cheese it, the cops!

geist und zeit

some jagged news: an extremely smart and accomplished young poet and scholar, kelly grovier - who writes all the time for the times literary supplement - has a book coming out on walking stewart: very much the kind of thing i was contemplating! it's quite typical: two centuries without a book on the guy; suddenly everyone's doing it. i am contemplating whether this pre-empts my project. this is the kind of thing that happens in the sciences all the time, but it can also happen in the humanities, though with very different inflections. one good thing: grovier is an excellent writer and an expert on british romanticism. stewart will very much get treated right. what i could possibly do better - or so i tell myself - is work stewart into the history of philosophy.

you know when i was doing a book on voltairine de cleyre - the great american feminist and anarchist, neglected since her death in 1912 - sharon presley contacted me to say she was doing a book too, so with some discomfort we collapsed our two projects into one. but when we published in 2004, eugenia delamotte's book came out almost simultaneously. and also brigati's reader. really these things make you think twice about zeitgeists. 

bending space itself

here's a rough sketch of a life of walking stewart, eventually to be extended into an introduction to the life and thought. this at least gives a rough idea of the astonishing itinerary.

real walking

walking stewart's realism:

It burst upon my intelligence with a blaze of light the following momentous and natural notion, That all facts, relations, or analogies of things, were totally independent of all human opinion, and its forms of logic or language. Fire, light, matter, motion, mind, exist now with al their qualities, as they existed at all times of antiquity; and no errors of language or opinion can give any alteration to their different qualities, or degrees of relations, or analogies in real existence. (Philosophy of Sense, 166)

i seem to have worked out how to update my website, and i've started a zone for walking stewart (as i've done before for nathaniel rogers and josiah warren).

keep on walkin

De Quincey puts Stewart "among the armies of Hyder-Ali and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry," in Paris during the revolution, Lapland, "the solitary forests of Canada," "the deserts of Asia and America," etc. John Taylor - "Oculist to the Prince of Wales" - places him in Persia, Armenia, and walking to Edinburgh to talk to Dugald Stewart. Rumor adds Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, he was simultaneously present in various locations in London. De Quincey:

In 1812 it was I think that I saw him for the last time; and by the way, on the day of my parting with him, had an amusing proof in my own experience of that sort of ubiquity ascribed to him by a witty writer in the London Magazine: I met him and shook hands with him under Somerset-house, telling him that I should leave town that evening for Westmoreland. Thence I went by the very shortest road (i.e. through Moor-street, Soho--for I am learned in many quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily led me through Tottenham-court-road; I stopped nowhere, and walked fast; yet so it was that in Tottenham-court-road I was not overtaken by (that was comprehensible), but overtook Walking Stewart. 

That is, there is the vague suggestion of X-Men-like mutant superpowers (teleportation? time-bending? or perhaps ubiquity itself), no doubt of advantage to a philosopher.

 

 

solitary traveller

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.

walking the cow

i've been checking out a truly eccentric or fabulous figure of the kind you sometimes run into in philosophy: walking stewart. i'm in possession of a copy of a work by stewart from around 1793, apparently titled: The Revolution of Reason, or the Establishment of the Constitution of Things in Nature: Of Man, Of Human Intellect, Of Moral Truth, of the Existence of Universal Good: From the Era of Intellectual Existence or the Publication of the Apocalypse of Nature, An. 4. or 5000. damn i wanted to use that for my next thing.

thus far the writing is pure funk: he has his own whole jargon, like a preincarnation of heidegger. but even with the actual walk around the known world, he's also very much a british philosopher, and he lurches into extreme clarity:

Human reason by controuling the exercise of the passions, will, no doubt, procure longevity to the body; but should imagination, through analogy, suppose the procuration of immortality by the infinite ratio of increasing reason, it would be downright insanity; as well might the man who lifted a calf every day, till it became a cow, expect to lift a house, mountain, globe, universe, and ultimately, carry all nature like a hat under his arm.

so: there are limits to human reason. there are limits to knowledge or science. or: the fact that moore's law has worked out this long doesn't infallibly indicate that it will continue to do so. or you might say: beware the malthusian style of inference: well if it keeps on doubling... i'd like to send that as a note to my bete noire ray kurzweil and anyone else who proposes to carry all nature like a hat under his arm. i am a secular believer in original sin: i think we are irremediably flawed, and that the singularity is going to suck exactly as much as we do, since it will have been perpetrated by and for us.

i'll perhaps be keeping you updated on walking stewart. or if anyone knows anything or has a read on him, let me know.