fmdolan

fmdolan

After earning my Ph.D. at Princeton in 1987 I began teaching at UC Berkeley, in the Department of Rhetoric – then something of a wildlife preserve that sheltered scholars in many fields including literature, film, intellectual history, law, politics, and sociology as well as philosophy. Thanks partly to that I’ve worked on a variety of topics over the years, from political and moral philosophy to philosophy of art, philosophy of mind, hermeneutics, and American politics and culture. I’m a strong believer in liberal education and the study of the great books of the Western canon but I also have an abiding (but very sketchy) interest in the religion, art, and literature of India, China, and Japan (only in translation, sadly). Among the mighty dead, thinkers I’ve found especially compelling include Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Arendt.

With regard to spiritual life, I was brought up in Catholicism but now find Protestantism more congenial. In my teens I had some experiences that, thanks to Richard Bucke, I identified as “cosmic consciousness,” and I tried to make sense of them by listening to Alan Watts on KPFK and spending time in Los Angeles at the Zen Center (founded by Taizan Maezumi Roshi) and the Vedanta Temple as well as the Ramakrishna Monastery in Trabuco Canyon, which is not far from where I grew up (both were founded by Swami Vivekananda with the involvement of British expats Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley). I came closest to finding an articulation of “cosmic consciousness” as I experienced it in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who strikes me a paradigm of what it means to be a human being and what it means to be an American. Over the years my relationship to this sphere of life became mainly intellectual and conceptual, but recently I had a wholly unexpected experience of a divine presence that rekindled my desire to connect to the experiential aspects of spiritual life.