ok an update on walking stewart (1749-1822), the outsider philosopher who walked home to london from madras, from abyssinia to siberia, and around america. etc. he was a pro-french-revolution radical in the 1790s, i believe, and a pro-british militarist in the napoleonic wars. (among other things, he promises that the if we realize the truths expressed in his aptly-titled the philosophy of sense; or, the book of nature, revealing the laws of the intellectual world founded on the laws of the physical world, forming the sun or source of moral truth or sensitive good, as the physical sun, the source of light, heat, and motion to this planet of the earth (1815), we'll kick napoleon's ass.) (honestly, one could be forgiven for thinking that stewart was a hoax perpetrated by tom de quincey and percy shelley, or even by crispin sartwell. i'm working on the theory that he was fully actual, or actual in the same sense that you are.)
as that title indicates and as a moment's contact with anything he ever did will demonstrate, he was an extremely eccentric thinker and person, with a particular aptitude for tortured expression. "He has generally been treated . . . as a madman," writes de quincey. "But this is a mistake; and must have been founded chiefly on the titles of his books." later de quincey takes back the 'mistake' bit: "certainly, when I consider every thing, he must have been crazy when the wind was at N.N.E."
also he was continuously, comically, grandiose; i guess you could say i wish passages like the following, from the first page of opus maximum, or the great essay to reduce the moral world from contingency to system (1803), were intended to be funny, but either way they are.
I shall open this stupendous Essay of intellectual energy with the
most important discovery of the moral laws of nature that was ever
made by human intelligence, viz.
That the word knowledge signifies no more than a capacity of mind
to conform the relations of thought to the phenomena or appearances of
things, whereby we conceive the course or order of nature's action
independent of its essence or unknown causes.
now, on the other hand, there are many interesting features of his philosophy. he is a materialist, indeed some passages are close to quotations from lucretius. human consciousness is a little material bubble in a big material universe, which we can and do know; he is a realist. but he has an almost hindu vision of the oneness of all material things, really a mystical vision in which each of us lives in and as the whole which is in constant redistribution. death is the dispersal of a material body, and also the extinction of consciousness (he is an atheist; de quincey: "In many things he shocked the religious sense, especially as it exists in unphilosophic minds. . . . And indeed there can be no stronger proof of the utter obscurity in which his works have slumbered than that they should all have escaped prosecution."), but it is not our selves we should be concerned about; rather, the good of the whole through all of time. here is one way (among myriad) that he expresses his "great parent idea": "the incessant transmutation of matter from one human body into all the surrounding bodies of nature, both in life and death" (philosophy of sense, xv)
he is a pragmatist in his way:
It is most certain that the utmost limits and speculatios of practical or theoretical good must be brought to the measure of experience; for, whatever systems of policy, moralist, or philosophy the mind may form in imagination, they must all be brought to the test of practical institution, to prove their result of utility or good. (Philosophy of Sense, xvii)
but he also rails at the scientism of his day, which is extremely rare in the period and place of his early authorship, and which may have actually influenced the shape of british romanticism (wordsworth knew and admired stewart; de quincey loved the guy, and regrets that for the last ten years of stewart's life, he de quincey was too pre-occupied with taking opium to see him stewart); he keeps saying that there's plenty you can't prove by experiment, and you should free yourself to reason analogically, or in whatever manner is appropriate to the material under consideration.
The doctrine of experimentalism pervading the whole continent of Europe, can exist only as the fashion of the season among thoughtless wits and scientific idiots: it stands in direct opposition to the laws of intellectual power; for, what can prohibit the process of thought to follow the necessary laws or course of its own actions . . . that is, ideas, experimental sentiments, notions of analogy, and phantasms? (philosophy of sense, xviii)
he explicitly rails against enlightenment french thought, and indeed the french to last atom of their very being, and holds that logic, while ok in its place, is an arid landscape where ideas shrivel up and die; you've really got to use your imagination, to paraphrase the pips. he's very in the rousseauvian cult of nature.
also he is, as you would expect, deeply cosmopolitan, in a certain way, though also by the end of his life a british chauvinist. so he says, for example,
Before I began my travels I was of a very irritable disposition; but,
after a very short period, I had found so much opposition to my will,
and so much to offend my feelings, in the censure and curiosity of
strange nations, that I at length acquired a temperance of toleration
that has ever since formed the greatest cause of happiness in my life.
(opus maximum, xxiv)
he is insistently autobiographical but also not. he actually does not reveal much about specific adventures serving the nabob, etc. supposedly he wrote 30-odd books; i've been able to identify by title about half that so far, and i've got five or six things sitting around; the pile is very intimidating. one title i like: roll of a tennis ball through the moral world, a series of contemplations by a solitary traveller.
at any rate, this seems to be the project right now. so maybe i'll try to publish a selection of his writings with an intellectual-biographical essay, the de quincey, and scholarly apparatus.
