[Two weeks ago, Ismar Jugo from our student magazine Qualia kindly asked me to do an interview for their series on professors who leave Groningen. Ismar wrote up a text condensing and commenting on what might have been the gist of our conversation. I am very grateful for his piece and would proudly like to share it here:]

Professors come, and professors go. This year Martin Lenz, professor in the history of philosophy, left our beloved faculty for the University of Hagen in Germany. In this Qualia-interview, we ask him some questions about how he came to Groningen, his time on our faculty, and what he will do in the future. The Qualia wishes Martin the best of luck in Hagen.

Coming to Groningen

Being in the position to interview a professor you like can be overwhelming, because you have so many questions that you do not know where to start. So, I thought that a good starting point for this interview was to ask how he ended up at our faculty in the first place? His answer was rather surprising. Instead of telling a story of a person who started out as a student, and took a linear, progressive path to the honourable position of university professor, Martin told me a story that had much more to do with chance and luck. ‘It’s quite simple,’ Martin said, ‘at a certain point I was desperate to get a job. In Germany you have a long trajectory before you are fully qualified. After finishing a PhD – which is one book-, you have to finish a Habilitation – which is another book that is distinct from what you did in the first book. This means that you can go on for a while without ever being fully qualified. I even thought about doing something else, but then I saw this job advertisement, a tenure-track position, for this faculty. When I looked at the criteria, I was surprised to see that I actually could be a good fit. Then I applied and got lucky. This luck changed my life for the better.’

While I was happy to hear that coming to our faculty had such a positive effect on Martin’s life, I was a bit puzzled when he said that he just ‘got lucky’. After his response, I had to ask how it was possible that someone who becomes a professor was just lucky? His reply: ‘After some years in academia I’ve been in quite some hiring-committees myself. And now I can say, looking from the other side of the table, that for many positions you get around twenty applicants that are an excellent fit. What you get here is that you have pool of applicants that are equally qualified, and you have to refuse nineteen of them because there is only one job. This is where I see the luck coming in. This last phase is unpredictable simply because there is nothing you can do. I guess that really is a kind of lottery.’ As someone who still needs to start his professional life, it was somehow very relaxing and encouraging to hear this. Working hard does help to get you into the pool of twenty people, and so it is essential, but luck will always be a factor that plays a huge role in your career and your life in general. Martin added: ‘It sounds really silly to say, but I can only say one thing: be yourself, because that is the best you can be, and that is what you can be best at.’ Writing this interview, I realized that what Martin said was absolutely not as silly as it may sound. Simply because there can be a competition in being something, there cannot be a competition in being you. It’s just you with yourself, and that’s it.

After establishing how Martin ended up in Groningen, and that luck plays a huge role in all our lives, I tried my luck and posed the next question. I asked Martin if he could remember the first impressions he had of Groningen. I was not only curious about how he encountered the faculty, but also what changed during his stay. He answered that it was a wonderful welcome, and that he encountered a lively, philosophical community. There was a sense that things could be changed and so he felt that he could add something to this community. One of the things Martin could do was hire Andrea Sangiacomo as a postdoc (on grant money he had received earlier still in Germany) who came up with wonderful ideas in both teaching and research. Martin is especially happy about the creation of ‘The Groningen Centre of Medieval and Early Modern Thought’, which was able to make all the good things that were already happening in the department visible to others.

Martin elaborated a bit more on his encounter with Dutch academia: ‘I really liked Dutch academia because they hire very internationally, and so you end up with an international community. Also, it presents itself as being devoid of hierarchy, and while this may be true for some part of the community it is not for others. Slowly I started to notice that the hierarchy in Dutch academia is more hidden. This is something that I had to learn.’ Yet, Martin thinks that the good thing about Dutch academia, and Dutch culture in general, is that we are used to ‘polderen’. ‘Especially in the context of a conflict,’ Martin said, ‘people do not get worked up that easily. It seems there is a kind of awareness that we all need to get on with it the next day.’ 

Being in Groningen

The first course that I followed from Martin was on Medieval Philosophy in my first year. Later in the bachelor, I took his course on “Condemned Philosophy” and Wittgenstein’s PhilosophischeUntersuchungen. When I started my research master, I had a mandatory “Core Issues” course from him on the methodology of the history of philosophy named “Philosophy and Its Past”, but I also choose to follow his course “What Is Thinking? Medieval Philosophy of Mind”. While all these courses already give an idea what Martin teaches and researches, we would need to know the courses he gave when he started teaching at our faculty to get a more complete image. I asked him my next question: What were the first courses you gave in Groningen, and did the topic of the courses you gave change over time? If so, why?

The first courses that Martin gave on our faculty were a course on Hume and a course on the History of Analytic Philosophy. Martin elaborates: ‘Two things on the Hume course. First, I was amazed that there were such great students over here. Such a nice and lively atmosphere in the classroom. Many of these students ended up doing intriguing things, and one of them just became an assistant professor.’ The second thing that Martin said was that he really discovered Hume through this course. ‘The students push you in your reading of a text by asking the question: ‘How does this work?’ And then you ask to yourself: ‘Indeed, how does this work?’ The result of this course was that I started to read Hume as an idealist because that was the only way I could make it work. This was a wonderful teaching experience.’

Martin admitted that he was quite intimidated by the course on the History of Analytic Philosophy because he never taught such a big course in his life. The course existed of eight sessions, and was part of the regular bachelor program. ‘It was a real challenge to teach something at such length,’ Martin said. ‘In this course I realized that it is not enough to just focus on the content but that it is also important to teach about how we approach a topic. This brings us to the second part of your question. The ‘why’ of the change. Why? Because I thought that I needed to teach more on the methodology of doing philosophy, the way we read texts, hermeneutics and so on. All this flew into the course that I took up then, which was the “Philosophy and Its Past” course.’ This research master course was very special for Martin. There he encountered research master students with a very wide range of interests. He had to teach them something about the history of philosophy that was not only interesting for them but that could also help them in their own field of interest. The focus on the methodology of doing philosophy was interesting and useful for everyone. And, as someone who followed this course, I can say that it was interesting and useful to think about philosophical practice from this point of view.

In my next question, I wanted to find out if there was a central message in the courses that Martin taught, because I had the idea that there was a kind of thread that connects all these courses. Therefore, I asked Martin if there was such a thread, or if I just was suspicious. ‘Well, there is and there isn’t,’ Martin answered. ‘While the content of a course is different, the way I teach courses is similar. I think of courses like jazz improvisations. Where you have a lot of voices, a lot of talents coming together, and they all contribute something. At the end there must be a piece of music that everyone remembered after the session. Of course, they will remember what they say but they will also remember what the music was. Something can be carried over to the next session. And the main ingredient in music and improvisation is surprise. So, what I attempt to do for myself and for the students is to offer ways in which we can be surprised.’ Martin sees surprise as an important didactical tool. It can make you relate to the content in a better way. In his words: ‘That what surprised you will stand out, it will be something you will think of.’   

Later in his teaching career Martin found out that the element of surprise does not have to work immediately in class. Martin: ‘Now I am old enough to occasionally receive emails where people say something like: ‘I hated your course at the time, but now after three years something kind of hit me.’ So, I realized that the way of learning philosophy is something which happens in a longer period of time than one course. Sometimes you need to have patience for something to attain the right place. This is something to trust in. It just doesn’t necessarily happen immediately.’

As students we encountered Martin mostly as a teacher, and not so much as a researcher. Recently Martin published Socializing Minds. Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy, and this made me curious about what kind of research Martin did in Groningen. He acknowledged that he promised to write this book when he got hired, and that he would prioritise it. The book just changed so much in shape during his stay in Groningen that it took him longer to finish it. One of the main things that changed was that Martin took up a more dialectical approach: ‘It is very common to take a position and to defend it. But I think that figuring out the possible positions that one could have on a topic, and try to go through them is something different. And that’s what I mean with “dialectical”: you go back and forth. Not just black and white. Now I find myself endorsing something and then getting critical of it, undermining it. It’s like a self-dialogue, at the end of the day.’

According to Martin, there is a great shift on what is important in this dialectical approach. While in this former approach it is important what the result is, so if the positions hold in light of possible objections, in the dialectical approach the importance lies more in going through the different possible perspectives on the topic. ‘It is about opening up a dialectical, dialogical space in which you can move,’ said Martin, and he continued, ‘it is a bit like the theatre where you are not guided by any constraints. So, with dialogical I do not mean ‘writing dialogues’, but I mean going back and forth through all kinds of possible positions.’ For Martin every position is a voice, and he wants play with different voices. The main reason for this is that he actually does not know what his position is at the beginning of a project, but only at the end, he starts to understand what he thinks. Martin: ‘It is about working out what I think, and that happens by going through all the possible positions and their contradictions.’ Martin stresses the point that this dialogical approach came about due to the many interactions he had with his colleagues and students in Groningen. And, as one of his students, I can say that Martin did take every proposed perspective very seriously. Martin would take a very long time trying to understand what you said and what it would mean if we accepted it. I think that he often took his students more seriously than they took themselves, and with that, he demonstrated that we should take ourselves more seriously as philosophers.

Leaving Groningen

While we could go on talking about his time in Groningen for hours, we had to move on and ask some questions about him leaving this city before he would actually leave. One of the things I was curious about is what Martin expects to miss when he leaves Groningen. Martin first mentioned that he is very nostalgic person, so he will miss many things. ‘The interactions I have with colleagues certainly, but also teaching at this faculty.’ He got adjusted to the Dutch context, and enjoyed the way the students challenged him here very much. Another thing that he will miss is the city of Groningen, and the faculty building. ‘Groningen is a beautiful city,’ Martin said, ‘and, I don’t know if it is the case in general, but it certainly it is the case for this faculty, they are very good in combining the old and the new. That is something you do not see very often.’ Martin added: ‘It is not irrelevant where things happen and where you are. And this combination of the old and the new is ingrained in the building. That is special and not unimportant.’ I can imagine that for a historian of philosophy who always has to interpret the past from the present, combining the old and the new, so to say, this building is an ideal work environment.

            Martin will leave the University of Groningen for the University of Hagen which is a university where much teaching happens online. The in-person teaching is something that he does really like, so he will need to adjust to this new reality. Nevertheless, Martin is also very excited for his new position in Hagen: ‘I will not have a position in history of philosophy but in theoretical philosophy in Hagen. This does not mean that I will wholly abandon history for theory, but it means that I can combine them. Which is very nice.’ Another thing that Martin wants to do is focus more on reading. He is not only interested in the phenomenology of reading, but he also wants to collaborate with schools. Next to that interest, he is interested in different ways of doing philosophy. He is experimenting now with using visual means to express philosophical ideas. Martin: ‘It is not the case that I would not do these things here, but there I will have a change of environment and more freedom to do what I want. Partly because my position here is described differently than it is there. There I can play more free jazz.’

            After all these intriguing answers, we had one last question that we traditionally ask professors and other staff-members who are leaving. The question is: Is there any advice that you can give to the students of this faculty? Martin had to think for a while, and then he said: ‘I do not really think that I have any advice, but one thing keeps coming back to me. This is the ‘trick’ by relevance. The idea that what we do should matter to society or something. It sounds good, and somewhere it probably is good, but it also seems to block certain routes. My advice will be that you should do what you want and not what you think other people expect from you. There are so many things that people do that are tied to other people trying to sell something, or other people thinking what should be done. What you do should not have to be useful. If you want to do it, then it certainly is already useful and important. People who already do that should keep on going.’