Manes Eschews Tunnel Vision, Delights in Dual Philosophy

Jonathan Manes, CC '03, is in a band. Actually, according to the web site he made--a visual feast of blinking, multicolored checkerboards--Monopöle! is more than just a band: it's a self-described "cultural phenomenon." In person, Manes is much more modest. The band, he admits, hasn't played together in a few years; maybe, just maybe, their songs weren't entirely groundbreaking. But on one point he remains firm. When pressed to admit that Monopöle! was just another short-lived high-school punk band, he refuses to budge: the band, he insists, "was unaffiliated with any particular brand of music."

Manes, similarly, refuses to affiliate himself with one particular discipline. When Manes came here four years ago, he intended "to just be a straight chemistry major," but his interests drifted: first biology caught his attention, then philosophy. When he graduates, he'll have not only two majors--biochemistry and an independent major in the philosophy of science--but also as varied a Columbia résumé as you'll find: drumming for four years on the Marching Band, being widely and deeply involved with Columbia politics for just as long, playing oboe with the Bach Society and a campus wind quintet, writing for The Columbia Political Review and The Blue and White, playing field hockey, editing the Columbia Undergraduate Philosophy Review, and winning his share of academic awards and fellowships. Manes, in other words, is hard to pin down.

Manes at first seems restless. He opens and closes the clasp of his watch, flips switches on the camera he's carrying with him, and snaps his head around when he hears someone greet him with a "Hi, Curly." (On his first trip with the Marching Band, his new bandmates informed him that, as there was already a Jonathan on the band, that couldn't be his name. He was given half an hour to either come up with a new name or face being known as Long Dong. Manes chose Curly--his hair is best described as "big"--and the name stuck.) He speaks animatedly about his academic and political work, his palms firmly against the table. His senior thesis was on the nature of classification in science: whether the categories into which, to use Manes's examples, elements, psychopathologies, and species are placed exist naturally and are simply discovered by enterprising scientists, or whether they're somehow constructed, influenced by what's useful for us.

He came down on the side of construction, and when he talks about how his dual experience in philosophy and biochemistry helped him to consider the problem, he makes a double major like his seem not only logical but necessary. "To do traditional science," he says, "you have to be able to focus on a really small area. You need to have tunnel vision." Philosophers, on the other hand, must be competent in several areas; one of the main skills philosophy demands is "bullshit detection," the ability to apply different types of knowledge to a problem and figure out what just doesn't make sense. But, he says, "Philosophers talk about things divorced from anything that actually goes on in the lab." The way things actually work is "a lot messier" than much philosophy takes it to be. His work paid off: Manes was a finalist for the Rhodes scholarship and was offered both the Kellett and Commonwealth fellowships for graduate study in England. He hopes to enroll in a Master's program in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge.

Manes's interest in how things actually work doesn't restrict itself to philosophy. The way he tells it, he became involved in the behind-the-scenes work of student politics by accident. Along with his friend Samir Arora, CC '03, he went to a meeting that he thought would be about running for the first-year class council. It wasn't: he'd gone to a meeting for people who wanted to join the Committee on Elections, Nominations and Appointments. He joined, he says, mostly because he was there, and he ended up working with CENA for more than two years. He calls it a "pain-in-the-ass, thankless job," but his tone makes it clear that he enjoyed being able to shape the less prominent aspects of student politics. Last year, he was elected to the University Senate--"I had good posters," he says. There too he relished figuring out what agendas were at work, using his "bullshit detection" to look at the politics behind things like a "change in wording from 'must' to 'should.'"

Of his four years at Columbia, Manes says he is grateful, he's gotten a lot out of them, and he's met amazing, motivated, interesting people.

"I was such a kid in first year," he says. "Now I've been taught to face unemployment."