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.