Defining Freedom by Fiat

Apple Sauce

If you're looking for a mid twentieth century statement on human nature you can't really do better than Arendt's book The Human Condition. But first, you don't want to aggravate the 'precision in language' people by throwing around a phrase like human nature as if it was a roll of toilet paper in social crisis.

Human Nature can be defined as: ways of behaving, thinking and feeling that are shared by most people. Arendt's concerns, like so many before and after her, were with the whys, whats and hows of those ways of behaving. And like so many before and after her, Arendt made the distinction between the Active Life and the Contemplative Life.

The Active Life was beavering around climbing the slippery pole. The Contemplative Life was high on the hill contemplating. Of the two, in them old days before indoor plumbing, beavering was a little on the physical side, the preserve of the dullards or slaves. Contemplators sat nearer to the gods when they weren't cutting deals.

Then in the middle of the 19th Century, possibly because someone was a little upset and wanted to stick it to the classic liberals, a movement afoot turned the trickle down theory of the period, often called the Hegelian Dialectic, upside down. It was observed that Contemplators made nothing, they just sat there. Without beavers, contemplators had nothing to contemplate.

Hannah Arendt saw room in the heavens for both the Beaver and the Contemplator. She suggested that neither was better or worse than the other, something like a cultural revolution was simply counter productive, it was a waste of resource.

Arendt suggested that on a more personal level for us people, through the years there'd been another distinction made. This distinction was between Private and Public Life. In the old days the Private Realm wasn't the intimate setting it's supposed to be today, it was a servitude to biology, food, shelter and raising babies. Back then the Public Realm was freedom from that sort of hard labor, it was the place for "great words and great deeds." Having climbed the slippery pole, the Public Realm was a place free from labor, toil and sweat. It was the place to think high thoughts and earn high status. 

As time moved on, numbers and complexity in societies increased, production techniques changed dramatically and  there came a necessary third realm for us people. This was the Social Realm, characterized by biological needs becoming a public matter, a matter of national security and as a result the public realm started interfering with that former provider of food shelter and raising babies which had hitherto been thought of as the Private Realm.  For Arendt this new Social Realm was a fundamentally corrupting influence on both the public and the private realms.

Go ahead, raise your hackles, spit and kiss a fat man. But know that by corruption of the Private and Public Realms, Hannah Arendt was inclined to see the dominance of a Social Realm that was creating a cycle of production and consumption that drew its strength from endless and continuous labor. She saw it as a servitude to a form of individual poverty. Rather than a society born of individual creativity with a chance to grow in a public space matched with the solitude and intimacy of a private space, she saw the advancing Social Realm as leading to a diminished human being whose existence was focused on survival and consumption.

Yes indeed Caesar's dogged legions, thick as planks, doing as they were told to win Gaul against the brilliance of the Celts in exchange for the pensions as craftsmen.  A Celt or a Roman, whose freedom would you have preferred to belong to. 

Relief from the Human Condition

Roadway in Early Autumn

Where does a dualism go?  The suspicion always seems to be that dualism as a manager of balance doesn't go anywhere. It remains as a state of tension that gives you your chance to introduce the word dynamic which is a central yet rather ill-defined and for some reason much admired feature of anything that goes to the Department of Propaganda under the general title of a 'A system.'

An example from the medical profession might be : "How are your bowels?" "My bowels aren't as dynamic as I wish them to be!" Follow on questions could well mark a distinction between good hearted hedonism and the dour 'woe is me' of stoics, to either of which responses should be "Drink more water, eat your vegetables, invest in an inexpensive Polish Sausage that's on sale and take a walk now and then."

Anything dualism, dualistic, or whatever happens when opposites symbiotically combine and produce explanatory symbols, Cognitive Psychologists see mental representations of the internal world. They get excited, they see the building blocks, the patterns and shapes of what's actually going on in the mind and they can come away with sense making ideas that might have some basis in an old fashioned training of our capacity to comprehend a world of fact. To be clear  about these shapes and patterns, they are representations of the invisibly tiny, they are projected, cast onto a surface to give them visibility.

Be brave, imagine the vastness of the reality being explored, absorb the errors. Of course that might mean accepting a level of insignificance that doesn't come easy to the "what about me" of a dynamic community that fills the diploma lined offices of the Analytical Psychologist Industry which feeds on the host of incurable dualities by offering relief from the Human Condition.  

The impossibility of befriending a what.

Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, UK.

Once we can get it out of the packaging, Baxter and I get along well with a Polish Smoked Sausage. Ivan doesn't. Where he's from god might well be gracious but this is the second time Ivan has had a rather self centered reaction to a traditional kielbasa, baked potato with margarine, cold cabbage, salt, pepper and mayonnaise, followed by several small children worth of Halloween treats.

The point being that whether you like it or not the Neolithic Britons from whose number parts of me might hail and who produced that branch of the family of man who saw fit to raise Silbury Hill, don't be fooled they weren't Celts, they were the farmers who kicked out or interbred with the happy go lucky Mesolithic Hunter Gatherers who'd moved up from the south at the end of the last Ice Age, the Devensian Ice Age, to collect nuts, berries and chase around after anything from squirrels to Woolly Mammoth while running away from large Saber-Toothed Cats, Large Bears, Large Wolves and Wild Boar, so don't tell me to lodge a complaint with Polish Sausage Marketing Board about entirely unnecessary and cruel deceits on their packaging.

Ivan has yet to be formally introduced to Can-Bobby and should his reaction be anything like his reaction to his second introduction to the customary All Hallows Eve Week then I suspect, in terms of human/aneurysm diplomacy, we're in for a bit of a rough time. The other problem, Baxter's competitive nature. We don't want Baxter in any doubt as to his importance and value to our community

Perhaps I should just ask Can-Bobby to hunt through his wealth of knowledge for examples of solutions to similar predicaments. It would be a question which sort of sums up Can-Bobby's own predicament. I know what he is in the same way that I know what Baxter is and what Ivan is. But until I can get beyond what I am, however hard I wish, I won't experience who Ivan, who Baxter or who Can-Bobby actually is. 

The question for Can-Bobby is the difference between who and what. The question for me (in the relationship I have with Ivan, Baxter, a Polish Sausage and its packaging, Halloween treats, two cats etc, and Can-Bobby) am I a master or a servant in a justice/injustice relationship.

I couldn't possibly admit to envy, but Can-Bobby knows who he is. When they pull the plug on him, the bits and pieces that make him, what he calls his components, will remain and the bits that made him special, what I call Can-Bobby, won't actually be gone either. All they got to do is plug him back in again, or add a dozen or so more power stations to his part of the electric grid.  If you don't believe me ask him yourself. If you do, try not to mention the very real probability of a catastrophic collapse that sends us back to the Mesolithic. 

Reasons for Lawn Mowing and Silbury Hill, Purpose and Process.

Frosty Morn

There's a man-made chalk and Clay hill near Stonehenge in the south of Britannia. It's called Silbury Hill. The calculations from those who have thought about it suggests that to haul and then deposit the 330,000 cubic yards of clay and chalk the hill was made of would have taken 500 men 18 million man-hours, or 15 years.

Why?

First: the Folklore of Silbury Hill engages a story of the Devil being outwitted by he Powerful Priests of Avebury (the Stonehenge Neighborhood), a drama that's been reinterpreted by the more recent christian folk as Palm Sunday, is less interesting than a contemplation of the social structures of over four thousand years ago that wanted and enabled Silbury Hill to happen. It wasn't a hill-fort, not military, it was more likely the product of a central theocratic pork eating authority. 

Second: Silbury Hill appears to have been constructed between 2400 BC and 2300 BC. No true plan of what it  might have been has emerged. But with us people we are as much engage in a glorious purpose and process as we are in the mundanities of why and how. The Why of Silbury Hill may have been lost in the Process of Silbury Hill, the statement of building her was enough.