Gerald Dworkin's Philosophy Commonplace Book: A Review

Jerry Dworkin has put together an impressive collection of short quotations, jokes, and aphorisms that together give a vivid picture of the history and current state of the discipline of philosophy, and indeed that also shine light in the search for answers to profound philosophical questions. The purpose is to edify and amuse at once, and in this Dworkin certainly succeeds. Many of the jokes are Jerry's own, and they are some of the best in the collection.

Jerry Dworkin might not be hands-down the funniest person in the history of philosophy, but he's probably the funniest Dworkin. Not that he's had much competition. There was that one who had the line about 'clerking for Learned Hand', which always made me snicker but was probably just a one-off sort of thing, and there was that other who... well, never mind. As for Jerrys, there he's had some stiff competition indeed, and in the same broadly borschty category. But this much can be said with certainty: Jerry Dworkin has survived all the other Jerrys and all the other Dworkins, and now, with this rich epoch-making e-tome, has singlehandedly revived the genre of the commonplace book, and bequeathed to the generations a fine collection that is bound to survive its author. At least if anyone can figure out how to download the damned thing. I had to write and request a review copy, which was duly sent along. Which in turn compelled me, morally, to either fork over the $5.97 a Kindle download would have cost me, or to do a little write-up. Since I am now an employee of a French university and therefore am basically worrying at this point about stocking up enough coal for the coming winter, I decided to do the writing thing.

Let's get something straight right away. Philosophy humour is generally awful: dismal vocational coping, and nothing more, substantially no different from the bumpersticker you might spot on a sagging Econoline that reads 'Electricians Conduit Better'. And if anyone ever again suggests to me that awful Monty Python sketch about the philosophers' football match, I am just going to come clean and tell them that my ideal of humour is rather closer to Redd Foxx's classic routine, You've Got to Wash Your Ass. Even if we limit ourselves to Pythonalia, who can honestly say that that philosophy-football bit is better than, say, the All-England 'Summarize Proust' Contest? But that one is about literature, and fails to elicit squeals of self-recognition. We want Monty Python to be our Dilbert.

But Jerry Dworkin is no Scott Adams, and his compilation is based on the understanding that humour is, or ought to be, more than a coping tool for professional philosophers. Ideally, it serves as a powerful motor for the pursuit of philosophical truth itself, and even as the vehicle by which this truth is delivered. The whole book is a collection of quotations, yet for some reason Jerry has decided to offer some epigrams (thus, quotations) before moving to the collection properly speaking. One of these is from Patricia Marx, who says: "Truth masquerading as a joke is always what I strive for." Drop the 'masquerade' part, and we get closer to what I myself am inclined to suspect, though generally too cautious to say: that truth is a joke, a very serious joke perhaps, but still a joke. This is why 'getting' a joke is, if you think about it, pretty much the example par excellence of understanding. (And yes, this includes the Foxx routine.)

The humour here is mostly American rather than British, thank God, though with due respect paid to Oxbridge deadpan as but one of the sources of our mongrel American sensibility. One appreciates in reading this collection what a huge debt 20th-century American philosophy owes to Jewish popular culture: there seems to be a fluid translation of idiom --which must have occurred sometime in mid-century, which owes much to the singular genius of Sidney Morgenbesser, and which I suppose still awaits its full history-- between the Catskills and the Ivy League. Much of the subsequent humour, then, seems to revolve around the clash of habituses that came with breaking open the stranglehold WASP mandarins once had on higher education in the humanities. 

Some years ago Jerry took a part-time position at the University of California, Davis. This might help us to understand the origins of the commonplace book. You see, one quotation Jerry might have done well to include is Josiah Royce's report in an 1878 letter to William James: "There is no philosophy in California." He did not mean this as a description of the temporary circumstances of his recently founded university at Berkeley. He meant to capture the essence of that place, where "the atmosphere for the study of metaphysics is bad." This is how I tend to explain my own stunted development in matters of abstraction and speculation, being from that distant territory myself and only going back east to learn of the existence of immaterial and eternal entities at a relatively advanced age.

But Jerry went the other way and arrived in California rather late, and the effects of climatic degeneration could not completely eat away the deep learning he had acquired earlier in his life (presumably somewhere cold). Perhaps he began compiling this commonplace book to help him cope with his new surroundings, as an explorer might dose up on quinine before descending into the tropics, or, perhaps better, as a senior will stock up on large-type word-search books before being checked into a senior-care center. I don't know. What I can say is Jerry Dworkin has definitely found all the right words.

---

Philosophy: A Commonplace Book by Gerald Dworkin (Kindle edition).

Comments

[Abbas Raza]

Did you send this to Jerry? I am sending it now! Brilliant.

[alan nelson]

Not only is this well written, but it made me YouTube the Redd Foxx. (Jerry was a fixture at Illinois-Chicago Circle when I was a grad student there).

[Jerry Dworkin]

I have long encouraged fellow philosophers to read Justin's blog which I regard as the smartest and most interesting philosophical blog around. I can now add that his taste in books is also first-rate.

As a historian, however, he nods. I arrived in California in my early 20's to take a Ph.D at Berkeley.
So any learning ( deep or otherwise) is partially due to the salubrious climate not overcoming its degenerative effects.