Professor Larry Vogel of the Philosophy Department is retiring this semester, and I sat down with him to reflect on his life and career, including what he hopes to do with his final course, and a look into the future. Vogel embodies a wise, grandfatherly, professorial spirit that seems borrowed from another time. He is a prickly contrarian, but he would hate to seriously hurt anyone’s feelings and apologizes for accidental slights. He is curious about your family and your upbringing, and he loves to banter. He gives deep thought to history’s most puzzling questions and does not venture a definitive answer; he admits wisely, like Socrates, that he knows nothing. He is retiring—semi-retiring, since he will teach his famous Heidegger course once more in the fall as an adjunct—but sooner rather than later, his career is coming to an end. Although he will continue to play an active role in his community – he plans to get involved in get-out-the-vote drives and maybe even teach English to recent immigrants – it is clear that he’s going to miss this profession.
Vogel was born in 1952 in West Hartford, Connecticut to a middle-class, secular Jewish family. He grew up in the midst of the social movements of the 1960s, tilted in a politically progressive direction by his mother, a proto-feminist and member of the local school board with a Masters in education. Still, he felt “spiritually adrift” in suburban Connecticut, where he attended the prestigious prep school Loomis-Chaffee. A history professor with a penchant for philosophical readings introduced Vogel to German social theorists Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, while a local community organizer gave him a work by German philosopher Martin Buber. Those two mentors ignited his passion for philosophy: “I still have the book, with big fat letters in magic markers,” he reminisces.
Vogel began college at Johns Hopkins, but the huge research university environment felt stifling: “I just didn’t connect with anybody in the way that I had at Loomis.” Vogel realized he needed the environment of a small liberal arts college and planned to transfer to Vassar. Then he recalled a memorable lecture on Socrates by a professor, Drew Hyland, who came to speak to his high school class. “I called him up on the phone at his office, and he answered!” Hyland invited him to meet at his office, where Hyland recommended a young professor who was also incoming to Vassar, Mitchell Miller.
Miller became a mentor to Vogel right away: “I looked at my best teachers as gods, and it’s kind of embarrassing, in retrospect.” Studying Hegel, Heidegger, and Arendt as an undergrad, the issues that grabbed him then are the same that he thinks about today: “My animating questions had to do with meaning in life and the foundation of morality, and connections between people, psychological questions that had a philosophical side to them. That’s always what moved me, partly because religion never provided that kind of foundation for me.”
He was planning an undergraduate thesis comparing Buber with Hegel when he had a panic attack, something of an existential crisis, which led him to drop out of school. He traveled around the country on his own: hitchhiking to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, sleeping in the Sugar Bowl Stadium, road-tripping with a newfound friend through the Southwest up to Oakland, hitchhiking to Vancouver, then taking the Trans-Canadian railroad back home. He returned to school, completed his thesis, and graduated.
“I didn’t want to go into philosophy because that was the only thing I could do,” Vogel recalls with a laugh, “So I wanted to work in the real world first.” He served a short stint with a pharmaceutical industry newsletter before he took a job doing research at the Ford Foundation on Vietnam draft violators, writing a policy proposal designing an amnesty program that was then implemented by President Jimmy Carter. He followed this with a job at the Pentagon, writing a successful book on the program, and he had a promising career in public policy lying in wait, but he was longing to return to philosophy. “Why? Because my philosophy professors had meant so much to me. They changed my life,” he said.
So he set off to graduate school at Yale in 1977, “as much to be a teacher as to study philosophy… I would have been a rabbi, except I didn’t believe in God.” His grad school professors explained his love of teaching by saying that he was a “theatrical person.” Anyone who knows Professor Vogel knows how animated he can be—his passion is palpable, it’s a passion for learning, for his students, for the whole endeavor. He finished his coursework in two years, then joined his alma mater, Vassar, as an adjunct professor, diving head-first into teaching while putting off the less exciting work of his dissertation. “The problem was, I loved it so much, and I had developed a repertoire of courses, so they kept rehiring me!” There he met his soon-to-be wife, Carol, who pushed him to finish his dissertation, later published as The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Then, he applied for a position at Connecticut College, at which he married Carol, had his two children, Max and Gabriella, and achieved tenure.
While teaching at Conn, Vogel studied the Jewish students of Heidegger—Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and particularly Hans Jonas—who were reacting in confusion and horror to their mentor’s descent into Nazism. He spearheaded an effort to republish Jonas’s Phenomenon of Life, which had fallen out of print, and soon after was invited to present at a Jonas conference in Israel, in which Jonas himself would be in attendance. Commenting on the experience, he said, “It was amazing to say the truth, and he thought that I hit the nail on the head, which was very nice.” He impressed Jonas so much that he was invited to his 90th birthday celebration in Germany. Jonas ended up passing away before the event, but the show went on regardless, and there Vogel and Lore, Jonas’s widow, conceived of a new anthology called “Mortality and Morality,” which went on to become the standard overview of his work. Since then he has published numerous essays, joining an international community of Jonas scholars, delivering talks all over the world. “I found my groove, it’s a very niche kind of thing, but it worked for me, you know, it took me to interesting places, got me meeting interesting people, and that’s kind of joyous,” Vogel said.
Vogel’s famous thematic seminars have made him one of the most beloved professors at Conn. He notes that “the beauty of being at a liberal arts college is that you get to teach such a range of things, whatever grabs your interest at a given time.” “Free Will and Moral Responsibility” was his earliest seminar, touching on political and social issues. After 9/11 he introduced two new courses, “Evil,” and “Tolerance, Intolerance, and the Intolerable,” which brought him further into the sphere of social theory. But it got too dark, and Vogel designed a course on “Happiness,” which lifted his spirits considerably. After the election in 2016, Vogel became preoccupied with the threats to American democracy, designing “Democracy in Crisis,” which eventually morphed into his final class, “Liberalism(s).” Vogel’s lifelong experience observing politics has not dulled his concerns. Today, he says, “I believe we’re at an existential moment; that your future depends on what happens in November.”
Vogel beams with pride when he talks about his wife and children. He and Carol, a philosophically-inclined psychoanalyst, have had flexible schedules, allowing them to be hands-on parents. His house was “always the center of activity for kids.” His son, Max, works in player development for the New York Mets, while his daughter, Gabriella, is a polymath who works in software development in New York. “We’ve just loved being parents,” he said and it shows.
That palpable joy Vogel exhibits is not limited to his personal life—for instance, Vogel describes the creativity of syllabus design as “one of the funnest parts of the work” without a hint of pretentiousness. Vogel’s scholarship is impressive, no doubt, but he deeply, truly loves to teach. He knows firsthand the power that an inspiring mentor can have over a young mind, and I hope he knows that he has become the kind of professorial gem that he once idolized.
