UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Wednesday, 2 September 2015 at 2.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR DERMOT MORAN on 2 September 2015, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on KARSTEN HARRIES
President, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen,
I am very pleased and honoured to introduce to you Professor Karsten Harries, Howard H. Newman Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Karsten Harries was born in Jena, Germany, in 1937, and witnessed at first hand the catastrophic end of the Second World War as a seven-year-old boy in Berlin. His father, a physicist, moved the family to the USA, where Karsten studied at Yale University, receiving his B.A. in 1958 and his Ph.D in 1962 with a thesis on the meaning of modern art, directed by George Schrader. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (1963 -1965) before returning to Yale in 1966 as Associate Professor. He has been full Professor of Philosophy at Yale since 1970 and held the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy before the present position. He has held many visiting professorships including the University of Bonn (1965-1966; 1968-1969) and he was a Guggenheim fellow (1971-1972). Harries’ publications include The Meaning of Modern Art, 1967; The Bavarian Rococo Church, 1983; The Broken Frame. Washington, 1989; edited, with Jamme, Christoph. Martin Heidegger: Kunst, Politik, Technik. Fink Verlag, 1992, English, Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994; The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, Infinity and Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; Art Matters. A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” , 2009, and Wahrheit: Die Architektur der Welt (2012). Karsten, a native German speaker, is best known as an interpreter of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and indeed was one of the select few invited to contribute to Heidegger’s Festschrift. Professor Harries was one of the first to challenge Martin Heidegger’s intellectual relationship with National Socialism and has commented critically on Heidegger’s notorious rectoral address of 1933 where he aligned Freiburg university with the National Socialist cause. Harries was also one of the first to compare critically Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language as providing the canopy of our world, something later taken up by Richard Rorty. In opposition to Wittgenstein, Harries shows that Heidegger is a proponent of the inadequacy of everyday language and of the necessity for poetry to keep up a space for meaning. Harries is particularly interested in Heidegger’s reflections on the meaning and status of art in the age of technology. Does art still speak to us today? In a related domain, he is deeply interested in the relation between the sacred and profane and is a world expert on German regional Church architecture, specifically the Bavarian Rococo church. He has also pioneered the growing new area of the philosophy of architecture. He is one of the world’s foremost theorists of contemporary architecture and is internationally known for his contribution to architectural theory. In 2007 Yale University’s School of Architecture, in recognition of Harries’ work in this area, awarded him the degree of Master of Environmental Design. He has a dedicated Festschrift in his honour, “Heaven and Earth: Festschrift to Honor Karsten Harries,” a special issue of International Journal of Architectural Theory in 2007.
Professor Karsten Harries is a frequent visitor to UCD for more than 25 years since early 1990s. He has commented on Newgrange in his Ethical Function of Architecture and has been a regular visitor to the West of Ireland. He served as the NUI Extern Examiner in Philosophy from 1992-1996. This demanding role involved travel to the NUI universities in Dublin, Maynooth and Galway examining undergraduate and graduate degree work in philosophy. Harries was invited to deliver the sixth UCD Millennium Lectures in 2000 on “Technology and Art on the Threshold of the Third Millennium” in Newman House. Most recently, he gave the keynote address at a Philosophy conference in Newman House, May 2013. Indeed just yesterday, he led a seminar on the current state of philosophy at the International Center for Newman Studies in UCD.
Professor Harries has been generous in assisting UCD graduates to gain postgraduate studies places at Yale. I was a Teaching Assistant for Professor Harries at Yale University in the 1970s and he was my doctoral advisor. Indeed he has continued to be my mentor and, regrettably, he has had to write his fair share of references for me over the past 40 years. Indeed Harries has the distinction of having the most PhD students in Philosophy in the USA. In the spirit of intellectual generosity that so typifies him, he is currently putting up all his lectures, all fully written on, on the Yale server available for all to download. These lectures have enthralled generations of students at Yale and it is wonderful to have them available publicly on the internet.
Professor Harries also has close intellectual collaborations with internationally renowned architects including the Irish-born, UCD-graduate Kevin Roche, who practice is located in New Haven Connecticut, and who designed, for example, the Convention Centre that has transformed the Dublin docklands.
Karsten Harries is something of a Renaissance man. Besides being a renowned philosopher and expert in architectural theory, he is an accomplished artist working with pastels and oil paintings and recently had an exhibition of his work at the Yale Whitney Humanities Center. For Karsten, art is the concrete complement to the abstractness of philosophy.
He is also an expert mushroom forager and identifier. It is not everyone’s experience as a graduate student that you would be required to sup with Karsten at his home in Hamden (where he invited all his grad students and they were required to read chapters of their dissertations to the other assembled students). He would experiment on us with his latest mushroom finds – as you know the most poisonous mushrooms usually look remarkably like the most edible ones! So one quickly learned that the relation of student to supervisor has to be one of supreme trust! Karsten has three children. His son Martin in Professor of English at UC Irvine. I should mention his longterm partner, his wife Elizabeth Langhorne, who is a professor of Art and a leading expert on the work Jackson Pollock who is in the audience today. Karsten and Elizabeth travel together and spends their free time in the beloved retreat of Vieques, a small island in Puerto Rico, and tending to their vegetable garden in their home in Hamden, Connecticut, which has been a haven to Yale graduate students over the years. I think Professor Harries is living witness as to how to live the philosophical life and it is most fitting that we honour him today.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.