Alumni SpotlightBill Martin (c/o 1978)

FU: What originally attracted you to philosophy?

BM: This is not a hard question for me to answer. Basically it was growing up a serious Christian boy against the background of the 1960s. Specifically, I was raised in the Presbyterian Church, which in itself was not the deepest of spiritual sources (not the part of it I was exposed to at any rate), but I was told to read the Bible, and I actually read it. For sure, it took me a good while to read all of it (I was probably thirteen or fourteen before I got through the whole thing), but at the same time I was hearing bible stories in Sunday School and I was hearing interpretations of Bible verses in sermons. I didn't realize at an earlier age, of course, that what I was hearing was an interpretation (and a translation).

It was "the sixties" that, bit by bit, made me think differently about Christianity, and about everything else. In particular, the way that Bible stories and verses were explained in the church that I grew up in was very right-wing. There came a moment when I realized that Moses and the prophets and Jesus and the disciples and apostles didn't seem a whole lot like the Cadillac-driving, conservative, Sunday School teachers I had. (Not that they weren't nice people, I should add.) Of course, I didn't experience any of these things directly (although my uncle Sam, who has always had a strong influence on me, and who is a Presbyterian minister and theologian, was a part of things), but the Civil Rights movement had a big effect on me, at a fairly early age. All sorts of other things came into play, the student movement against the war, the women's movement, the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power, hippies and Yippies, even some small awareness of the Cultural Revolution in China. As much as anything, too, I was inspired by the huge wave of creativity in rock music that especially got going after the Beatles.

Through all this I was interested in philosophical questions associated with Christianity and theology more generally (and, to the horror of some of my Christian friends and the adult leaders of church groups and Youth for Christ, I was interested in why millions of people believed things that seemed just the opposite of what I believed). I also had a debate partner in high school who exposed me to some philosophical texts, especially from Plato and Nietzsche. Still, until the beginning of my senior year of high school I hadn't thought about being a philosophy major in college, my aim was to become a minister. (Of course, philosophy is a good major for that purpose, but I didn't understand that at that point.) And, in fact, I wasn't completely determined to go to college, I thought about just trying to make it as a rock musician. I also want to mention, since so many people were influenced by this, that this was a time (in the late '60s and early 70s) when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (and Bertrand Russell, though this had less of an effect on me) were famous people in the world, for their politics and philosophical work (not to mention their good looks!). Even though the vibe of the time was politically militant, it was also quite existentialist as well--perhaps because of the centrality of the "youth movement," and young people are almost naturally drawn to an existentialist worldview. In any case, all of this was swirling around in my head as well.

I finally came to a stopping point with the Presbyterian church, it was not only too conservative but also generally too focused on the morbid side of things, with no sense of joyous mutual flourishing and no sense of "For God so loved the world." I heard about a Methodist church where the preachers were heavily into liberation theology and were militantly against the war, and the assistant minister was a bit of a hippie, even. I started attending that church in my junior year. I should mention that the music there was very good, too. In fact, a man who had been a singer in the church while majoring in music at the University of Miami went off to join the Houston Grand Opera, which later performed the first ever complete version of "Porgy and Bess"--my parents took me to see this for my birthday the next year, and it was fantastic.

Unfortunately, in September of 1977 (as best I recall), that church came apart over the stand the ministers took on the war. While the ministers were radical and outspoken against the war, about half the church, and probably the better-off half, were not, and after some especially radical sermons on a hot, Miami Sunday morning, the ministers were reassigned. This was very traumatic to me, and two consequences followed: First, I was done with organized religion for quite a long while. Second, I was, thus, no longer interested in becoming a minister, and I started to think seriously about majoring in philosophy in college.

There are numerous other chapters in this trajectory, of course, but I've almost never looked back, and for the most part I have felt very privileged to have been a tiny part of the great traditions of philosophy.

FU: Can you say something about the kind of philosophy in which you have specialized, and the directions this work has taken over the years?

BM: I've never been very good at "specializing." So, I've been quite fortunate, with not a little bit of just pure, dumb luck, to have had a nice career nonetheless. I suppose that it's no surprise that, given what I said above, that I am interested in the intertwining of philosophy and politics, and at the same time with a number of thinkers, who I now group together under the heading "French Marxism" (namely, that trajectory that runs from Sartre to Alain Badiou, and that includes Beauvoir, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and also Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem). In conventional terms, then, I suppose you could say that my specializations are Political Philosophy and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. But my M.A. was concentrated in history of Western philosophy, and in my Ph.D. I did a good deal of work in analytic philosophy, especially Wittgenstein, Quine, and Donald Davidson. Of course, I got some very good exposure to Wittgenstein when I was at Furman, with the very excellent Wittgensteinian, Jim Edwards. I also had the privilege of studying Kierkegaard, William James, and C.S. Pierce with both Prof. Edwards and Doug MacDonald. With Prof. MacDonald I was very fortunate to have had a whole course on the philosophy of George Santayana. Back then, there were only three faculty members in the department, and I only had one course with Tom Buford, where I learned some things about Plato and aesthetics, but not nearly as much as I should have--that was my fault for thinking I already understood art from the standpoint of philosophy, when in fact I understood very little (and still have a long way to go!). It has been a great pleasure in my life that I got to know Prof. Buford much better after I graduated from Furman, and especially as he became a leader and major exponent of what might be called the "new personalist" trend, reviving these important but largely ignored philosophers from Boston University--figures who influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. a good deal, by the way. Among the other things that have drawn my philosophical and intellectual passions down through the years are the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, the ideas and music of John Cage, questions of gender and sexuality, the ongoing horrendous racism of American society, and Wendell Berry and the "new agrarians."

There's a lot more, and I guess the point is that it is hard to make this into something one could call a specialization, other than perhaps the "specialization" of philosophy itself. To put this in classical terms I am interested in two questions: What can be known of the good, the true, and the beautiful (or aesthetic value, at any rate)? What can be done to advance these things in the world?

On the one hand, certainly the thread that runs through all of this is "politics," in the larger sense of the possibility of creating a radically better society, one that promotes mutuality and flourishing. On the other hand, there is no philosophical question that does not interest me, even if there are many that I do not have the time to explore at the depth they deserve. I suppose another way to put this, and it is something I think about a good deal, is that I am a "theorist" rather than a scholar. Of course I am interested in knowing and understanding as much as I can about various figures, from Parmenides,

Pythagoras, and Plato, down to Derrida, Davidson, and Badiou, but I am more interested in putting their philosophies to work on the central questions, and most of all on the problem of creating a good society. In recent years, largely spurred on by the work of Alain Badiou (1937- ), who is the figure I have spent the most time with in the last ten years or so, I have turned toward ontology. I was always interested in the question of the "new," especially the revolutionary, but I didn't think of this so much in terms of ontology--and certainly not in terms of mathematics, as Badiou does. One aspect of this for Badiou is what he calls a "return to Plato" (though with the perhaps not entirely feasible twist that Badiou wants "a Plato of the multiple" rather than of "the One"), and Badiou has gone so far as to make a "hypertranslation" (as he calls it) of the Republic. For my part, I have gotten back into Plato a good bit, and have taught the Republic every year for the past several years.

Another big change for me in the last three years is that I have turned to Buddhist practice (Soto Zen, to be specific) and thought. This followed a very difficult year for me in 2011 (which, if I write about it at length, I will call "the year of living stupidly"), but it also followed a lifetime of holding on to Western monotheism in one way or another, including that form of Western monotheism called Marxism. In the first half of 2011, I came up against certain personal limitations and certain things that had been weighing on me for a long time. After a summer at home with my life-partner (Kathleen League, who is also a philosopher), I went back to Chicago for the fall term. However, just a few days into the term I was riding my bicycle up in Skokie (forty miles into a sixty-mile ride) and was hit by van. I was pretty smashed up, and spent the next two months in the hospital. (This was followed by another month in a hospital bed and wheelchair in my apartment and then another six weeks learning to walk again. I still walk with a cane, and probably will from here on out.) Somehow, in the aftermath of all this, certain things made sense to me in a way that hadn't before, in particular the Buddhist ideas of "emptiness" and "letting go" (of "attachment"). In the spring of 2012, thanks to reading the book Hardcore Zen by Soto monk and fellow bass player Brad Warner, the idea of "just sitting" also made sense to me (I had tried it before over the years, but the way in which it was explained to me in the past didn't seem like something I could do). One of the things that appealed to me about Zen was the way that theory and practice worked together.

Where some of this fits together with the philosophy of Badiou is that it is one thing to make a theoretical critique of the idea of "the One," but another to really let go of this idea of some overarching or underlying scheme that "holds everything together." It is especially difficult in a social and cultural context that has been so deeply defined by Western monotheism and monological thinking to let go of "the One" and to let this letting go express itself in new ways of thinking and living. I do find Badiou a little narrow at times in his conception of philosophy--he only finds it in "the West." Now, I do accept that not everything is "philosophy," that there are major differences between philosophy and "thought systems" such as religions and ideologies where, to use Albert Camus's definition, there are far more "answers" than there are questions. But it is not hard to see that, in Asian and East-Asian thought there are traditions of argument and disputation and open questions. There is thought that is reflexively critical, and there is development. My reason for raising this is that there is already something of Badiou's "Plato of the multiple" in Gautama the Buddha. Where, for Plato, the ontological question is that of "the one and the many," for Buddha it could be said that the question concerns "the none and the many." I'm not saying that Buddhism isn't a "religion," though it is probably more "philosophy" than any other religion, and there is a saying in Zen that "the point is not to answer your questions, but rather to question your answers."

Another angle for approaching this point about "the One" is that, despite the efforts of all of the French philosophers I like, and other continental figures such as Nietzsche, and, from a quite different angle, major analytic figures such as Quine, Davidson, and Rorty, it is quite a difficult thing to embrace contingency and to not let some sense of a logic of necessity sneak back in. Probably every philosophy

teacher out there hears their students say on a regular basis, "I believe everything happens for a reason." That is a very powerful notion in our society, and a very frustrating one. I don't know very well what students at Furman are like these days, but when I was there (1974-1978), there was a lot of blithe "God's will"-stuff that was heard all the time. (Back then, Furman was still formally associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and there were many students who, while academically-suited to Furman, would have felt more at home, spiritually and ideologically, across town at Bob Jones.) Usually, "everything happens for a reason" is offered to "explain" something bad that has happened, on a personal or a larger scale. Of course I sympathize with the frustration that people feel when there seems, in reality, to be no explanation for why something horrible has happened; philosophically, what is significant is that the "everything happens for a reason"-idea makes of "God" an empty signifier.

I suppose that one Buddhist impulse is to just let the empty place-holder sit with emptiness and not to fill that in with the idea of "God." After all, if you ask the person who says that "everything happens for a reason" what the actual reason is, it turns out that the "reason" is beyond our kin, and that's no explanation, it's no different from saying that everything happens for no reason. Still, contingency is difficult, and, somehow, even while I try to embrace it in theory and practice, and to not be seduced by necessity, it is not as if I have lost all sympathy for Jewish and Christian ideas, and most of all in the idea of redemption. As I write this, I am in Mexico City, teaching a course at Universidad Iberoamericana on Jacques Derrida's book, Specters of Marx. It is clear in Derrida's conception, which owes a great deal to both Judaism and Christianity, that there is no justice without resurrection (he uses that word) and redemption. In both Derrida and Badiou, there is still a good bit of philosophical interest in the relation of "grace" and "works."

Well, that's enough of a sermon on Zen for now; leave it that in the spring and summer of 2012, I started sitting on my own, and when I returned to Chicago I joined a temple. I am a beginner, of course; at age 58, though, and having been beat up pretty badly in my accident (and having to scale back considerably on an activity about which I have been "fanatical" and "militant"--as my partner puts it)--I have metal parts now and stuff, I expect to be a beginner from here on out. On the other hand, this makes a good deal of sense for a practice that is in the school of Shunryu Suzuki, whose best-known book is Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

One of the reasons I first began checking out the philosophy of Badiou is that he comes from the Maoist milieu of the post-1968 Paris scene. That whole scene in French thought and politics has been important to me, as I indicated before, for a long time, even since I was in high school. This is a big topic, and I know many are not, shall we say, overly fond of me for this, but I have been associated in a more direct way with Maoism (in the U.S., and somewhat internationally, but, to be sure, in a milieu very different from that of the Parisian version) since the early 1980s. This association has undergone major transformations since 2008, and again I have been helped and influenced in this by Badiou, who shows that we can recognize that a revolution (or what Badiou calls an "event"), for all its great impact in its time, reaches a point of "saturation," where it has given all that it can give. Then it is time to move on. This does not mean that one becomes a traitor to this "sequence." For sure, it is hard to make that turn, and the more likely thing is that one just runs things into the ground. I've certainly been guilty of this, and not just with regard to politics. At the same time, even as Badiou entered a period that can be called "post-Maoism," he recognized that the Chinese revolution (or, more properly, revolutions in the plural) kicked up certain problems and contradictions that not only could it not solve itself, but that remain poorly-understood and unsolved today. So, there is more work to be done here, and I feel called and well-placed to do some of it.

Even before I made these turns toward Badiou and Buddhism, it had struck me that one thing no one (to the best of my knowledge, and I have pursued this to some depth) has really tried to understand is that Mao, of all the major revolutionary leaders or theoreticians of twentieth century, was the only one who

did not have a background in Western monotheism. Even in biographies, Mao's Buddhist background is at most acknowledged, but never developed--not in terms of what it was, and not in terms of what it was not. Now, to some extent, in adopting Marxism, or even Marxism-Leninism, Mao was working within a framework of "synthesis into the One," and also within what, from Badiou's standpoint, is an "epistemological" framework rather than an ontological one. I myself had developed this side of Maoism in my book, Ethical Marxism, stressing Mao's "categorical imperative,” that the essence of Marxism is captured in the proposition, "It is right to rebel." Insomuch as Mao attempted to create an alternative to the model of socialism represented by Stalin's leadership of the Soviet Union, however, he opened the way to an alternative to "the One," or as Mao put it, "one divides into two." Some of this is not so much "Buddhist," at least directly, as it is "anti-Confucian," but this side of things as well brings Mao into contact with the same impulse that led the Buddha to challenge the ontological and political commitments of Hindustani religion, especially in their orientations toward hierarchy and "good order"--where order itself is higher than justice.

How all this "philosophy" worked out "on the ground," so to speak, is a very complicated subject, and there were certainly major disasters (though we have to be careful with many of the claims made by those hostile to the Maoist project). But there were also major accomplishments that are rarely acknowledged. Strangely, one of these that seems not to get much or any acknowledgement these days concerns the situation of women. In the "Mao period" of China, more girls and women came further, and faster, than ever before in history. A good comparison here is with India. It would be nice if people who have only ever heard the skeptical or condemnatory side of the revolutions in China would look into even just this side of things a little bit.

In any case, these kind of thoughts, regarding Buddhism, Mao, and Badiou, have set an agenda for me in recent years, and a great deal of my work is taking place within this agenda which, partly to be provocative, I call "Zen Maoism."

In the past two-and-a-half years, starting in spring 2012, I have had the opportunity to spend a decent amount of time in China, about ten weeks altogether. Most of this has been with the fantastic School of Philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai, where I taught in March 2012 and October 2013. As I like to say, I taught French Marxism to Chinese students in English. Otherwise, I spent another week in Shanghai in spring 2013 at the annual conference of the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle--a really good group that I would recommend to my fellow philosophers and students of philosophy. It's the kind of place where I can talk about this Zen Maoist stuff. I've now given four or five talks on this topic, this "gathering synthesis" that I hope at the same time will represent a significant break, and always the academic philosophers in the audience, who are all Communist Party of China members, say that my general agenda and the idea of a "Buddhist side" or even core to Mao's theory and practice is "crazy." Therefore, I know that I am on the right track!

Meanwhile, Confucianism and neo-Confucianism are being heavily promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, as an attempt to create some sort of "spiritual glue" in the midst of China's restoration of capitalism and the spiritual vacuity that obtains in conditions of market anarchy, where the only injunction (rarely met, however) is to "enrich yourselves."

So that's what I'm working on!

FU: You are also a musician. How do your musical interests intersect with your philosophical interests?

BM: For a long time I tried to keep the music and the philosophy somewhat apart, even though I was always attracted to what can be called "music of ideas." My entre into such music was not so much the

great music of ideas that had been around for a good while in the Western classical tradition, or even in the jazz of the period before Be-Bop, but rather the rock music of the mid- and late sixties. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it's close enough to say that it all goes back to the Beatles, and then opens up very widely from there.

To see the intersection of philosophy and music for me, it might be useful to revisit the period in which these things were making such a big impression in my life--and in the lives of many, many people. There seem to be these two diametrically-opposed views of "the Sixties" and its aftermath these days, either a loving, bedazzled nostalgia, or the opposite view, that the Sixties were really just a load of crap. For sure, if the Sixties were a "dress-rehearsal for revolution," as some said, the fact is that the rehearsal was too long ago now. On the other hand, there was a cultural and social opening there that was really unprecedented on a global scale, and it is still worth taking stock of this opening, if we can do it without too much nostalgia and if we can also measure the distance, quantitatively and qualitatively, that we are from any such opening now.

My first two album purchases were really fortuitous, as far as being interested in ideas was concerned: Abbey Road (which remains my favorite album by the Beatles) and “In the Court of the Crimson King”, by King Crimson. Both were released in 1969. It's not so strange that I got a Beatles album that year, more or less everyone did; but how did I come into the orbit of King Crimson? This was again a good lesson in contingency. When I was thirteen, growing up in Miami, we would visit my grandparents in Rock Hill, SC. Next door there lived a boy two years older than me, who I would play with, mostly blowing off firecrackers and riding skateboards. By age 15 or so, this guy was into electric guitars and rock music, and played in a little band. So, when I went next-door for some skateboarding adventures, he was heading to band practice, and he took me with him. The first song they played was "Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man," and they would put on the album at different parts of the song to work on those parts. It was all pretty incredible, and that album cover, which is possibly more famous than the album itself, stayed in my mind, and I got the album upon returning to Miami. That opened many doors for me.

Of course I listened to some of the usual, brilliant crap that early teens get into (Grand Funk Railroad stands out), but a good friend of mine, from fifth grade already, was also into King Crimson. I was riding my bike through his neighborhood and we got talking. He--Zane Edge--was already "famous" in our school for having played the drums in a fifth-grade talent show. By that point, around age fourteen or fifteen, I was playing electric guitar and Zane had acquired a big, double-bass, Ludwig drum set. Of course a lot of music had floated past me at that point, and along with the Beatles in the mid-to-late Sixties I had really liked Tommy James and the Shondells and also a good deal of Motown music (quite early I had a crush on Diana Ross), especially Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Obviously, things were moving very fast at that point, and it wasn't long before Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, and Led Zeppelin were major forces, as well as the great Bay-Area bands (Jefferson Airplane was always big for me), etc.

So much incredible stuff, but the thing is, it was the Beatles, then King Crimson, then the other great progressive rock bands, especially Yes, that opened the doors wide to everything else in the world, of music and much else, but especially music. From this opening it was possible for a kid like me to go from rock and progressive rock to Bach and Beethoven, to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, to John Cage and Stockhausen (who is one of the faces on the cover of Sgt. Peppers), and to Duke Ellington, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Thelonius Monk, and on and on. And, yes, it was also possible to go from the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Kinks (who never got the credit they deserved), etc., to Buddy Guy (who I saw play a couple years ago at age 74), Albert King, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Koko Taylor, Robert Johnson, and the rest, and that shouldn't be left out, either. And from the African influences in rock music (rock music emerging from, after all, the intersection of British Isles song-craft and African drums and chant meeting in the oppressive cultural cauldron of enslaved blacks and indentured whites of the

American South) it was natural for me to want to know what African musicians themselves were doing. From the Latin connection in some Bay-Area bands (Santana, foremost, but also Quicksilver Messenger Service and, in a quite different scene in L.A., War), one could go to both indigenous Latin American music and, for instance, Dizzy Gillespie's Afro-Cuban jazz. Of course there was the George Harrison-Ravi Shankar connection that pointed East. Obviously what I am saying is that the whole world of music just seemed to only open further and further in that time, and other bits of culture and politics came along with this.

I had taken some piano lessons from third to sixth grade, then in seventh grade I played trumpet in the band, because my father had a trumpet. By the spring of seventh grade I wanted an electric guitar, and my mom got me one for my birthday with S&H Green Stamps. Two things led me to switch to bass guitar when I was fifteen. Or maybe three things, one of them the usual thing that everyone wanted to be a guitar player, and, like many others, I recognized early on that there would always be a need for bass players. The other things were: 1) seeing the Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin at the University of Miami and thinking that I wasn't really going to make it as a guitar player, but that I might be able to do what the bass player was doing; 2) the song "Roundabout" by Yes became a radio hit, and, as every bass player at least of a certain age knows, Chris Squire's bass line was remarkable and innovative in a number of ways. I was already playing bass (I had a little Fender Musicmaster at that point, a very basic instrument, though not by any means a bad one--a funny thing is that the fellow I sold it to in my junior year in high school recently found me on Facebook, after a span of forty years) then, but hearing Chris Squire opened me to a much larger world of possibilities. I really started practicing hard at that point, and also I started saving up for a Rickenbacker bass guitar.

So then it was music all the time for me, either jamming with people most weekends, or the two bands that I played with most of the way through high school and even in the summer when I was home from Furman. One of these bands, with Zane on guitar and my still long-time friend Garry Rindfuss on drums, was what one would call today kind of a "tribute" or "cover" band. (Our singer, Mark Davenport, whom I'm not in contact with, but who I remain aware of through Zane, also played drums, so we had two drummers.) We didn't think of ourselves that way, but the fact was that ninety-five percent of our repertoire was Black Sabbath, the first three albums. We tended to play horrendously loud! Playing the music of Black Sabbath was interesting, given that I was still a committed Christian in a fairly mainstream way at that point. So that raised questions for me.

Another band I played with was also with Garry Rindfuss, and a friend of ours, who I had also known since elementary school and Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts named Mark Stone (not the current Furman philosophy professor!), who played tenor saxophone. So that was kind of an unusual group, with just bass, drums, and sax, but playing rock rather than jazz. It was a neat thing, and expressive of the fact that a lot of rock musicians in that time wanted to do things that were out of the ordinary. (I should mention, though, that I got the idea from an obscure group in England called Back Door.) We called that group "Morning Sky," and we actually auditioned as a group for the Music Honor Society at our high school, playing an original composition--and we got in.

The Black Sabbath group was called "The," as we could never agree on a name. Neither group was set up to make money, we just did it all for the fun of playing, and we mainly just played at parties that our classmates had. "The," for that matter, played mostly on the patio of the house where I grew up in Miami, and there wasn't a single one of our rehearsals that didn't end without the police showing up to tell us to shut it down. A few years ago, Zane worked on a cassette tape we had made, I think with two cheap microphones, during a "rehearsal," and put it out on a CD. As he pointed out in the liner notes, while others were doing "garage rock," we were pioneers of "patio rock." One time we were playing and these two girls showed up on bicycles; they said they had heard Black Sabbath from some distance away and decided to follow the sound. When we determined where they were when they first heard us, it was five

miles away. Of course, not long after, the police showed up, as usual. Listening to the CD many years later, I think we sounded pretty good. With two drummers, there were times when the tom rolls were out of sync, which, for some reason unknown even to me, I find hilarious. But our version of "War Pigs" sounds quite good, I think, quite credible. I'd love for us to gather from our far-flung parts of the U.S. (Atlanta, NYC, and Chicago) and play again.

By now I have played the bass guitar for more than forty years, and I still practice regularly and have lots of music projects in the hopper. One of my big hang-ups in recent years is that I don't get along so well with technology, and so, even though I have lots of projects recorded and many ready to record, I haven't been able to put them out. But that is finally about to change, so in the next few years I hope to put out a bunch of CDs, now that the CD age is completely over!

For a long time, even while ideas were the heart of my interest in both philosophy and music, I didn't want to write in a philosophical way about music. I didn't want to mix philosophy and music-making. A few years ago I heard a talk at the Sartre group of the U.K., asking why Sartre did not write about music. Sartre grew up around lots of music (his uncle was Albert Schweitzer), was friends with American jazz musicians such as Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, and he played the piano for an hour every day. Sartre also had a good singing voice. So music was a big part of his life, but he didn't write about music in his philosophical work (and only mentioned music very occasionally in his fiction, such as the famous reference to the early jazz song, "One of these days," in La Nausee). In the discussion we came to the conclusion that Sartre wanted an area of his life that he didn't intermingle with philosophy, something that could just be its own separate domain. That's how I looked at it for a long time, too, and also I thought that, if I was writing about music then I wasn't playing music.

That's silly on some level, but the fact was that there were long periods in graduate school and even more during my time as a professor at DePaul when it was not practical to play so much, at least in terms of getting things together with other people. I always kept my practice regimen together pretty well, basically an hour a day, and I still do that. Up to a point, though, I worried that, if I started writing about music, I would become a music-writer instead of a musician. However, I did think from time to time about doing something philosophical on progressive rock music, I had written a paper for a humanities class in high school on King Crimson. Then, in the early '90s, I came across a book on Robert Fripp and King Crimson, by Eric Tamm; I thought it was pretty good, and I figured that, since Tamm had already written on one of my two favorite progressive rock bands, I would write on the other one, Yes. I went from there to write on progressive rock generally and on what I identified more generally as creative rock music (from the later Beatles and the Velvet Underground to Bjork, Sonic Youth, etc.). But the Yes book was definitely the most edifying to write, not only of the music books, but probably of all my books.

Fortunately, this turn to writing on music did not close me off from playing, and it even led me into getting to know a little bit some of the musicians I wrote about, especially Chris Squire from Yes and Robert Fripp from King Crimson. I should mention that I had a principle, when I was writing the books, of not trying to have personal contact with the musicians I wrote about--I felt there was too much writing in rock music that was mixed up with biographical details, and I wanted to concentrate, in a way influenced a good bit by Theodor Adorno (who didn't like rock music, however), on musical form and ideas and their interrelation. There is a good deal of sociology of rock music that is very interesting, of course, but I wanted to show that something more like a real philosophical perspective could be applied to rock music, especially to music that could "stand up" to such an analysis, so to speak.

When I was at Furman, sometimes I would just wander the aisles of the library, just looking for books that looked interesting. One find that turned out to be life-changing was a book on John Cage by Richard Kostelanetz. Though I continue to play lots of music, from folk-rock to jazz, that Cage wasn't interested in (except through his student and protege, Yoko Ono, and, later, her third husband, whose name escapes

me at the moment!), I have a special place in my heart for Cage and post-Cage experimental music, including music that was influenced, as well, by Zen Buddhism. Zen might also be called "emptiness practice" in a similar way to much of Cage's music. This is one of the ideas that has become most important to me both philosophically and politically in recent years, so this interplay between philosophy and music is as strong as ever for me.

FU: What advice would you give to a Furman philosophy major?

BM: It was probably never such an easy thing to major in philosophy; I would imagine that, now, it is harder than ever. So, first, I just offer a salute to all the philosophy majors.

There is a bit of a battle going on in academic philosophy as I write this, between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, though on the side of the latter is a good deal of other kinds of philosophy that are not specifically "analytic" (for example, American philosophy, Catholic philosophy, Asian philosophy, etc., to say nothing of feminist, critical race, and Marxist philosophy). At the same time, the humanities in general are under attack, and philosophy probably as much as any of the humanities, for being quite "useless" in terms of the narrowly pragmatic imperatives of our society. The analytic/continental thing has been going on for many years, of course, but it seems to be heating up at the moment over some things said in the last couple of years by Brian Leiter--the founder and main force behind the "Philosophy Gourmet Report" (an informal rating system for philosophy programs)--in the blogosphere and on the interwebs. The "Gourmet Report" has a good deal of influence on undergraduate students who are looking for graduate programs. I don't know that undergraduates need to get wrapped up in the issues around the "PGR" so much, but it is an interesting case of the functioning of the "institutions of philosophy," in sociological terms, and in terms of what Michel Foucault called the matrix of "power/knowledge"--a good deal of which seems to run counter to what one would hope is the true spirit of philosophical inquiry.

One of the things I benefited from a great deal when I was a philosophy major at Furman, again in the time when there were only three professors in the department, was a more pluralistic approach to the history of philosophy and to more recent philosophy, and the avoidance of what could be called a "narrowly-sectarian approach." I'm very grateful for that, and my sense is that this broad and non-sectarian approach remains the norm in the Furman department. If anything, I imagine that things are even better now, because the department is so much larger and so many other approaches are included.

If I may, I'd like to say something about Brian Leiter and the PGR, since it potentially bears on current Furman students as they investigate graduate school. In general Prof. Leiter (who, at present, is in the Law faculty at the University of Chicago) and the PGR tends to reinforce the power and prestige of the already powerful and prestigious programs. Now, of course, it is not for nothing that Harvard or Princeton or Stanford, etc., are what they are, but they also have interests in holding or advancing their positions that go beyond, to say this again, the pure spirit of philosophical and intellectual inquiry. That is a reality that one has to deal with, and that some of us hope to address, but the question is whether one can deal with this reality without selling one's soul to it. I don't always disagree with what Brian Leiter says about certain kinds of continental philosophy, but I have some issues with his position that, again, might be worth thinking about for undergraduate philosophy majors who are thinking about graduate school. There are certainly forms of continental philosophy that go perhaps too far from having some kind of foundation in an argumentative structure. But if Heidegger and Derrida go too far, in Leiter's view, then why not Wittgenstein? Where is the line, exactly? And why can't at least some of the work that is supposedly on the other side of the line be considered something like "meta-logic," even if with a hermeneutic spin? At the same time, isn't there some analytic philosophy that is something like the equal and opposite reaction to what might in fact be truly flaky continental philosophy? Basically I mean analytic philosophy that is still stuck in a very narrow, and often trivial, neo-positivist paradigm. And

doesn't this kind of philosophy get promoted quite a bit in analytic circles, seemingly more because of its pedigree than anything else? As far as I can tell, not that I spend all that much time checking up on Brian Leiter, he doesn't seem to expend nearly the effort denouncing the analytic side of this equation as he does on the continental side. Most of the analytic people at elite schools don't seem to see this issue, either, and meanwhile they are silent while Leiter trashes the more continentally-oriented schools (mine among them). Also, under the idea that at least some philosophy ought to be creative and experimental and even a bit wild, in other words that there might be good reasons to take risks in philosophy, then might not some of the philosophy done in this spirit turn out to be "fraudulent"?

This to me is again sort of a "Wittgenstein" point. In analytic philosophy, sometimes it is very hard to distinguish between a truly important argument and mere cleverness, perhaps akin to being good at the Rubik's Cube. In continental philosophy sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a truly important argument, or perhaps a truly illuminating reading or description of a situation, and mere literary artifice. Sometimes in either case the very person making the argument doesn't know the difference, he or she doesn't know if they are simply getting carried away with some logical or literary facility or if they are in fact taking what might be called a creative philosophical risk. (I had an essay published a few years ago in a book on chess and philosophy where I argued for undecidability in the case of a risky chess move, even on the part of the person making the move and even when the outcome is the one desired.) Should we encourage "philosophical risk," especially in going into places "where no philosopher has gone before," even if the outcome might turn out to be flaky? I don't see where this question is so different from the "equal and opposite" one about how what analytic philosophers call "rigor" (how this fits with the versions of analytic philosophy that are supposedly based in "intuition," I've never understood) can lead to triviality and a refusal to consider questions of the human condition, or rather to denounce such questions as non-philosophical. And I don't see where the institutions of analytic philosophy have shown a basis for letting this distinction, and judgments of flakiness, rest with one person--except insomuch as this situation serves their material interests.

I like a lot of analytic philosophy, I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to study a good bit of it in graduate school, especially some of the major figures of analytic metaphysics and epistemology. I continue to have warm feelings toward, and to learn from, the work of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, Quine, Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and, especially Donald Davidson. (Davidson is never far away from any philosophical problem that I am trying to think through.) To me, the whole divide between analytic and continental philosophy is no harder and no easier to bridge than the gap (or gaps) between the "hard" sciences and the humanities, what C.P. Snow called "the two cultures." Science is great, which goes without saying, so if we have some philosophy that is modeled on science, that could be great too. The humanities and literature and the arts are great, too--which, unfortunately, does need saying these days--so, if we have some philosophy modeled on literature and the other arts, and on the writing of history, and on the study of ideas in religion, and so on, that could be great as well. How these "two philosophical cultures" communicate with each other is a difficult question, though I would suggest that Richard Rorty provides one model (developed in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, among other of his works, and encapsulated in the title of one of his essays, "Philosophy as a kind of writing"), and Alain Badiou another, one predicated upon Truth and the idea of "conditions of philosophy." I'm sure there are other models, but it might be fruitful to compare these two, especially if this were done in a constructive spirit. None of this means we shouldn't be critical and make judgments, however. Some stuff truly is either flaky or just plain trivial. But there's no getting beyond the role that institutions and places of power and privilege play in this discussion.

None of this is meant to speak to what undergraduates ought to be doing, I think the best thing for undergraduates is to get a good grounding in the Western canon, along with a good selection of figures and themes that are not necessarily in the core of this canon, and a good selection of contemporary work in both the analytic and continental traditions. Again, it looks like the Furman department is doing a great

job in just this way. So, as Jacques Lacan said (and as Badiou likes to repeat) as an ethical injunction, Keep going! All that matters of this for undergraduate philosophy majors who are considering graduate school is to be mindful of the fact that what we used to call "the doing of philosophy" (and of course the teaching of philosophy) is done in institutional settings.

At the same time, and perhaps this is what I would most like to say, the fact that career prospects for academic positions are so tenuous at this moment, and are likely to be for some time to come, could also be taken as a moment of great freedom. Anyone so brave at this moment to follow the path of studying and working in philosophy (I mean "doing philosophy") will have to do so out of a passion for philosophy and philosophical questions. And anyone who does feel such as passion should, I think, follow one's heart, and work hard, study hard, think hard (which includes taking a break and clearing one's mind from time to time, just as good athletic activity includes proper rest). Set yourself the goal of doing good things and important things. Feel both proud and humbled to be a part of a tradition that goes back for millennia.

Perhaps if more students will approach philosophy in this way, some of the sillier forms of institutional politics will start to clear away. Obviously, we will also need some administrators who are mindful of the value of the humanities and of philosophy and who will back that up with institutional support. In our own capacity as philosophers, though, at least let us go forward with a sense of mission and hope that others will see the importance of this. As a philosophy major, even if you do not choose to attempt an academic career, or if you do attempt such a career but do not obtain a position in academia, I think you will be alright, as alright as anyone might be in the uncertain times that are already here and that will most likely continue for a good while. If you are working to be a philosopher, or perhaps something like a "philosophical person," you will most likely want to be ever-more literate, and to be well-informed about what is going on in the world and in the sciences and in culture (and different cultures). In intellectual terms, what else would one want to be? If you pursue these things, I think you will find good things to do in the world.

FU: What is your best memory from your time at Furman?

BM: In many ways I wasn't a great fit at Furman, which was mostly me. I found a good deal of the atmosphere at Furman too conventional. I was born in the South (in Columbia, SC), and my parents were "real Southerners" who, I think, inculcated in me many of the better things about being from the South--to be welcoming and friendly, for instance--but I was also a product of having spent my formative years in Miami, Florida, which is decidedly not the South. I had long hair, and by my junior year, I had the longest hair of any boy at the school. I was (and am) a vegetarian, which at that time was very "odd" at Furman (I'd like to know how things are now). On a regular basis there were Christian fundamentalist evangelical campaigns at Furman, guys who would knock on your dorm-room door, to ask you if "you know where you're going after you die." When I didn't seem to be the appropriate kind of Christian for what these evangels were looking for, that was one kind of problem, but it seemed to be even more of a problem that I didn't eat animals and didn't think that people should eat animals. At the same time, my attitude wasn't always the best, in fact sometimes quite the opposite, and this sometimes kept me from playing well with others, and from learning all that I could have.

Nevertheless, I am very grateful for my education and general life-experience at Furman, and in any case there is little point to "disavowing" some big chunk of one's life, one can only go forward from whatever present one finds oneself in. To be Sartrean for a moment, even though one part of his thought I never had much interest in was his whole discourse of "authenticity," it would all the same be rather "inauthentic" to do anything other than to embrace one's life experience as adding up to the person one has become, for better or for worse. And now I mostly think of those years with fondness, or I mostly

think of the things from those years that I can think of with fondness--and, as the good book said, let the devil take the hindmost.

So, let me mention a few of the moments in my time at Furman that I think of with the most fondness.

On Saturday nights, generally, I would hang out in one of the dorm rooms of one of my closer friends at Furman. These friends, with whom I could generally be seen in the dining hall at lunch or dinner, constituted for the most part the small "scruffy element" (as I came to call it some years later) at Furman. After a while we would put on a great album from the time, "Harvest for the World" by the Isley Brothers, and dance around, play air guitar or play guitar on tennis rackets. It was a simple but fun thing that happened pretty much every weekend. Some from this crew are still friends, and some for one reason or another are not, but in that moment I loved them all, and therefore I still do.

I also saw some very good concerts both at Furman and at the Greenville Civic Auditorium. Probably the most memorable of these was seeing Parliament-Funkadelic on the great "Mothership Connection" tour (with the great Bootsy Collins on bass, and he also opened the show with his own Bootsy's Rubber Band), with my good friend, still today, Chelsea Snelgrove. We were two of about five white people in a sea of black people, which was a great experience in and of itself--just digging good music.

Another great musical experience for me was seeing Prof. Ruby Morgan of the Music Department play Bartok's third piano concerto with the Greenville Symphony in the auditorium building where the department was located then--I can't remember the name of it now. I admired Prof. Morgan from afar for a number of years, and then was thrilled to meet her some time later at a meeting of the South Carolina Philosophy Society, because she married one of my professors, Doug MacDonald. I see from the university website that Prof. Morgan is still going strong, which makes me very happy.

In general, I had a very good time at the dances that would be held in the dining hall. I've always enjoyed dancing to rock music, and perhaps I am especially fond of the memory of those dances now because I can't dance like I used to, thanks to some very bad injuries I sustained in the bicycle/van accident I mentioned earlier. I liked the variety of bands that would come, as well, from a progressive rock band, a Beatles tribute band, some good funk bands, and even some of the "electric bluegrass" that was a bit of a trend at the time. I get the feeling that not so many people are dancing to bands now, in this age of EDM. For me it was fun both because of the dancing and also watching other rock musicians play, to see what I could pick up.

With a couple of my fellow scruffies I also enjoyed putting on little coffeehouse concerts in the upstairs of the student center. That was a nice space. Most of the music we played tended to be traditional, folk music, or Bob Dylan songs, the key players generally being Chelsea, Chet Williamson, Bo Bradham, and myself. I know that Chet and Bo later developed into very credible string band and also Irish musicians. One of my favorite things was if the more "country-folk" musicians would give Chelsea and I space to do an improvised duet on guitar and recorder, or on bass guitar and piano. We tried to follow that very "searching" but "sensitive, probing" sound heard in groups such as the Paul Winter Consort and Oregon, and we didn't sound so bad.

One of these coffeehouses I put together as something like a senior recital for someone who wasn't actually in the music program. I played two works that featured solo bass guitar and racks of little percussion instruments, and occasionally words and sounds made vocally, one of these pieces written by myself, and the other a piece by John Cage for a four-stringed instrument, titled "26'1'1149" for a stringed instrument. I read a poem, and we had a small jam with a student who I only got to know as I was putting the concert together, though, as these things go these days, I know him now through social media--he has lived in Italy for some time. This fellow, Freeman Carmack, was and is a very talented keyboardist. For

drums we had Chelsea on congas, and a guy who recommended himself as having "great chops" on drum set, but it turned out the latter's chops had not been tested in situations with other musicians besides himself, and in the tempo and dynamics departments this guy would just spin off into his own world, basically blasting the rest of us out with a drum solo that just got faster and louder. We had to reset a number times before giving up, but I suppose something of instructive value was produced. So, the thing was for the most part a success (I certainly learned how to build racks of small percussion instruments out of the parts from military surplus cots), and some of that stuff I was doing back then I am still doing today.

So, from music to athletics, even if of a somewhat low level. I enjoyed racquetball and tennis a good deal back then--both sports that I can't play anymore. Probably to the annoyance of many, because of the noise, one of my dorm mates (I'm not naming names!) and I used to go out to the tennis courts late at night, as in about 2:00 a.m., and turn on the lights, and play two or three sets. That was pretty brilliant. I also enjoyed jogging around the campus and, for the last two years at Furman, riding my road bike on the paved roads around school. I wasn't into mountain biking at that point, but I bet that would have been pretty cool in that setting, and I know that whole area is something of a mecca for cycling these days, thanks to George Hincapie.

Of course, a major part of my life in the last two years of my time at Furman was meeting Claudia Ericson and getting to know her. We remained together for eleven years, through various crazy twists and turns. I was never very good at "growing up," and my family background did not prepare me very well for a mature relationship, so, in a way, it is amazing that this first serious relationship lasted as long as it did. Though we haven't been together since 1987, Claudia and I remain in touch and are still friends, and I am grateful for that side of my life at Furman as well.

Back in the day, our little group of scruffs would stay up till all hours in the dorm debating various things, but most often music. Believe it or not, the great "Beatles vs the Stones" conflict was still raging, though sometimes this also took the form of talking about the remaining years of progressive rock music versus some of the newer, more "straight-ahead" and gritty rock such as the “Born to Run” album by Bruce Springsteen. When the Sex Pistols came on the scene in 1977, that completely changed the conversation, and meanwhile I was also thinking a lot about Bach's cello suites and the transition from the middle to the later John Coltrane (which unfortunately only meant a year or two of his too-short life). Intermixed in all the musical debate was everything from the ontological argument for the existence of God (which I've always found rather brilliant) to whatever was the political spectacle of the moment. I loved those late-night dorm conversations and I try to find something that would model them for my students today at a school where only about ten- or twelve-percent of students live on campus.

Lastly, and I did save this for last, even when I was having difficulties in negotiating the general parameters of college life, or the inside of my own head, I was always quite happy when I was actually sitting in my philosophy classes. In addition, I also felt in a good state of mind in the literature and creative writing classes that I took with professors Stanley Crowe and Gilbert Allen, and the religious studies course I took with Albert Blackwell. I was often not a very conscientious student, and often my attitude was not brilliant, to say the least, but when it came to the kinds of questions we discussed and the kinds of texts we read in philosophy, literature, and religion, my mind would light up nicely. There was also an excellent course in my senior year, called "Ideas in the Arts," it was an excellent course to take in my last year at Furman. There was a day that every philosophy student knew about, when either Prof. MacDonald or Prof. Edwards would tell "the John Benedict Anderson story," and we would walk around in kind of a weird state for days after that. It was kind of a version of the ancient Taoist story of the man dreaming he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man--except Anderson was a man who could not tell his "real life" from his "dream life." Obviously a great deal depended on the vividness of the storytelling, and though I had Jim Edwards for this particular class, I know from accounts that both Edwards and Doug

MacDonald were brilliant storytellers. The vibrations I felt in my brain on the day of hearing that story were a good example of everything I appreciated about Furman and everything for which I remain grateful.