In Memoriam: George Walsh

The staff and trustees of The Objectivist Center note with sadness the death of George Walsh, at his home in Salisbury, Maryland, on Thursday, November 8, 2001, after a long illness. He is survived by his wife, Cathy, and three children. George was a professor of philosophy, an intellectual leader of the Objectivist movement who served on our board of trustees from the beginning, and a dear friend whose loss is keenly felt by everyone whose life he touched.

Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to an Irish Catholic family, George studied philosophy at Williams College and Brown University, and went on to earn his Ph.D. from Princeton University. During his long and distinguished career, he taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (1948-68), Eisenhower College (1968-79), and Salisbury State University, where he remained professor emeritus of philosophy after his retirement in 1989.

George had an astounding range of erudition in the history of philosophy, not only about the major thinkers that philosophers recognize as landmarks in the field but also about lesser figures and minor schools. More than once, in conversation with George, I found that he had read the collected works of philosophers I had never heard of. His fascination with the diversity of intellectual life led him to explore its alleys and dead-ends as well as its highways.

He had the same fascination with religious doctrines and sects, and with psychological theories. He could teach courses on the varieties of Buddhism, or on Freud and his warring intellectual descendants, as easily as he could on Plato, Aristotle, or Kant. I remember walking with George in New York City and passing a small Protestant church of some obscure denomination. Pausing to look at the structure, he casually related the distinguishing doctrines and practices of the sect, its origin in some long-forgotten controversy, and the name, career, spiritual obsessions, and sexual habits of its founder.

George published philosophical essays on Herbert Marcuse and on John Rawls, explaining and critiquing the thought of these influential thinkers. He also co-translated The Phenomenology of the Social World, by Alfred Schultz, a leading continental philosopher. But his true medium was the classroom and the lecture hall, where he charmed generations of students with his erudition, wit, and passion for ideas. Legends gathered around George at the schools where he taught, including the famous story recounted nearby by Francis Kane, his colleague at Salisbury. At Objectivist conferences, he delivered wonderful lectures on Rousseau, Kant, Marx, and the major world religions. (George edited his lectures on religion for publication as The Role of Religion in History, published in 1988 by Transaction Publishers. A timely excerpt from the chapter on Islam is reprinted on pages12-15.)

George became interested in Ayn Rand and Objectivism in the 1960s, the movement's first period of rapid growth, and became acquainted with Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and the other intellectuals who gathered around them. As a trained philosopher in the middle of his career, George embraced this new system of ideas sympathetically but critically, earning Rand's respect (and occasionally her ire) for his probing questions. Years later, he helped found the Ayn Rand Society, an organization for academic philosophers interested in her work; he negotiated the society's affiliation with the American Philosophical Association and served as its first secretary.

At about the same time—the late 1980s—the Objectivism movement was in turmoil over issues that I have described elsewhere. When the time came for me to part company with the orthodox movement, George was my strongest ally and the co-founder of what became The Objectivist Center. We spoke frequently about the issues and events in the conflict, and discussed every aspect of the new organization we envisioned, from its name to its mission and structure. At our first event, in February, 1990 George introduced the proceedings with a ringing affirmation of the "spirit of independent thought, rational inquiry, open discussion, and debate" that we felt was essential to Objectivism. As long as this organization exists, his legacy will live on in our commitment to that spirit.

George could be the very image of an absent-minded professor. His relationship with "the real world"—a phrase that, for philosophers, has the connotations of travel to an exotic land—was somewhat tentative. Yet on the important things in life, he was one of the most grounded people I have known. He was a man of solid integrity, ready to stand up for his convictions. In the late 1960s, for example, when the American Philosophical Association voted to condemn the Vietnam War, he stood up to demand that, in order to be consistent, the assembled philosophers should also proclaim a belief in objective moral principles. At the same time, George was a realist with a shrewd political sense of how people would actually behave. This combination of traits made him a peerless advisor. Time and again, when I went to him for advice about some decision, I came away with the two things I needed to know: what was the right thing to do, and what it was going to cost me.

George was a humanist at heart. Though he had little sympathy for contemporary "secular humanism"—with its fixation on the sins of religion—its moral relativism and left-wing leanings, he shared the spirit of Renaissance humanists like Montaigne, who had painted on his ceiling the credo Humani nil a me alienum puto—"I consider nothing human to be alien to me." That credo could have been George's. He mined the rich history of human thought and practice not only for the veins of truth he could add to his own convictions but for the larger truth about human nature and aspiration. He loved the enterprise of human life in all its diversity, with all its false starts and contrariness as well as its triumphs.

This spirit was a welcome addition to the Objectivist movement, where the love of Man has sometimes led to contempt for men. More importantly, it made George the scholar, teacher, colleague, and friend whom so many of us loved. We offer our deepest sympathy and condolence to his family and friends.