DEVIN CURRY

Closing my eyes, I can conjure a fairly clear picture of the kitchen at 51 Leroy Street, as it looked in the year 2002. (There’s a gap between the linoleum flooring of the kitchen and the hardwood of the family room. The gap bothers my parents; to me it feels like home.) I’m thirteen years old and sitting at the table after dinner. My brother is sixteen, skinny legs dangling off the kitchen island. Dad is standing with his back to us, wearing a faded band t-shirt, washing dishes at the sink. We’re arguing about aesthetic relativism again.

Let’s say that, this time around, the particular topic is whether all 90s/00s pop music is drivel, or whether Bob Dylan’s voice is objectively good, or whether Clerks is an inferior movie to Unforgiven. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the topic, Dad is defending the idea that there are absolute standards of artistic accomplishment—standards that “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” exceeds and that “Bootylicious” doesn’t come close to meeting. Galen and I are having a great time ridiculing that idea and our dad’s steadfast support for it. “It obviously depends on what people like,” we stress, “and different people obviously like different things.” Dad’s having a good time too, but he’s also a bit annoyed. We’re not getting the point.

At the time, I thought his only point was that we were wrong. I thought that Dad was taking an absolutist stance because he was a Platonist (I had a very dim idea of what that meant, but I knew I thought it was silly) who believed in timeless objective facts about which things are Good and which things are Bad. I thought, in other words, that he was an aesthetic ideologue, earnestly but misguidedly committed to what he saw as the one pure Truth of the matter. He wasn’t. I was, indeed, missing the point. That’s not to say that Dad didn’t believe in the objective greatness of Bob Dylan. He did. But he wasn’t arguing with us in order to defend the truth, not directly anyway. He was arguing in order to educate Galen and I—to help us become better thinkers and (relatedly!) better people.

Dad was (a bit) annoyed, not because our aesthetic opinions were False, but because our relativism was so unsubtle—because we were (once again) failing to think through its pitfalls and to take seriously reasons in favor of believing in objective aesthetic standards. The lazy relativism we were endorsing entailed that Chopin (or “Choppin’”, as we pronounced it when we wanted to bug Dad) was objectively no more talented a pianist than Billy Joel, that Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths were objectively no better wrought than Dan Brown’s. The point we were supposed to get was that this unrefined variety of relativism was intellectually untenable—and thus that we should think harder about what we believed. That intellectual work might have led us to absolutism (and, if so, hopefully to a subtler version of absolutism than the one I inaccurately ascribed to Dad at the time), but it also might have led us to shore up our relativism. He genuinely didn’t care what we believed, so long as we believed on the basis of good reasons, articulated (and continually rearticulated) through careful reflection and frequent reexamination.

Dad has always taken a similar approach to giving us advice on what we do with our lives. He genuinely doesn’t care which career paths or relationships we pursue, or generally how we spend our time, so long as we act on the basis of good reasons, articulated (and continually rearticulated) through careful reflection and frequent reexamination.

* * *

Dad is a rare kind of human being: someone whose life is structured by an ethical project, as opposed to either a lack of serious ethical concern or a rigid ethical ideology. (I’m actually blessed to have two such parents, but Mom isn’t retiring yet, so that tangent will have to wait.) Dad’s parenting, teaching, scholarship, administrative work and rabble rousing have all been carried out as part and parcel of his ethical project—his life’s work in the fullest sense—of striving to be the most thoughtful person and citizen he can, and of striving to help others become the most thoughtful people and citizens they can, in a polis that he strives to improve and protect.

He would never be so grandiose as to say such a thing about himself. Not in those words. But he doesn’t have to. Because he is sufficiently grandiose to say such a thing about Socrates.

In an as-yet-unpublished essay about whether Socrates was a supporter of democracy or oligarchy, Dad characterizes the snub-nosed, pot-bellied Athenian as an ethical and political exemplar. Socrates should be emulated, not in spite of the fact that he (avowedly) possessed no moral knowledge, but because he responded to his moral ignorance with epistemic humility. Given his lack of moral knowledge, Socrates refused to adopt a firm moral or political ideology. But that lack of ideology didn’t preclude clarity of moral purpose: Socrates, as every student of my dad’s will surely recall, chose death over retirement. (Don’t worry—Dad isn’t retiring from philosophy in the relevant sense. Like Socrates, he couldn’t even if he wanted to.) Nor did humility keep Socrates from acting. As Dad puts it:

Socrates is not the withdrawn Epicurean. He is actively engaged in the life of the city, in politics, albeit in non-traditional ways. He quite actively sought the moral improvement of himself and his fellow citizens one-on-one and face-to-face...in honest argument devoid of the trappings of force and power. He certainly does not remain quiet. Indeed, it proves impossible to shut him up.

You could replace “Socrates” with “David Curry” and it wouldn’t alter that passage’s truth-value.

* * *

As with Socrates, it wouldn’t be quite right to say that Dad doesn’t suffer fools, full stop. He’s actually quite happy to suffer harmless fools, from his own children espousing aesthetic relativism to the guy who wants to argue about theodicies at the bus station. Indeed, he excelled as a teacher not just because he brought out the best in his best students (i.e., the ones who have contributed to this festschrift), but also because he found ways to connect with many comparatively foolish students (face-to-face, and often one-on-one).

But Dad is infamous (in some quarters) for not suffering fools whose foolishness threatens to harm the things he treasures. Without getting into the details, I can personally attest that he was (ahem) never unwilling to chew out people (teachers, basketball coaches, cops) whose foolishness wronged one of his kids. (If you ever get the chance, mention his name to one of Tess’s high school boyfriends.) More publicly, here’s the conclusion of a book review he wrote in 1992, towards the beginning of his career. (I was three years old, and fondly remember falling asleep every night to the melodic mix of a Choppin’ sonata paired with Dad’s computer keyboard clickety-clacking as he wrote in the tiny office next to the bedroom I shared with Galen.)

Perhaps the fairest evaluation to make of Desiring Theology is that it is reassuringly postmodern. It fulfills one’s expectations. If, then, one enjoys reading sloppy history of philosophy, conclusions based on little or no argument, trivialities posed as profundities, and Nietzsche and Sartre selectively interpreted and dressed out in impenetrable prose, one should enjoy this text.

And here he is in the Chronicle of Higher Education just last year. (I was thirty-five, reading his piece on my phone while trying to get his grandkids to sleep so I could do some clickety-clacking of my own.)

That decline in funding combined with the pandemic-era enrollment declines created the perfect opportunity for authoritarian administrators to impose their increasingly corporate visions of higher education onto their institutions. While faculty and staff members scrambled to educate their students during a pandemic, administrators sharpened their knives, shamelessly seizing the opportunity to gut programs, the faculty, and faculty governance.

Harmless foolishness is fine, even to be encouraged insofar as it can be a step towards wisdom. But come for truth, goodness, beauty, the liberal arts tradition, or respectable readings of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and you’ll have to reckon with the estimable ire of David C. K. Curry. That last one sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t. Dad considers the strand of postmodernism represented by Desiring Theology and its ilk to pose a significant threat both to humanistic understanding and, when it seeps into mainstream political culture, to responsible democratic citizenship. He didn’t pen that snarky review out of pettiness; he wrote it out of a sincere sense of ethical duty.

His beef with postmodernism is not grounded in him claiming to possess the one true reading of Nietzsche (or whatever). Dad is genuinely epistemically humble, countenancing plenty of room for intellectually responsible disagreement­—in scholarship and in politics. He even seemingly respects (which is certainly not to say that he endorses) the variety of relativism that I’ve come to defend in my philosophical writing. What he despises, with Socrates, is sophistry and charlatanism: bullshit wielded in ways detrimental to the ethical flourishing of people and polis.

* * *

Unlike Socrates (see Crito 52b), my dad does love to go on vacation. He has also spent a long career cultivating his capacity for leisure: for immersion in the valuably useless. Retirement—and the time it affords for reading, writing, gaming, cooking, travel, and genealogical sleuthing—will suit him just fine. Though, rest assured, he’ll always find ample occasion to raise hell when his ethical project demands it.