Bob Solomon and Kathleen Higgins’ ‘80s Love Story
Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins have a more-or-less typical love story — it’s just that Nietzsche was their matchmaker. Solomon joined the faculty of UT Austin’s Department of Philosophy in 1972 and Higgins joined a decade later. Over the course of a few years in the early ‘80s, their academic collaboration grew into the love of a lifetime, one that animated both their scholarship and their writing. And while Solomon passed away in 2007, for Higgins, it still does.
Solomon originally planned to become a doctor, enrolling in medical school at the University of Michigan. But when he audited a philosophy course taught by Frithjof Bergmann, Solomon’s plans changed.
“The story he always told about leaving medical school was that he was skipping anatomy class to attend existentialism lectures,” recalls Higgins. “He had an idealistic vision of helping people, but medical school was mainly nuts-and-bolts and he found his classmates’ attitudes uninspiring. One day, Bergmann talked about Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ — the idea that time repeats itself in an infinite loop — and the prospect of living the same life over and over again exactly as it is. Bob thought ‘I have to get out of medical school!’”
That wasn’t Solomon’s only motivation to change course. He lived, as he put it, “under a medical death sentence,” diagnosed as a baby with a genetic heart defect that doctors estimated would give him, at most, ten years to live. The ten-year prognosis rolled over through his 64-year life. “The idea that he could be gone at any moment was always with him, and I can’t imagine that didn’t impact why he thought about these matters. It may also have been why he considered going to medical school in the first place,” Higgins says.
Her path to philosophy was straighter. She went to a Catholic school taught by Dominican nuns who “marched to the tune of Thomas Aquinas,” as she says. Whenever Aquinas or his hero Aristotle were mentioned, Higgins was fascinated. In hindsight, she says, the things she thought about when she was young were often philosophical; she just didn’t realize it at the time.
“I used to think, ‘Considering how vast time is, how did I happen to be lucky enough to be alive now?’ Problems like this didn’t seem to bother other people, but they preoccupied me.”
When Higgins joined UT in 1982, the philosophy department was quite diverse in thought. Both she and Solomon were interested in “continental” figures — non-British, non-analytic European philosophers — and Higgins had written her dissertation on Nietzsche. She already knew of Solomon through his writings and Solomon likewise took an interest in Higgins’ work. Then Solomon organized a Nietzsche conference and asked Higgins to help. The rest, as they say, is history.
“To be honest,” says Higgins, “when I first laid eyes on him, I thought, ‘Wow!’ I assumed he’d be elderly because he’d published so much, and I was shocked to see a person who was young and vital.”
And Higgins wasn’t the only person taken by Solomon’s zeal for life. “His vitality impressed everybody,” Higgins says. “His passion for life and his conviction that thought added to life’s splendor and mystery made him a model for a lot of people and captivated many, many students.”
As a teacher, Solomon was legendary. So much so that filmmaker Richard Linklater cast Solomon as himself in his 2001 film Waking Life, in which he discussed existentialism as positing the value of “living passionately, of taking responsibility for who you are.” He argued that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of despair, is in fact an acceptance of the idea that life is one’s own to determine, an idea full of hopeful promise. “What you do makes a difference,” he says in the film. “It’s always our decision who we are.”
Solomon’s decades of thought and writing focused on such themes, asking questions about personal agency, the purpose and meaning of life, and the role of emotions in demonstrating that meaning — how one can take responsibility for one’s own life and make it something of wonder and joy.
Solomon also wrote on business ethics, which, to him, also probed questions about one’s values and how they might be applied to practical life. Higgins recalls that he was concerned about the “greed is good” view in business. “So many students used to say they aspired to make a lot of money but had no answer when asked what for, and Bob found this worrisome. Playing a role in the life of the community wasn’t enough on people’s minds,” Higgins says.
But Solomon taught and listened without judgment and made room in the classroom for everyone’s style and sense of priorities. He relished the idea that people could have a discussion without assuming there would be a resolution. Higgins took this lesson from Solomon and applied it in her own teaching. “I try to make philosophy classes reflect the fact that people can respectfully disagree with each other and that having a particular starting point doesn’t mean that you should be closed to any other viewpoint,” she says. “There are lots of ways of looking at the world, and recognizing that can be enriching.”
Solomon’s ideas enriched Higgins’ thought, and vice versa. He respected her own philosophical voice, one that at UT in the ‘80s — in a field still today dominated by male thinkers — wasn’t always readily heard. Higgins was officially the first woman to earn tenure in the department in 1988, at a time when it was still regularly denied to women scholars.
“My colleagues weren’t used to having women around. The way some of them talked in meetings seemed like they considered it a gathering of good old boys,” she remembers. “That has improved a lot. For one, there has been considerable effort to redress the obvious imbalance. The department now more closely reflects the proportions in the field, though the field remains heavily male-dominated.”
Solomon was an ally and a support for Higgins as she fought the glaring gender inequity. They talked about the differences in style of teaching between women and men and how these differences were perceived by students, often to women’s disadvantage. Higgins recalls that Solomon helped draw his colleagues’ attention to the gender disparity and worked to figure out how to improve the situation.
Many things have changed since the ‘80s. As Solomon and Higgins’ love deepened and evolved, so did the department and the field. Philosophy in the United States had long been understood as a kind of two-party system, Higgins explains. Back then, the division was so distinct that the department had requirements for graduate students to take an intro course to the analytic tradition and an intro course to the continental tradition. That didn’t last very long, though.
This division in the field is now being increasingly superseded, in a good way, she says, by the sensible perspective that it’s worthwhile to read interesting thinkers’ writing — regardless of where they’re from. And fewer people subscribe to the idea that there are only two buckets of thought: analytic and continental. Many topics that are now of interest to the field parallel public interests outside of it, such as questions surrounding artificial intelligence. “Developments in this area have led to further thought in philosophy about what it is to have a mind and the nature of consciousness,” Higgins says. Animal rights, gender, and social justice in epistemological contexts have also become less marginalized concerns in philosophical discussion. The interfaces between philosophy and psychology have also become more pronounced, she says, notably in philosophy of mind and philosophy of emotion. And Western philosophers are showing greater interest in other philosophical traditions.
For more than 20 years, Solomon and Higgins explored such topics together in collaboration and in their individual scholarship. They wrote together, edited for one another, and traveled around the world attending conferences, delivering lectures, and connecting with students. One can’t help but wonder if both scholars’ focus on emotions and passion had to do with their scholarship and thought being so tied into their romantic love — one deepening the other in turn.
Then, in 2007, at age 64, Solomon’s “sentence” caught up with him. He died, suddenly, of a heart attack in the Zurich airport while in transit to Rome with Higgins.
This year, her 42nd year teaching, Higgins published Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning: Philosophical Reflections on Coping with Loss with University of Chicago Press. While she was already interested in grief as a research topic before Solomon’s death, the book was also inspired by it. In it, she describes her experience in the moments of his death, how she coped with her grief, and how a piece of art, a scene from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, helped her make sense of some of it.
In the scene, the computer HAL has gone rogue, takes control of the spaceship, and shuts down the life support functions of the pods holding several unconscious crew members. Slowly, the viewer understands that the crew members are dying, but only by watching the lines on the pod monitors’ screens go flat. Similarly, Higgins only grasped what was happening when seeing the same kind of display on a monitor in Zurich as Swiss medics tried to revive her partner after he collapsed.
“I had difficulty explaining to other people why I kept obsessing about how he must have felt abandoned,” she writes. “Even though I had been there, I was so disconnected from what was happening to Bob that mentally I was hopelessly far away, not appropriately supportive. Making this comparison [to the film scene] enabled me to convey to friends how I was led to feel at fault, despite my powerlessness…”
Solomon also wrote about grief during his career, focusing on the memorialization or dedicatory aspects of grief and the way grief involves continuing a relationship with a loved one who has passed. He had just begun work on a book about death a couple of days before he died. Higgins recalls that Solomon’s editor said he felt superstitiously responsible.
That kind of response, along with Higgins’ own feelings of guilt, were reactions she saw frequently in her research. So she explored them further, looking to her long-studied field of aesthetics and how it ties into grief. “Philosopher Arthur Danto had spoken at UT about beauty as something people seek out in connection to death or loss, which primed me to think about it,” she says. “I was also finding that the way people related to me in my own grief seemed gestural. Because you don’t know what frame of mind a grieving person is in, it’s helpful that there are conventional gestures for conveying sympathy and concern. But it struck me that such gestures have an aesthetic character, involving presentation, some gesture, or some object that is resonant with meaning.”
When Higgins reflects on who Solomon was, she notes that his sense that he never knew how much longer he had made him unusually present, and that that intense presence was likely one of the characteristics that made him so charismatic to his students. “One of the things that drew me and others to him was that he was really there,” she says. “Although his diagnosis could be seen as anything but an asset, his response to his situation emerged as a gift.”
Solomon made Higgins more present, too, as did the narrowing of their future due to his diagnosis. They wanted to immerse themselves fully in the time they had, and they did. They both loved travelling, giving talks, writing, teaching, art, dinner with friends, talking with students, human relationships — and Higgins still finds meaning and joy in these activities.
There is obvious irony, of course, that Solomon, born with a heart condition, spent his career writing about emotions, love, joy, and beauty — his heart full of passion and enthusiasm, and big enough for all his family, friends, students, colleagues, and especially his beloved wife. A layperson does not necessarily expect an existentialist to write a book called The Joy of Philosophy. But those who loved Solomon knew well the code he lived by: to find joy, passion, and great love by ignoring his heart (condition) to follow his heart.
“I will always miss Bob,” says Higgins. “I remember talking to another professor of philosophy whose wife died, and he told me, ‘her shadow is always with me.’ I understood exactly what that meant. There is a kind of presence that I still feel. In one sense, the ongoing response to the death of a loved one appropriately goes on for the rest of your life. The person remains a part of you, and gratitude for that can help as you go forward.”