Heroes Not Zombies

I have a habit of buying the Guardian on a Thursday. It’s the Technology section that attracts me but I usually enjoy the whole paper. Do you ever read obituaries? I don’t often but I really should make a point of doing so more often. Reading an obituary of Hans Georg Gadamer in the Japan Times a few years ago completely changed my understanding of health and opened the doors for me to a mysterious and previously unexplored (by me) section of the bookstores – philosophy.

Today I read the obituary of Norman Cohn. No, I’d never heard of him either. He died aged 92 and this phrase was the first one in the obituary to catch my eye –

as a lecturer in French at Glasgow University (1946-51), he embarked on the studies that would make his reputation, despite having no formal training as an historian. Indeed, his very unorthodoxy may account for the originality of his insights.

Isn’t that such a great insight? How often does “formal training” and orthodoxy crush innovation and originality? The subject of his studies and publications was the recurrent myths which continue to underpin the demonisation and destruction of whole groups of people.

As Cohn himself pointed out, all his work was fundamentally concerned with the study of the same phenomenon: “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil”.

This statement by writer, Richard Webster, really grabbed my attention –

The key to his extraordinary achievement perhaps lay in the fact that in his own life the personal and political were never severed, and matters of the heart were as important to him as matters of the head

Here was a man who obviously lived in a holistic passionate and highly individualistic way. His first wife, Vera, who he married in 1941, was

daughter of Menshevik revolutionaries, who had previously lived in a ménage à trois with Raoul Hausmann, one of the founders of Dada.

She died aged 96 and he subsequently married for a second time. Richard Webster, writes –

When I last met him in December 2004, he was genial, hospitable, radiant with his recent marriage to her and looking forward to a late honeymoon in Provence during which he would celebrate his 90th birthday.

And concludes

His greatness will always reside in the manner he combined deep scholarship with a passionate zest for life.

Wow! Is this an inspirational life, or what?