Mesmer in a Mountain Bar: Anthropological Difference, Butts, and Mesmerism

Abstract

I am not sure whether Bob Butts at the present time would still prefer to be a taxi driver rather than a philosopher. That twenty years after this confession he still prefers bars and mountains to philosophical seminars and conferences, is something I believe I can present as a confirmed fact on the basis of extensive, pleasant experiences shared at such places. Among Butt’s favorite mountains are certainly the Swiss Alps, which Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) praised in his great poem, “The Alps”. I hope I am not being too partial to the flatter foothills when I say that in the last decade our friend of the mountains has grown very fond, too, of this part of the country.³ Especially that magic triangle between Constance with its lake, Wildhaus in Toggenburg with the simple wooden house where Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) was born and grew up, and Zürich with the Kronenhalle, where James Joyce used to keep his beer from getting flat.

Here the learned do not bargain for paper treasures, One measures not the roads to Rome and Athens, Reason one does not tie to scholastic precepts, And no one teaches the sun to move in its orbits, (…), And here nature gave the teaching of how to live right, To man in his heart and not in his brain. (Composed 1728)¹ Albrecht von Hallen “The Alps”, I would really rather be climbing a mountain, tending bar, or driving a taxicab than writing a philosophical book.

(Robert E. Butts, 1968)²