Heidegger and Sartre on Essence

 

Moth Mullein

Essence, for Heidegger emerged from Experience. His deliberate way of putting it was thus : "The Essence of Dasein lies in its existence." So put that in your pipe. Heidegger's book Being and Time was read by Sartre when Sartre was in prison waiting for the authorities to decide whether he was going to be a danger to France's relationship with the Third Reich and if so should he be sent to a labor camp. Inevitably the idea of being thrown into the swamp where a being over time creates its own meaning was tempting.   

Run Rabbit

 

Wild Bunny

"The Role of Myth in Community Reinvention in a Post Industrial Age: An Essay in Postmodernist Interpretation." A simple enough title for Delyth Primrose's Doctoral Thesis, but as a title was it humble enough? The point being that back then when we were all so much younger it was the rage for the brighter sparks in the Western World to pontificate mightily on the end of the Industrial Age to no great effect and even fewer conclusions. The increasing powerlessness of the worker was a prime source of tremendous unhappiness, we were ripening for the fascists, and of course in the scrap for funding, society was increasingly becoming a problem of Business Management. As a result our world as an engine of productivity lost its dreams to another death spiral. Let's face it, as we stare back into the past, Miss Primrose's preoccupation with sadomasochism was probably more fruitful. Baxter certainly thinks so. Yet, like a cry into the dark, all of fifty years later, we still hear the lyrics of Chambawumba's song Tubthumping.

Hell is Other People

 

Afternoon Rest

Sartre's comment was at the end of one of his plays about two men who found themselves in a room together and slowly realized that the room they were in was hell.

Endings

The Cruel Sea

Monsarrat's book The Cruel Sea published a year before I was born had an ending. It had a place in many graveyards, it had several tombstones. This book sold over 11 million copies. The trouble with endings in a book is the word end. The thing is nothing is ever finished. In total Monsarrat wrote well over thirty books, closer to forty if you have the patience to count them all. The understanding, the totem, that nothing is ever finished is a characteristic of art not commerce. 

A Totem to the Spirit Level,

 

Totem

No one in their right mind should use the expression Spirit Being without a tongue in their cheek and a smile on their face. We give the past too little credit, pour woo-woo on it and reckon they were all not much better than extra old people closer to moron than the current crop of living old people. Totems are not occupied by Spirit Beings, they are symbols of shared understandings. This whole Spirit Being nonsense is for the con artist, the dubious character at the bus stop, chamois and coffee salesmen, any one under sixty, the hick that has the nerve to suggest it's the Real McCoy, may his own Spirit Being rot in hell. This simple pole in the ground pictured above is an as yet an unshared understanding. It's a totem to the inventor of the modern Spirit Level and its French inventor, author, scientist, traveller, cartographer, orientalist, and diplomat with the impossible name of Melchisedech Thévenot, or Melshid Seveno.  Benjamin Franklin, who was interested in a lot of things, read Seveno's book on Swimming, so there! Prior to the February of 1661, when the Spirit Level was invented, the best the world had been able to manage for determining level was a bowl of water. The Bowl of Water Level time frame would have included the Great Wall Of China, Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Ancient Athens, Uruk, Machu Picchu and it goes on. 

The Puck of the Afterlife

Evening Primrose, not related to Primula Vulagaris or True Primrose

Baxter is finding it very difficult to accept the possibility that Corgi Archibald likes painted garden gnomes and the Heiress, whose name is Delyth Primrose, does not like painted garden gnomes. It's those sort of little details that cause Baxter to doubt the authenticity of my recollection, sends him running to The Spleen for confirmation. Meanwhile The Spleen is not only a geriatric, he's unreliable, he has his own agenda. He has persuaded the aging collective that at the moment of death a committee from on high will descend and each one of our constituent parts will be tried. Those given an A grade for their service to our shared life will go to heaven. Those given a B grade will be given their next opportunity to shine again by being reborn in someone else. Anything below a B grade goes directly to hell, none of this Dante nonsense there's only one level, flames and little people with pointed sticks. Baxter, the aneurysm, has no chance of avoiding the little people, and neither do I, which is why we are both interested in the possibility of an almighty who believes in Grace, it's the effort grade for a jolly good sort of chap whose true virtues are well hidden, they make excellent and cheerful company for a perfection that seeks to lighten the endless millennia of monotony with a little diversity. The Puck of the Afterlife amongst the madrigals and charades. Can you imagine, a damn good reason to hope for the Nietzschean Limbo of a B grade.

Megalohydrothalassophobia or Fear of Sea Creatures

Unlikely to be Timothy Grass, could be Pigeon Grass, less likely to be

 the exotic Melica Transsilvanica paying a visit

I have a Grass AP, or is it an ap. Here the rivers are running greenish yellow with grass pollen, my inputs and outputs are sludged-up with a grizzly sticky goo, I can't hear the current seventeen year Cicada hatching  and I know exactly why Jean-Paul Sartre wore a tie at the beach. For him meaninglessness was full of possibilities, a great adventure, but unfortunately as a callow youth of fourteen he'd developed a fear of sea creatures, particularly Crabs and Lobsters. Very understandable. In an attempt to cure him of his Sea Creature Phobia a former student of his suggested mescaline while looking at projections of assorted sea creatures. It was the latest thing in emergency psychiatric therapy. The experiment turned into a really bad trip for Our Jean-Paul, he had flashbacks for years, and he had adverse and often irrational things to say about the Saint Anne Hospital in Paris, and about his former student Doctor Lagache. 

Cretin as an alternative

The Bloom of a Tall Fescue

Over time the word cretin has become associated with the more negative meanings in box of rocks stupid. Romans blessed Christians with the word crestin or an unfortunate person, which was polite of them. And there's an iodine deficiency called cretinism which can result in congenital deficiencies among mountain people, nothing to laugh at. The dilemma here where I live is what to do with Baxter's endless use of the word retard.  

 

The Shared Condition of Uncertainty

The Bloom of Sweet Vernal Grass

My own view of Sartre's existentialism is positive. His idea of a Shared Condition is a rather beautiful one. My own negative view of Sartre's critics essentially revolve around the accusation that they've allowed themselves to become the hapless subjects of quasi-religious quackery, a form of wish-fullness that offers hope to the frail of mind, the wide eyed, the trustful and the bitter of heart.  A group to which Sartre applied the title Bad Faith. We used to be called Cynics, and even Nihilists by the Cretin-hood of Elders who'd given up on the perchance to dream and needed a bunch of confident softies to sneer at. The central theme of such a classic human reaction is the ever present uneasiness inherent in certainty. I use the word Cretin for a positive reason. It describes the moment when certainty asks you to just start making stuff up to demonstrate your point. Oddly, the origin of that splendid word Nihilism - from the Latin Nothing - was in an adverse intellectual reaction to the approximately 47,000 words of Wilhelm Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that had shamelessly announced the end of worry because a great mind had rationally demonstrated that our fate was obviously beyond our control. The funny thing is, any respectable definition of Life, particularly the human experience of the condition, might suggest it's actually the other way around. Our fate isn't handed down, nor is it already in place when we arrive, thanks to uncertainty from beginning to end we have something to say about pretty much everything until we surrender to idea.

Condemned to be Free

The Bloom of Orchard Grass

Strictly, the phrase is "Man is condemned to be Free." It's a quote from Sartre's 1946 essay "Existentialism is Humanism." Round here, Orchard Grass is a big pollen producer, the breeze chases it around the fields. Orchard Grass has no other pollinator than the movements of air. It has no motivated bee to deliver it. In that sense it's "As Free as the Wind." Doesn't suit everyone, least of all those who claim to be Free. Hence the title of Sartre's major work, "Being and Nothingness" in which he explores the emptiness in nothingness that motivates us to take interest. He wrote "Being and Nothingness" when he was a prisoner, it was published in 1943 in Occupied France by the Gillimard Publishing House.  An English translation was published in 1956 when I, apparently, was an ill behaved four year old yearning to be both free, properly entertained and well fed

The Lutheress

Katharina von Bora by Lucas Cranach the Elder

Katharina von Bora, sometimes called The Lutheress, from the age of five years old until she was twenty three was educated and lived in a nunnery, first as a child and then as a nun. This cloistered life did not suit Katharina. In the year 1523 she sent a letter to Martin Luther explaining her dire situation. She and a couple of her sister nuns wanted only to free themselves from the bondage of Catholicism. It was a tricky moment for Martin Luther. The politics weren't good, there was little prospect of freeing Nuns from Nunneries ever being a winning argument and in the name of the Good Lord what would happen to the nuns once they were beyond the Nunnery Walls. Soon enough Martin Luther came to one of those why not conclusions, he contacted a respectable citizen who delivered Herring to Mary's Thrown, the Nunnery where Katharina was living, and lo Katharina and her sisters were soon hiding in a covered wagon containing empty Herring Barrels being smuggled out of their cloistered world into the enticing world of the Protestant Reformation. Today of course everyone knows the story of how a forty one year old Martin Luther met his twenty six year old wife, and go ahead call me fragile if you wish to, but I'd like to think that when Immanuel Kant was doing his Sunday School and worrying about the spelling of his first name, most of the other children in his class had a healthier interest in the generous Lutheran understanding that we are all sinners, some more lovable than others, there is no currying favor, whether the Lord likes us enough to grant us grace is entirely up to him or her, or something gynandrous such as an Orchid or a Dutchman's pipe.

Kant's Christian Name

This guilty Tom Turkey has just finished ravishing an infinitely respectable Hen Turkey. Without wishing to disappoint anyone I don't think Immanuel Kant was ever arrested for anything. But, while Kant was baptized Emanuel Kant, he changed his name to Immanuel Kant. The vague answer to the question Why bother? is that his name change had something to do with him being a young Lutheran in a Lutheran Sunday School that insisted on reading the central parts of the Old Testament in Hebrew. All kinds of sensible reasons for doing that, including an overwhelming sense of guilt. Oddly enough when I was kicked off Facebook for Jay walking with intent to whistle, I changed my name from Tim to Timothy, in the hope that I might open a new, perhaps more Christian account. But, and this is just an opinion, you'd sort of think Kant had better things to do than go to the effort of formally replacing an Em with an Imm. Back then in the mid to late 1700's, long before the Zuckster and his odious sycophantic clones repeatedly effed with us all, it was probably easier for a person to tinker with his or her name. In the end if Emanuel Kant had been arrested, and maybe tried in a court of Star Chamber, spent time in the stocks, there's a good chance Baxter might not lump him in the same addendum as Plato. There again there's still hope. Emmanuelle is the female version of Immanuel, meaning "God Is With Us". And Emmanuelle Arsan was the pen name of the novelist who wrote Emmanuelle, a book that became a series of somewhat spicy feature films that inspire hundreds of millions.  

Flower Boats and Baxter's Phobias

 

The bloom of Privet

Baxter's finding it hard to believe that during the Second world War My Landlady was paid good money to help get Hannah Arendt out of France into Spain and onto a ship that took her to the Caribbes and from there like so many she was smuggled into a xenophobic USA where she found a new home in New York City. He can't actually remember this Landlady, nor can he remember my life as a car thief, or the strange affair I had with a Doctor of Sociology while being badly used as a practice doll by one of her students who was in training for La Cindy and due to inherit a Flower Boat. I know, it's all very confusing, but even more disappointing Baxter had developed a persistent and irrational fear of Plato's Ideal Forms. And, thanks to Baxter's unhealthy attachment to the wisdom of our Spleen this phobia has been recently transferred to postmodernists generally, he's tired of hearing about them. 

Cato the Elder

"The Victorious Cause pleased the Gods. The Defeated Cause pleased Cato." The quote is from a long, long Poem by a Roman called Lucan. The Cato in question was Cato the Elder, or Marcus Porcius Cato. He was a genuine Roman, not one of those Post Republic Caesar worshiping types who sucked up to Emperors and the wealthy. He was a man who believed in the Senate, thought Greeks were Street Corner Hoodlums, and Carthaginians were dangerous lunatics. Hannah Arendt mentioned him in her book, The Human Condition, and in her book, The Life of the Mind.  Why? For Arendt it had to do with Judgement and what it was to hold a firm opinion and stick to it through thick and thin. For Cato there was often more honor to be had from standing with the losing side. Same with the French Foreign Legionnaires. 

Transcendental Idealism?

What did Kant mean? I’ll tell ya. Transcendent means above ordinary experience. Kant saw structures dominating our minds, he put us at the service of those structures, and he referred to the study of those structures as Transcendental Idealism. It was fairly comfortable, a bit too safe, a tad fatalistic but he was able to say we were reasonable beings, because that's how we were structured, and that Morality, for example, was a product of one of those structures which in his view meant that somewhere in the mist there was a categorical Imperative which while it might not be able to tell us what being moral and upright actually was, nonetheless we people were leaning toward what Dr Martin Luther King later called Justice. This cozy sense of predestination was roundly, and in my view constructively rejected by Postmodernist thinkers. 

Saint Augustine's People Part Two

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674)

In the early days of the Christian Church in Europe the Augustinians were a loose collection of free wheeling and independent Hermits similar to the Carmelites. The Carmelites were originally from Mount Carmel in Palestine, the Augustinian Order of Friars were originally from the hills of Tuscany in Italy. Like the Carmelites, in the eleventh or twelfth or maybe the thirteenth century the Augustinians found it necessary to curry favor with the fellas in the Christian Church who had the money and political contacts, and who were led by an elected official called The Pope who still humbly bears the job title of God's Representative Here on Earth. For a bunch of religious nuts from Tuscany to be taken seriously by the business side of Western Christianity they needed to demonstrate their provenance. In the Augustinian ranks there was a folk memory of a Saint Augustine of Hippo, who certainly did not make a virtue out of poverty and had admitted to God in several letters that he found it very difficult to take a vow of chastity seriously, but who in around 400 had written a book called the Rule of Augustine on how a religious community should manage itself. The Pope still had a copy of this book, and was interested. Tuscany's Augustinians pulled out all the stops, called in favors and forged documentary evidence that they weren't some fly by night bunch of mountain bandits, their order went all the way back almost a thousand years to the North African Saint Augustine who was of Berber and Roman origin and in fact their order had been founded by the great man but they'd been forced to leave North Africa following the Sack Of Hippo by the Vandals in 431.       

Saint Augustine of Hippo's People

 

The words Counter and Reformation when combined is when groups of people decide to go backwards and maybe try to start again. In the Catholic Tradition descriptions of counter reformations usually include the words Mendicant and discalced. Mendicant is a posh word for begging, relying on alms and charity. The primary mission of mendicants is to spread the Gospel. Discalced means to be barefooted or sandal wearing. The Vow of Poverty is a calling and in times of Counter Reformation within the Catholic Church, Discalced Mendicants were a refreshing sign of faith and trust in the Lord, they were the street musicians of hope. Following the Protestant Reformation inspired by Martin Luther, who was an Augustinian Friar, the Augustinian Order produced a Counter Reformation of Augustinian Mendicants.   

Suspended Again

 

Suspended from Facebook again. Not sure why. No doubt I aggravated a squillionaire algorithm. I'm a creative possibility that cannot be monetized, wouldn't that be a golden moment for Baxter and I. As for our level of pissed-off-ness it would be harder if the Facebook pages were filled with erudition and learning instead of tease and yearning, the crockpot of cock and bull, an easter without a resurrection and chocolate eggs. Not sure that Baxter agrees, he's waiting for god to send him his manual.

The other Anarcho-Syndicalist.

Chomsky is from the Americas. His mum and dad were Jewish Immigrants from Ukraine which back then was part of the Russia Empire. His dad, William, decided to leave Russia in 1913 to avoid being conscripted. William found work in a Baltimore Sweatshop. He went to University. When William's son, Noam Chomsky was ten he wrote an essay on the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement that briefly thrived in Barcelona before being crushed by Franco's fascists. The crux of the Anarcho-Syndicalist argument is that a person's productive life is central to his being and people should be in control of their own productive lives. Fascists don't believe that.

I Can't Help It

Call me a blasphemous amateur, it won't stop me from saying that in Western thinking the Continental Idealists and the Anglo-sphere of analytic empiricism all claim the testament to their heritage is in the Ancient Greece of Plato and Aristotle. So be wary of Greeks bearing Gifts. But there are distinctions to be made. From the Swedes, south through the People's Land of Germany and the novelists of Russia and Poland to La Belle Dame Sans Merci of Revolutionary France, these are The Continental Thinkers. The second theme is the small Island of Britannia, its attachments and memories, including the landmass of North America. These are the shopkeepers and chamber of commerce thinkers, practical minds that prefer not to talk with their hands and who would rather everyone else learn English. Chomsky is an Analytic Philosopher from the Americas who may have emerged from a clash between Behaviorism and the peculiar faiths of Anarchism, who found solace in humility and a distant contact with Kant's understanding of transcendence. Kant's transcendence submits us people to a structure that gives the phrase "I can't Help it" to both Lili Marleen's search for love, Chomsky's grasp of grammar or syntax and Kant's own understanding of morality.

The look and Sound of Words. Magister Ludi

The Uganda Flag. A collection of hairpins and a couple of bangles. A Hippo resting on a cloud. A series of Italian prints with church qualities. And a country courtyard, a print which became the centerpiece of a mind game that decorates the unfinished pages titled The Tenant's Agreement. Sometimes you have to admit these things so in Conversations with Baxter the better game was Hesse's Glass Bead Game. OK so Hermann Hesse wrote in German, but I wonder who else really wishes the master of the glass bead game wasn't called a Magister Ludi. Even for the future, it just sounds cretinous.

"Of Course Your Guinea Pig Goes to Heaven."

It's hard work for an analytical empiricist to demonstrate the potential for trueness without the custard pie utterances of idealists that sound so restful. Russell, essentially, answered the question what makes a good philosopher by suggesting the person had to be nice, humble, decent, curious, questioning, aware of limitations. If they were angry, or bitter or a power mad megalomaniacal creep, then not much chance of something worthwhile emerging.