Most people know Bill Gass as a writer of fiction and essays, but I knew him first in my life as a philosopher; my colleague, who taught philosophy here for many years. What kind of philosopher was he?, you may ask. That is a question that can’t be readily answered in terms of schools of philosophy or ideologies. However, I can say that Bill received his PhD in philosophy at Cornell in the 1950s; and when he studied there, Cornell was a center of analytic philosophy. The term is ambiguous; but at that place in that time, it would have meant something like ‘the precise logical analysis of sentences or propositions, in either ordinary language or the more formal contexts of science or math’. And, in fact, Bill told me once that he always thought of himself as an analytic philosopher. I think that, as a philosopher of literature and language, that is what he always was. But I also think that his construal of what counts as the careful analysis of language evolved over time into a broader and more distinctive view than that of the analytic philosophers from his graduate school days.
You can see clues to that evolution in some of Bill’s remarks on other philosophers and the ways theydid philosophy; notably, the infamous Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was in residence for a brief period at Cornell. Here is Bill’s impression of him: “old, unsteady, queerly dressed … he struck me as some kind of atheistical, vegetarian nut … but when he got to teaching the philosophy of science or the foundations of mathematics,” Bill said, Wittgenstein “was absolutely brilliant.” But I think that, for Bill, philosophical brilliance encompassed more than sheer logical rigor. As he put it, while Aristotle’s reasoning can be quite dazzling, he just doesn’t have Plato’s style or panache. So much the worse for Aristotle, we might think, since it is partly by way of Plato’s dialogue-style, that a great mind is revealed; one that uses a literary form expertly to get his philosophical ideas across.
More directly to the point of the development of Bill’s own thought, it’s important to note that he came to part ways with his dissertation director at Cornell, Max Black. The topic of Bill’s dissertation was metaphor; and as a major exponent of analytic philosophy in what might be called the classical sense, Black did not hold metaphor in high regard, particularly when it was used in philosophy, science or math. “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black wrote, is to belittle him … like praising a logician for his handwriting.” That is, they are decorative, at best.
Bill, on the other hand, had a more expansive view of the nature and value of metaphor, both in language and in life. He came to think, in fact, that there could be non-linguistic metaphors. “Metaphor has been thought to be the pet of language” he said “… but you can make metaphors just by juxtaposing objects.” If so, then metaphor may be more philosophically important than Black believed. To see this, consider two ideas that emerged during Bill’s 30 year career, which suggest how his views resonated with the history of philosophy since 1955.
One idea is that is that our thoughts and memories have a narrative form. We understand objects and events by telling stories in which they appear. And metaphors play essential roles in the narratives, especially bodily metaphors like ‘she was a rock, reliable in every way.’ If it is true, as Bill says, that objects can be arranged metaphorically, then surely thoughts aboutthose objects might have metaphorical dimensions as well, as this theory maintains. More than that, perhaps thinking itself is like juxtaposing objects: “I was forced to think,” Scott Fitzgerald once said. “It was very difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks,” putting some next to others where they may have never before been.
The second idea is that, sometimes thinking and remembering depend on visual imagery; i.e. mental pictures, in some sense of the word. Bill’s idea that there can be metaphorical objects suggests that mental images – and not just concepts or sentences in the language of thought – can function metaphorically, too, since pictures preserve the key features of what they represent. This is an ancient idea, but it gained new life in the 80s and 90s, fueled by psychological research.
Both of these issues were of great interest to me when I came here, some thirty years ago. So I was very keen to talk about them with Bill. One night on my first visit to campus, he drove me around after dinner to see the sights of the city, and we stopped in front of the art museum. There was a little fog, the façade of the museum and the fountains in the lake were all lighted up. It was a beautiful scene. We sat there, under the words, “dedicated to art” and talked about the philosophy of art and literature. Fresh out of graduate school at Columbia University, I remember thinking, well, maybe St. Louis isn’t so far from New York after all!
Over the years after that, I occasionally sat in on some of Bill’s classes on subjects such as ‘the sentence,’ or ‘the paragraph.’ Bill said that, in his classes, he always aimed at “the clearest possible orderly expression of ideas.” It was intriguing to me see how he did that using images and metaphors; analytic philosophy done with panache.
When the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program was developed here, Bill was, I think, generally supportive. (Although he liked to refer to artificial intelligence as artificial insemination, the meaning of the metaphor being pretty clear). But one day at a department meeting, an unfortunate event occurred. As part of a sweeping effort to clean up and rationalize the curriculum in philosophy (modernizethe department, to use one historian’s term), a faculty committee had made recommendations that left Bill’s class in philosophy of literature out. At the meeting where the changes were discussed, Bill made some angry and eloquent remarks about the disrespect that this implied for literature and for his broader view of analytic philosophy; and he stormed out of the room, never, really to return again. Philosophy’s loss, the writer center’s gain; but in itself a metaphorical moment in the history of philosophy in which passion and poetic indignation carried the day. I will miss the philosophical conversations I still occasionally had with Bill after that over the years. They were for me always an exercise in trying to reason with style.
Mark Rollins delivered these remarks as part of William H. Gass: His Life and Legacy, a memorial at Washington University that took place on April 6, 2018.
