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The end of student activity groups?
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Christian student groups are using the courts to attack the legality of student fees and changing the free speech debate on campus
(03/08/99)

Thong wars
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Pop culture studies turns 25
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When Ray Browne founded the first department to study "Star Trek" semiotics and cartoon aesthetics, he expanded the boundaries of academic study forever
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Vices of the mind
By C.K. McCabe
How Kant blew my mind and changed my life
(03/03/99)

Beyond the bottom line
By Alec Appelbaum
Faced with the unpredictable world of global business, some MBA programs are searching for a new way to teach ethics.
(03/01/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

Jean-François Revel and his son, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, set out to have a spiritual dialogue -- but the cosmic harmony was shattered when Christopher Hitchens showed up.

BY CHRIS COLIN | Philosopher Jean-François Revel, in a plain gray suit and topped with an imposing bald head, crossed a leg in his hotel chair with that great French look -- half auteur, half politician. His 52-year-old son, Matthieu Ricard, sat propped on an elbow on the bed, draped in the rich red robes of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The men exchanged funny smiles, the kind that at once acknowledges nothing and everything about the gulf between their existences. There was a book here, one sensed, before the two even opened their mouths.

The book is "The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life," recently translated into English (and 18 other languages) following enormous success in France. It records 10 days of conversation between the renowned iconoclastic philosopher (author of "Without Marx or Jesus," "A History of Western Philosophy from Thales to Kant" and "Why Philosophers?") and his son, a molecular biologist-turned-monk from an inn high in the mountains of Nepal, overlooking Katmandu. The dialogue -- which collides scholarly rigor with spiritual exploration -- covers all the contemplative bases, from secular ethics to faith, science, activism and even psychoanalysis.

Awaiting a presentation sponsored by Harper's magazine at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism that evening, the two Frenchmen spoke in their hotel room about their U.S. tour. How -- after New York, Boston and San Francisco -- did they like Americans? "It is more important how they like us," Revel laughed, half seriously. Many Americans, the men agreed, appeared to be interested for strange reasons.

"The idea of father and son, the sentimentalities -- in Europe, it doesn't play much. Here it's more important," explained Ricard. In France, he claimed, people buy the book for the ideas. But in America, the familial element steeps the book in either sentimentality or conflict; more compelling than a famous philosopher is the promise of another family drama.

"The [American] reporters always ask the same question: 'How did I feel when my son left for India?'" Revel mused.

But readers looking for drama will ultimately be disappointed. Ricard and Revel present a radical departure from America's archetypal father-son relationships, and anyone hoping for either tension or tender displays of affection will find the book Spartan in this regard.

From their quiet tones and careful manners, it's evident that the two transcended conversations about curfew long ago. They converse more as colleagues than filial relations, patiently allowing each other to speak, and responding with calmness, thought and occasional levity. "Kant was a great thinker, but his style was worse than the [brochures] on United Airlines," quips Revel at one point. "Be careful -- in America you might be sued," Ricard replies.

"Yes, maybe, I hope so."

As an avowed opponent of "totalitarian systems of ideology," Revel was quick to express his wariness of prescriptive, totalistic visions like that of his son's Buddhism. Yet despite fundamental disagreements with Buddhist principles -- "the theoretical background of Buddhist wisdom seems to me unproved and unprovable," he writes -- he concedes that he finds "very striking similarities" between his son's beliefs and "many aspects of Greek philosophy" -- the thinkers who have deeply influenced his worldview.

In contrast, Ricard invokes a down-to-earth ontology, grounding his ethereal, transcendent views in colorful analogies. Pleasure without happiness, he says, is "like a burning match, which has a tendency to consume itself as it burns." Serious but genial, Ricard emanates an air of irreverence that seems to ease the snarl of life discussions.

For all the patience Revel and Ricard have mastered, their conversation had its hitches. Listening to these two men, speaking across religions, across generations, seriously pursuing a common belief in communication, there is a poignant sense of ships passing in the night. No amount of cooperation can reconcile two distinct ideologies at their most radical divergences. No length of discussion can transcend what is, in the end, too many words too vaguely defined. Nothingness, the self, truth -- these concepts simply reverberate within Buddhism and Western philosophy too differently for resolution. One appreciates this book as one appreciates a drop in a bucket.

And then there was the almost-empty bucket as it was presented at the Harper's forum. That evening, Feb. 26, the Berkeley journalism school hosted a panel discussion moderated by Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Revel and Ricard, along with journalist (and Salon contributor) Christopher Hitchens; Rev. Mark Richardson, director of the Center for Theological and Natural Sciences; and J-school dean Orville Schell met before a full crowd of journalism junkies, new agers, skeptics and Lapham lovers to air and examine a few of the book's conversations.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Hitchens speaks his mind and horrifies the mindful