Marjorie Grene: Personal Memories (original) (raw)

2010

Abstract

Richard Burian has just given us a comprehensive account of Marjorie Grene's life, of the kind of philosopher she was, and of the role she played in the construction of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB). My ambition is more modest. I will honor Marjorie Grene's life by sharing two personal memories, which both testify about her as a person and about her way of thinking. My first memory relates to Marjorie's stay in Germany when she was a student. She went to Heidelberg in 1931 with an American grant, with the objective of discovering modern German philosophy. In 1931 she was 21 years old, and she had just obtained her B.S. degree (with biology as her main discipline). She had heard of Martin Heidegger and was eager to know more about him. She was indeed fascinated by Heidegger's thinking, but she left Germany with much more sympathy for both the person and the philosophical problems raised by Karl Jaspers. Jaspers had been first trained as a psychiatrist and valued empirical knowledge, especially biology. Although Heidegger made Marjorie famous through her very first books devoted to existentialism and to the famous German philosopher (Grene 1948, 1957), Jaspers interested her because he was a physician and a psychiatrist who considered that life and concrete living beings ought to be taken more seriously by philosophers than was usually the case. As Marjorie told me once, Jaspers gave her an example of a kind of philosophy that considers the life sciences as crucial for philosophy. Jaspers also revealed to Marjorie the possibility of a philosophy based on both the notion of personal commitment and our biological nature. I now come to the particular recollection that I want to tell. I first met Marjorie in 1987 in Blacksburg on the occa- sion of one of the earliest ISHPSSB meetings. Around this time, a series of books had begun to appear that denounced Heidegger's commitment to the Nazi ideology and suggested a possible relationship between this ideology and Heidegger's metaphysics. These books, especially the pioneering book by Victor Farias (1989 (1987)), were harshly criticized by a num- ber of Heideggerians. In those years, the standard view was that Farias had gone too far. Some time after the Blacksburg meeting I asked Marjorie, "What do you think of Farias's book, and of Heidegger's alleged relationship with Nazi power and ideology?" Her immediate response was that Farias' book fell far short of the truth—Heidegger certainly was a Nazi, and he was so not only as a consequence of his opportunism. Mar- jorie added that she had been staying in Germany from 1931 to 1933, that is to say, before Hitler took power in 1933. She also said, "Although I was fascinated by Heidegger's teaching and thinking, I immediately experienced in my flesh what I was to him the very first time that I met with him: I was an American, I had been trained in biology, I was Jewish, and I was a woman. These were as many reasons to consider me as belonging to a class of inferior human beings."

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