Bioethikkonventionen zu allgemeinen Regelungen zu kommen.

Aber umgekehrt - ist das nicht doch wieder eine Art Zensur?

Der Unterschied ist ganz sicher der, daß diese Regelungen demokratisch durchgesetzt werden müssen und auf einem breiten Konsens beruhen. Zensur im traditionellen Sinn war eher die Maßnahme eines autoritären Staatsgebildes. Wie man das einmal im historischen Rückblick sehen wird, ist eine andere Frage. Aber gerade im Bereich der technischen Manipulationsmöglichkeiten hinsichtlich des menschlichen Körpers steht unser Selbstbild als Menschen fundamental in Frage. Es kann natürlich sein, daß in hundert Jahren ein Art "Neo-Mensch" verächtlich auf uns herabschauen wird.

Und was entgegnen Sie dem Wissenschaftler, der sagt, er erforsche nichts anderes als die "Wahrheit"?

Dieser Wissenschaftler redet ganz ideologisch, weil er nicht sieht, welchen gesellschaftlichen und welchen ökonomischen Interessen er letzten Endes folgt. Und was dabei herauskommt, ist eine konstruierte Wahrheit. Aber ich finde es wichtig, auch für den Wissensgegenstand andere Gesichtspunkte, die traditionell eher im Bereich der Ethik oder der Ästhetik angesiedelt wurden, geltend zu machen. Man muß fragen: was ist überhaupt wissenswürdig? Oder, indem man nach ethisch relevantem Naturwissen fragt: Wie kann man die Natur so sehen, daß das, was sie uns moralisch bedeutet, im Wissen bereits aufgenommen ist?

Bis wohin darf man gehen, ohne relativistisch zu werden?

Ich glaube schon, daß die Wissenschaft ein ausgezeichneter Typ von Erkenntnis ist, und das liegt natürlich an der Intersubjektivität. Wissenschaft bedarf immer der Zustimmung anderer und ist für Kritik offen. Ganz wichtig ist auch das methodische Vorgehen: im Prinzip muß die gewonnene Erkenntnis von anderen nachvollziehbar sein. In diesem Sinn möchte ich die Wahrheit der Wissenschaft nicht klein schreiben. Nur muß man sehen, daß diese Wahrheit ihre historische Einbettung hat, daß eine begriffliche Voraussetzung existiert und daß ein technischer Hintergrund - die Geräte - für die Wissenschaft eine Rolle spielt. Wahrheit bedeutet hier die nachvollziehbare Weise, wie man in einer bestimmten Situation Gegenstände bzw. die Natur zum Phänomen machen kann.

Wenn man Wahrheit als Nachvollziehbarkeit, als Verständigung über Experten sieht, dann bleibt die Wahrheit unter den Wissenschaftlern. Müssen wir nicht den Begriff der Wahrheit erweitern, weil es dabei doch nicht nur um die Übereinstimmung zwischen Experten gehen kann?

Es ist richtig, daß Wissenschaft durch das entsprechende Training vom "Laienverstand" abgetrennt ist. Aber im Prinzip ist das, was die Wissenschaftler machen, immer nachvollziehbar. Recht haben Sie insofern, als das, was die gesellschaftliche Einbettung und rechtliche Regelung der Forschung angeht, auch die Laien ein Mitspracherecht haben müssen, auch wenn diese vieles, vor allem in punkto Methode, nicht nachvollziehen können. Es ist dies ein Problem, das nicht leicht zu lösen ist. Ein gutes Modell hierbei ist das des Geschworenengerichtes: Die Wissenschaftler müssen die Laien, die dann entscheiden, auch überzeugen können.

Glauben Sie, daß Wissenschaftler diese Rolle akzeptieren könnten?

Da gibt es sicher Widerstände. Die Wissenschaftler profitieren von ihrer dominanten Stellung in der Gesellschaft. Andererseits hatte Schelsky noch die Befürchtung, daß die Politik abgeschafft und an ihre Stelle eine Technokratie treten würde, in der die Ingenieure die entscheidende Macht haben -das ist nicht eingetreten.

¡¡

Mit Gernot Böhme sprachen Antonia Bertschinger, Eveline Ruf, Takashi Sugimoto, Dominik Vogt und Markus Wild (alle Universität Basel).

Dieses Gespräch ist das Ergebnis der Tätigkeit der Arbeitsgruppe "Philosophisches Interview" (Leitung: Urs Thurnherr) an der Universität Basel. Diese Arbeitsgemeinschaft hat den Status eines Kolloquiums und ist im Sinne eines hochschuldidaktischen Versuchs gegründet worden. Die Teilnehmenden, die entweder vor ihrer Lizentiats- bzw. Magisterarbeit stehen oder an einer Doktorarbeit sitzen, treffen sich in einer ersten Sitzung, um eine zeitgenössische Philosophin oder einen Philosophen zu be-stimmen, die resp. der für die Fragestellungen und Problemhorizonte ihrer aktuellen Arbeit am interessantesten ist. Danach setzt sich die Gruppe ein Semester lang mit den Arbeiten der gewählten Person auseinander, um am Ende des Semesters die herausgearbeiteten Fragenkomplexe zu strukturieren und anschließend das Interview durchzuführen. Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft gibt damit den Teilnehmenden nicht nur die Möglichkeit, unmittelbar für ihre Forschungsarbeiten tätig zu sein, sondern will darüber hinaus einen konkreten Beitrag zu einer Verbindung von Universität und späterer Berufspraxis leisten. Für die Publikation ist das Interview von der Redaktion gekürzt und überarbeitet worden.

The pros and cons of email counseling

by PETER B.  RAABE

RELATED LINK
* The UK Samaritans
* Philosophy & Counseling Pages
* Philosophical Counseling Website
* Internet Therapy

Just as technology has changed most other areas of our lives, it has changed the nature of counseling. While most of us think of counseling as being a face-to-face and often very intimate dialogue, telephones, computers, and video cameras allow consultations to take place between individuals who may never meet each other in person. Such is the case with counseling by email.

A quick search on the Web reveals a growing list of websites offering online counseling services mostly geared to a psychotherapeutic approach. Interactions are of two types: one-time visits in which the client asks a question and the counselor gives a detailed response, and ongoing visits in which the counselor and client form a relationship that allows for deep inquiry into the client's concerns. Some philosophical counselors feel that, if their practice does not include online counseling and a "virtual office" in cyberspace, they are losing potential clients and revenue as well as missing a ride on the wave of the future. But is email counseling a sign of things to come? Counselors who believe their clients have benefited from counseling by email are happy to extol its virtues to anyone willing to listen. But what about those things that can go wrong?

Justin Irwin, communications officer for a crisis hotline organization in the United Kingdom called the Samaritans, says their email service "has been growing rapidly." However, he is quick to point out that he would not consider their email service as counseling, but rather "non-directive, non-judgmental emotional support offered by helping the 'caller' explore their emotions or feelings behind any particular problem they might be going through." The UK Samaritans received about 7,500 messages in 1997, over 15,000 in 1998, and Irwin expects their 1999 total to be close to 30,000. He points out that email "callers" are twice as likely to express suicidal feelings as those who call by telephone. This may be due to the fact that more than half of their email "callers" are under the age of 25, and thus in the age group most likely to attempt suicide. But Irwin thinks it is also due to the nature of the medium being used: Email eliminates a face-to-face or even phone-to-phone discussion, so the young and naturally inhibited may find it easier to express suicidal feelings.

UK philosophical counselor Tim Lebon says his experience with email counseling has been very good. The act of writing seems to him to be more appropriate than verbal dialogue for assessing arguments and mapping out one's ideas. It encourages both client and counselor to think deeply in trying to work out their responses. It also allows them the time necessary to do this -- time in quantities rarely available in formally arranged "appointments."

There is general agreement that what recommends email counseling over all other mediums is the fact that client and counselor can connect over vast distances at very little expense. Email counseling does not require the counselor to organize appointments, rent an office space, allow for travel time, or purchase a "professional" wardrobe. It does not call for the client to be physically present, a requirement that the physically challenged or extremely shy, nervous, or easily embarrassed client may find difficult to meet. The absence of a physical appearance also means that the client-counselor relationship will not be negatively affected by the counselor's race, sex, age, and so on. Furthermore both client and counselor can reflect back over print-outs of past sessions. A hard copy allows them also to make notes directly on the printed page and thereby gather questions and insights that can serve as catalysts for future discussions. Online counseling also allows the counselor the time to reflect and, more importantly, to conduct research into unfamiliar areas without losing "professional face" to the client.

But Shlomit Schuster, a counselor in Israel, feels email counseling is woefully lacking in communicative capability. She argues that if you are going to allow technology to act as the intermediary it should at least function at the voice or visual level. Tim Lebon agrees. He has found that emailing makes it harder for the counselor to pick up important nuances from the client, such as facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and pauses and hesitations. This, he says, makes it more difficult to "work with the whole person."

Martha Ainsworth points out at her very informative Internet Therapy website that "online counseling is experimental." There are better ways to get help. A most obvious flaw with email counseling is that it is not available to anyone without a computer or Internet access. Even if such access exists, for online counseling to work both client and counselor must have a certain level of competency in their writing skills. If either cannot express themselves clearly, or conversely if either is inclined to write long, unwieldy passages, the counseling relationship will soon deteriorate into frustration. Email messages need to be concise. Unfortunately, this can lead the client to censor his thoughts, edit his writings, and eliminate important material for the sake of brevity. Spontaneity is lost to convenience.

Perhaps the second biggest drawback is that there is a lack of that physical closeness to a warm and caring human being that research has shown is vital to the effectiveness of all the helping professions. Most counselors who have counseled by email agree that they prefer to explore the eyes of their clients rather than the pixels of their computer screens. They also complain that the use of humor as a part of therapy is very difficult to employ on the Internet. Merriment can be missed or, worse, it can be misunderstood. A joke can read like the worst kind of callousness or insensitivity and can easily lead to the termination of a counseling relationship.

While a client may have the perception of an immediate connection with the counselor once the "Send Mail" button has been pressed, there is no guarantee there is a counselor at the other end. A response from counselor to client and vice versa can take an excruciatingly long time. A sent message may also be intercepted. Cyberspace hackers feel no moral obligation to respect the privacy of others. And I imagine that a person using his employer's computer to send messages to a counselor has no legal right to confidentiality either.

For clients there is no legal protection against fraudulent counselors. But fraud works in both directions. At the moment there is also no legal recourse for the online counselor whose client fails to send the promised check in the mail. It is possible that payment may only be reliably received if the counselor has set up some sort of elaborate electronic payment system (some counseling websites charge by the minute, some by the message). Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the client isn't a fraud -- that is, someone simply having a good laugh at the counselor's expense. There is no way to verify by email that a client's distress is real. This means that the rise in the number of suicidal email messages received by the UK Samaritan could simply be due to young computer users having them on. There is no way to tell.

My own experience with online counseling has been limited but also very rewarding. The few clients who have approached me for counseling by email were distressed but not in crisis situations. They were articulate and comfortable with the medium, and they did not consider online counseling their only option. This made them ideal email clients. Whether email counseling will replace all face-to-face counseling in future is not a serious question. Just like the telephone, email can be very useful in altering the time and space between two people, but it will never replace the pleasure of two people meeting in real time and in real place.

________________

Dr. Raabe welcomes inquiries by email, telephone at (604) 986-9446, or regular postal mail at Dr. Peter B. Raabe, 46-2560 Whiteley Court, North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V7J 2R5.

Is philosophy useless? 

by MICHAEL RUSE

RELATED LINKS
* Michael Ruse
* Books by Michael Ruse

Suppose you are a potato grower and you have a big contract to supply McDonald's with prepared French fries. It would be really great if they could come packaged with their own fat for frying, so that all one had to do was pop them into the microwave. So, you go to the Pork Producers of Ontario and buy a couple of their best and fattest porkers; then over to the University of Guelph where helpful people in the Ontario Agricultural College take a gene from the pigs and put it into the potatoes -- Yukon Gold, of course, a variety developed at Guelph. And lo and behold, from now on you have your high cholesterol spud, and never again will you need to get out the chip pan and heat it up. A major culinary breakthrough has occurred.

But is it kosher? I mean, what happens if you are a practicing Jew trying to observe the dietary laws? Obviously you cannot wolf down McLobster (or McHommard as they call it out in Prince Edward Island). But what about those terrific McFries? Are you allowed to eat something with a pig gene inserted? It is still a potato that you are eating, albeit with a new bit of DNA inserted? Does it matter that the DNA came from a pig, or rather that the DNA in the potato was copied (many times by now) from DNA that was originally in a pig?

It turns out that the answer is rather interesting. If you are a Jew, a potato is just a potato, no matter how you have messed around with it. The origin of the new DNA is irrelevant. Enjoy your French fries. However, if you are a Muslim, then the potato has been rendered unfit for human consumption. It does matter where the DNA originated, and that it came from an unclean animal is enough to condemn it forevermore. For the Jew, what counts is the functioning of the organism as it is now. For the Muslim, what counts is the history of the organism, whatever its state now.

We have here a fascinating parallel with a problem which has long engaged philosophers of biology. One group (which includes me, incidentally) wants to claim that what counts when considering an individual or a group (like a species) is the way in which they function at the moment. Another group (which includes my good friend David Hull) wants to claim that what counts when considering an individual or group are the histories of the individual or the group. Thus, suppose a fat little bloke, with the distinctive hat, long coat, and hand tucked in, got off the boat at Star Island and started recruiting Shoalers for a march on Moscow. I would say that this was Napoleon, even if it turned out that some mad scientist in Boston had made him out of chemicals the winter previously. Likewise, if Phil Hefner were carried skywards by a monster with big teeth and small arms, I would say that he had been carried off by Tyrannosaurus rex, even it were a reconstruction by Steven Spielberg which had been just a bit too successful. David, on the other hand, would say that it was just an ersatz Napoleon no matter how much it was like the original, even if it had thoughts and memories (or "memories") just like the original. And the dinosaurs are extinct and that is an end to it; they are gone and can never come back.

Twenty-five years of happy debate -- in print and at conferences in nice parts of the world -- have convinced me that there is simply no way of solving the philosophical problem. It is all a question of rival intuitions and that is an end to it. I think that Napoleon is alive and well and living on Star Island. David thinks that it is an imposter. The same is true of Tyrannosaurus rex: I think it is a real dinosaur; David thinks it is a movie prop. Which all goes to make me think that when real decisions have to be made about moral action -- or any action -- philosophy is useless.

Religion can give you answers because ... well, because religion is in the business of giving answers and is not too bothered about a little reason along the way. A potato with a pig gene is something quite beyond the worldview of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Mohammed, so make a decision and then enforce it! A decision -- any decision -- is better than no decision. (I am not saying that all religions in all ways are unreasonable -- read Saint Augustine sometime if you think that -- but rather that religions are in the job of giving people advice on how to live. They recognize that sometimes you have to make a decision one way or the other, and get on with things even though there is no good reason behind the decision to go one way rather than the other.)

For all that I am a professional philosopher. I have been thinking these kinds of thoughts quite a bit recently. I have been putting together a book of readings on cloning for Prometheus Books, a small press in Buffalo, New York. I am doing it at the request of the editor, a long-time friend, and I cannot honestly say that it was a topic to which I had given much thought until last summer. Then, having done a survey of the literature and having collected a suitable bunch of papers and discussions -- more accurately, having paid a graduate student to survey the literature and to collect a suitable bunch of papers and discussions -- I found myself having to sit down, write the introduction, and think about the underlying principles which led people to take different positions on the morality of cloning, particularly the morality of cloning humans.

If I looked at the religious writers on the subject, then things were pretty simple. The conservatives -- Catholics, evangelicals, orthodox Jews -- were against human cloning. They wanted no part of it whatsoever. The liberals -- Unitarians, Quakers, Anglicans, some Lutherans, and so forth -- were much more sympathetic to cloning. No one should set out to make monsters, obviously, nor do we want a Brave New World situation, where we have the production of squads of epsilons to do the joe jobs for us (why should we bother when we already have all of those immigrants to do the dirty work for us?), but cloning in itself is an okay sort of thing to do. Indeed, there might well be times when one is positively morally obligated to do it.

However, philosophers and philosophy was much less helpful. Take the two big secular moral philosophical systems: utilitarianism and Kantianism. These would seem to take you in completely different ways. Utilitarians insist, thanks to the greatest happiness principle, that you ought to maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness. Cloning would therefore seem to be morally acceptable on many occasions. Suppose you want to clone yourself. Why not, so long as you are reasonably healthy and happy? If one Billy Grassie is a good thing, surely two Billy Grassies are an even better thing. Just think, with the right training we might have new Mozart operas being produced even today. 

Kantians insist on treating people as ends rather than as means. They are against cloning, on every or virtually every occasion. Could it possibly be right to reproduce another Billy Grassie simply as an expression of the original Billy's pride or desire to achieve vicarious immortality? Could we think that we are really going to produce a new Mozart however much training we give the clone (and in any case, would we really want to put a kid through the training that the real Mozart had, just so we can listen to Don Giovanni Mark Two)? Does anyone really deny that the Grassies and Mozarts are the thin end of a really big wedge which is going to end up with squads of epsilons?

But you can swing the arguments just as easily the other way. Am I going to be truly happy going through life knowing that I am just a clone of Michael Ruse -- that I have no identity in my own right? Will I not tire of yet another Mozart opera? Better by far that we produce our own music rather than forever looking back? Will I or anyone be truly happy in a world serviced by artificially produced morons? Conversely, what about natural clones? Does the Kantian truly believe that identical twins cannot be treated as ends rather than means? (If anyone thinks that such people cannot have true identities, they should meet the Kupp twins, my son Oliver's best pals -- yet after nearly ten years, I cannot tell them apart physically.) What about someone whose child is dying tragically of cancer? Does one truly think it immoral to want to perpetuate that child through cloning. (Add some conditions if you like. The mother has had a hysterectomy -- through no choice of her own -- and so the loving parents can have no more children, etc.)

The point is that philosophy seems absolutely useless to solve the question of the morality or desirability of cloning. More than this, I have to say that the suggestions of some of my fellow philosophers on the subject seem to me to be absolutely nutty. One distinguished (male, heterosexual) philosopher suggested that the really great thing about cloning (I mean, THE really great thing -- the paradigm of why it is a good rather than an evil) is that now lesbian lovers will be able to have children. One of them can be cloned and the other can act as a surrogate mother. This strikes me as political correctness gone absolutely stark raving bonkers.

Which is an interesting reaction by me, and I am sure that some of my readers will already be turning to the keyboard to write of my iniquities. (Heavens, if you get upset when I call Konrad Lorenz a Nazi, which he was, how are you going to react when I say that I think it is daft to suggest that the one great boon of cloning is that it opens up new reproductive possibilities for same sex partners.) So let me rush to say at once that I really have no absolute objection if this is a use to which cloning is put. More than that, let me say that I can well imagine that this can be a happy and meaningful practice or experience which would not otherwise be open to people who (for whatever reason -- choice, genes, environment, God) find themselves in such relationships. But what strikes me as absurd -- and wrong -- is the thought that the only or the best end for new technology is doing something which is at the lifestyle end of the spectrum rather than the necessity end.

I suppose that what I am trying to say -- although I am pussyfooting around because good liberals like me are not supposed to be moved by such things -- is that I worry when new technology gets used in ways that are unnatural. At least, when what is natural is something which is taken to be just one option among a number, or even taken to be something of no significance whatsoever. Suppose a couple do have a dying child they want to clone. I am not sure that it is a wise thing to do -- think of the pressures on the new child -- but I do understand and sympathize. Their concern is natural. But if a lesbian couple insist on reproducing in this way, then do not expect me to feel entirely happy or doubt-free. Do not expect me to think that nothing can go wrong (simply because of this particular situation). If evolutionary psychology has taught us anything, it is that the biological relationships between parents and children are not to be denied or downgraded. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's studies of family violence show this and so do Sarah Hrdy's studies of mother-child bonds and when they work and when they fail. You are going to have one person knowing that another person is carrying her child, and the second person aware that she is the hedge sparrow with the cuckoo in the nest. (Sorry if that is offensive -- say rather, you are going to have the second person knowing that the child she bears is not biologically hers but that of someone else, who is going to be around all of the time.) Everything might work out just fine, but it is silly and irresponsible to pretend that it will never ever set new challenges. If evolutionary psychology be correct, these could be major. It is not a natural situation and for that reason alone you should beware.

As it happens, the naturalness question does get raised quite a bit in the cloning debate. Catholics, for instance, are committed to the notion of natural law, and try to judge morality against it. But naturalness seems to be an underlying theme with a lot of people who have never even heard of Saint Thomas Aquinas. There is a feeling, even by the most secular of people, that organisms -- humans in particular -- are not just thrown together randomly, but rather that we function, we work, and in very particular ways. Moreover, while we can certainly interfere with the functioning, we should do so with care. Interference in the first place should be to get us back to proper functioning if we have deviated -- taking pills for high blood pressure, for instance. And in the second place, we should change functioning only in careful and circumscribed ways -- a good stiff gin and tonic to unwind after a department meeting. (Actually, given my colleagues, one could say that a large drink is needed to get back to proper functioning.) Generally, there is a norm which is natural for humans, and to break from it is dangerous and perhaps even wrong if it goes too far.

Christians justify naturalness by reference to God, who intended things this way because they are good. Evolutionary ethicists like Ed Wilson justify it by reference to our evolutionary heritage -- the wisdom of the genes and so forth. If you are neither, then you justify naturalness by prudence based on experience: The more you start altering things around, the more you run the risk of having unfortunate side effects. And this applies to cloning. The entirely secular person may say that there is nothing wrong in principle in using cloning how you will, but humans are animals with emotions and social needs as much as with a physiology. The more you start to push things around, the more you start to run the risk of providing a solution which is worse than the problem.

This talk about naturalness goes back to the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, and it is still a subject of great philosophical interest today. (There was, a few years back, an intense discussion of the nature of sexual perversion and how and when and why it might be considered natural or unnatural.) Which rather suggests to me that there may still be a place for philosophy, even now. I am certainly not going to say outright that utilitarianism and Kantianism are useless, but perhaps as guides to action they are not as helpful as many think. But there are other issues which are important, and other philosophers have looked at them, and it is perhaps in those areas we should be directing our interests. Conceptual problems about what is the true nature of a human being and so forth. And as a bonus to all of those good Christians who are upset because I have been rude about their disdain for reason, might I point out that Aristotle was the philosopher with perhaps the most influence on your religion, so perhaps you might join with the philosophers in their inquiries, showing that you are not so unreasonable after all!

____________________

Michael Ruse, Ph.D., is a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph in Canada, founding editor of Biology and Philosophy, and editor of the Philosophy and Biology series for Cambridge University Press.

July 3, 2000

A Literature From Below

GÜNTER GRASS and PIERRE BOURDIEU

The role of the public intellectual--and the moral onus, assuming that one exists--seems ever to thread the Scylla of celebrity and the Charybdis of marginality. In a conversation printed in part simultaneously in the French daily Le Monde and German weekly Die Zeit, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Nobel laureate Günter Grass discussed the role of intellectuals in society, stylistic practices in sociology and literature, neoliberal economics, the emerging world order and other topics. The following is adapted from a translation from the French by Deborah Treisman. Bourdieu is a professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, was founder in 1975 of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, and is author of, among other works: The State Nobility (1996), The Rules of Art (1996), On Television (1998), The Weight of the World (1999) and Pascalian Meditations (2000). Grass, a native of Danzig (now Gdansk), defines himself as a "citizen writer" and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Among his works are The Tin Drum (1959), From the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Rat (1987), Dog Years (1989), The Flounder (1989) and My Century (1999).

Pierre Bourdieu: You have spoken somewhere of "the European or German tradition"--which is also, by the way, a French tradition--of "opening your big mouth." I am delighted that you received the Nobel Prize, and I am also delighted that you haven't been transformed by receiving the Nobel, that you are as inclined as you ever were to "open your big mouth." I am hoping that we can open our big mouths together.

Günter Grass: It is relatively rare for a sociologist and a writer to meet in a German setting. In my country, it is more common for philosophers to gather in one corner of the room, the sociologists in another corner and the writers, all giving each other the cold shoulder, in the back. A communication of the kind we are undertaking now is the exception to the rule. When I think of your book The Weight of the World or of my last book, My Century, I see that our works have something in common: We are trying to retell History, as seen from below. We do not talk over society's head; we do not speak as conquerors of History; rather, in keeping with the nature of our profession, we are notoriously on the side of the losers, of those who are marginalized or excluded from society. In The Weight of the World, you and your collaborators were able to put your individuality aside and to base your work on pure understanding, without claiming always to know better: The result was a snapshot of social conditions and the state of French society that could easily be superimposed on other countries. I am tempted, writer that I am, to mine your stories for raw material. For example, the study of the young woman who came from the country to Paris in order to sort mail at night. The description of her job makes one understand the social problems without harping on them in an ostentatious manner. I was very pleased by that. I wish that there were such a book about the social conditions in every country.

The only question that struck me comes, perhaps, from the sociological domain: There is no humor in this genre of writing. It lacks the comedy of failure, which plays such an important role in my stories, the absurdity inherent in certain confrontations.

Bourdieu: You have written magnificently about a certain number of the experiences we evoke. But the person who hears these stories directly from the one who experienced them is often wiped out by them or overwhelmed, and it isn't always possible to maintain one's distance from them. We felt, for example, that we had to exclude a certain number of narratives from the book because they were too poignant or too pathetic, too painful.

Grass: When I speak of "comedy," I don't mean to imply that tragedy and comedy are mutually exclusive, that the boundaries between the two don't fluctuate.

Bourdieu: Absolutely.... That's true.... In fact, what we aim to do is to make our readers see that raw absurdity, without any special effects. One of our rules was that there would be no turning of the stories into "literature." This may seem shocking to you, but there is a temptation, when one is dealing with dramas like these, to write well. The rule here was to be as brutally pragmatic as possible, to allow these stories to retain their extraordinary, and almost unbearable, violence. There were two reasons for this: scientific reasons and, also, I think, literary ones, because we chose not to be literary precisely in order to be literary in another sense. There are also political reasons. We felt that the violence being perpetrated at the moment by the neoliberal politics established in Europe and Latin America and in many other countries--that the violence of the system is so vast one cannot explain it through purely conceptual analysis. Our critical resources are no match for the effects of this political system.

Grass: We are both, the sociologist and the writer, children of the European Enlightenment, of a tradition that has now been thrown into question everywhere--or, at least, in France and Germany--as if the European movement toward Aufklärung, toward Enlightenment, had failed. Many of its early aspects--we need only think of Montaigne--have been lost over the course of the centuries. Humor is one of them. Voltaire's Candide and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste, for example, are books in which the social conditions described are equally horrifying. Yet, even in pain and in failure, the human capacity for comedy and, therefore, victory, comes through.

Bourdieu: Yes, but our sense of having lost the tradition of the Enlightenment is tied to the complete reversal of our vision of the world that has been imposed by the neoliberal vision that dominates today. I think (and here, in Germany, I can make this comparison), I think that the current neoliberal revolution is a conservative revolution--in the sense that one spoke of a conservative revolution in Germany in the thirties--and a conservative revolution is a very strange thing: It's a revolution that restores the past and yet presents itself as progressive, a revolution that transforms regression into progress--to the extent that those who oppose this regression seem themselves to be regressing. Those who oppose terror come to seem like terrorists. It's something that we have both experienced: We voluntarily classify ourselves as archaic--in French, we are called ringards (old-timers), arriérés (outdated).

Grass: Dinosauria...

Bourdieu: Dinosaurs--exactly. That is the great strength of conservative revolutions, or "progressive" restorations. Even what you're saying, I believe, illustrates the idea. We are told: You're not funny. But the era is really not funny! Honestly, there is nothing to laugh about.

Grass: I have never claimed that we were living in an amusing era. But the infernal laughter triggered by literary means is also a form of protest against our social conditions. What is peddled today as neo-liberalism is a return to the methods of the Manchester liberalism of the nineteenth century. In the seventies, in most of Europe, there was a relatively successful effort to civilize capitalism. If you believe in the principle that both socialism and capitalism are the charmingly spoiled children of the Enlightenment, then you also have to admit that they have had a certain way of keeping each other in check. Even capitalism has been subject to certain responsibilities. In Germany, we call this the social economy of the market, and there was a general consensus, which included the conservative party, that the conditions of the Weimar Republic should never be reproduced. This consensus broke down in the early eighties. Since the Communist hierarchies fell apart, capitalism has come to believe that it can do anything, that it has escaped all control. Its polar opposite has defaulted. The rare remaining responsible capitalists who call for prudence do so because they realize that they have lost their sense of direction, that the neoliberal system is now repeating the errors of Communism by creating its own dogma, its own certificate of infallibility.

Bourdieu: Yes, but the strength of this neoliberalism is that it has been applied, at least in Europe, by people who call themselves Socialists. Whether it's [Gerhard] Schröder or [Tony] Blair or [Lionel] Jospin, these are people who invoke socialism in order to further neoliberalism.

Grass: It is a capitulation to economics.

Bourdieu: At the same time, it has become extremely difficult to create a critical position to the left of the Social Democratic governments. In France, there was the great strike of 1995 that mobilized a large portion of the population--laborers, office workers, etc., and also intellectuals. Then there were a whole series of protests. There was the unemployed workers' demonstration, the European march to protest unemployment, the illegal immigrants' protest and so on. There was a kind of continuous agitation that obliged the Social Democrats in power to pretend, at least, to be participating in some sort of socialist discourse. But in practice this critical movement is still very weak, for the most part because it is limited to a national level. One of the most important questions, it seems to me, in the political arena, is to know how, on an international scale, to create a position that is to the left of the Social Democratic governments and that is capable of having a real influence on them. But I think that any attempt to create a European social movement at the moment would be very unlikely to succeed; and the question I ask myself is the following: What can we, as intellectuals, do to contribute to that movement, which is indispensable, because, despite what neoliberalism holds to be the case, all social victories have been won through battle? If we want to create a "social Europe," as they say, we must create a European social movement. And I think--it is my impression--that intellectuals bear a great deal of the responsibility for the creation of such a movement, because the nature of political domination is not only economic but also intellectual; it lies also on the side of belief. And that is why, I believe, we must "open our big mouths" and try to restore our utopia; because one of the defining qualities of these neoliberal governments is that they do away with utopias.

Grass: The Socialist and Social Democratic parties also believed somewhat in that idea, when they claimed that the downfall of Communism would also wipe socialism off the globe, and they lost confidence in the European workers' movement that had existed, mind you, much longer than Communism had. If one abandons one's own traditions, one abandons oneself. In Germany, there have only been a few timid attempts to organize the unemployed. For years, I have been trying to tell the unions: You cannot content yourselves with supervising only the workers who have jobs--and who, as soon as they lose them, fall into a bottomless abyss. You must found a union for the unemployed citizens of Europe. We complain that the construction of Europe is taking place on a purely economic level, but the unions themselves have made no effort to find a form of organization and action that goes beyond the national framework and has an impact across borders. We must create a counterweight to this worldwide neoliberalism. But, to tell the truth, most intellectuals today swallow everything, and it gives them nothing but ulcers. Which is why I doubt that we can count exclusively on intellectuals. In France, it seems to me, one speaks always, without hesitation, of "the intellectuals," but my experiences in Germany have shown me that it's a mistake to believe that all intellectuals are on the left. You can find proof to the contrary throughout the history of the twentieth century, the Nazi era included: A man like Goebbels was an intellectual. For me, being an intellectual is not a proof of quality. Your book The Weight of the World shows how those who come from the working world, who are union members, often have more experience in the social domain than intellectuals do. Those people are now unemployed or retired and no one seems to need them anymore. Their potential is lying fallow.

Bourdieu: Let me go back for one second to the book The Weight of the World. It is an attempt to attribute a much more modest and, I believe, more useful function than one usually does to the efforts of the intellectual: the function of "public writer." The public writer--and I've witnessed this in the countries of North Africa--is someone who knows how to write and who lends his talent to others so that they can express the things they know, on one level, far better than the person who writes them down. Sociologists are in a position that is unique. They are not like other intellectuals; they are primarily--though not always--people who know how to listen, how to decipher what they hear and how to transcribe and transmit it.

Grass: But that means that we must also call on the intellectuals who situate themselves in the proximity of neoliberalism. There are those among them who are starting to ask themselves whether this circulation of money around the globe, which eludes all control, whether this form of madness that follows in the wake of capitalism might not be about to collide with some kind of opposition. Mergers, for example, without purpose or reason, that cause the "redundancy" of 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 people. All that counts for stock-market valuations is the maximization of profit.

Bourdieu: Yes, unfortunately, it is not simply a matter of opposing and thwarting the dominant discourse that claims to represent a unanimity of voices. In order to fight it effectively, we must insure that the criticisms reach the public. We are constantly invaded and assaulted by the dominant discourse. A vast majority of journalists are often unconsciously complicit in the process, and it is incredibly difficult to break down that illusion of unanimity. First, because, in the case of France, it is difficult for anyone who is not very established and very well-known to get access to the public. When I said, at the beginning of this conversation, that I hoped you were going to "open your big mouth," it was because I think that established public figures are the only ones, in a sense, who can break the circle. But, unfortunately, they are often established precisely because they are unquestioning and soft-spoken and because we want to keep them that way, and there are very few who make use of the symbolic capital their position gives them to speak out, to speak frankly and to make sure that the voices of those who cannot speak for themselves are heard. In My Century, you evoke a series of historical events and a certain number of them touched me very much--I am thinking of the story of the little boy who goes to the Liebknecht demonstration and pees on his father's back. I don't know if it is based on a personal memory, but in any case it shows a very original way of learning about socialism. I also very much liked what you said about Jünger and Remarque: you say, between the lines, many things about the role of intellectuals and their complicity in tragic events--even in those they appear to criticize. I also liked what you said about Heidegger. That's one more thing we have in common. I have done a whole analysis of Heidegger's rhetoric, which has had a terrible effect in France almost to the present day.

Grass: What is important for me in that story about Liebknecht is that you have, on one hand, Liebknecht, the agitator of youth--a progressive movement in the name of socialism is just beginning--and, on the other hand, the father who, in his enthusiasm, doesn't realize that his son, who is sitting on his shoulders, wants to get down. When the little boy pees on his father's neck, his father gives him a fierce spanking. This type of authoritarian behavior later causes the boy to enlist voluntarily when troops are being mobilized for the First World War--in other words, to do exactly the opposite of what Liebknecht was hoping to inspire young people to do. In My Century, I describe a professor who reflects, during a Wednesday seminar, on his reactions in 1966, '67 and '68. At the time, his point of departure was a philosophy of high ideas. And he has come back to it in the end. In between, he had several spurts of radicalism, and he was one of those who publicly tore Adorno to pieces from the podium. It is a very typical biography of the era. In the sixties, I was caught up in events. The student protests were necessary and they set more things in motion than the spokespeople of the pseudo-revolution of '68 wanted to admit. That is to say, the revolution didn't take place, it had no basis, but society did change. In From the Diary of a Snail, I describe how the students yelled when I told them: Progress is a snail. Very few wanted to believe it. We are both now at an age where we can, I agree, be sure to continue to open our big mouths, for as long as we retain our health; but our time is limited. I don't know what it's like in France--I don't think it's any better--but I believe that the younger generation of German literature has proven to have little inclination or interest in perpetuating the traditions of the Enlightenment, the tradition of opening your big mouth and interfering. If there is no renewal of that, no changing of the guard, then this aspect of the good European tradition will also be lost.

¡¡

Peter Koestenbaum, clinical philosopher

by PETER B. RAABE

RELATED LINKS
* Philosophy-in-Business
* The New Image of the Person by Peter Koestenbaum
* The Vitality of Death by Peter Koestenbaum
* WHiP Archive: Philosophical Counseling

As an academic discipline, psychology, like physics, is of no help to anyone. Physics becomes useful when it is applied in engineering. Psychology becomes useful when it is turned into practice as psychoanalysis or psychotherapy -- that is, when it becomes clinical.

Philosophy suffers the same fate of uselessness when it is merely studied as an academic subject. But what is the philosophical equivalent of clinical psychology?

A few, but very few, philosophers have at various times argued that there ought to be a clinical application of philosophy that serves the same purpose as clinical psychology. But for many philosophers the word "clinical" in "clinical philosophy" conjures up an image of the worst kind of institutionalized curative procedures in which paternalistic experts, applying their powerful "medical gaze," as Foucault called it, dispense healing to the grateful sufferers. And for many philosophers today the idea of philosophy being combined with psychotherapy, and philosophical counselors working hand-in-hand in clinical practice with psychotherapists, is simply unimaginable.

What then prompted the development of clinical philosophy some 30 years ago? And why are clinical philosophers and philosophy clinics not a prevalent feature in today's therapeutic community? 

In the 1970's Peter Koestenbaum, at that time professor of philosophy at San Jose State College in California, attempted to advance the integration of philosophy and psychotherapy with the publication of The Vitality of Death: Essays in Existential Psychology and Philosophy (Greenwood, 1971), followed by a 570 page volume entitled The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Philosophy (Greenwood, 1978). In the latter book Koestenbaum defined clinical philosophy as "the confluence of a combined phenomenological model of being and existential personality theory with depth psychotherapy." He argued that when the medical model of the person (which he referred to elsewhere as the ghost-in-the-machine theory) is the standard of normalcy and the basis of treatment, healing becomes a very limited activity. From the perspective of clinical philosophy the medical model is a form of "cultural pathology." The "philosophic 'cure,'" as he called it, is to overturn the model itself on which the putative cures of conventional therapy are based.

Koestenbaum sought to help establish clinical philosophy "as a bona fide discipline, with both theoretical and practical orientations." He pointed out that many patients treated at that time with conventional therapy or medicine "are in truth people who suffer from philosophical conditions, rather than psychological diseases. They suffer from the basic problems of life (such as responsibility, love, and death) and need philosophical insight and help." He wrote that it is "quite readily possible to diagnose a client philosophically, and as a result of that to propose a treatment strategy, a counseling direction, or even a didactic course." According to Koestenbaum clinical philosophy requires of the practitioner a solid background in philosophy, especially in what he called "the phenomenological model of being and the existential personality theory, and in psychology and psychiatry, especially clinical practice and experience in psychotherapy."

Koestenbaum, now 72 years old and still very active in the field of business ethics, recently traveled to Mexico and Europe before returning home to the United States. I emailed him several questions which he was kind enough to answer.

RAABE: In The New Image of the Person you discuss what you call clinical philosophy. You consider clinical philosophy not as a replacement for psychotherapy, but as an addition to it. Because of this some philosophers argue that clinical philosophy is not true philosophical counseling (which they separate completely from psychotherapy). How would you respond to this?

KOESTENBAUM: I see clinical philosophy as a presuppositionless (to the degree possible) description of what it means to exist as a human being in the world. I think Heidegger in his own way attempted that in Being and Time, and, earlier, so did Descartes in his Meditations and in his Discourse on Method. Clinical philosophy is an attempt to do precisely that. No one can claim perfection. The project, however, is worthy.

Psychotherapy illuminates the structure of consciousness and of human relations. It divulges how consciousness works, especially in such areas as embarrassment, anxiety, growth, projection, effusive joy, reconciliation, hope, and other forms of insight. It opens up the possibility of layers of awareness, even of the peculiar mechanism of the unconscious, so cleverly assailed by Sartre. Psychotherapy enlarges the field for phenomenological investigation of the inward life, of intersubjectivity, and of its impact on externality.

Psychotherapy is only accidentally connect with "healing." It is better to conceive of it as an inspired way of learning more about oneself as an individual but even more about how the mind works. This is particularly true if we dwell on the unusual fact that in psychotherapy we see that consciousness reflects on itself, that we think about thinking and feel about feeling. This phenomenon of "reflexivity" is a universal philosophical conundrum that tells us something about the unique nature as well as the peculiar limits of knowledge.

Once we are aware of the deep structures of human existence, through this kind of a presuppositionless analysis of what it feels to be us, we can develop, expand, and act on them as a way to help us become stronger as persons. We can teach and dialogue intelligently. This would be called philosophical counseling, in my way of thinking. The differentiator is the power of philosophic insight, philosophical vocabulary, philosophical depth and perspicuity. This leads to character, to inner strength, to the willingness to risk, and no longer to be anxious about anxiety or guilty about guilt, but just plain anxious and guilty.

I think we need not be fussy about borders. Life is a seamless experience, and disciplines foster a divisiveness required for clarity and precision but which can distort the ambiguities of real experience.

RAABE: What got you, a philosopher, motivated to develop the theory and practice of clinical philosophy?

KOESTENBAUM: When you study phenomenology and existentialism you recognize that you are face to face with some inspired and penetrating insights into what it means to be human. You are grateful for the sharp minds that have come up with trenchant observations of inner states and ways of being in the world. They talk about anxiety and free will, about your sense of identity and uniqueness and the inevitability of death. They talk about authentic and neurotic guilt. And they make the effort to let you in on their discoveries of inner landscapes. You may not agree with them. There is no problem with that. All you need to do is to improve on their descriptions of the human condition. We will all benefit from that.

I worked on this thirty years ago, and it became immediately obvious that psychiatric descriptions of these inner states benefited from philosophic deepening, and, of course, vice versa. The initiative was taken by psychiatrists, and for years we had joint conferences and journals. It was a fruitful time for both professions. My two long books, The Vitality of Death and The New Image of the Person try to chronicle the development of these philosophic-psychiatric ideas.

I found my home in bringing together the depth of psychiatry with the depth of philosophy. You could always tell the training: psychiatrists wrote differently from philosophers. The only one who could write in the style of both combined was Rollo May.

I have been using the power of the combined disciplines for helping people manage their business issues. It has been a long struggle. I feel I am in the midst of it, trying to find applications, be in touch with what is real, serve my clients well, and maintain my integrity with respect to values. It is a great adventure. I feel I have made progress, but, believe me, the real tasks still lie ahead.

RAABE: What would you say to those psychologists and psychotherapists who argue that philosophers don't belong in counseling?

KOESTENBAUM: It's odd to use the expression "belong". There is behind such talk a territorial dispute that has more to do with vested interests (which are understandable, of course) than with intellectual integrity. There are competent people in both fields. And there are mature people in both fields. And there are charlatans and inept people in both fields as well. In a free society, people can be where they wish to be, as long as they are totally honest about what they do and what their credentials and qualifications are, and do not violate the laws. The question is, what are their underlying issues and what can we learn from them?

RAABE: We don't hear much about clinical philosophy, either in university philosophy departments or in counseling departments. Why do you think that is?

KOESTENBAUM: Two reasons: 1) Those of us interested in the field and committed to it do not spend enough energy, seriousness, and both developmental and marketing effort in bringing the subject matter out to the public's attention. Mea culpa is answer one. 2) When stuck, the rule is to analyze the resistance We face the same obstacles that Freud did. There are two differences: we don't have a Freud (volunteers are welcome) and the age shoots great men and women, opting instead for mediocrity. In Freud's day, both fortunately and unfortunately, the Great Man theme was alive. We do not want a cult. We want integrity and professionalism. And that takes personal courage and sacrifice.

___________________

Dr. Raabe is a philosophical counselor and author of Philosophical Counseling: Theory and Practice.

The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin 
The famed critical theorist is widely believed to have committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Was he actually murdered by Stalin's agents?

To many contemporary intellectuals, especially academics of postmodern outlook, the radical German writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) embodies the restless consciousness of the past century. Jewish and Marxist, a critic and philosopher, he was little known during his lifetime. But after his death - he is widely believed to have committed suicide in Spain, as he attempted to flee the Nazis to America - his essays were collected and translated into English in the '60s and '70s. These challenging works form the basis for his standing as a leading social critic of his day.

His friend and admirer Hannah Arendt called Benjamin "probably the most peculiar Marxist ever." A connoisseur of esthetics more than an economic determinist, he wrote outside the rigid strictures of the Marxist canon. While his associates Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht embraced Stalinism (the former ambivalently, the latter enthusiastically), Benjamin was more interested in the artistic radicalism of the French Surrealists. His essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has been read by legions of university students; but the last major work verifiably his, an essay entitled "Theses on the Philosophy of History" written just months before he died, represents something more important: one of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced.

Seen by enthusiasts as a kind of latterday Rimbaud, a genius whose work was submerged amid the noise of his capitalist surroundings, and whose life was cut short, Benjamin today - make no mistake - is a superstar. An Amazon search for his name calls up 304 titles - including a memoir by Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. And central to his cult among leftist academics is his suicide.

Benjamin died at a hotel in the Catalan town of Portbou in late September 1940, having just crossed the Pyrenees on foot from France with several companions. A manuscript he reportedly carried with him to the end has disappeared. Thus, his death - in Franco's Spain, as he fled the Nazi invasion of France - is held to epitomize the destruction of the modern intellect by fascism. Yet a careful analysis of the evidence points toward a different conclusion - that Walter Benjamin was murdered by Soviet agents.

This conclusion rests not on any smoking gun, but on two lines of detective work: first, showing how tenuous in all its particulars is the generally accepted story of the suicide; second, showing how thoroughly plausible is the deliberate liquidation of such a man in that time and place. To make this case requires an excursion into the murky world of leftist-intellectual intrigue in wartime Europe.

In a feature in the Times Literary Supplement of February 9, 2001, Lesley Chamberlain, a writer on Freud, reviewed the essentials of the accepted account of the suicide. "Benjamin's famous fate," wrote Chamberlain, "was to fall afoul of the Spanish police ... who determined to put him on a train [back] to France the next day. Ill, exhausted, and hearing that he was beginning a rail journey that would surely lead to his death in a concentration camp, he overdosed on morphine. Shocked by his demise, or confused as to their orders, the Spanish police allowed the remaining party to continue." Comments Chamberlain, "The history that murdered Benjamin was brutal and nonsensical."

Apart from Benjamin's fear of the Nazis, none of Chamberlain's factual assertions can be confirmed. Momme Brodersen, author of Walter Benjamin: A Biography, published in English in 1997 and incorporating recent research, concedes this. "None of the new evidence contradicts [the suicide story], although it does not categorically confirm it either." Documentation of Benjamin's death by a Spanish judge shows no evidence of the presence of drugs. A doctor's report states that a cerebral hemorrhage, perhaps aggravated by the exertion of crossing the Pyrenees, killed him. Strangely, the New York German Jewish weekly Aufbau, two weeks after his death, printed an account in which Benjamin committed suicide by swallowing poison "before the horrified eyes of his four women companions."

One of those women, Henny Gurland, is the source of the only contemporaneous document purporting to support the suicide theory, a document often referred to as the "suicide note."

Just how Gurland and Benjamin had met is not clear, but they crossed into Spain together, along with Gurland's son and several other refugees they encountered on the way. An extreme leftist with, according to recent research, a faulty memory, Gurland wrote a letter to her husband, Arkadi Gurland, within two weeks of Benjamin's death. In the letter, she recalled that the morning after they arrived in Portbou, in the hotel where they spent the night, she was summoned to speak with Benjamin "around seven o'clock." She continued: "Benjamin told me that the night before, at 10 p.m., he had taken a massive dose of morphine, but that I should say that he was gravely ill. He gave me a letter for myself and another for Adorno. Then he lost consciousness."

Can we believe that a "massive dose of morphine" required nine to ten hours to take effect? The death register at Portbou places Benjamin's demise at 10 p.m. on September 26, at least 14 hours after this alleged discussion with Henny Gurland. The chronology, moreover, cannot be established with certainty. Brodersen's account, apparently garbled, places both the mountain crossing and Benjamin's death on September 26, but a visit by a doctor, Ramon Vila Moreno, to Benjamin at the hotel in Spain on September 25. Further confusing the chronology, Lisa Fittko, the amateur guide who led Benjamin and the others into Spain, asserts in a memoir that Benjamin first appeared at her door in Marseilles on September 25, but that the trip to the border and the crossing itself were delayed by at least a night.

As for the letters that Gurland says Benjamin gave her, she also claimed that she destroyed them, then later reconstructed their content in the form of a single communication of postcard length, in French, dated September 25, 1940. This appears in The Complete Correspondence of Adorno and Benjamin (published in English in 1999). It reads in full:

In a situation with no way out, I have no other choice but to end it. It is in a little village in the Pyrenees where nobody knows me that my life will be finished. I ask you to transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the position in which I saw myself placed. There is not enough time to write all the letters I would have liked to write.

There are several problems with this text. Portbou is not a "village in the Pyrenees," but a fairly large municipality on the coast. Then there is the oddity of a German, at death's door, choosing to communicate with two Germans in French. Above all, this "suicide note" - cited by Broderson as "the only 'conclusive' proof" for the suicide theory - is nothing of the kind. Whatever Walter Benjamin may have written on the day he died has not survived. The author of this message is Henny Gurland.

To step back and follow the trail leading up to the death of Walter Benjamin, we must return to the fall of France in June 1940.

German troops entered Paris on June 14. Some two million people, French as well as foreign, among them many anti-Nazi intellectuals, had begun a mad rush south ahead of the invader. This frantic exodus was not the first such journey. When the desperate multitudes approached the Spanish border, the human stream seemed to have reversed a tide seen just a year before: In the spring of 1939, half a million Catalans, many of them anarchists defeated in the Spanish Civil War, had walked through the passes of the Pyrenees and poured into France.

Among these Spanish Republicans there had been many foreigners. The French government had herded them into camps. With the onset of World War II in September 1939, they were joined by thousands of German, Austrian, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian refugees living in Paris, who were ordered interned by the French authorities. Walter Benjamin was one of these; for three months, he was held at Vernuche in the Loire valley. In November 1939, he returned to Paris, where he remained until the arrival of the Nazi armies in the capital. Then he joined the tramp southward. But progress was slow; he arrived in Marseilles in August. Although the American visa that had been arranged for him should have allowed him to transit Spain safely, he decided?for reasons never elucidated?not to enter Spain by train but to cross the border on foot, through the mountains.

In the meantime, a relevant development had taken place in New York. At a luncheon on June 25, the Emergency Rescue Committee had been established with the mission of finding leading Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals in France and transporting them to North and South America. The chief organizer of the effort was an Austrian leftist exile, Karl Borromaeus Frank, alias Paul Hagen. Hagen's representative on the scene in France would be a young American liberal journalist, Varian Fry.

Fry, the subject of a recent film, Varian's War, as well as a biography, and the author of two volumes of memoirs, succeeded in saving numerous leading European cultural figures. These included Hannah Arendt, the artists Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, and Jacques Lipschitz, leading surrealists including the poet and essayist André Breton and painters André Masson and Max Ernst, and dozens more political thinkers, sociologists, and psychologists.

Fry was a hero, and the Emergency Rescue Committee saved many lives, but it had its dark side. Paul Hagen was by all accounts a dubious character. He had been a leading figure in a clandestine Leninist organization, New Beginning, that had infiltrated the German and Austrian Socialist and Communist parties in the 1930s. During and after the war, New Beginning alumni showed an uncanny ability to insert themselves, and to function as agents of influence, wherever important decisions were being made.

And Hagen was devious. He received money to float the Emergency Rescue Committee from a particularly nasty Soviet agent in California, Mildred Edie Brady. He managed to slip in and out of Nazi Germany unmolested on underground missions. Andy Marino, a biographer of Fry, strongly suggests that Hagen tried to persuade Fry to let him take the American's passport and impersonate him in Europe.

In all he did, Hagen gave priority to the interests of his Leninist network. The first individuals he asked Fry to track down and smuggle out of France were not leading intellectuals but four completely unknown New Beginning cadres. Fry complied, dedicating resources and incurring risk to save these four ciphers. Something strange was afoot.

Hagen and New Beginning may have fallen under the control of the Soviet secret police. According to anti-Communist researcher Herbert Romerstein, documents in the Berlin archives of the German Communist party indicate that Hagen served as an agent for Moscow. When Hagen came to the United States in the late 1930s, his visa was sponsored by a Soviet spy in the State Department, Lauchlin Currie, and he was associated with another Soviet agent, Alfred Stern.

In 1942, Hagen would attempt to join the militantly anti-fascist Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. But as Romerstein reveals in his new book, The Venona Secrets, Hagen was less than candid with the OSS about his involvement in a notorious incident, the disappearance of socialist activist Mark Rein from Republican Spain. Rein, the son of a famous Russian anti-Communist exile, had vanished from a hotel in revolutionary Barcelona, leading to an uproar among foreign supporters of the Spanish Republic concerned about the widening campaign of terror by Soviet agents behind Republican lines.

Hagen told the OSS he had gone to Spain in July 1937 to try to find out what had happened to Rein, a comrade in New Beginning, but he concealed the fact that he had also been in Spain in March of that year, in Rein's company. Rein disappeared on the night of April 9.

Another New Beginning member, author and economist Franz Neumann, is identified in the Venona documents as a Soviet spy inside the OSS, where one of his leading collaborators was Arkadi Gurland, the husband of Henny Gurland. (Neumann's own widow would marry another OSS colleague, the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In addition, the tentacles of New Beginning extended to the dissident psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich and German leftist politician Willy Brandt. Much research on this topic has been done by a biographer of Reich, Jim Martin, for his self-published book Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War.)

Finally, one more associate of Hagen in New Beginning, a Czech agent of Soviet terror named Leopold Kulcsar, had been in Barcelona in 1937, assigned to track down and arrest German-speaking anti-Stalinists and torture them into false confessions of betraying the Spanish Republic. Moscow wanted a parallel, outside Soviet borders, to the infamous purge trials, and the targets of attempts to realize such a judicial travesty included George Orwell.

Lest all this seem a digression, an anecdote from the refugee flight from Paris in 1940 is illuminating. Miriam Davenport, a young American who would work for Varian Fry, fled to Toulouse, where she fell in with one Katia Landau, an Austrian anti-Communist leftist who had personally escaped the clutches of Leopold Kulcsar. The Stalinists had twice arrested Landau in Barcelona in 1937. The first time, she had organized a hunger strike and was released within a week. Rearrested "without a warrant and by sheer brute force," she was confronted by an interrogator who repeatedly asked her - in a jail controlled by the Spanish Left - whether she was Jewish. "He told me, 'for us it is a question of race,'" she recounted in Stalinism in Spain, published in 1938. "I replied that for us Communists and Socialists the question of race does not come up. But it did remind me of the language of the [Nazis]."

What Katia Landau told Miriam Davenport in Toulouse was so alarming Davenport would remember it decades later and include it in a memoir now posted on a website dedicated to her memory. Landau was afraid. She had detected operating among the refugees one of the Russian agents involved in her imprisonments in Spain. She told Davenport, "We are all in danger. He will see to it that the Gestapo knows where to find us. That is how they work." Landau fled, while Davenport proceeded to Marseilles, where she was horrified to be approached by the same Russian spy, who tried to get her to reveal Landau's whereabouts. She asked him about the Communists' attitude toward the fall of France, given that the Hitler-Stalin pact was then in force. He replied, "We are observing a benevolent neutrality." Her appreciation of such complex dangers was one of the reasons Davenport decided to help Varian Fry.

Unquestionably, the Soviet secret police was operating a chokepoint in southern France?sifting through the wave of fleeing exiles for targets of liquidation. These included open anti-Stalinists as well as individuals associated with dissident positions by more tenuous, personal ties.

To track down their targets, the Soviets employed agents of many nationalities. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr explain in their Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, these agents, "serving as relief officials, would use their freedom of movement among the warring nations of Europe (America was not yet a belligerent), to act as covert couriers for the Soviets." Thus, in September 1940, Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Communist International, secretly issued an order to Earl Browder, head of the American Communist party. In imperfect English, his instruction to Browder was: "Have some of your peoples not known as members of Party in the organization that have to be organized in your country for various relief to people of Europe." A month later, Noel Field, a former colleague of Alger Hiss and fellow Soviet spy in the State Department, quit his post with the League of Nations. He joined the Unitarian Service Committee, for which he opened a refugee office in Marseilles, working as a secret liaison between Communist leaders in the Nazi-occupied lands.

Proof that a Soviet liquidation operation was underway in the area had already come in the summer of 1940, in the case of Willi Munzenberg, an old Marxist revolutionary and creator of the global network of "front groups" that so successfully wooed Western liberals during the '20s and '30s. Munzenberg and his main underling, the Soviet secret police agent (and quondam husband of Marlene Dietrich) Otto Katz, had employed the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler and others in distributing Communist disinformation worldwide. But Munzenberg, and then Koestler, broke with the Soviets, the first in 1937, the second a year later. Katz never did. He remained one of the most fearsome terrorist intellectuals in Moscow's employ.

Munzenberg had been arrested and held in an internment camp in southern France until the summer of 1940, when he was released and walked away in the company of two "German Socialists." He soon was found hanged from a tree near Grenoble. The man who knew the most about Russian disinformation operations had been silenced.

Heading south from Paris, Walter Benjamin walked straight into this maelstrom of evil. And, although his acolytes have chosen to ignore it, he was eminently qualified to appear on a Soviet hit list.

In Marseilles, in September 1940, the protagonists of the final act in the drama of Walter Benjamin were in place.

Varian Fry was there, working for the Emergency Rescue Committee. It is unclear whether he had any direct contact with Benjamin, though he would be informed of the latter's death.

Another supporting character was Benjamin's friend Arthur Koestler, who, to escape internment, had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion using a fake Swiss identity as "Albert Dubert." In August, he was sent to a Legion station in Marseilles. Eventually, with the help of Varian Fry, he would obtain false papers authorizing transit to Casablanca. As Munzenberg's former subordinate and co-defector from Moscow, Koestler was a marked man. Thus, when Alfred Kantorowicz, a Communist propagandist who had worked for Munzenberg, but who remained loyal to Stalin, saw Koestler in the French port, he avoided him. Notably, Walter Benjamin didn't. Indeed, he and Koestler sat in a café, exposed to the world, and discussed their future.

Recounting their meeting in a memoir, Scum of the Earth, published in 1941, Koestler would contribute to the legend of Benjamin's suicide. He said that Benjamin - "one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have ever known" - showed him a hoard of 62 sedative pills he had kept since Hitler's takeover in 1933 to maintain the option of ending his own life. Koestler had no such supply, and Benjamin "reluctantly" divided the seven-year-old pills with him, keeping only 31 tablets for himself. Koestler wrote, "They were enough... At Portbou the Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead."

Koestler was not infallible on points of detail. In Scum of the Earth, he stated Benjamin's age as 55, when he was only 48. In a later book, The Invisible Writing, he seemed to say that Benjamin began with only 30 pills before sharing them. And in a much later translation of Scum of the Earth, he gives the original number of pills in Benjamin's possession as 50.

However, Koestler knew very well something else about Benjamin. The two men had lived next door to each other in Paris in the period after Willi Munzenberg's split with Moscow, and had frequently joined Otto Katz in poker games. What may have been revealed in loose talk around the poker table can only be guessed, but it would have caused Katz and his superiors in the Soviet secret police to see Benjamin as dangerous. Indeed, Koestler, Benjamin, Katz, Munzenberg, and at least one other ominous figure?Rudolf Roessler, better known as the operative "Lucy"?had a history together that scholars of Benjamin have glided over. Benjamin may have come to know much too much.

Consider his ties to Roessler. This extraordinary German exile had opened a publishing house in Switzerland. After Hitler came to power in Germany, Roessler and Benjamin had maintained a literary relationship. In 1936, Roessler had published a book of classic letters edited by Benjamin (under the pseudonym Detlef Holz) entitled German Men and intended for sale in Germany. As Momme Brodersen notes, Roessler was "a specialist in subversion,... a genuine secret agent." Indeed, he was one of the most famous spies to serve in World War II, transferring crucial information from the German high command to Soviet operatives in Switzerland. Benjamin may have known compromising facts about Roessler.

Finally, there was Lisa Fittko, an exiled German leftist in her early thirties and a newcomer to Marseilles. Benjamin had met Fittko's husband Hans a year before in the French internment camp at Vernuche, and she considered him a "friend." Just how Benjamin came to choose Fittko as his guide across the mountains is unclear. In her confusing and self-contradictory memoir Escape Through the Pyrenees published in 1985, Fittko admits she had "scouted a sure route across the border" mere days before.

She also claimed that Benjamin had already made an unsuccessful attempt at escape, stowing away aboard a freighter dressed as a sailor. Certainly, he was in a hurry to get out of France. But Benjamin, Henny Gurland, and Gurland's son were Fittko's first clients as a Pyrenees guide. Further, her method of selecting a path through the mountains was strange. She relied on a crude diagram drawn from memory by a French contact, claiming to have been directed more or less casually to the "Lister Route." In the memoir, she notes insouciantly, "General Lister of the [Spanish] Republican army had used it for his troops during the Spanish Civil War."

This comment conjures up yet another menacing element of the landscape into which Benjamin had wandered. Enrique Lister was not a general in the Spanish Republican army; he never rose above the rank of colonel. He was, however, one of the most fanatical and ruthless Soviet agents in Spain. He had been trained in Moscow, and took control of a section of the Spanish Republican Army that was used to execute dissident anarchist peasants. His route was a way his terrorist comrades took in and out of Spain.

Lister was so extreme a Stalinist that in the 1970s, when the Spanish Communist party adopted reformist "Eurocommunism," he directed an ultra-Muscovite schism headquartered behind the Iron Curtain and subsidized directly by the KGB. I encountered veteran Listerite cadres in Spain years afterward and can testify to their ultrasectarian and even violent mentality.

Lisa Fittko's choice of the Lister Route had other troubling aspects. The Spanish border was honeycombed with anarchists, as well as members of the dissident Marxist POUM, or Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. These Catalan refugees - "impoverished heroes and hotheads," as one Spanish historian calls them - functioned with great effectiveness smuggling Jews, other anti-Nazis, and British service personnel out of France. They too were terrified at any mention of Lister. Curiously, neither Lisa Fittko nor the Varian Fry network made contact with these mountaineers for many months, until nearly the end of Fry's operation, when Fry became dependent on them.

Lisa Fittko was well aware of the political intrigues in the subculture of refugee rescuers in Marseilles. She knew, for example, that Varian Fry's first mission - to save the four New Beginning cadres - was "a big secret." After Benjamin's catastrophic passage, Fittko's husband joined her. She recalled his telling her, "All the people from New Beginning have gone abroad by now, so there's no more need for secrecy." Soon the Fittkos were recruited by Fry, who rechristened the Lister Route the "F Route." Weirdly, although Fry said he wanted to find "guides who knew the mountains," he settled in the short term for Lisa Fittko, whose sole journey of this kind had resulted in Benjamin's death.

On that trip, Lisa Fittko, Benjamin, and the Gurland youth lugged the writer's heavy briefcase, containing his "new manuscript," along the mountain paths. Four decades later, Fittko quoted Benjamin as saying, "This briefcase is most important to me. I dare not lose it. The manuscript must be saved. It is more important than I am, more important than myself."

What could the lost manuscript have contained? Given the disillusionment with the extremist Left explicit in "Theses on the Philosophy of History," written earlier that year, it is possible the new work comprised an even sharper critique of Marxism. Hannah Arendt commented that Benjamin was "rather afraid of the opinion and reaction" of Adorno and others in the Institute for Social Research, the famous Frankfurt school, to his "Theses." But Jewish historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem recalled, in his Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship, that Benjamin had declared himself "finished with Russia for good." The lost manuscript may also have contained privileged information Benjamin possessed about his erstwhile poker partners in Paris, including Otto Katz.

(On this score, it is depressing to note that several reviewers of a book published in 2000 by Harvard University Press mistook it for Benjamin's lost work - even though the editors themselves made no such claim. In fact, the Harvard volume, The Arcades Project, is the translation of an unwieldy collection of notes, articles, and quotations Benjamin left behind when he fled Paris. It is ludicrous to imagine that he would have laboriously copied all this out in the days before Xerox machines and carried it with him into exile. The manuscript lost on the Spanish border has never been found.)

After many hours, the travelers reached a cliff overlooking Portbou. There Lisa Fittko left them, pointing the refugees toward the town. At some point, the Spanish authorities, apparently out of bureaucratic arbitrariness, decided to send Benjamin back to France the next day. He entered the hotel in Portbou in anticipation of being expelled. He may simply have failed to find an official susceptible to bribery. But there were definitely Gestapo agents in the town, possibly in the hotel. There Benjamin died.

After his death the Gurlands and the other refugees who had joined them paid a bribe and proceeded on their way through Spain. Koestler received belated news of Benjamin's "suicide" in Lisbon. By his own account, he reacted by attempting to kill himself, presumably using the pills his old poker partner had given him. But his stomach rebelled, and he vomited up the poison. Was this reaction motivated by depression or despair? Or did Koestler know something about Benjamin's situation that made the latter's suicide a cause for fear or guilt?

The Fittkos eventually quit the Fry network and escaped to Cuba via Lisbon, assisted by Spanish anarchists. Henny Gurland, author of the "suicide note," went on to marry the psychiatrist Erich Fromm, and died in 1952. Her ex-husband, Arkadi Gurland, the recipient of her account of Benjamin's death, was linked during the 1950s to an East German agent in West Germany, Viktor Agartz. After World War II, German Socialists prevented Karl B. Frank - alias Paul Hagen, the malign background presence in the Varian Fry network and throughout these events - from returning to Germany. He remained in the United States, where he died in 1969. The poker-playing agent Otto Katz came under Soviet suspicion during the war for his association with British spies and was hanged in Prague in 1952. Rudolf Roessler, a k a Lucy, was arrested in Switzerland in 1953 and convicted of spying for Czechoslovakia; he died in 1958. Koestler emerged obsessed with suicide, and expired in a death pact with his much younger wife in 1983.

The Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, noting the disappearance of the manuscript "for which Benjamin was prepared to sacrifice his life," asked for a "rigorous investigation as to what happened to it." No such investigation has ever been completed. The last word may remain with Hannah Arendt, who pointed out that Benjamin died during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, "whose most feared consequence at that moment was the close cooperation of the two most powerful secret police forces in Europe."

I do not pretend to have established how, why, or at whose hands Walter Benjamin died; it is clear, however, that few of the widely accepted details of his death can be relied upon. Three lessons emerge from this inquiry.

First, "rigorous investigation" must continue, unfashionable though it be in the academy. Historians must abandon their politically correct prejudices. These biases prevent them from recognizing the truth of the Cold War insights of Koestler and others and understanding the monstrous evils of Stalinism, from the recruitment of intellectuals for terrorist tasks, to Moscow's practice of eliminating inconvenient witnesses.

Second, Vladimir Putin has made noises about closing the Russian archives that were opened to local and foreign historians in the wake of communism's fall. Not only must these archives remain open, but many more should be made available to researchers - for Benjamin's is far from the only case still shrouded in mystery. Juliet Stuart Poyntz, an American Communist, disappeared from her New York apartment in 1938 and was never seen again. Like Marc Rein, José Robles, the translator and friend of the American author John Dos Passos, vanished in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The Russian defector Walter Krivitsky was an apparent suicide in Washington in 1941. The anarchist labor leader Carlo Tresca was shot dead on a Manhattan street in 1943. Otto Ruhle, biographer of Marx, died in Mexico City in a murky situation the same year. The anti-Stalinist writer Victor Serge and the Yugoslav-American historian Louis Adamic perished after the war in questionable circumstances, the first in Mexico, the second in the United States. And so on. After decades of concealment and deliberate obliviousness, the truth of such cases cries out to be revealed. Mr. Putin, open these files!

Finally, there is much nostalgia among intellectuals for the 1930s, but the history recounted here is terrifying. Nearly every protagonist lied, knew lethal secrets, or had a hidden agenda. One night recently, after spending a day in the Library of Congress researching this article, I came out into the cool evening mist of Washington, capital of the Free World. My sense of relief was so intense I felt as if I had escaped from hell; I recalled the words at the end of Dante's Inferno: "E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle" - We came out and looked up at the stars.

By Stephen Schwartz