Audio Tapes of Robert C. Pollock
By Thomas W. Casey
Time magazine recently profiled David Hartman, the Israeli philosopher. In that full three-page profile Hartman is described as “perhaps Israel’s paramount religious philosopher. . . . For these Jews, Hartman is a Rebbe, a particularly wise teacher.” The article goes on to say that Hartman went to Fordham University for five years
. . . knocking heads with the Jesuits. It was there that he encountered the great Roman Catholic philosopher, Robert C. Pollock [emphasis mine]. And there that he abandoned religious absolutism. Under Pollock’s tutelage, Hartman developed the respect for religious tolerance that infuses his beliefs, and came to appreciate the American pluralistic experience as expressed in the writings of William James and John Dewey. (Time, April 30, 1990. p. 90)
The American philosopher John J. McDermott, probably Pollock’s most distinguished student, wrote some years ago that the theme of experience, especially the American experience then the focus of the Fordham University philosophy department
was generated for the most part if not totally, by decades of extraordinary teaching on the part of Robert C. Pollock. . . . Over against a good deal of hostility and widespread institutional disinterest, Robert Pollock waged a valiant struggle to upend the narrow parochialism, both speculative and academic which pervaded Catholic institutions before our time.
McDermott goes on to extol Pollock’s thirty years of selfless pedagogy and his unrelenting insistence on the importance of understanding medieval thought, especially its mystical tradition, as a forerunner of American pragmatism. McDermott sums it up well when he writes:
For some thirty years he taught Medieval philosophy with a fashion of imagination and scholarship nowhere matched in the field. Where else in this country could one find full-length course on Scotus Erigena, detailed analyses of the Victorines, or listen to unusual relationships structured between Peircce and Duns Scotus. His lectures on Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure were classics of their kind. (American Philosophical Association Proceedings, 1978)
The brief span of this paper contains three parts, to be covered respectively. First, a biographical sketch of its subject, second, a general description of the audio tapes of his lectures along with an inventory of their quantity and contents. And thirdly, an analysis of some of the themes found in the tapes on American philosophy, and finally some concluding remarks.
Having known Robert Pollock for some fifteen years (our acquaintance began when I was his student back in the early sixties), I like many of my generation and generations before tend to assume that everyone either knew him or, at least knew of him. Such an assumption belies that fact that he has now been dead for twelve years and retired from Fordham some twenty years. I’m sure my contemporaries find it sobering to be reminded by such pedestrian facts.
Pollock’s life spanned the first two-thirds of our century. Born Jewish in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 30, 1901, he emigrated along with his parents at an early age to Chicago, I recall no trace of a Scottish accent which would argue for his early transition from Scotland to America.
He attended Harvard for his undergraduate studies and received his B.A. in 1924 in Experimental Psychology and Philosophy. His graduate studies, also at Harvard, included such mentors as Alfred North Whitehead and the distinguished psychologist William. McDougall. He received his M.A. in 1927 again in Experimental Psychology and Philosophy. From 1927 to 1930 he taught at Bowdoin College in Maine and then attended the Medieval Institute in Toronto from 1930 to 1932. The fledgling Institute was then directed by Etienne Gilson and Robert received his Ph.D. there in 1932. From 1932 to 1936 he taught at the University of Notre Dame and in 1936 he embarked on his thirty year career at Fordham University, retiring in 1966. From 1966 to 1973 he was Director of the Center for Humanistic Studies at Seton Hall University and for many years during his Fordham and Seton Hall tenure taught courses at Pace University, It was during his Harvard years that Robert converted to Catholicism for reasons that have never been clear to me. No doubt his omnivorous readings in Medieval Christian thought and his almost mystical reverence for the Gothic cathedrals both played a role. Continuous lecturing for half a century extended to within just a few weeks of his death on May 30 of 1978 at the age of 77.
Unfortunately Robert Pollock never committed his ideas in any systematic way to paper. In fact his publications are meager compared to the depth and breadth of his message. And it is possible that his message would have vanished with the passing of his students over the next 25 years. However, we are fortunate to have audio tapes of many of his lectures. Most, if not all, of these tapes were recorded by his wife Miriam (now deceased). Through a complicated set of events too numerous to detail in a paper of this length, the original tapes are now in the hands of a former student of Robert’s, Professor Thomas Davis, who teaches English at Ulster Community College in Stone Ridge, New York.
Fortunately, the tapes are very comprehensive and contain virtually the totality of Robert’s ideas. They were made over an eleven year period (1963-74) and are of very good audio quality. The earliest tapes date back 27 years and the most recent seventeen years.
There are approximately two hundred and thirty tapes, most of 80 minutes duration and good audio quality. The general inventory includes:
St. Augustine 34
Medieval Philosophy 46
American Philosophy 43
Christian Humanism 45
Dimensions of Contemporary Experience 26
Phenomenon of Woman 16
Humanistic Dimensions of Science 18
This comprises about three hundred and thirty hours of material, so you can imagine what a monumental task it would be to index the tapes in any detail.
I am currently indexing the tapes on American Philosophy and have listened to all of them. I would like to spend the remainder of this paper describing their contents and sharing with you some of my conclusions.
They are 43 in number and were recorded as follows:
1963 1
1964 12
1965 13
1966 1
1969 10
1970 4
1974 1
undated 1
___
total 43
With a few exceptions, these tapes are his class lectures given at Fordham, Pace, and Seton Hall. His wife dated each of the lectures and gave the title classifications I used in the general inventory.
Well, for you former students and/or colleagues, be assured that the prophet of old comes to life in each of these lectures. The booming voice can be heard, arms flaying and banging on the table—all you need to complete the picture are those file folders he would spread out on the desk where he would desperately search for a quote that would prompt him to soar again to unsurpassed heights of insight and eloquence.
Now to the contents of the tapes. Broadly stated, Pollock’s history of Western thought would read something like this: A line of intellectual and spiritual descent from Plato to Plotinus, down through Augustine, the philosopher and theologian of experience and architect of the Middle Ages; on to the mysticism of Pseudo Dionysius and the naturalistic pantheism of Scotus Erigena, then to the medieval mystics like Bernard of Clarivaux, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart. On to the breakthrough of Renaissance thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno in proclaiming the infinity of the material universe or, as Pollock loved to quote Nicholas of Cusa, “where the circumference is nowhere and the center is everywhere,” This tradition was carried on in America by the New England Puritans, the Transcendentalists and found its most recent, and best, articulation in the Pragmatism, of Peirce, James, Dewey. Pragmatism, he argues, would be ‘’utterly intelligible” ( he loved the word ‘utterly’ ) without tracing its medieval scientific roots coupled with the uniqueness of the American frontier experience.
Well, the above gives you a taste of Robert’s love for speculative adventure. In a given lecture he was seldom, if ever, confined to a single thinker or time period. indeed each lecture, regardless of its original topic, would contain the names of many and sometimes all the above mentioned thinkers. His students found little but frustration in attempting to take notes and most yielded to the temptation of watching and listening as his lectures moved in enlarging concentric circles. His coveted phrase of a circumference is nowhere and a center everywhere could well be applied to his lectures. Trying to stay with him and the profusion of ideas in any given lecture was like being in charge of dust at a rodeo. Since Robert published little and since few, if any, of his students took comprehensive classroom notes, these tapes take on an added significance.
On to the last phase of this paper: Pollock’s views on American culture and American thought. A careful review of these tapes reveal several themes of which I will note three:
* the effect of the wilderness and frontier experience on the American imagination;
* the pivotal role of the future, and possibility as found particularly in the pragmatists; and finally
* the mystico/pantheistic tradition in Western thought and its expression in American thought.
There are at least a half dozen allusions to the crucial role that the wilderness played in expanding the American imagination. This was one of his cherished themes when he lectured on the American mind. The sheer quantitative expanses of the physical frontier was in stark contrast to the geographic, limitations of Europe. This immensity Pollock referred to as “an enormous physical fact” (Tape #2). He liked to refer to such naturalist writers as Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson, John Muir and John Burroughs as well as such popular legends as Paul Bunyan “who casually combed his curly beard with a pine tree” (tapes 3 and 23). The American mania for bigness he finds substantiated by the frontier studies of Ray Allen Bilington, in Westward Expansion (p. 38), who claimed the frontiersmen “found turkeys that weighed 70 pounds, sturgeon 12 feet long that had to be killed with axes, oysters 13 inches across, and streams sometimes so fast that the fish had to get out and walk” (Tapes 23, 29, 33).
The immensity of physical nature in America presented infinite possibilities and the category of possibility itself would become one of the hallmarks of the philosophy of Pragmatism. This is particularly true of the thought of William James and John Dewey. Dewey felt indebted to James for teaching him the importance of possibility, prospection and the future in the interpretation of experience.
The tapes contain about ten separate references to the importance of the future in American experience in general and American Pragmatism in particular. One can hear him using such phrases as “man lives forward, thinks forward, emotes forward, fantasizes forward” (Tape 43) or “there is no intellectual life without inclination” (Tape #4) [emphasis mine] or arguing that the present and its identity is laden with expectation, prospection and tendency (Tape 25). In tape #1 Pollock refers to the American psychologist Gordon Allport and his contention that “we have been wrong in measuring growth as a mere reaction to the past; ignoring the relationship between growth and the future.” In the same tape he quotes James: “the permanent presence of the sense of futurity has been strangely ignored by most writers. The fact is that our consciousness is never free from the ingredient of expectancy.’’ Or he will quote Dewey to the effect that “an idea is something hoped for.” (Tape #4) He contended that the essential difference between American Pragmatism and British Utilitarianism is the former’s emphasis on prospective character of experience and the latter’s emphasis on understanding the present through retrospective analysis of its antecedents. (Tape #4)
The personal philosophy of Robert Pollock was inseparable from his interpretation of the history of Western thought and the American mind. His lecture style was anything but that of a dispassionate chronicler of ideas. To a considerable extent, each of his lectures was a creative exercise delivered with a passion born of inner conviction, where the message and the messenger became inseparably fused. Many of these lectures were delivered with such passionate vehemence that, upon completion, left their subject physically exhausted.
Central to understanding Pollock’s mind and hence his interpretation of the Western and American intellectual traditions is the need to grasp its pantheistic and mystical elements.
Divisions, discriminations, bifurcations, and dualisms of all sorts were undermined by Pollock. Such conventional distinctions as self/society, means/ends, body/soul, subject/object and even that of human/divine were always viewed as derivative and secondary rather than ultimate and foundational.
There are constant references to pantheism in these lectures. (See Tapes # 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 18, 43.) The Christian message itself was a paradoxical confusion of the human and divine or finite and infinite is the historical person of Christ or he will cite Augustine’s claim that “God is that which is closer to me than I am to myself.” He would favorably expound on Scotus Erigena and his confusion of God and nature in his fourfold division of nature, There was the medieval theophonic view of the world expounded by Bernard and Bonaventure and the emphatically pantheistic writings of Meister Eckhart. Later would come Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, Bruno proclaiming the infinity of the material universe and concluding that the earth cannot be the center of the universe since an infinite universe cannot, by definition, have a center. Or, it becomes a world where the circumference is nowhere and the center is everywhere, He found favor with the contemporary exponent of pantheism, Teilhard de Chardin, and he frequently quoted Chardin on “the Divine possibilities of matter” (Tape 7 & 14). In American thought he pointed to people like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Muir and Burroughs and their tendency to see God as immanent in physical nature. Or the pragmatists like James whose God is finite, in time, and primus inter pares (first among equals) and Dewey’s explication of God in his A Common Faith as the highest of human ideals, namely democracy. Indeed Dewey in his Experiences and Nature speaks of the greatest philosophical fallacy as the tendency to translate eventual functions (moral ideals) into antecedent existents (classical conception of a transcendent God). At one point in these tapes Pollock, in a moment of heightened enthusiasm, bursts forth with the claim that “God Himself is a pantheist!”
Finally, a word about the mystical dimension of Pollock’s thought and his identification with the Western mystical tradition. He reminds us that the highest reality of Plato is the Good which is beyond form. It will become the foundation for the via negativa (the formless) of the medieval mystics. He was enamored of the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. He loved to quote Meister Eckhart who variously refers to God as “Nothing, Divine Unselfconsciousness, Non-Spirit, and Formless.”
This mystical spirit he finds most emphatically in William James who speaks of “the richness of life and the poverty of all possible formulas.” In all there are about a dozen references to the importance of appreciating the mystical dimension of experience because through such experience the limitations of intellectual categories and discriminations will be realized.
Pollock calls James “first, last and foremost a man of religion” (Tape #16). He agrees with John J. Chapman that “the great religious impulse is at the backbone of his (James) work” (Tape #31). James’ preoccupation with religious experience of all sorts is evident in his Varieties of Religious Experience. His doctrine of pure experience as antecedent to all categorical or logical distinctions is essentially a mystical contention (Tape #43). He quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes with favor when he contends that in Pragmatism “the aim and end of the whole thing is religion’’ (Tape #31).
To close, what Holmes said of Pragmatism could also be said of the message of Robert Pollock preserved in these tapes.