Back in the mid-1950s when a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Washington I made friends with a fellow graduate student named Willi Unsoeld. We were not close friends but we did engage in occasional conversations about issues and ideas of both philosophical and other nature. Later on Willi became a world wide phenomenon as a key member of the American team that climbed Mount Everest in 1963. He was also at that time a professor of philosophy at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
After their heroic conquest of Everest Willi and two other members of the team gave a presentation at the college where I was teaching in Seattle about the ups and downs of their adventure. They not only gave us a highly informed account of their adventure, but kept us laughing with tales, some embarrassing, about their journey. Also, to their amazement, they had used up all their oxygen and were forced to come dome the mountain without oxygen. This was the first breakthrough revealing that much less oxygen was needed than had been thought. Since then many such climbs have been made without any oxygen at all.
A few years later, in 1976, Willi was on a climb in the Himalayan range with some friends and his young daughter Devi. Devi had been named after a mountain peak in this range, Nanda Devi. It was Devi’s life goal to climb this peak before she died, but on the climb she was overcome by a high altitude attack and died before she could be brought down from the mountain. Devi had argued vehemently with her father and others trying to finish her climb, but it was not to be.
In 1979, while he was leading a small group of students on a rather routine climb of Mount Rainier near Seattle, Willi himself was swallowed by an avalanche and died. He was, of course, mourned and missed greatly by his family and students for many months to come. Willi had earned his Doctorate degree at the University of Washington and taught both philosophy and religion at both Oregon state University and Evergreen State College. He was an immensely popular professor and was well-known for his boundless energy and hilarious sense of humor. For several years he served as Executive Director of the Peace Corps, and Vice President of the Outward Bound Program.
Willi had originally set out to be a Protestant Minister and studied at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkely, California. but he found most denominations too narrow-minded and so he shifted to the study of philosophy. As a graduate student at the University of Washington he was very admired and enjoyed for his easy, open manner and clever sense of humor. As I mentioned in my Blog about Henri Bergson, Willi wrote his Doctoral Dissertation about Bergson’s philosophy but in the end found his thought disappointing for not providing any authentic moral criteria by which to live.
The crux of Willi’s disappointment with Bergson’s thought was that while tracking the struggle between the need to accommodate oneself to traditional societal norms and the drive to go beyond them, Bergson seemed not to be able to choose between them, That is to say, Willi concluded that Bergson could not reconcile the values of the dynamic and the static, could not choose between them. Willi seems to have thought that this deprived Bergson’s philosophy of any basic valuational direction.
For those wishing to know more about Willi I recommend the play by John Pielmeier, “An Evening of Wilderness Spirit”, Rain City Projects. Or one could borrow Willi’s dissertation from University of Washington Library through the University Library Loan system), Seattle, WA. 1991) and Fatal Mountaineer by Robert Roper, Saint Martin’s Press, 2003). One could also borrow, as I did, Willi’s dissertation from the University of Washington Library through the University Library Loan system.