Erratic Schwabinger Otto Gross

"Dear Jung, -- I climbed over the asylum wall and am now in the Hotel X. This is a begging letter. Please send me money for the hotel expenses and also the train fare to Munich. -- Yours Sincerely." (Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst, [p. 164])

This wonderful letter was sent by Otto Gross to Carl Jung shortly after Gross had left Jung's care. Gross was a brilliant young physician (a neurologist who worked with Emil Kraepelin) and early psychoanalyst who conducted many of his analyses in Schwabing's Café Stefanie. He at times resided in the early hippie haven, Monte Verità. In my post on that settlement, I noted its similarity to the 1960's counterculture. One missing element, it seemed, was the experimentation with drugs. Well, it wasn't missing when young Otto arrived. As a physician, he had access to drugs, and he did more than just experiment with them. In fact, among the ills for which Jung was treating him at the Burghölzli clinic were addictions to cocaine and morphine.

Gross' brilliance is attested by Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, who met Gross in Schwabing. Jones says, "[Gross] was the nearest approach to a romantic genius I ever met .... He was my first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis .... Such penetrative power of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again." (Ibid., pp. 163-4)

Gross was a prototype of the young punk rebel. The focus of his rebellion was the constricting, martial culture of German-speaking central Europe. The point of his rebellion is captured by Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, who say that Gross'

central insight was that it was not fathers alone ... who formed the repressive structure of personality in their children but that instead it was the structure and culture of a patriarchal society that had institutionalized repression in the family. His solution was to call for an expressive and unrestrained sexuality, which the unique conditions of Schwabing had shown to be possible. ('Otto Gross and Else Jaffé and Max Weber', Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, Theory Culture Society [1998] 15: 129) 

Indeed, it was Gross who coined the phrase "sexual revolution" (or its German equivalent).

So, for Otto the political was very personal. This brought him into conflict with Freud, who resisted efforts to link a political program to psychoanalysis.

The fusion of personal and political themes in Gross' life is especially clear in connection with his father, Hans Gross, an influential early criminologist (whose classes Kafka attended). Hans was the very opposite of Otto. Hans thought that 'degenerates' (e.g., vagabonds and revolutionaries -- e.g., his son) who didn't respond to treatment should be sent to Africa. Hans studied and tried to develop more effective forms of incarceration, including the concentration camp.

Karl Valentin

So, it's easy to sympathize with Otto Gross in his conflict with his father. Still, Otto was schizophrenic and did great harm to others. For instance, he was wanted by the police in Switzerland because of his role in the deaths of two women -- one an assisted suicide (Lotte Hattemer in 1906), the other a death by overdose (Sophie Benz in 1910). Also, he took no, or little, responsibility for his four children, as is indicated by the fact that both his sons (born in 1907 to different women) were named 'Peter'. He took no role in their naming.

It seems that Otto, though he meant well, didn't know what 'well' meant. It's not entirely surprising, then, that his father tried to have Otto committed to an institution. Hans succeeded in having Otto arrested in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1913. Otto was sent back to his homeland, Austria, and confined there in asylums at Tulln and Troppau. This father-son conflict became a cause célèbre, prompting Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire (among others) to oppose in print the father's incarceration of the son, an act that became emblematic of a generation's wider conflict with the patriarchy


The battle of the Gross's, père et fils, resonated with Kafka and engendered his generally sympathetic response to Otto Gross' ideas. Indeed, Hartmut Binder and others have claimed that the conflict fed Kafka's conception of The Trial. Still, it's difficult to find evidence of any influence by Gross on Kafka, and some authors deny that there was any (see, e.g., Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross' Impact on German Expressionist Writers [NY: Peter Lang Publishers Inc., 1983], p. 164).

As was noted (above), Hans Gross was one of Kafka's professors. In fact, according to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth: the Counterculture Begins Ascona, 1900-1920 [Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986], p. 40), "Kafka had sat under Hans Gross for sixteen class hours a week in his fifth, sixth, and seventh semesters of law at Prague University." Shortly after he graduated, Kafka met Otto Gross briefly in 1907 (although only the linked source reports that encounter). Later, in 1917, Kafka and Gross met at least twice, first on a night train from Budapest to Vienna (or from Vienna to Prague -- sources differ here) and later in Prague. Of the meeting on the train, Henrik Jensen says (pdf), "Kafka was with Gross ... listening to his meanderings, afterwards claiming that he had not understood a word. Still, he did see something 'essential' beyond the ridiculous, as he later stated in a letter to Milena Jesenská." Here's an excerpt from Kafka's letter (as quoted in a paper by Gottfried Heuer): 

I have hardly known Otto Gross; but I realised that there was something essential here that at least with its hand reached out of the "ridiculous." The perplexed frame of mind of his friends and relatives (wife, brother-in-law, even the enigmatically silent baby amongst the travelling bags ...) was somewhat reminiscent of the mood of the followers of Christ as they stood below him who was nailed to the cross.

(The 'wife' was actually Gross' mistress, Marianne Kuh, and the 'brother-in-law' was her brother, Anton Kuh.) Later in 1917, Gross met in Prague with Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and others to discuss a new journal in which Kafka showed interest. It was to have been called the Journal Against the Will to Power. Also, Martin Green reports (Mountain of Truth, p. 40) that Kafka read all of the articles that Gross had published in a journal called Die Aktion. Finally, in 1922, three years after Gross' death, Kafka severely criticized Werfel for casting Gross in a bad light in his play called Schweiger, in which the loathsome character of Dr. Ottokar Grund was made the spokesman for Gross' ideas (according to Peter Stephan Jungk, Franz Werfel [NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990], p. 92).

Im Café by Jeanne Mammen

Otto Gross had direct or indirect connections with many other famous people -- Max Weber, D. H. Lawrence, Gustav Landauer, etc. -- but one of these in particular stood out for me. One of Gross' followers was Heinrich Goesch, who befriended Paul Tillich and (rather more intimately) his wife, Hannah Tillich. (That last link is to an article about his parents by René Tillich -- highly recommended. It even mentions a trip to Lake Ascona, near Monte Verità.) According to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth, p. 192), the Tillichs were receptive to many of Gross' ideas, as mediated by Goesch.

Update (Nov. 27, 2011): In a NY Times review of David Cronenberg's film A Dangerous Method, Otto Gross is described as, "A fellow analyst, sent to Jung by Freud, who turns out to be a feral and charming emanation of pure id, an imp of the Freudian perverse."

Who were the professional philosophers in Nazi Germany?

Eric Schwitzgebel has a post about professional philosophers (and ultimately ethics professors) in Nazi Germany. How many of them supported the Nazis? How many took a stand against the Nazis? How many tried to be neutral on the matter?

In his post, Schwitzgebel determines who the professional philosophers were by looking at the number of people who completed a Habilitation in philosophy. That's a sensible approach, but it should form only one of several criteria for counting professional philosophers.

To see why, note that one of the first academics to be dismissed by the Nazis was Paul Tillich. Though known chiefly as a theologian, Tillich had a doctorate in philosophy (but no Habilitation) and periodically taught in philosophy departments. At the time of his dismissal, he was a philosophy professor at the University of Frankfurt.

Another German professional philosopher in the 1930's who lacked the Habilitation was Karl Jaspers, who was teaching philosophy at Heidelberg in 1937 when he was forced into retirement by the Nazis (because his wife was Jewish). Jaspers' training was in medicine. I don't think he even had a philosophy degree, let alone the Habilitation.

Finally, there is Kurt Huber, who was part of the White Rose resistance group and was executed by the Nazis in 1943.

Huber's higher degrees were in musicology and psychology, but (according to the above site) Huber, a Leibniz scholar, started teaching philosophy at Munich in 1926. I think it was in that capacity that he met and influenced the younger members of the White Rose group (esp. Sophie Scholl). Moreover, Huber actually joined the Nazis in 1940, apparently due to his opposition to communism, before becoming a martyr in the White Rose resistance.

More KBBC posts

The Barth blog conference has some new posts, including one on Paul Tillich and one on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

August religion links

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University has a good collection of articles on the civil rights movement and on King's theological influences (inc. entries on Barth, Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the social gospel movement, a tradition that wielded much influence in my home and native land). King's work is situated in the tradition of African-American preaching in Preaching With Sacred Fire, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Here's an NPR interview (ht) with Simmons. The interview includes a recording from a sermon by C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father).

The influence of this same tradition on President Obama is analyzed by Ronald F. Thiemann, and it's the subject of this CNN piece, which features quotations of Gustav Niebuhr, Richard Crouter (whose new book on Reinhold Niebuhr was just released), and former Senator John Danforth.

Two more reviews of Newman's Unquiet Grave, one by Terry Eagleton and one by Anthony Kenny
Francisco Ayala: 'Evolution can be religion's friend'

Siris has an interesting treatment of James' 'Will to Believe'

Gary Gutting poses challenges to theists and to atheists

Laura Miguélez reviews Stephen Williams' The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity

From Gordon Marino's article on Kierkegaard: 'Philosophers gravitate toward epistemological problems such as what makes a belief true or false. Kierkegaard, however, is unusual in that he fixes his attention firmly on the belief or appropriation side of knowledge: on our personal relationship to ideas.'

Martin Gardner, a 'whys' man

Martin Gardner died on May 22 at the age of 95. He wrote the 'Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American for 35 years and was an accomplished critic of pseudo-science.

I first became aware of Gardner by way of his work on C. L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), especially as evidenced in his Annotated Alice (see also his Universe in a Handkerchief). Of all Gardner's works, though, my favourite one is his Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (wise indeed). Here's a review from the New Criterion (where Gardner himself published several reviews).

If philosophy begins in wonder, then Whys is a great entryway into philosophy. The index is loaded with names like Wittgenstein, Russell, Reichenbach, Carnap, Rudolf Otto, Tillich, Barth and F. R. Tennant, but Gardner never introduces the philosophy cold (in textbook fashion). Instead, he makes the philosophical questions seem like the most natural and enticing explorations on which to embark. He works up to this effect by way of more literary reflections, sometimes making his approach through passages from children's literature.

For this purpose, Carroll and L. Frank Baum (author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz) seem to have been Gardner's favourites. I particularly like Gardner's use of an episode from The Marvelous Land of Oz in connection with the concept of the numinous (on p. 342 of Whys). In this episode, Tip is startled when the wooden Saw-Horse comes to life. Gardner notes that the Saw-Horse is even more startled, rolling its eyes and "taking a first wondering view of the world in which he had now so important an existence" (Gardner quoting Baum, p. 342). Gardner then asks whether this (and other) quotations have not stirred in the reader "a similar sense of surprise and wonder." "Have you never," he continues, "felt amazed to find yourself not only living in an Ozzy world but, more incredibly, aware of the fact that you are alive?"

It was in Whys that Gardner announced his 'philosophical theism'. He later characterized himself as "a mystic in the Platonic sense."

I have found two nice blog tributes that focus on Whys, one by Julia Galef and one by William M. Briggs (from whom I've learned that Gardner studied at Chicago with Rudolf Carnap).

One of the best on-line resources concerning Gardner can be found at the Cambridge University Press blog, which includes a 5-part interview from 2008.

Here are several obituaries and tributes: the Guardian, the NY Times, the Telegraph, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Lewis Carroll Society, Discover, the Skeptical Inquirer, one by James Randi, one by Roger Kimball, a video clip at BoingBoing, and several items at Scientific American (inc. a contribution by Douglas Hofstadter).

Here's an older article from the Wall Street Journal (last April 2) and an interview of Gardner by Alex Bellos.

Update (May 26, 2010): More tributes to Gardner are being tracked here (in English & Spanish).

Quite the brouhaha in the National Interest

John Gray and A. C. Grayling go toe-to-toe at the National Interest's site. Gray wrote the initial, longer attack piece. Both authors fight dirty. That is, ad hominems all over the place! Indeed, Grayling's rebuttal consists of little else -- I hope he posts a longer rebuttal than the quick one he's offered.

I'm more sympathetic to Gray's position. Grayling, Hitchens and the others take a too simplistic view of religion's historical influence. One example is their neglect of abolitionism's roots, especially in the UK. Even those British philosophers, like Hume, who opposed slavery, tended still to be racist. Their opponents were British writers who appealed to the Biblical notion that we're all equal in the eyes of God.

Gray notes the positive influence of some English philosophers (such as Locke) in promoting toleration and respect for freedom of expression, but he doesn't mention Milton. Is that a deliberate omission? Regardless, while Milton the Puritan likely wouldn't measure up to our current ideals of toleration, he played an important role in their development.

Gray points to the malign influence of 20th-Century atheistic regimes, noting that so far, atheists in power have been illiberal. His approach reminds me of that of Marilynn Robinson. Both authors round up the usual benighted, wannabe rationalists (usually Marxists), document their crimes, and then add: 'Sure, most rationalists will deny that these characters are what they had in mind when talking about reason, but that's the same move that we religious folks make when we disavow the Crusaders. See? How do you like it?'

Some of Gray's points on this score reminded me of Paul Tillich's application of the notion of idolatry to recent history. Tillich itemized the terrors that follow when one's ultimate concern is invested not in a forever transcendent, divine target but, rather, in some finite, wholly immanent object (such as a human leader or the state).

Here's where a point can be made in support of Grayling's side of the debate. Granted, the atheistic rulers of the past century left a sad legacy, but that is because they extended their devotion to a concrete, historical object (such as the state). By contrast, Grayling's more liberal brand of atheism takes as its focus the ideal of reason. Given our inevitable failure to be perfectly rational, to do so is to direct one's trust towards an ever-receding, transcendent ideal (rather than towards any historical figure).

So, many religious and atheistic ideologies of the past were equally dangerous because their trust, loyalty or ultimate concern resided in a concrete, contemporary figure in the government or church instead of in a never wholly manifested ideal (secular reason or an infinite God) that stands forever in judgment of our historical, fallible efforts.

Gray would likely acknowledge something like this point but reiterate that most ideologies, whether religious or atheistic, have an equally sorry track record when put into practice.

On-line philosophy works

In my philosophy classes I try to use on-line readings when possible. It saves students some money and it provides one with a searchable text. There are many sites where these philosophical texts can be found, but they vary in quality (esp. when the texts are translated).

I'm listing here some of the sites with classic texts in philosophy that I like to consult. I won't link to Episteme since, though it has been an excellent resource, that site became corrupted and I haven't heard that it has recovered.

A. Early Modern
First, it appears that the more important philosophical texts in the early modern era are the most widely available on-line. Here are some of the relevant sites:

1. This Marxist site has lots of texts by Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Adam Smith, etc. (They also have works by Heidegger, Carnap, Godel, etc.).

2. This Idaho site has many early modern works, including lots of Locke, Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Latta's translation of Leibniz's Monadology, and works by several of the lesser figures of that period. In fact, the list of texts runs into the 1800's (ending with Schelling). Translations tend to be older, but respectable. I noticed, though, that some of the links are broken.

3. Jonathan Bennett's early modern texts are very helpful, especially for students. Bennett has posted several texts on-line "with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought." Works by the six big early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume) are included, as are works by Adam Smith, Richard Price, Newton, Thomas Reid, Hobbes, Malebranche, Anne Conway, Jonathan Edwards, etc. There are even excerpts from Kant's first Critique and a few texts by John Stuart Mill.

4. Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.

5. Finally, here are the complete works of David Hume.

B. Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard & Nietzsche
As mentioned, some of Immanuel Kant's works are available at the above sites. One can also find a recent translation of the Critique of Pure Reason by George Macdonald Ross. Here is the orginal German version, and here's another copy of Kemp Smith's 1929 translation; this last version includes a "PERL driven search engine." Stephen Palmquist has put together a glossary for this work.

For Hegel, here is a recent translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Terry Pinkard.

Here are some of Kierkegaard's books and several works by Nietzsche.

Walter Kaufmann's lecture, 'Sartre and the Crisis in Morality'.

C. Analytic Philosophy

Much of Bertrand Russell's work is on-line.

Selections from Dewey, James and several philosopher-psychologists (inc. Wundt & Stumpf)
'Scholarly editions of Wittgenstein's works and Nachlass' from the University of Begen's archives, along with many essays about Wittgenstein. Other 0n-line works by Wittgenstein appear in the right menu of the blog 'Methods of Projection'.

Lots of Wilfrid Sellars' works are available, including Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, among other Sellarsian texts and resources. There's also a pdf of Sellars' Notre Dame lectures (of which there's an incomplete audio recording).

The HIST-Analytic site has many papers and books (or parts of books). Many, but not all, are pdf's. There are several selections from works by Mach, Russell, G. F. Stout, Pritchard, Moore, Broad, C. I. Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Ramsey, H. H. Price, Dray, D. C. Williams, Hart, Grice, Rawls, etc. Elsewhere, there's Herbert Spencer's First Principles.

Volumes 1-14 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science are now on-line.

I found the penultimate draft of John Searle's 'Minds, Brains, and Programs'. Many recent on-line papers in the philosophy of mind are linked to at David Chalmers' site.

If I teach formal logic again, I'll consult this Handbook of Modal Logic as well as Ryckman's Logic Works.

D. Ancient & Medieval Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion
I don't teach ancient or medieval philosophy, but here are two good lists of resources (the latter of which includes many links to modern texts on religion as well). Here's a site that has 'Christian classics', including many medieval texts. This Fordham site gathers links to medieval humanities texts.

I'm sure there are lots of other on-line translations of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers' works, but this is a good start. I found only some old translations of Plato (inc. Jowett's translations) via these two sites. And here are some of Jowett's Plato translations for the iphone. I also found W. D. Ross's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. John Holbo has posted his new translation of Plato's Euthyphro, Meno and Book 1 of The Republic.

This site lists more than 200 modern philosophy of religion texts that are on-line (including many books), including some by Tillich and some by William James. Speaking of James, here's his Varieties of Religious Experience. The Mead Project has posted excerpts from some of A. N. Whitehead's books. Whitehead's Religion in the Making is available elsewhere.

Here's a pdf of Ian Ramsey's paper, 'Talking of God: Models, Ancient and Modern'.

At the Alex site you can search by author's name for e-texts in the humanities, including many philosophical works. I'm not sure how widely the searches range -- many of the above sites don't turn up there -- but it does at least locate works that are available on Gutenberg. Also, the University of Adelaide's library has a list of e-texts in the humanities (again with many of the great works in western philosophy) that are accessible via that library and via other sites, too (inc. Gutenberg). Finally, many on-line classic philosophy works can be located at the Online Books Page.

Tillich and Niebuhr interviews

Here's a video of the first part of a talk with Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr is interviewed by Mike Wallace. The Harry Ransom Center (Univ. of Texas at Austin) has a neat lineup of these Mike Wallace interviews from the late 1950's. Other interviewees include Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali, Bennett Cerf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Allen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Fromm, Henry Kissinger, etc., many of whom speak through clouds of cigarette smoke as Wallace puffs away on his sponsor's product.

Tillich on instrumental reason

"… [A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means." (Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, pp. 136-7)

Tillich & Kierkegaard on irony

I knew that Paul Tillich anticipated some of the recent expressions of dissatisfaction with pervasive irony (inspired by David Foster Wallace's critique [pdf]). I finally found the quote. Here it is:

"The word ‘irony’ means that the infinite is superior to any finite concretion and drives beyond to another finite concretion. The ego of the romantic in Schlegel’s sense is free from bondage to the concrete situation. … Romanticism drives beyond any particular actualization of the infinite in a finite situation. Now this romantic irony breaks through the sociological forms, for instance, … the idea of the family, … the political stability, etc. All these forms now become questionable. … [Irony] always says ‘no’ as well to a concrete solution to life’s problems. … But if this happens, then with the loss of concreteness a sense of emptiness sets in. Schlegel had the feeling that by undercutting the forms of life, the beliefs, the ethical ties to family, etc., a situation arises in which there is no content, no obligatory contents. This results in a feeling of emptiness with respect to the meaning of life. … It is this dissatisfaction with any concrete situation, this ironical undercutting of everything, not in terms of a direct revolutionary attack, and not in order to transform reality …, but in terms of questioning, undercutting, etc. …" -- Paul Tillich (History of Christian Thought, pp. 385-6)

Update: Tillich must have been influenced by Kierkegaard's critique of pure irony. Here are some relevant passages (with citations at end of post):

'In irony, however, since everything is shown to be vanity, the subject becomes free. The more vain everything becomes, all the lighter, emptier, and volatilized the subject becomes.' (pp. 258-8)

'[Pure] irony is no longer directed against this or that particular phenomenon, against a particular existing thing, but … the whole of existence has become alien to the ironic subject and the ironic subject in turn alien to existence, that as actuality has lost its validity for the ironic subject, he himself has to a certain degree become unactual.' (p. 259)

'In order for the acting individual to be able to accomplish his task by fulfilling actuality, he must feel himself integrated in a larger context, must feel the earnestness of responsibility, must feel and respect every reasonable consequence. Irony is free from this. It knows it has the power to start all over again if it so pleases; anything that happened before is not binding.' (p. 279)

'Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has.' (p. 285)

All quotes are from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates (ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong [Princeton University Press, 1989]); quotes are taken from Brad Frazier, ‘Kierkegaard on the Problems of Pure Irony’ Journal of Religious Ethics, 32 (2004): 417-47.