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PROFESSOR FRANK CIOFFI
Professor Frank Cioffi was well known among Freud scholars for his subtle criticism of Freud and among philosophers for his profound exploration of less well known aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. This is often to be found in papers he sadly had not enough time to collect, as in his superb ‘Wittgenstein And The Riddle Of Life’ published in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s The Third Wittgenstein 2004. He was born in New York City on January 11 1928 and died on January 1st 2011. His forbears came from Vico Equense (Vico’s birthplace) a fishing village near Sorrento. He was the son of Salvatore and Melina Cioffi. His mother had died giving birth to him and Frank recalled that his father had so adored her that he could not bear to see him and he was brought up by his grandfather’s second wife, his step-grandmother, whom he always called his mother and whose son Lou (his uncle) he always regarded as an elder brother. His father died shortly after his mother. Both his parents had lost their mothers in childbirth. Frank was deeply struck by Schopenhauer’s view that all life is bought at the expense of other life, while never accepting Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of pessimism. He also prized Pascal’s reflections on the miseries of human life. Like Santayana, whom he admired, he had enjoyed a catholic upbringing, but lost his faith.
Frank’s schooling was in New York City. His ‘brother’ served in the U S army in Europe in World War 2 and Frank, at the age of seventeen, tried to get into the marines. He eventually entered the army and was with the occupying forces in Japan. He loved his period in the army and was grateful for the opportunity to meet such a diversity of people with all of whom he seems to have got on well. He then had a spell with the graves registration service supervising the repatriation of bodies, from France to the U.S. of servicemen killed in the war. He next spent some time in Paris, where he attended lectures for foreigners at the Sorbonne, and met an old friend from New York, James Baldwin, with whom he discussed the then work in progress Go Tell It On The Mountain. Another friend, Lionel Blue, persuaded Frank to try to get into Oxford, assisted by finance from the G I bill of rights. After a spell at Ruskin College, Frank entered the newly founded St Catherine’s where a friendly Allan Bullock helped him to negotiate his way through the various university requirements. He was tutored in the philosophy part of PPP by Friedrich Waismann and Anthony Quinton. After the award of his degree in 1954, he spent two years researching in Social Psychology at Oxford with Michael Argyle. From 1956 to 1965 he was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Singapore. When he, along with other foreigners in the faculty, was asked to resign, the senate passed a resolution deeply regretting his departure. He came to England as one of the founders of the new University of Kent in 1965.
As was the case with other new universities at the time, Kent was inventing new combinations of studies in an attempt to overcome too early specialism. Part One, which lasted four terms initially, consisted of a course on Britain and The Contemporary World, where students had to do a combination of literature, history and philosophy. Frank Cioffi’s wonderful introductory lectures on philosophy and on the problem of The Meaning of Life induced many students who did not know the subject to take it in Part Two. His lectures were always meticulously prepared, but, like those of the William James and Wittgenstein whom he so greatly admired, were not read but were delivered spontaneously. Often they were applauded at the end and, where the time table permitted, students asked him to continue. He had a marvellous gift for enlivening his lectures with jokes, anecdotes, historical digressions and references to film and popular culture without ever detracting from their intellectual content and fundamental seriousness. When he was offered a professorship and the chance to found a department of his own at the University of Essex, a group of teachers and students in the humanities went to the Dean of the faculty and the Vice Chancellor asking that he be given a professorship at Kent so we would not lose him. But without success. So he went off to found an extremely successful philosophy department at the University of Essex. He had been visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley from 1970 to 1972 and had spells at Appalachian State University and the Australian National University. After his retirement from Essex in 1994, he came back to live in the house in Canterbury that he and his wife Nalini had always loved. He became an Honorary Research Professor at the University of Kent.
Frank Cioffi’s range of reading in his own subject and in literature and history was extraordinary. He defended Oxford analytic philosophy, but he also was acquainted with the world of Franz Brentano, Husserl and phenomenology. He revered William James and George Santayana and much admired the work of Georg Simmel, particularly the latter’s essay ‘On The Nature of Philosophy.’ He himself had highly original things to say, but often did so by way of reflections on the two figures of whom he made a particularly intense study, Wittgenstein and Freud. In 1973 he delivered, on the BBC Third Programme, a path-breaking lecture ‘Was Freud a Liar?’, which was reprinted in The Listener for 7th February 1974, and in his wonderful collection Freud And The Question Of Pseudoscience published by Open Court in 1998. Cioffi refined his criticism of Freud over the years. He came to feel there had been too much emphasis (partly owing to Popper’s work) on Freud the pseudo scientist and not enough on Freud the weak humanist. Later critics of Freud such as Frederick Crews, Allen Esterson and Malcolm Macmillan always acknowleged their deep indebtedness to Frank.
Frank Cioffi’s metier was the public lecture and the essay rather than the organic book. In 1998, his collection of essays on Wittgenstein and related subjects was published by Cambridge University Press under the title Wittgenstein On Freud And Frazer. He was always deeply concerned with what Wittgenstein had to offer the humanities, psychology, aesthetics, music and religion, and in particular with Wittgenstein’s hostility to causal explanation and to scientism, and his preoccupation with solipsism. See, in particular, the paper ‘‘Congenital Transcendentalism and ‘The Loneliness which is the Truth about Things’’’. The latter phrase is slightly adapted from a thought which occurs to James Ramsay at the beginning of chapter 12 of part 3 of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Cioffi thought that solipsism is often confused with something different (and not nonsensical) an essential community in loneliness which Arnold captured in the line ‘We mortal millions live alone’.
Frank Cioffi was, as the phrase goes, ‘much preoccupied with death’. He shared Larkin’s view in ‘Aubade’ that there is something specious in Lucretius’ arguments against the fear of annihilation, but he shared the Lucretian view that annihilation is nothing to be feared and could not understand his revered Dr Johnson’s refusal to accept this. At the end he was working on a paper on responses to atrocity, in particular to the Holocaust or Shoah. The following is from a draft. ‘The situation is one in which we anticipate from some future state of epistemic consummation not merely the resolution of our perplexity as to what it is that troubles us, but closure, whereas what keeps the thoughts flowing is not ignorance but ambivalence, and what will put them at peace is not a discovery, but a decision. The guilt of the living towards the dead, for example, needs to be exorcised and not merely acknowledged. As J.C. Powys puts it, ‘You are allowed to forget’’. His friends and readers will not forget Frank Cioffi as long as they live
Not till those grieving die
Will Grief be dead.
He is survived by his wife Nalini and his step-grandson, Luke.
(Compiled by Frank Cioffi (nephew), Edward Greenwood and Laurence Goldstein)
IN MEMORY OF THE PHILOSOPHER FRANK CIOFFI by Edward Greenwood
(Died January 1st 2012)
You liked to lift an appraising eye
To where dull roofs met duller sky.
Not for you the shuttered street,
The noonday heat,
The pine-fringed bays,
The tourists sipping wine in smart cafes.
Rather some drab coffee bar,
Coffee and ash from your cigar
Mingling in a stain,
The world outside dissolved in rain.
If poets are aged eagles at forty two
Let the old philosopher speak true
For he is a wise evening bird
Who must be heard.
On Death, you’d steer
Between Lucretius’ calm and Larkin’s fear.
Epicurus’ specious cure
Would not work for him for sure!
He felt all must see
That nothing’s worse than not to be.
Deft in analysis, your mind deployed
An acumen that quite destroyed
The devious stratagems of Freud,
And left annoyed
The faithful crew
Who still maintained his theories were true.
You were able to unite
Heidegger’s darkness, Ryle’s dry light,
Brought to Wittgenstein
A mind incomparably fine.
‘Into the dark’ the poet said,
All humankind must join the dead,
Plato, Hume and Kant and Nietzsche
There is no creature
Whom death will spare
From the fate all mortals share,
The fate you did not fear,
Whether far, or whether near.
You’d long made your peace
With knowing that your life must cease.