{"id":254,"date":"2017-10-28T18:55:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-28T15:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=254"},"modified":"2025-12-07T20:48:59","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T17:48:59","slug":"remembering-reiner-schurmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/254\/remembering-reiner-schurmann\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Reiner Schurmann"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew Schurmann the author, but I didn’t know Schurmann the teacher. Reading a work about Parmenides and Plato by V. Adluri<\/a>, a student of Schurmann’s, I was surprised by the prologue, which I copy here. I believe that no teacher can have a better honour than this, to generate into the heart of his student such a loving memory. I wish all teachers and students\u00a0were granted such a bliss.<\/p>\n

\"ReinerWhen I came to the New School for Social Research, I came to study under Prof. Reiner Schurmann. My undergraduate mentor, Prof. Joan Stambaugh, was unambiguous in her advice: he was one of the best teachers available. So I began my graduate studies, bright-eyed and bookish, having studied books as mainstream as Plato’s Dialogues and as esoteric (for an undergraduate, 15 years ago) as Heidegger’s very late works. I was registered for Prof. Schurmann’s lectures on medieval philosophy. I was armed with the books, ta biblia, but quite unaware that these would be inadequate to any future biography of mine. Although publicly Prof. Schurmann was name-tagged the “Heidegger man,” (a classic case of missing the forest for the trees), what he taught me had nothing to do with bibliographic Wege.<\/p>\n

When I first saw him in class, I was shocked. He was frail, emaciated even, but robust in his speech and brilliant in his eyes. He was awesome in a daemonic way, and although easy to respect, few could truly love him. Although I took copious notes, no philosophical questions occurred to me. I dutifully read all the recommended books, and submitted shamelessly clever papers. Yet I sat uneasily in class, fearing the time when the retrovirus would defeat so great a man. He incarnated all the tele of a graduate student: he was an accomplished teacher, an admired scholar, and a respected thinker. He seemed invincible, yet I knew this virus very well. It had already deleted many of the best men I knew.<\/p>\n

It is hard to say which came first: my love for him or the fearful knowledge of his ever-present mortality. But both seemed somehow to feed on each other. When I saw him in his office and later outside campus, we never talked about “ideas.” And when I went back to Plato’s dialogues, the comfort food for philosophers, their epistemological pretenses deconstructed themselves. I began to see Socrates the man, condemned to die as Reiner was, and I could no longer believe in the seriousness of the “theory of forms.” The everlasting landscape of the topos noetos, with its immortal, perfect forms, now mocked all men, especially the one I loved. Within the deadly isolation of the epidemic, my subculture learned the lesson of survival learned long ago by the children of Israel: believe in your community. My community was metaphorically and actually the community of mortals.<\/p>\n

The Platonic dialogues, I learnt through my association with Reiner, do not “immortalize” Socrates; they preserve the ephemeral – his mortal face. By etching the immortal forms onto Socrates’ perishable body, Plato accuses the forms of their impotence and their irrelevance. Yet, tragically, he also proves their indispensability. Scholars now debate whether Socrates was a character in Plato’s dialogue and whether he was just a mouth-piece for the younger man’s philosophy. To them, I say: no more accurate, more moving, more personal and more complete a biography was ever written. Is it historically accurate? Or is the dialogue mere fiction? I try to show in my work that history and true accounts only produce bibliographies – biography requires preserving the individual, the lover, the mortal, and the singular. The body of this dissertation will not mention Reiner’s name on every page, but it is his biography in this fundamental sense. Of course, he would have written it better, but I claim with a certain pride that no “historian” could have done a better job. The life and loss of each one of us is neither as bas(e)ic as a fact nor as capricious as fiction. …<\/p>\n

Hardly had Reiner passed away, when Reiner’s “philosophy” – i.e. his bibliography, not his biography – supplanted him as a cheap idol (Greek eidolon) would. In one seminar, I was amazed to hear this ultimate condemnation of the man he was: “nice guy, but influenced by an errant philosophy.” Though provable bibliographically (its opposite can also be proven by more careful readers; facts can be used in any way), biographically this is wrong on three counts. Reiner was not a “nice” guy. He was mercilessly intolerant of pretension and just about as polite as Socrates. In terms of “influence,” his philosophical praxis consisted solely of the discovery of cracks in all foundations. Reiner was less susceptible to other philosophies than Socrates was to Alcibiades. The term anarchy, which has many levels of meanings for him except the most obvious one, also means the susceptibility of all “influences” to critical questioning. Finally, errant philosophy is a sword that cuts both ways: as soon as a philosophy becomes conspicuously errant, such as Heidegger’s is alleged to be, it begins to teach even greater and subtler philosophical lessons.<\/p>\n

Biographically, Reiner taught me the difference between particularity and singularity. In his writing, he claims the difference as follows: “…death as mine temporalizes phenomena because it is absolutely singular. But the singular cannot be treated as the determinate negation of the universal; the contrary opposite of the universal is the particular. It takes a neglect of the persistent tie between time and the singular, a tie signified to me by my death, to append these conflictual strategies to the list, long since Antiquity, of terms that are mutually exclusive within a genus and jointly exhaustive of it.” For Reiner, interested in the public sphere, the singular was a tool to demonstrate the illegitimacy of univocally binding “phantasms,” such as totalitarianism. For me, interested in Reiner, the singular was happily the object of love, tragically the object of death, and ultimately, the face and fate of all phusis.<\/p>\n

Knowing Reiner in his last days was nothing more and nothing less than what walking with Socrates must have been for Phaedrus. In one way or another, all shadows of the immortals that covered up the mortal singular – be it the city, hyperurania, philosophical and erotic genera – fell away from my eyes like scales falling off the eyes of a blinded man. No more generalizing philosophy for me in the style of Lysias! Like Parmenides (I argue), no matter how seductive the realm of eternal, simple being may be, we must return to our pluralistic mortal cosmos, where singulars are possible. In my thesis, which is a continuation of the journey I began with Reiner, I extend his notion of mortality to redefine (if definition is even possible in the realm of singulars) human beings and phusis in terms of mortal temporality.<\/p>\n

Reiner Schurmann was born of German parents in Amsterdam in 1941. He received his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1981 and was Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Among many other awards for his scholarship and writing, he received the Distinguished University Teacher Award in 1989. He wrote a seminal work on Heidegger and, just before his death in 1993, completed the two-volume Broken Hegemonies, a study of the imposition of the universal on the singular throughout the history of philosophy.<\/p>\n

Cf<\/em>. Adluri on Parmenides and the Transcendence<\/a>, The Man Without a Face<\/a>, Plato Home Page<\/a>, Meeting Meister Eckhart<\/a> (featuring Schurmann’s book on Meister Eckhart<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew Schurmann the author, but I didn’t know Schurmann the teacher. Reading a work about Parmenides and Plato by V. Adluri, a student of Schurmann’s, I was surprised by the prologue, which I copy here. I believe that no teacher can have a better honour than this, to generate into the heart of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,9,4],"tags":[3283,813,1631,1632,363,1633,1634,453,1636,452,44,1635],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-europe","category-plato","tag-adluri","tag-heidegger","tag-joan-stambaugh","tag-medieval-philosophy","tag-parmenides","tag-philosophical-questions","tag-prof-schurmann","tag-reiner-schurmann","tag-scholar","tag-schurmann","tag-socrates","tag-teacher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}