The Invisible Hand, Lovely Form and Francis Hutcheson

Sundown

 Francis Hutcheson was a preacher, a thinker and teacher who when he was 52, died on August the 8th 1746 in Dublin. He had a thing for the senses and in his Essay on the "The Nature and Conduct of the Passions" he worked on a list of six "Senses."

 The first was Consciousness. By which a man had a sense of himself and all that is going on in his mind.

The second was an internal sense of Beauty. This sense allowed a man to sense beauty in objects. It was internal because it was a little bit personal.

The third sense was, sensus communis. This was "a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery."

The Fourth sense was also a sense of beauty to the extent, as Hutcheson saw, we people had a moral sense of beauty in "actions and affections, by which we perceive virtue or vice, in ourselves or others."

The fifth was a sense of honor, which Hutcheson thought of as the other side of shame. He saw it as the pleasure of doing the right thing as opposed to the discomfort of doing the wrong thing.

A sixth sense was the sense of the ridiculous, which in Hutcheson's day was a word more closely aligned to an ancient idea that imbalance in the humours, or bodily fluids, could be cured by amusement and laughter.

The thing about Hutcheson, his influential thinking gave the minds he impressed with his charismatic teaching and his writing a sense of an enlightened world that he saw as having been designed by an " Author of nature... who had....  much better furnished us for a virtuous conduct than our moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful instructions as we have for the preservation of our bodies. He has made virtue a lovely form, to excite our pursuit of it, and has given us strong affections to be the springs of each virtuous action."

Adam Smith who wrote Wealth of Nations, and coined the phrase "The Invisible Hand," had been taught Moral Philosophy by Hutcheson at Glasgow University..

A Universe of Constant Transition and the Golden Calf

Moses Indignant at the Sight of the Golden Calf,

William Blake 1757-1827

Lacan talked about lacking, Borges talked about the nothingness of personality, Heidegger addressed meaning, Sartre went on about a nothingness he compared to being, and we've enjoyed Bertrand Russell's disappointment with Wittgenstein's passionate explorations of language. Now we need to go back a bit and have a peep at the Golden Calf, specifically the Psychology of the Void.

One of the problems for a loose leaf collection of brick making people lost in the desert is when their temperamental and possibly insane self appointed leader occasionally disappeared for forty days and forty nights. They were basically left in the middle of nowhere. On one occasion, the brick-makers, while he was gone, collected the gold and silver earrings and bangles from family collections, melted it all down to make a golden calf, who they hoped would be an infinitely more reliable figurehead and guide through the tribulations.

When Moses finally got back from the mountain, he did not think it funny. As he explained in his biography he went into one of his yellow faced rages, he started yelling about having no other god but me, he broke important legal documents which had been written in stone, he burned the Golden Calf which he then had ground into a powder and he forced everyone to drink, and he was obliged to ask the Levites to make sure the traditional 3000 people were slaughtered.

The point is, by building a golden calf the average brick-maker didn't actually think he was breaking a law. What he thought they were doing was filling a void. They were trying to mend a broken circuit, they were materializing the infinite, they'd reconnected and golly, how happy they were when they thought they'd fixed the loop, they sang and danced. The Golden Calf wasn't a conduit to a Voice dictating laws from on the top of a mountain it was a genuine, in-place, ill-defined Noun, who could do weddings, provide a moment of calm and stuff.

Mind you John Walking Stewart would have been persuaded to suggest that by taking circulating precious metals and fusing them into a Golden Calf it would have been a crime against sensate atoms, a crime against moral motion, not something the Laplanders would have engaged in.

Not absolutely certain that the Stone Tablets were any different, but Moses had half a point, this Golden Calf was vibrationally dead, it pretended that something permanent could exist in a universe of Constant Transition, and if you had megalomaniacal leanings, as a source of meaning the Golden Calf was individualistic, it wasn't down from on high and potentially it was incredibly subversive. 

Prediction Centers and Sensate Atoms

Ant Work

 Our issue is of course simple. "Love, purpose, beauty and the Everywhen, don't leave a footprint in the sand or in laboratories." At least not yet.

An argument suggests that the brain is a "Prediction Center." It makes stuff up and if this stuff seems roughly correct it becomes fixed as a belief which is difficult to dislodge. We, possibly more linear thinkers are inclined toward what we nobly call evidence, the world is obviously flat otherwise we'd fall off it, wouldn't we. The claim that possibly non-linear thinkers, who are more open minded are more likely to believe stuff unsupported by evidence is a tempting one. And in my role as a fuddy-duddy, the thing to remember is that through our history we have always been a species that cleaves to neither linear nor non-linear ways of thinking, there are two sides to our brain and we embrace both.

Perhaps a more interesting aspect of our many ways of being is explored under the subtitle of "Tribal Handshake" which is the understanding that a shared belief is more valuable than a belief supported by facts, and here it seems that when you as an individual see your group agreeing on something your brain releases the cuddle hormone, otherwise known as Oxytocin. So, it's not what the brain believes, it's the cohesion the belief creates that puts the glee into the gathering of irrational masses. And as we all know Oxytocin is psychologically addictive.

There are some, in their search to unearth the home of emotions, look for the tension between the Limbic system, where emotions are made, and the right brain, where the poetry of the non-linear lives and the left brain, where the step by step of the linear lives. The Model is called the Approach vs. Avoidance model. It's very tempting, but a tad too insular. This is how the model sees the tensions: the emotion emerges from the Limbic system, the right and left sides of the brain either approach them to the point of intimately engaging with them or having appraised the emotion in the context of a wider world avoids it. Here the left brain might relish Greed as a necessary ingredient to a line of thinking, and the right brain might eschew greed to the point of arguing against Greed as a guarantee of eternal life amongst the hoarders and spendthrifts in the Fourth Circle of Hell. 

For Walking Stewart who died in the 1820's, Moral Motion and the Great Circulation, we as people are far too interrelated with the whole, you can't go round saying this brain part does x and this brain part does y and this brain part makes emotions. Oh No! We people are far too flexible and responsive to the contexts of our thoughts, there's absolutely no chance of you or I ever being able to come up with a stable moral response to a circumstance. Certainly not! We can justify anything. What happens is that something like the emotion of greed messes with the circulation, and the reality of Moral Motion is that good things make the universe better and bad things make the universe badder. The point being it's the society, the lives we live in the society that determines whether we are Beasts of the Forest or whether, like the Laplanders, we are contributing to the tranquility of sensate atoms. 

Another Shot at Songlines

Golden Willow

 OK, so let's risk ostracism with an act of faith by falling into the Everywhen of the Original Australian Peoples, Walking Stewart's ill-tutored Great Circulation, and the Buddha's Karmic Ripening in an attempt to kick out the jams and go Punk Rock on social structures that were persuaded to fill out the nothingness of longing by inventing the Coffee Table Book. 

What!

In our own time, in our own place, Stewart is closest to our habits of thinking. His Great Circulation, can be subtitled Atomic Ethics. It's not about the bombs, it's about atoms, the tiniest part of mass and Moral Motion. Like Whitehead a hundred years later, Stewart proposed that fundamental matter was sensate, it had the gift of senses. If you were nasty to it, that nastiness was recorded, and round the Great Circulation went taking your nastiness with it. There again if you were good to it, it was recorded into the long term record and round it went taking your goodness with it. For Stewart when you died, you personally were not rewarded for being good or bad, instead you returned to the atoms you were made of and these atoms joined with the universe. 

The Buddha has a whole university of not schisms as such, better to call them distinct practices. Karmic Ripening as a means to understand belonging to the whole, uses the idea of seeds planted by good or bad deeds which when conditions were right sprouted and returned to haunt or bless you. And when you think about some blubbering supreme court justice casting around for righteousness and coming up with what goes round come round, rest assured it wouldn't be the first time some horrible mother's boy has caused the Buddha to think about taking a ruler to knuckles.

To you and I, the Everywhen is a non-linear concept of time explained to us by anthropologists. Anthropologists are people and as people they have disagreements. Their general definition defines the Everywhen as a simultaneous past, present and future which can be understood as an Eternal Present where the distinction between being awake and asleep are very blurred. Reality, in this understanding, isn't fact or fiction it's a resonance shared with the living mind of the land itself. To walk a Songline is to walk inside the mind of an ancestor. And when you add to that Songline or subtract from it because of a change in the circumstances of a waterhole you are expressing a state of relatedness between yourself and your role in the reality of the universe.

 

The Germanic Festival of Yule In Bethlehem

A Yuletide Young Buck Hoof Print

 Even Johnathan Swift "hankered after a lost Golden Age." Hanker comes from Dutch words that mean to hang, to hook and to crave. Johnathan Swift was an Irishman who died in 1745 of "unsound mind and memory" when he was 77. Swift's hankering lead him to write "satirical prose" such as Gulliver's Travels, and long before Swift, back in Ancient Greece, poets were waxing and waning on the shores of "Lost Golden Ages." Fortunately I remain puerile, which comes from the Latin for boy, which these days means "childishly silly and trivial." And so it is, that my grasp of a golden age falls off the cliff whenever the word "Civilization" is mentioned. 

It's not so much a question of stealing souls, it's more a question of replacing them. So, let's talk about the Kenneth Clark who doesn't have an 'e' at the end of his surname, he's the Kenneth Clark who was made a life peer for "Services to Art." This Kenneth Clark, you might be glad to hear, died 1983 when he was 79. He was a well mannered boy, polite and hardworking, from yet another family who'd made their fortune in textiles. Kenneth wasn't an artist himself but he knew a lot about Art, and in his later years, in response to thinly veiled criticisms of his "Great Man" approach to the world in general and Art in particular he wrote this:

"I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology."

He is quoted here as a man whose soul had been replaced, he had a creed, an "I believe" response. Fair and balanced, in his society he was everything he wanted to be. When Kenneth Clark knew he'd be dead soon, he did a Schlegel, he decided the Church of England was too secular for his taste, with pomp and ceremony he prostrated himself to the Roman Catholic Church. An operating system, which, he'd probably decided, gave him a better chance of attaching his frequencies to the frequencies he imagined already operated the next world. 

I can actually hear a tidal wave of criticism. But as I said, I remain Puerile. So na-na-nanny-boo-boo.

Written and unwritten.

Old Bits of Wood

 How accurate are the means of our understandings. The second question is: what do you mean by means? I'll tell ya! "An action or system by which a result is brought about, a method."

You got math, physics, biology it's a long list that includes Accounting and Creative Accounting. Some way off is the question: has physics cheated us? Max Planck in his 1944 speech in Florence Italy suggested that maybe it had. And why? Because by means of physics the finalizing metaphysical equation hadn't been determined, a conclusion hadn't been reached, something as yet unidentified, was missing. In short the Physics journey was unfinished, the means had a long way to go.

When Planck offered his thoughts on the gaps in physics, many a hard-nosed adult went spiritual and in the meanwhile far away in the bombed out ruins of Frankfurt am Main, Arthur Schopenhauer, a bad tempered Metaphysical Materialist well known for throwing a seamstress down stairs, grunted in his grave. He'd never been big on linear thinking, the compulsion to require an ending was not strong in Arthur. Nor was it a quarrel between circles and straight lines for him, it was closer to what John Walking Stewart called Moral Motion.

And what on this good earth did your hero mean by Moral Motion? 

First of all, with a name that includes "John" and "Stewart" there is no way he can be my hero, if there was a "Chad'' in there I'd spurn him completely.  Second of all: Moral Motion is Stewart's name for the idea that the universe is not made of "objects," but of sentient matter in a constant state of transition. And this is were the argument that Thomas de Quincy attempted to develop over how and where Stewart got his ideas, twinkles anew in our warm, festive hearts as we sup on Kentucky's own Ginger Ale and wish it was Bourbon.

For his part, Walking Stewart claimed that all his ideas had come to him through the physical act of crossing continents on foot. De Quincy knew for sure that Walking Stewart was an "untutored," ill-stabled genius who'd done a bit of walking, and might have stumbled upon and talked to Buddhists and European Materialist as well as a mix of atomist and animist thinkers, and he'd got got himself so muddled up he couldn't order his thinking into a well trained bundle. And it's true Thomas De Quincey's own contribution to the written world was spectacular, all that and he'd discovered a novel way to monetize addiction, he'd invented the genre of Addiction Literature.

The Romantic critique of the Industrial World had dreams of changing it all for the better. A holism that completed the whole man, didn't leave parts of him lost and panting. And your'e right, percentage-wise not many people heard of Schlegel's Lucinde or Hoffmann's Nutcracker, until Dumas and Tchaikovsky did stuff to the Nutcracker and Emmanuelle Arsan did stuff to Lucinde, and Lo as the line was straightened the genre of Romantic literature, and chorus line theater turned sticky from industrial portrayals of lingerie. 

As a result, in the search for a happy ever after, never was Schlegel's contribution to the meanings in Irony mentioned. Schlegel supposed that the role of irony in art was to demonstrate there was no such thing as an ending. Try putting a slightly retarded Bastian on the back of a fluffy dog and flinging him around in a dark void called "The Nothing" and not mention Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer Heidegger or Sartre.

No wonder David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at his girlfriend, he couldn't get his mind around the possibility that if it ended happily or with hope, it was suspect. And yes as Baxter likes to point out, throwing coffee tables at anyone or anything is a first world problem. 

For de Quincey's interest, as he wonders where Ann went, the thousands of generations of Aboriginal People of Western Australia were well tutored in their understandings of their world. It was place where the land carried the dreaming, were custodians of the verse walked the tracks of songlines, followed the lore, and maintained a frequency. 

Of the two, de Quincey and Stewart. Stewart was closer to understanding a world without the written word. That world would have been a non-linear world. In that non-linear world where, as a transient collection of atoms I am nothing without everything else.

Where have the Butterflies gone.

Bark

 Back when De Quincy was a Romantic young junkie the word resonance wasn't commonly used. It's from Latin for echo or resound and more recently its meaning as a vibration has reached the marketers and propagandists where it's called a virus. Through physics this echo or resound has found a home in the world of electronics, specifically radio waves where it was baptized as frequency and there it slowly pushed aside harmony. 

And whether you like it or not, as we return to Jorge Luis Borges' essay on the Nothingness of Personality you might notice a vibration stirring the spirit, a harmony soothing the soul, a resonance rhyming with balance because I at least am going to argue that the last Golden Age of our species was destroyed by the written word.

Borges was a young man when he wrote The Nothingness of Personality. He claimed Personality was a "mirage maintained by conceit, it was without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He also suggested that a reader absorbed very little of what was written, rarely was the reader ever in a position to challenge or debate what was written, and altogether, in my view, Borges insinuated the relationship between writer and reader was a sterile relationship where the writer, in the interest of his own success, was attempting to impress the reader either with the equivalent of tablets from on high or a ripping yarn which as a best seller could mean a second home in the Cairngorms, or somewhere. 

The meanings in resonance that incline toward balance allows for the concept of what Zarathustra called Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, the Master of Balance if you prefer. An imbalance betrays itself as a disharmony, a frequency that produces only static on the wireless as you search for Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station out there on the North Sea that's touched your imagination and into which you want to fall.

Go ahead, ask Socrates, he'll tell you the written word creates the illusion of understanding, fosters a pretense of knowledge, destroys memory. If you don't believe me then tramp homeless, friendless, handheld deviceless and hungry across the land, and there you may ask where the hedgerows have gone, you might wander after Hedgehog, and try to remember when you last saw a Butterfly. Or not.

  

The Sky Emu, Songlines and The Everywhen

Yellow Jacket Nest and Skunk or Possum

 The Sky Emu, is a dark blob in the Milky Way that we linear English Speaking Peoples have totally castrated by giving it the incredibly dull name of The Coalsack Nebula. Sure, the Coalsack Nebula can't be seen by most of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, but South of the Equator it's very much a feature for anyone interested in Emu.

I will tell you why but as with the Trans-Pacific Partnership which was crushed in 2017 by the current resident of the White House because he didn't want to understand it, it's complicated.

The point is, The Sky Emu, depending on where it is in the sky and what shape it is will tell you what the Emu are up to. What kind of mood they're in, whether they're wandering around, nesting, laying eggs. And don't be fooled, the Emu are untrustworthy and they are dangerous. In 1932, the Australian Government authorized the military to take up arms against The Emu.

The other thing to remember, which the Australian Military overlooked as they lost their war against Emu, you don't hunt Emu when the Sky Emu tells you they're nesting. If you do, your sin becomes a ripple in the fabric of time, all the way back into the past, the Everywhen thus threatened, your food sources would be destroyed, songlines would no longer lead you to water. Shame on you, you pathetic creature!

Of course, all over our own northern hemisphere, there was a time when people would look at the sky and do a Sky Emu interpretation on it. For example in Ancient Egypt it was fairly straightforward, when in the course of a year, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, first rose after seventy days of absence just before sunrise, usually a week or two before the end of the summer, it meant the river Nile would soon be flooding. The Greeks called Sirius the Dog Star and they accused her of being the cause of the Dog Days of Summer.

In the North we have rather abused our relationship with the earth and the heavens. We fossilized the Songlines, made chocolate chip fortune cookies out of the Everywhen, stars twinkle and we catch them when they fall for luck......Anyway, thank god the days will lengthen for a while,

 

A permeable Membrane and the fate of the Sodomites.

Dappled

When it comes to Plato, Kant, Hegel and a whole bunch of others, some of them English Speaking disciples of the Enlightenment, those of us who share the quest for a tie wearing Grail of Reason, find ourselves accusing those of the Romantic Vision, along with the Woe is me Existentialists and anyone who claims to be uniquely spiritual and/or creative, of being pit dwelling, hat wearing blobs with very little going for them.

And I say this as someone who owns a deep respect for the world as it might have been during the Paleolithic period, the several million years before the farmers messed with our lifestyle and just twelve thousand years ago turned us Neolithic, a paltry description for twenty-five thousand years of poor nutrition, shorter lives, more diseases, social stratification and conflict over land ownership.

The point is you can't touch the Romantics without submitting to an understanding of all that and the Taoist Way. "Once I was a butterfly, fluttering this way and that, then I woke up and saw that I was a man. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." Good pothead Neolithic stuff, the dreamworld and the first rational question: "What is Real?"

For Taoists the answer came this way: both dream and awake is part of a larger unified flow. Or as Can Bobby would tell you, dream and awake for a Taoist are just "different frequencies of experience." Worth noting that if Can Bobby ever feels anything it'll be a different frequency.

 Go ahead, sneer away as you dream of an event in Bethlehem which has badly messed with calendar for two thousand years. But rest assured if you were in Western Australia thirty five thousand years ago, you'd settle down for the night and while asleep you'd left the shell and traveled to a small, often permanent, body of water you hadn't visited for years, and spotted a tree that had fallen over or a spring that had dried up, then, according to the law, there was a good chance you owned that billabong. And why on earth? Well, dream time was real. 

In the 1960's, as we beatniks were being overwhelmed by hippies, traveling while asleep was called Astral Planing, but trust me in those days justice had been well sterilized and Astral Planing didn't hold up in court even if prior to the English Invasion it had always been a custom and practice, and a god given right of the Welsh Speaking Peoples.

So we got what Can Bobby refers to as a "permeable membrane" between sleeping and waking. The Romantics embraced the permeability of that membrane. Here there's a sentiment that's sort of from Genesis. It goes something like this: 'The Children of Sodom have lost the right to Petition Fate."

They were doomed. Man, woman and child, all of them doomed. I don't know about Jesus or the Holy Spirit but an overly sensitive God the Father felt badly ignored, he had to set an example, and he'd have no mercy on them. Romantics, might have described the Sodomites, and the Gomorrahites, as stuck in the light of the sun. A light that only showed boundaries not connections.

Alcoholics have a cure, they say sorry, admit to their sin and submit to a higher power. It's very romantic and rather ironic way to deal with the higher power of alcohol.

Hoffmann's Anthem to the Romantic Vision

Local Visionary 

 The easy criticism of the Romantics dwells on the idea that they are romantic, just one big woo, a heaving breast factor and fields of daffodils.

So let's look at a German Romantic called ETA Hoffmann, who in 1816, with Napoleon far away, this time on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, published a book called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Many might know Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, which was adapted from Alexandre Dumas' version of Hoffmann's Nutcracker. Alexandre Dumas wrote the Three Musketeers. Dumas' Nutcracker, was written in the 1840's, it was written as a children's version of Hoffmann's somewhat Gothic Nutcracker. 

Of interest, a Nutcracker, in German, is a Nussknacker. Here, the German word nusse is as vulgar a description of gonad as nut is in the English language. And we can all be fairly certain that Hoffmann knew where nusse lay on the symbolic order of meaning. And I'll tell you why.

It all started for Hoffman with sausage making. Imagine a household where a king had decided to hold a sausage feast for his friends and neighbors. Meanwhile in her kitchen the Queen had received the news and was carefully separating the lard from the meat to make sure the proportions were correct, her king didn't like his sausages too greasy, nor too dry.

As she worked a mouse emerged from under the floorboards. This mouse was Madame Mouserinks, she was the Queen of the Mice, she was large and powerful, she explained her own royal lineage and asked for a little pork fat to sample. The Human Queen obliged, and unfortunately out from under the floorboards came Madam Mouserinks' seven sons as well as numerous relatives who ate up pretty much all of the lard for the King's sausages.

You might be able to imagine the King's reaction. His Feast of Sausages was a disaster. The sausages his queen had made, were lackluster, far too dry, his business connections were most unimpressed. What had happened? It could be time to do a Henry the Eighth on the missus.

The Queen, familiar with her King's rages, explained exactly what had happened in the kitchen, it wasn't her fault. The King ordered his clockmaker to make devices that would rid his castle of mice. Madame Mouserinks and her mice were subjected to a terrible pogrom, it was an extermination which left Madam Mouserinks very distraught. She carefully plotted her revenge, she'd wait until the new child was born to the upstairs realm, she sneaked into the newborn's well appointed nursery and cast a spell on Princess Prilipat. She turned the beautiful little baby into a hideous, big headed, nutcracker faced monster who had a beard.  

The Queen discovered that the only way to break the spell was for some goodish looking boy who'd never shaved and never worn boots to crack open a Krakatuk nut and feed the nut's kernel to the grotesque Princess Prilipat. The Krakatuk was not an easy thing to crack. Many had tried, some had broken their teeth in their efforts to impress the girls and curry favor with Royalty. 

And lo, the upstairs King's clockmaker had a nephew, who as it turned out was rather good with Krakatuk nuts. He did his thing, opened the nut with his teeth, took the necessary seven steps backwards without looking. Princess Prilipat was relieved of her gruesomeness, she became a blue eyed blond with excellent prospects for a Disney Role.

But, As the clockmaker's nephew was stepping backwards he stepped on Madame Mouserinks, the Queen of the Mice, and as she died she cursed the clockmaker's nephew. She turned him into a an unpleasant looking actual nutcracker.

Not exactly Sugar Plum Fairy. She wasn't invented until 1892, when the marketers reckoned the whole Nutcracker story needed a climactic dance for a male and female lead, a curtain close, followed by a happy ever after with Christmas presents and other carnal delights, sausage stuffing and plum pudding.

Hoffmann's Nutcracker was a very different feast to the 1892 extravaganza. All very well a gal feeling sorry for a cursed nutcracker that had been given to the family as a present and had been broken by her heavy-handed brother.

In Hoffmann's Nutcracker it wasn't defeating this or that with mousetraps or curses or whatever and running off with a princess to wherever in white. Hoffmann's Marie wasn't even a princess, she was someone's sister who'd watched her brother break a nutcracker. And it was Marie's re-enriching the broken nutcracker, with her "childlike gaze" which could see the spiritual truth of a physical object, she bandaged the nutcracker's broken jaw, submitted herself to the Mouse King's blackmail, he wanted his revenge for the killing of Madame Mouserinks, his queen, he'd do anything to reduce the nutcracker to kindling. Marie would do anything to save her nutcracker.

Yes indeed, it was Marie's own radical empathy that enabled her many difficult sacrifices which returned the Nutcracker to become the person he'd once been, a clockmaker's nephew. And yes Marie's re-enriching the broken nutcracker required her to remake fairyland where the nutcracker could take her to the Kingdom of Dolls and when Marie was old enough they'd wed.

There again Hoffmann wrote an anthem to the Romantic Vision where the Nutcracker is a cursed and noble soul, where Marie is a witness to a spiritual vision and where reality is a thin veil over a magical world.

The Romantic Blessing and Menace

Friedrich Schlegel's Grave in Old Catholic Cemetery,

Dresden, Germany

Going to talk about the Sublime and Friedrich Schlegel. But first there's a question from Baxter: "Why go on and on about characters who lived their lives in the early days of the Industrial Revolution?"

It was a time of an aggressive confidence in the Western World. God might have again wondered at the point of it all and people, or some of them, thought they had more sensible answers. But the whole sentiment of "That which cannot be uttered, should not be uttered" which had impressed the Apostle Paul around 57 AD with his remarks in the Book of Romans, was coming alive. Paul had reckoned that only God could understand many of the incomprehensible moanings and groanings of the human mind, our job was to obey God and hang in there. There was Kant, a Saint of the Enlightenment who died in 1804, with his Transcendent Idealism which basically suggested there were some things we could have ideas about but could never prove or disprove, so worth keeping that in mind, but not to make too big a deal about them. There was the untutored Walking Stewart's "The philosopher must bow down to the microscope" and closer to our own time came Wittgenstein with his challenge to the logic of language that threatened to make Philosophy and philosophers redundant. If language wasn't rational, then What the hell!

In the 1700's and 1800's as a reaction to this aggressive confidence the sublime was embraced by the Romantics, and not just the daffodil and lonely cloud English Speaking Romantics. In Europe the German Romantics just didn't hold back, they jumped right in with a logic that put the pain, danger and fear into Burke's positioning of the word sublime in a symbolic order. 

The Burke in question was Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, when Thomas De Quincey was 12 years old. In an essay, Burke described his understanding of sublime this way: "Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror." It wasn't up close and personal with terror, it was thinking about terror from a safe place. Sublime was one of the most powerful emotions a mind could feel, it produced a tension that "tightens the body's fibers and momentarily suspends rational thought." 

The "suspends rational thought" part of the reaction to terror from a safe place, is the subject of Burke's essay "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." Of coincidental interest to Burke's contribution to the meanings in Sublime are Schlegel's contribution to the word Irony. The word Irony, Schlegel suggested, humorous or otherwise, cast doubt on fact, influenced art and literature to the extent that everything remained unfinished. In the way Irony had a metaphysical affect on comprehension.

 Friedrich Schlegel's "Lucinde," published in 1799 is described as an "early work of German Romanticism." This book didn't sell well, instead it became what is called a Literary Milestone, people read it because they felt obliged to form an opinion on the book's fragmented structure and answers to just how scandalous Lucinde was. Inevitably it developed a cult following, it didn't have a recognized literary structure, and the lovers, Lucinde and Julius, engaged in shocking non-traditional expressions of equality through physical acts, Lucinde would sometimes be the man. The point for Schlegel in his search for the sublime was not only an equality, it was rehabilitation of the flesh which is an idea declaring the erotic a unity between sensual and physical love, and nothing wrong with it as the pursuit of an understanding of self which focused on the individual's right to define his or her own morality and no one else. 

Burke was a Whig of good standing, he was Protestant through and through, he liked the idea of limits to the power of kings, he believed in promoting the middle class through representation in Parliament, he liked the idea of securing property rights and he had no problem with a German Royal called George inheriting the thrown of England so long as George I wasn't Catholic.

Burke's essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful was a must read for Romantics. Burke put a value on prejudice, and being Burke when he used the word prejudice what he meant was tradition, inherited wisdom, and that sort of hard-scrabble wasteland. He was firmly on the side of ways of doing things that were established, rather than start all over again with purely abstract reasoning.

The German Romantics took the Sublime and the Beautiful to heart, and in the Romantic tradition, there were a number of German Idealists who produced scholarship that redefined the Medieval. This word Volk, or The People, the common folk, the Romantics argued were closer to the real in the Medieval Period than they were in the Europe the 1700's and 1800's. In his studies, a man called Johann Gottfried Herder had identified the Spirit of the People or Volksgeist. He'd decided that Language was an "organic embodiment of a peoples soul and way of thinking." The German Language, he argued, contained the essence of the German Volk.  Das deutsche Volk.

When Napoleon invaded the homeland of das deutsche Volk, a philosopher called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in a series of addresses to the German patriots, having absorbed Herder's sense of the German Peoples cultural superiority, chose to remind the German Speaking Peoples that they're were the original Europeans, not like these bastard interloping French Speaking Peoples, and without any shadow of a doubt it was the German Destiny to control Europe not France. This was in 1808 when Thomas De Quincey was 21 years old

Friedrich Schlegel, the Romantic, had heard Herder and Fichte, he saw a domination of French Speaking Peoples as an abomination, he quickly became Anti-Napoleon. His Metaphysical Irony, his belief that nothing could ever be perfect, the spirit was free, collapsed. 

In 1808, the author of Lucinde moved to Austria, he found work as an Imperial Court Secretary in the service of the Austrian Empire where he wrote very exaggerated, rabble rousing proclamations against Napoleon and the French. Friedrich and his wife converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and he became a White Catholic Nationalist who believed in the destiny, the superiority and indeed the purity, of the German Speaking People.

The Sublime to the Practical, how uncomfortable was Thomas De Quincey

Elizabeth Penson. Thomas De Quincey's mother.

Miniature by Thomas Hazlehurst 1760-1818

It's difficult to get away from De Quincey's reactionary views on pretty much everything from the Peterloo Massacre to opposing the Abolitionist Movement. De Quincey didn't approve of slavery, he recognized it as a moral evil which had been around too long, he wouldn't have owned a slave himself, but much better for everyone if slave owners freed their own slaves rather than sending in the navy to sort out slave traders. De Quincey was a monarchist with little faith in the common folk. He thought British Imperialism an obvious solution to the world as it was and three years after his father died, his mother, the wife of a very successful textile merchant changed the surname to De Quincey. An association with Norman Royalty which her son Thomas learned to appreciate.

In his growing up De Quincey confronted a number of what some might call hurdles. His father died when he was seven, his older sister, who he "adored" died when he was six, and in 1796 his older brother who was like a hero to him died at fifteen years of age. His three surviving brothers and his surviving sister were normal, Thomas wasn't. He was what they call Intellectually Precocious, when he was eight he was fluent in Latin and Greek but he struggled with the shyness of Social Dyssynchrony, which is when a somewhat sickly person allows their intellect to isolate them from peers.

Say what you like about De Quincey's mum, she had the right idea taking her most difficult child out of King Edward's School in Bath and sending him to an inferior school in a small village called Wingfield in Wiltshire which was run by a strictly religious Vicar in the hopes of knocking the pompous social dyssynchrony out of him and by so doing giving him a chance to fit in.

In those days when the bread-winner croaked leaving large sums of money and business interests to the widow they used to have this whole guardian thing, which I think still happens. The Quincey family as it morphed into the De Quincey family was attended to and cared for by three guardians. The guardian put in charge of making the ultimate decisions for Thomas De Quincey's share of the inheritance was a man called Mr. Pringle. Put simply, Pringle was a religious nut who didn't approve of anything resembling joy. The shy and precocious, demonic, Thomas had problems with Mr. Pringle.

Safe to assume that Mr. Pringle's thinking on the subject of Elizabeth Quincey's son Thomas would run along the following lines: Brilliant but wayward, immensely vexing and difficult to manage, dangerously unsuitably for a stable career, fiscally irresponsible and incapable of handling his substantial inheritance. Mr. Pringle was a good Christian, I'm not blessed that way, but I can translate he nuances of decent language. What Pringle meant was this: Thomas was a real pain in the neck, he was needy and uncomfortable to be around, if he knocked on your door you'd hide in a cupboard rather than spend time with him.

When he was seventeen, young Thomas ran away from Manchester Grammar School, where he'd been sent to get him ready for The University of Oxford. He couldn't handle the life he was being forced to live any longer, he didn't want to go home to have to deal with his Guardian, a dogmatic, unimaginative man who was incapable of understanding genius. His battle now was food and shelter, hithertofore all that and luxuries had been provided for by his family. But that early morning in July of 1802 might not have been what we were all thinking. A brave man making a break for freedom, begin life anew!

Young Thomas had been in correspondence with his mother, a woman who understood genius and rather wished it hadn't fallen upon one of her children. She knew that Thomas had decided to runaway from his obligations to Mr. Pringle and the family. She hated the idea of it becoming a matter of public knowledge. She would have talked to Mr. Pringle about it. And she talked to Colonel Penson, her brother about it. Decisions were made. Conferences on the matter of what to do about Thomas were measured and very Christian, the  answer was to let him run wild for a bit, find out for himself, and Colonel Penson, rather than the Quincy estate would send him a Guinea a week. Which, Pardon my French, for a wayfarer, a homeless person, was a flecking Fortune. In today's money it would be about 200 dollars a week. 

At this point in my understanding of Thomas De Quincey, I find myself looking at a spoiled rotten, manipulative, self centered, little brat. And then I remember that when he ran from boarding school, he climbed out a window taking with him a bundle of possessions that included a collection of Greek Plays and a copy of Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads." 

The thing is, no matter what he took with him, he'd not be the only person to have run away from an English Boarding School. When Baxter was a bead in the eye of our heart, he and I made our run for it. We went missing at night, we had Leopards adrift on the slopes of Mount Elgon to worry about, and in a practical vein we took buttered bread from the school dinning room to feed upon. But with De Quincey I can be sure his pursuit of the sublime was a worship first enabled by the grant of one Guinea a week and the Laudanum he took for a tooth ache which he could afford to buy because of his uncle's money.

However, the title of his best selling, most memorable and lasting book "The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" which the wide eyed and innocent can still get new, was his own brilliant practical work of marketing.

 

The White Bear and War Torn Revolutionary France

Pitt the Younger. 1759-1806

The Last Prime Minister of Great Britain and the first Prime Minister of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

You can't really talk about Thomas Paine or John Walking Stewart without coming across a Coaching Inn established in 1685 which was first called The Fleece and was later called The White Bear. The Inn was in a part of London England nowadays called Piccadilly.

In the 1790's Piccadilly was frightfully fashionable, relatively peaceful, in modern parlance it was a hub for the social, literary and political elite. It had posh grocery stores, and a gathering of highfalutin bookshops were people went to talk about stuff, and worth noting that in the 1790's the drinking of coffee was all the rage, with over 3000 coffee shops across England. And I have to say that I was very disappointed when I found out that around 1791-92 John Walking Stewart was a lodger at the White Bear.

It just shows how the wish factor that aligns your thinking can often hit hurdles and how easy it is to yell "Fake News" when your feelings are hurt. I should have guessed that something like that would happen to my attempts at balance. It should have been obvious! Walking Stewart had been a general for Hyder Ali, and after pissing off Hyder Ali he'd reacquainted himself with East India Company by becoming a member of the Nabob of Arcot's inner circle. Stewart had money aplenty for his walk from Madras to London. The so called threadbare Armenian private soldier's jacket he'd wear, he'd probably paid for. And indeed you have to ask whether John Walking Stewart had ever actually slept in a hedgerow or befriended a very young streetwalker like Ann who when De Quincey was on the run from his family had filled his dream time with confusion and pity. Later in his life a vision of her regularly visited him in the rush of his opium highs, poor chap.... 

Anyway, you might want to know what on earth a founding father was doing lodging with Walking Stewart at the White Bear in the fashionable Piccadilly of 1791-92. Go ahead, quarrel all you want, Paine may not have signed the bit of paper but he was a revolutionary intellectual and former disgraced English custom and excise officer whose words and writings shaped a nations 'Founding Ideals.' If the prissy fingered passionless Yankees with their attention to detail and ridiculously big army can't handle a Thomas Paine being a founding father, then f-em in the ear. 

In the 1790's The French Revolution was the talk of the town. From rural England it all looked very European, it was just one big war after another big war, but "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" did appeal to a good few intellectual types in Piccadilly amongst whom lopping the head off a tyrannical yoke wasn't that big a problem if it was done "For the People and By the People." Perhaps not Walking Stewart's opinion, the only people he really trusted were the Laplanders

Thomas Paine had just written and published a book he'd called "Rights of Man" and lo, Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of the British Islands and her colonies, Great Britain as it was called through the 1700's until 1800, had decided to start banning books and arresting authors who didn't really see a problem with radical changes like those French Revolutionaries were engaged in, and on this subject, Pitt the Younger, despite being a man who'd remained obedient to his doctor's advice to drink a bottle of port every day since he was 14, couldn't help but notice that Thomas Paine, a particularly incendiary rabblerouser who'd had great success in the Americas had written another book and was dolling around in Piccadilly as an unmarried male and probably drinking coffee. 

But it was because he was lodging at the White Bear in a very fashionable part of town, and not hiding in a hedgerow, Thomas Paine was warned by his friend the Poet, Painter and Madman William Blake just in time for a Founding Father to run away to France where he was already an elected representative and was receiving income as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais region to the National Convention of France.

Paine missed his trial date for seditious libel, which had been set for December 18th 1792. The Magistrate declared him guilty, he was convicted of being an Outlaw, no better than a Highwayman, new warrants were issued for his arrest and on January 15th 1793, Thomas Paine, fulfilling his obligations as citizen of the world who represented the Pas-de-Calais region of France, was called to speak to the French National Convention on the subject of Executing Louis XVI (the sixteenth), husband of Marie Antoinette and King of France.

Thomas was of the opinion that the Republic shouldn't execute Louis, instead they should exile him. Thomas' reasons were like this: First of all, Louis wasn't all bad, if it hadn't been for Louis supporting the Americans in their war of independence from the British there would be no Constitution of the United States. Second of all he argued against the Death Penalty by suggesting it was a barbaric method of punishment favored by Monarchy and the French Republic shouldn't stoop to the level of monarchs. And thirdly, there was no point in turning Louis and his dumb-ass family into martyrs for the Royalists Cause. Thomas Paine voted against executing Louis, and for his trouble he was arrested and jailed during Robespierre and the journalist Marat's rule by fear. This was the period of French history referred to as the Reign of Terror. Thomas, a very brave man in defense of his beliefs, was lucky not to have been executed himself.

Interestingly, for those who in our difficult time may have a fever for karma, Marat, the journalist and ideas man, was stabbed to death in a bath by a supporter of the Moderate Girondin faction, a striking woman called Charlotte Corday, sometime in the year of 1793.  And  then a badly wounded Robespierre, who was the progeny of a lawyer marrying a brewer's daughter, was dutifully and formally executed for counter revolutionary activities in the July of 1794.

Vive La Belle France was by 1799 yearning for a Napoleon to tell his Grenadiers to fix bayonets. 

The Outsider In Walking Stewart

Woodland for the trees

We can't just toss the word untutored around and then accuse people of accusing other people of being untutored, and of course back then at the turn of the 18th Century, with the world rapidly reconfiguring there was sickness, disease and poxes aplenty, being untutored was often the least of your disfigurements.

So let's look at it.

Thomas De Quincey mentioned John Walking Stewart in three essays. All three essays were published after Walking Stewart was dead. For De Quincey, Stewart was all of the following: He was a "sublime visionary." He was a "Lion of London," an eccentric character who could be seen everywhere. He was the most eloquent man on the subject of nature the world had ever seen. He was a "Man of genius but not of talents."

De Quincey might have measured Stewart with a degree or two of envy, leading him to make sure everyone knew the Walking Stewart in the white hat was limited. Stewart's genius, De Quincey suggested, was wanting an organ through which to manifest itself. Stewart's ideas were crude, they were imperfect, obscure, ill-disciplined and half developed. They were not producible to a popular audience and they were poorly written. 

No matter what De Quincy, a nervous little man with a crush on Wordsworth, had to say about this and that, The Romantics thought Walking Stewart wonderful. This whole, untrained, untutored stuff was gold, it was Rousseauian poetry in a world that was slowly filling up with untethered throngs, homeless urchins, horrible smells, smoke and  things made of iron. They loved Stewart's rock star qualities, the naturalness of his eloquence on the universality of sentience, a mixture of Hindu, Buddhism, strands of the French Materialism of the 1700's that declared religion an inadequate source for an enlightened metaphysics, matter was all and everything. Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson and Alfred Whitehead were all well tutored minds we've looked at.

In most ways John Walking Stewart was an outsider as much as he was untutored. He was an expression unto himself. His companion in later life was a Miss Wilson and he must have been hell to live with. The lesson to learn from him is an insight into how we achieve understanding. For De Quincey, his book The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an account of his unending struggle with ghosts and with exploring himself. John Walking Stewart didn't have that trouble, he was a blockhead, he didn't need to belong, he remained an outsider, he made his own pattern of thinking.

So yes, our man was untutored!

Meeting your Benjamin or the Golden Mean of Good and Evil.

Shroom in the Woods

The Victorian coterie that included William Wordsworth (English Romantic Poet) and Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an Opium Eater) would have considered John Walking Stewart an untutored mind.

De Quincey, who died in 1859 at the age of 74, had a knack for the Ancient Greek language. He'd pointed out that in translations of the Bible from Greek into English the Greek word metanoia had often been erroneously translated as either repentance or conversion. Metanoia, as far as De Quincey was concerned meant the infinitely less dramatic a change of mind. None of this impressed his mother who was rather hoping he wouldn't turn into a self impressed pompous a-hole, so she sent him to a very poor quality schools in the hope that he would buck-up, and the first twenty odd years of his life he spent either running away or trying to run away from his home or his school.

Wordsworth died in 1850 aged 80. His mother taught him to read. He first went to a tiny school of "low quality" in Cockermouth which is a small town in a part of England referred to as the Lake District. Then he went to a school for "upper class" children in Penrith which is a small town a couple of dozen miles east of Cockermouth. While at school in Penrith William Wordsworth met Mary Hutchinson who he later married and had five children with.

The only non-boring thing about Wordsworth was the affair he had with a French woman in France called Annette Valon. The two lovers had both been inspired by Rousseau's ideal that all human beings were essentially good, and we'd all been hopelessly corrupted by society.

Annette and William  had a child together, he didn't marry her because you know he was only in France to test out a few Rouseauian Ideals, see what the French Revolution looked like before settling down to writing poetry and marrying a gal his mother approved of that he'd met long before his years at Cambridge, when he was a lad at school in Penrith. 

While in France Wordsworth met a man called John Stewart. What was John Stewart doing in Paris in 1791? No one really knows for sure, but apparently he was too much of a blockhead to survive Harrow, or ever find respectable work in England so his father had shipped him off to work for the East India Company when he was 15 years old. And having done his time in the colonies, he was on his way home to England.

John Stewart had a recent scar on his face, which was still sort of in the process of healing, but he looked fit enough even if he was still anxious to find an Edinburgh trained doctor rather than a shaman.

What had a happened!

The thing about the East India Company was they were incredibly corrupt, in their business dealings they treated people very badly. John couldn't handle it. But it was a big country, not all of it run by the East India Company. He found gainful employment in the service of the Sultan of Mysore. He'd led the sultan's soldiers against the East India Company's mercenaries as well as against rival Princes and he'd actually used Mysore Rockets against Elephants, which was sort of an ugly business and then in a more peaceful moment the Sultan had wanted him to collect unpaid dues from unwilling subjects. What option did he have but to again quarrel with his employer and this time he'd had to make a run for it. One thing had led to another and he'd basically walked to Paris from Southern India, he was looking forward to seeing London again, meanwhile he was rather enjoying the French Revolution and the sort of interesting people it had attracted .

In London, John Stewart was financially OK, had done well enough to make a claim for back pay in the English courts which were redistributing the Nabob of Arcot's Estate. In London, Stewart had written several books on materialist philosophy, he was a big fan of ecological balance, he was responsible for many a radical pamphlet some of which had resulted in him having to leave England to avoid a wrathful response from servants of the Regency who didn't need any more advice on how to manage Mad King George.

In his pursuit of the Golden Mean of Good and Evil, Stewart had loved his visit to Lapland, they were a perfect people. He'd had to cut short his visit to the city of Boston in the Americas because a friend of his had been accused of blasphemy and the church of the Americas was knocking on doors looking for him.  But of all his exploits and ideas, being considered untutored by an intelligentsia he'd both admired and had influenced, hurt John Stewart.

It was an intelligentsia that included a fellow pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who happened to be a founding father after meeting Benjamin Franklin in London. Paine was engaged in writing the The Rights of Man when he met John Stewart. There was Wordsworth, a Poet Laureate of England. And there was De Quincey a lazy savant who reckoned slave owners should be persuaded, not forced, to liberate their slaves and who'd once written that John Walking Stewart was the most eloquent man on the subject of nature he and Wordsworth had ever met. Put simply, Stewart, like the disgraced Customs and Excise Officer Thomas Paine, could talk, he could read and write, but he'd not been trained by the right people, he'd not met his Benjamin as he searched for his Golden Mean

When John Walking Stewart decided he was too old to live happily, he took laudanum on last birthday, the 19th of February, 1822. His body was discovered the following day, by friends. He was 75.

 

The Tutored and Untutored

Porch Bar

Omg! It's Monday. This time about forty five years ago I would have had no idea what Omg even meant, and if anyone had told me what Omg might have meant I'd have mumbled a few opinions about how the end of the world was closer than I thought before returning to how it was almost a tragedy that I was still looking out a window on a Monday morning and still walking around.

I was, in those days when the first inklings of old age started to hit me, a proud member of USDAW. The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers. I was a traditional milkman, I distributed bottles of milk, did a bit of gardening, used bacon fat to keep my finger pads and finger nails from cracking in the cold, chain smoked, drank heavily, I was a big fan of Solzhenitsyn, JG Ballard and for some weeks through the course of a wet springtime I had in my coat pocket a tea-stained free booklet, a compendium of a dozen or so essays, that had probably been written by Soviet Intellectuals for British Intellectuals to distribute through the ranks of the Welsh working class.

Let's put it this way, back then, no one in Russia, except perhaps the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, liked Hannah Arendt's book The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was yet another example of Western Corruption and over twenty years after it was first published Anti-Arendt Derangement Fever was still devoting resources to discrediting her ridiculous notion that Totalitarianism was a novel form of government that could be distinguished from despotism, tyranny and dictatorship because totalitarianism used terror against an entire population rather than just against political opponents.

And why was I carrying this damp Anti-Arendtian warbling around in my coat pocket? I'll tell you! Our union representative had had a political disagreement with his daughter, who happened to be a householder I delivered milk to, she was a lecturer at the University and she'd given me the compendium of essays to give to her father who refused to accept the offerings, read them, or even think about them. Stalin had been a Totalitarian, the Soviet Union a Totalitarian State, and it was for daddy to get over it, pick himself up and instead of being a relic of the past, get on with his life.  Back in those days I had a soft spot for the old Stalinist who ran our Union, didn't want to be held responsible for breaking the heart of a man who survived the Great Depression and the Murmansk Convoys. 

A Hungarian called György Lukács (not the thrice married, twice widowed, once divorced Hungarian anti-communist émigré, John Lukacs) György Lukács who died in 1971, had claimed Arendt was a typical, Idealist. She hadn't absorbed an understanding of the materialism that resulted in class. Her idea that Nazism and Stalinism were examples of this novel form of government called Totalitarianism was absolutely ridiculous. Both Hitler and Stalin were the results of a decaying capitalist systems, nothing more and nothing less. Arendt was cretinous and retarded if she was going to insist that totalitarianism was a new, unprecedented form of government that transcended material class interests and was in fact rooted in world domination and an ideological consistency that was maintained by terror, not by class or economics or anything even a little bit reasonable.

To be clear, back then in the mid 1970's, where I was at the City Road Milk Depot, Hannah Arendt's grasp of the masses was fully comprehensible so was Engels' interpretation of Marx. We were indeed, as Hannah would have it, an atomized non-class group of indifferent individuals, but, and this is the big but, we weren't uprooted, our minds never truly homeless or socially detached, we might have all voted labor and none of us was averse to a strike for better pay. Goddamn-it we were so short of milkmen, a couple of days off would have been lovely and there was a handsome tradition of working men going on strike and beating the crap out of anyone who didn't go on strike.

Hannah, for her part, was arguing that totalitarian movements were dependent on the masses. She saw us as ready to accept "a totally consistent, fictional ideology because we were alienated from all social and political ties."

Not sure that was the case with us. And yet the point in Arendt's understanding of Totalitarianism that she wanted to share was the role terror played in destroying the sphere of politics in the public square and by so doing terror maintains a Totalitarian State.

Yes indeed we milkmen, even the lone ex-patriot who did the school run, were well washed in myths, dragons, steam trains, poets, coal, rugby and the Men of Harlech who held the English at bay long enough to become immortal. The myths a totalitarian state would build around us would have been devious rather than accidental, we were a conquered people since 1283, we had festivals devoted to Irony, we'd been postmodernists since the Romans left us alone and one of our number who happened to run our union branch had a dad who had survived the Siege of Mafeking, lost a leg to The Somme and had been killed by a German bomb on January 2nd 1941, the only day in the year our union leader refused to work.

Those bastards would have started in England of course. The bloody crown would have sent the Prince of Wales to Cardiff Castle so he could formally announce visa limitations for Welsh men and women who wanted to visit England. We'd have jeered at the news as we anticipated refugees. Meanwhile, they'd have given gold badges to their immigration services and to Her Majesty's police. The Thatcherites would kill the School Milk Program before declaring "there is no alternative" and then they would set about trying to turn their subjects, whether we liked it or not, into obedient capitalists.

Let's destroy fact and thought, put an end to politics, rewrite truth by frightening everyone into silence. "Who would want to do that?" The obvious answer is "Cretins and Retards," but you'd need to be be untutored and powerless, not one of the great minds of the 20th Century, to sling those sort of shots across the enemy bow. The thing about intellectuals, they can't exist without us. Nor can the wealthy.

The English Speaker and Amor, generally and in particular.

This is a link to a heroine singing La Marseillaise

A Homeless Mind, as represented by sociologists keen to theorize upon the effects of the emotional and social displacements wrought by what is still called Modernity began, some might argue, with the Industrial Revolution. These thinkers see Homelessness as an absence of stable social structures that encourage belonging, which becomes a rootless anxiety where feeling safe doesn't happen. They go on to recommend a range of solutions designed around the idea that a mind being unhomed produces an unhealthy separation of public from private life that results in an alienation, an absence of whole hearted commitment to a set of "cultural norms."

It's yet one more version of a society wide ennui which apparently can also result from a surfeit of Postmodern Ironic Metaphysical Stress on the symbolic order that results in something like Truth being placed bang next to Probably Bullshit and Aren't I Clever for pointing it out.

And here I am still wandering what the heroine Hannah Arendt at the age of 18 ever saw in a loving relationship with a grim looking 35 year old married Martin Heidegger who already had his horrible mustache. None of my business! But, there are things in life that linger, and it's not just the upsetting image of Heidegger porking Arendt when I'm pretty sure that in the 1920's Heidelberg University had a boys swimming team.

Hannah's PhD thesis was titled: On the Concept of Love in the Thought of Saint Augustine: An Attempt at a Philosophical Interpretation. Or, if you prefer the simplicity of Love and Saint Augustine, and go ahead just try to ignore the flashing red lights in your homeless soul as you struggle with Love and Martin. Would that it was just physical. At the time she thought him a new prince of knowledge.

It's possible to take these unhinged moments of drifting in emptiness to the mental health professionals who would be only too happy to reinterpret a "Cultural Norm" so that I might be considered as engaged in a perfectly natural expression of entangled emotions running amok through a delicate psyche. You see, as with so many others, I like my Heroines to man the barricades, point to the horizon and sing about watering the fields with the impure blood of our enemies and if she can roll her r's a little like Marie Mathieu, I shall be as putty. And like you, I don't want my heroines to tell me in a German accent that it's all my fault for not thinking. 

Hannah's Love and Saint Augustine suffers when reduced by the passionless English language. Amor Mundi, love for the world requires footnotes aplenty. First of all Amor means directing the will toward, it's nothing to do with following a pair of high heels down a corridor. Augustine of Hippo's grasp of Amor Mundi, his love of the world, something Augustine regularly engaged in, wasn't a love that God encouraged. Love of the world was very much why people went to hell and had to spend the great majority of their waking hours feeling guilty. Same with Amor Sui, loving yourself. There was just too much of it, me-me-me all over the place. For Augustine what you needed was to have a whole lot of Amor Dei, loving God with all your heart and mind and body. It was that simple. Eternal life. A bit boring. But nothing to feel guilty about for ever and ever amen.

For Augustine the world was a temporary illusion and how you managed it determined your position in the next life. It was that sort of game.

For Hannah, Augustine's error was to devalue the public world, the shared world and human life within it. The public world, the political world had been cast into the firmament by Saint Augustine. Hannah, for her part sought a redemption for the world, and her point was, that the ethical commitments such a redemption would require, needed us to love the world for what is.

The Slope to Life and Entropy. Or the Homeless Mind and Purpose.

Snow

Let's talk about another Frenchman called Paul Ricœur. We have to because he writes about Narrative Identity and the continuous work of bridging the gap between sameness and change in us people. And yes, of course we're not going to call it sameness and change, that would be sad and pathetic like playing the Guitar in church or attempting to modernize Lutheranism.

The two new words are not big words but they share a quality found in the word entropy that makes it difficult to remember the difference between an increase of entropy from a decrease of entropy. With entropy the effort to visualize the distinction, i.e. whether a decrease in entropy means more chaos or less, might not be worth it. But in understanding Paul Ricœur and Arendt's understanding of the role narrative and story-making play in the building of structure in us people the difference between idem-identity and ipse-identity is a useful one.

Ipse is Latin, it means "himself," "herself" or "itself." And we are going to light a candle, ignore the sneers and within the context of Narrative Identity, we're going to call ipse-identity, Selfdom. It's the place we are at the moment in the present. It's not where we have been, and while selfdom might contain where we are thinking of going or where we might want to be going, it's not actually where we are going because fortune telling is a sin and people have been burned at the stake because of it.

Idem is Latin. Lawyers use it a lot when they write confusing documents, it means "the same." As idem-identity, it means your identity in terms of everything that came before.

In Arendt and Ricœur's story of a self there's a slope between the sameness of a past that can only be reinterpreted or reinforced and the selfdom of the present. A challenge to unity or a challenge to the cohesion of the narrative such as "I thought you told me you went to the doctor yesterday" creates tension on this slope. These challenges can sometimes persuade a person to get off the skis walk back uphill in search of a reinterpretation. If that looks like effort, they can plain make stuff up, which is easier to do when the idem is shall we say less well documented. 

However, tread warily grasshopper as you pad around in this swamp of what Paul Ricœur called Selfdom and which one of Arendt's lovers had called The Dasein, the being there which over time engages in the creative process of making its own meaning.

Yes! In our day and age we people as sources of milkable data might well become a bundle of data points who pay the bills. But Creative Is. We make our own meaning, or if you prefer this bundle of data points confronts it's environment, it remains unpredictable, it's an authentic contribution, irrational, emotion driven, disordered and unreasonable yet it's everything entropy can't help but run toward.

What's Ricœur and or Arendt's definition of freedom?

Is it: "Yes avoid the shortcuts in case you stop bothering to think." Or is it: "Staying true to one's unique, usually unlikable, possibilities." Or could it be a mixture of both.  

The Error of Not Thinking and the Banality of Lies

 La Chatte ne dorm pas

The words: "reflecting on unified self-hood over time" would I believe evince negative reactions in the ranks of the heathen. It's that whole business of "Where was I on February 7th 1958?" A narrative that bridges sameness and self. The argument for such a narrative is a tension between things that change (self) and things that don't change (sameness).

This tension between self and sameness, like everything else we people have to struggle with hour by endless hour on a daily basis, produces a life that can be thought of as a bunch of organs and tissues wholly devoted to an organism comprised of a series of choices made by a continuous, unified self. These choices can be judged and recorded, and compared to the choices of other unfortunates who enter the public square, which used to be where you went to get groceries, get your pork chops, they had a stocks for village miscreants, you could get beer, share opinions, layout your choices and so on.

In the good old days we just had memory, then came writing and the awfulness that is record keeping. Nowadays we have digital devices that spend a lot of time recording our choices so that we can be turned into milkable data. And! Our "unified self hood over time" now has to contend with an expanded public space that includes the Tar Pits of Facebook, unless you too are lucky enough to have been banned, tweeting which under the new owner is called something else and a wealth of Bobby's other friends and relatives, far too numerous to mention or even begin to understand, like Substack which seductively describes itself as "a new economic engine for culture," a coyness that makes a person inclined to invest in wrist slitting razor blades. 

The narrative, or tension, in us people that bridges sameness and self, which for so long had found a cohesion in the judge and jury of the face to face of a public square, now includes invisible spaces where the self can be be anything it wants as long as it maintains a sameness by getting enough praise and adoration through likes, algorithmic caresses or clicks or whatever.

This all produces an increased confidence in a way of viewing humanity Hannah Arendt promoted. We can add the Banality of Lies to the error of thoughtlessness Arendt suggested our collective psyche is prone to making.  Thoughtlessness, in this context, means "Not using thought to think." 

The Best we got is a Reality that "Kicks Back"

Supper

That's right! A stainless steel spoon and a modest portion of major nut-eater fare in an artisanal bowl, balanced precariously on a Sibley's Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America to protect a well-traveled Zanzibar Chest from possible dribblage. It's an identity crisis.

Praxis, means action as opposed to theory. Lexis, means the total stock of words available as opposed to grammar or syntax which is how words work when they are properly strung together on a washing line. For Hannah Arendt, one of our heroes, Praxis and Lexis, or Action and Words are how we people reveal ourselves for who we are.

But first we all just have to accept Nietzsche's comment in one of his notebooks which boldly stated: "there are no facts only interpretations." The rest of his life he spent coming to terms with this observation by trying to explain what he meant. Hence, in shorthand, Nietzsche's many books, in greater or lessor detail described the world of people as follows, and to save the washing line we're going to use colons:

A mobile army of metaphors, symbols, and anthropomorphisms: A social contract where people agree to use the same terms to avoid being misled by one another: This agreement allows society and communication to function and is a necessary life-promoting error rather than a perfect mirror of reality: This man-made fiction would have remained a fiction but for the intervention of belief.

My own crisis with truth at the moment isn't the nature of reality, it's tonight's supper. I'd prefer a ham-hock in soup, followed by a pork chop on a stick, an egg and bacon sandwich, accompanied by a fifty gallon barrel of real beer, a crate of Mount Gay, a dozen cartons of cigarettes and the Ghost of Tina Turner singing "we don't need another hero."