The Original Act of Creation

Arches in Town

Let's talk about some of Hannah Arendt's disagreements with Carl Schmitt. And here, no kidding, Carl died in 1985 at the decrepit age 96 while the beautiful, upright and golden Arendt died in 1975 at the age of 69. In 1933 Carl, who was a scholar and jurist, a professor of constitutional and international law, became a member of the German Nazi Party. "And your point!" Well I'd like first to say that Arendt couldn't help but have an admiration for Carl's scholarship and his "ingenious theories" but saw in him a splendid example of what she called the kind of "absolute cooperation" and replacement of first-rate talents with "crackpots and fools" that occurs under totalitarian regimes. In other words Carl had no balls and very little imagination. Of the many disagreements Carl and Hannah had, it may be possible to summarize them all by mentioning Arendt's understanding of "Spontaneous Beginnings." The term refers to her own thinking about the moment a new political order comes into being, or if you prefer, is born into the world. The discussion usually begins with Schmitt's thoughts on what he called constituent power and sovereignty. Constituent Power, according to Carl, was unlimited power and it belonged to the people. This power was completely arbitrary, absolutely no point in looking for an underlying rationality, and to show how logical and well read he was Carl assured his readers that "constituent power cannot be deduced from any a priori cause..... It is omnipotent and exceptional.... Does not depend on any norm or value..." Carl gets very carried away and he goes on to suggest that creating a New Constitution, new norms and values, required a "decision on the concrete form of its political life." The authority for this decision rightfully derives from Carl's absolute constituent power that has no a priori cause - nothing came before it, it's just obvious from experience. Naturally Arendt looked for dung to throw on Schmitt's walls and hunted down a shovel to sift through the soils and societies through history in her a priori insistence that new beginnings if they were to last, didn't have to derive from a Sovereign Power, an entity Carl defined as "he who decides on the state of exception." By state of exception Carl meant, whether this constituent power was creating new or suspending old, the original act of creation is an extra-legal action. Schmitt was a legal man. In other words, whether it was a psychological anomaly, a blank stare at the library, a passion for Cato the Elder, whatever the reason, it was the Power and Authority, ugliness and misery of force that tickled Carl Schmitt's tummy, gave him a sense of hope for a new world dominated by, if not a king, then a unity. Hannah Arendt's ideas about the spontaneous nature of beginnings was attached to the idea of being born, a new arrival into the world, the risk and excitement of the unforeseen, balloons in the park. For Hannah a political beginning was a shared world created by a collective promise, it was unpredictable and fragile, no two people are the same, it was an agreement, it was the founding act of a plurality. For Schmitt, a political beginning was a unity founded by an extra-legal power that determines and maintains a friend/enemy distinction. Hannah Arendt, a German citizen who was a Jew, had to leave Germany because of Schmitt's notion of unity.

Aristotle on Cognition

Aristotle son of Nicomachus, from Stagira

If you're over 55, instead of comb-overs, golf and colorful body creams it's worth preparing yourself for the inevitable retardation of aging by going back in time to reacquaint yourself with Aristotle's understanding of an element of the Psyche which these days is referred to as "Cognition." But first you must rid yourself of the Stoic conclusion that Logic is one of the three essential parts of philosophy, and embrace Aristotle's Organum by dismissing Logic as merely a preliminary tool used for all Disciplined and all Reasoned Enquiry. For Aristotle, Logic, despite the rather obnoxious Greek First attitude he offered his ex-pupil Alexander the Great, didn't hold with the Stoic position that presented logic as an elitist shell around the delicate yolk of physics and ethics, and as a result produced a monopolistic empiricism that didn't believe in throwing dung at the wall or shovels and as a result stifled inquiry, dulled passion and voided most of the fun in life. Aristotle's central theme in his exploration of reasoned understanding was to know the cause of a thing, and following that up by knowing that the thing cannot be otherwise. A nifty way of describing the scientific method. You start with sense perceptions, what your eyes, your mouth, ears, fingers and so on tell you. Your sense perceptions dutifully give appearance to your imagination which plays with them, looks them up in your memory, thus armed, the mind moves on from details of the appearances your senses have noticed and produces a universal about which, somewhere in your filing system, there may still be a record of prior contacts with said appearances and this is then given to a process of deduction that produces an explanation of the witnessed phenomenon which may have some semblance to true things. Then, as a non-stoic you of course have to add the elements of dung throwing, what you'd prefer to believe, and shovels, digging through your imagination for alternative "facts." Somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age the average male's share of physical and cognitive capacities enter a sort of stasis rich with potential for the charlatans of the culture, medical and advertising industries and at the age of seventy, retardation gathers pace as the cogs of cognition begin to fail, we start dribbling from the nose and the side of the mouth, find ourselves offering vicious and unnecessary opinions conjured out of midair and by the time we're comparing the decline of the Weimar Republic to the Temperance Movement in the USA that produced the 8th Amendment in 1920, which was repealed by 21st Amendment of 1933 while struggling to remember the name of the road we've live on for over twenty years, we're well past time for the grave. 

Hazlitt, Love, lust , Proles and The Party

Sedam or Stonecrop

An Irishman called William Hazlitt, who at the age of 52, died in Soho, which is in London, England, once got himself into a bit of a fix for following the ancient tradition of offering a woman money in exchange for sex. Unfortunately William had propositioned a rather well situated young lady, who took offence to his assumption that she was a harlot and made a point of telling the multitude that she was not for sale.  A good friend of Hazlitt, a poet called Coleridge, offered the opinion that Hazlitt was always in love with someone, and he went on to add that his friend was "addicted to women as objects of sexual indulgence." These days it could be called a Compulsory Sexual Behavior Disorder, but Hazlitt himself preferred to explore his obsession in terms of the fascinating relationship between love and lust. He wrote a book called Liber Amoris, The Book of Love, which was a touch on the graphic side and sold very well, earned William a reputation for being an obscene little man, his face marked by smallpox, who deserved nothing but ridicule and disgrace. As the years turned, especially after his death in 1830, William Hazlitt became renowned for his essays, his literary criticism, a long list of achievements that for some of his modern day admirers puts him up there with Samuel Johnson and even George Orwell. Here worth recalling that Samuel Johnson, a perfect gentleman who died in 1784, thought love a poor foundation for a lasting marriage and he saw lust as selfish and disruptive. Orwell on the other hand saw Love and Lust as intricate to his understanding of political power, individual liberty and human nature. Orwell went further, he saw personal relationships driven by love and lust as a central form of rebellion against totalitarianism. Why did Orwell think this? Because in his writing he notes that love and lust as a sexual relationship produced a private world which was outside The Party's control. Hazlitt, who was alive in the early days of Kant's domination of the Enlightenment was one who didn't think human motivation, human nature, was entirely selfish. He stood with the Romantic Poets, Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth against the utilitarians, the Adam Smith/Bentham invisible hand liberals on question of human nature being more robust and less  amenable to the simplistic and axiomatic understandings the utilitarians wanted to believe. William rather sweetly suggested "the love of liberty is the love of others, the love of power is the love of self." Then in Orwell's 1984 the lovers are captured and tortured, forced to betray each other and, no longer living as reinforcements for each other's love and lust, they were forced to return to The Party, become one with the loves and lusts of The Party. In Orwell's story, the lowest social class of Proles, their lives humdrum and ordinary, they were unimportant but necessary for the Party's survival, they granted a sense of unity and purpose to purer Party Members who were define by what they weren't, they weren't Proles. But as Orwell suggested the Proles retained more of their humanity, they enjoyed their own private loyalties, their secrets and their own humors, than the poor saps who were Party Members.

George Ionescu on Happiness and Defining Freedom by What It's Not

Walnut

Let's talk about a Romanian named George Ghiță Ionescu who wrote a lot of books, who became a British Citizen, who from 1958 to 1963 was Director of the Romanian Radio Free Europe and following the formal demise of the Soviet Union he founded the Bucharest School of Sociology. When you're born in 1913, gain awareness in the First World War, survive the 1920's and 1930's, live through the Second World war, survive exile, return to your home land in 1989 and in 1996 die at the age of 83, you might have a right to wax lyrical on the subject of politics and happiness. George's overall view was that the promise of happiness through politics is illusory. "How did he get there?" Like all students of the Enlightenment he starts out defining what he means by happiness by comparing Bentham and Aristotle on the subject of happiness. Bentham's utilitarian morality produced a hedonistic happiness of the greatest number. Aristotle's eudaimonic happiness - or 2500 year old woke of a good life lived virtuously, an idea so dripping with irony David Wallace might have blushed, has been centered on a sense of meaning, purpose, personal growth, and self-actualization which as everyone attached to the Culture Industry knows was achieved through a solid Protestant, or Calvinist ethic of hard endless and often pointless work that produces obedience and surplus enough for the dreamscape of picket fences and neighbors who make apple pies then send their horrible children round on Halloween to beg for chocolate. George Ionescu's pragmatic point was that attempting to legislate for an individual's internal and subjective state of happiness was ludicrous. Government, political systems, respond to measurable, or at least generalizable, outcomes. Whether you called it Tyranny or Paternalism, George distrusted any suggestion that the government or the state should be the arbiter of the Good Life or of the happiness of the greatest number. No, no no! "Happiness" wasn't the goal of politics it was a by-product of other legitimate goals of politics. George Ghiță Ionescu went on to suggest a few legitimate goals of politics that contributed to the by-product of happiness: Life, Liberty and a Just Framework were exampled. Mind you, and here's the reason George is a wise man, he was confident in his assertion that a Free Society wasn't necessarily a Happy Society.  So what did George mean by freedom : He saw it as an ideal and as a political goal. He saw it as a critique of communism, fascism and tyranny. He saw ideology as a threat to Freedom. He saw populism as a mental constraint chock full of unidentifiable conspiracy theories untouched by reality, it was a mentality maintained by a sense of persecution and it too was a threat to Freedom.