Questers and Other Oddballs – Page 4

Philosophy, Superman, and Richard C. Potter

I was pleased to hear from Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence this morning. He inquired:

About four or five years ago you wrote about an American writer and thinker, perhaps an academic philosopher, who published, I believe, two books and seemed to disappear. You had difficulty finding information about him online. I believe you said he had an interest in East Asian thought. His “career” was eccentric by conventional standards and he seemed to be something of a loner.

Then I remembered a post of mine which begins:

This post examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking, so if anyone knows what became of him, please let me know. The Philosopher's Index shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986.)

I don't know whether Potter is the man Kurp had in mind, but the former does satisfy part of Kurp's description. In any event, the Richard Potter story is an interesting one.

I recall talking to him, briefly, in the summer of 1981 at Brown University. I was a participant in Roderick Chisholm's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, and Potter, who I believe had recently completed his Ph.D. at Brown, sat in on a few sessions. My impression was he that he was unable to secure a teaching position. I also recall a slightly derogatory comment I made about the Midwest and how one might have to go there to find employment. Potter's mild-mannered reply was to the effect that he preferred the Midwest over other geographical regions. His name stuck in my mind probably because of a paper on the paradox of analysis he co-authored with Chisholm and because of the F & P article mentioned above. See here. But then he dropped out of philosophical sight.

A few years back, I did a search and he turned up again as a George Reeves and Superman aficionado. So here is part of the rest of the Potter story. Here is Potter's George Reeves site.

A checkered career, his.

I too enjoyed the Superman series while growing up in the '50s. Some thoughts of mine on George Reeves are in Superman: The Moral of the Story.

The Wild Diversity of Human Types: Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart

Zelda lived and died for fashion, collapsing at age 95 in the front row of a fashion show. Dolores, though starting off in the vain precincts of glitz and glamour, gave it up for God and the soul. This life is vain whether or not God and the soul are illusions. Should we conclude that to live for fashion is to throw one's life away for the trinkets of phenomenality, the bagatelles of transience? That to die while worshipping idols at the altar of fashion is a frightful way to die? These mere suggestions will elicit vociferous objection from some, for whom it is self-evident that to retreat to a nunnery is to throw one's life away for an escapist fantasy. But that is but another indication of the wild diversity of human types. The case for the vanity of human existence is well made in Ecclesiastes. See A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2.

A Kerouac of the Canyonlands

Long before Chris McCandless, there was Everett Ruess, Wandering Soul.

Introverts and the Internet

Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loner’s Manifesto (New York: Marlowe and Co., 2003), pp. 106-107:

The Internet is, for loners, an absolute and total miracle. It is, for us, the best invention of the last millennium. It educates. It entertains. It transforms. It facilitates a kind of dialogue in which we need not be seen, so it suits us perfectly. It validates. It makes being alone seem normal. It makes being alone fun for everyone.

And so it has its critics. They claim it keeps kids from playing healthy games outdoors. They say it is a procurer for perverts, a weapon in hate crimes. Underlying all of this, of course, is the real reason for their dismay: the Internet legitimizes solitude. The real problem is not that kids don’t play outdoors, but that they do not play with other kids.

I’ve read the whole of this book, and I recommend it. It's not a great book, but it is worth reading. Click on the title above to read some positive and negative reviews.

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

Dennis E. Bradford sent me three comments via e-mail on my recent Butchvarov post. I omit the first and the third which are more technical in nature, and which I may address in later posts. Bradford writes,

Second, and this separates me from Butch, Larry [Blackman], and you, I reject your assumption concerning the narrowness of philosophy. You mention a conceptual impasse that is “insoluble on the plane of the discursive intellect, which of course is where philosophy must operate.” I object to the “of course.” To be a philosopher is to be a lover of wisdom and who says that our only access to wisdom is via the discursive intellect? In fact, I deny that. As far as I can tell, the Buddha was the greatest philosopher and the wisest human who ever lived, and his view was that limiting our examination only to the domain of the discursive intellect prevents one from becoming wise.

Actually, I don't disagree with this comment. It is a matter of terminology, of how we should use the word 'philosophy.' For me there are at least four ways to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality. This post provides rough sketches of how I view the first three. I end by suggesting that the pursuit of wisdom involves all three 'postures.' (Compare the physical postures in the three pictures below.)

Philosophy

Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them. Discursive reason is reason insofar as it articulates itself in concepts, judgments, arguments, and systems of argument. As the etymology of the term suggests (L. currere, to run), discursive reason is roundabout rather than direct — as intuitive reason would be if there is such a thing. Discursive reason gets at its object indirectly via concepts, judgments, and arguments. This feature of discursive reason makes for objectivity and communicability; but it exacts a price, and the price must be paid in the coin of loss of concreteness. Thus the oft-heard complaint about the abstractness of philosophy is not entirely without merit.

Note that I define philosophy in terms of the activity of discursive reason: any route to the truth that does not make use of this ‘faculty’ is simply not philosophy. You may take this as a stipulation if you like, but it is of course more than this, grounded as it is in historical facts. if you want to know what philosophy is, read Plato. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says somewhere, "Philosophy is Plato, and Plato philosophy." (I quote from memory!) And there is this from Keith's blog.

The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and every activity that has arisen or will arise out of that.

(Richard Robinson, "Is Psychical Research Relevant to Philosophy?" The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 189-206, at 192.)

This is in line with my masthead motto which alludes to the famous observation of Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

Discursivity, then, is essential to philosophy as a matter of definition, a definition that is not merely stipulative but grounded in a possibility of our nature that was best realized in Plato and what he gave rise to.

Thus Jesus of Nazareth was not a philosopher, pace George Bush. If you insist that he was, then I will challenge you to show me the arguments whereby he established such dicta as "I and the Father are one," etc. I will demand the premises whence he arrived at this ‘conclusion.’ Argument and counterargument before the tribunal of reason are the sine qua non of philosophy, its veritable lifeblood. The truth is that Jesus gave no arguments, made no conjectures, refuted no competing theories. There is no dialectic in the Gospels such as we find in the Platonic dialogues. This is not an objection to Jesus’ life and message, but simply an underscoring of the fact that he was not a philosopher. (But I have a nagging sense that Dallas Willard says something to the contrary somewhere.) Believing himself to be one with the Father, Jesus of course believed himself to be one with the ultimate truth. Clearly, no such person is a mere philo-sopher, etymologically, a lover of wisdom; he is rather (one who makes a claim to being) a possessor of it. The love of the philosopher, as Plato’s Symposium made clear, is erothetic love, a love predicated on lack; it is not agapic love, love predicated on plenitude. The philosopher is an indigent fellow, grubbing his way forward bit by bit as best he can, by applying discursive reason to the data of experience. God is no philosopher, thank God!

Agreeing with Bradford that a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, I yet insist that he is a lover and pursuer of wisdom by dialectical means, assuming we are going to use 'philosopher' strictly. This use of terms does not rule out other routes to wisdom, routes that may prove more efficacious.

Indeed, since philosophy examines everything, including itself (its goals, its methods, its claim to cognitivity), philosophy must also examine whether it is perhaps an inferior route to truth or no route to truth at all!

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative. The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before the reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth. If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an idol.

The reader must of course take these schematic remarks cum grano salis. It would be simple-minded to think that cold impersonal reason (philosophy) stands in simple and stark confrontation to warm personal love (religion). For philosophy is itself a form of love –- erothetic love – of the Absolute, and without the inspiring fervor of this longing love, the philosopher would not submit himself to the rigorous logical discipline, the mental asceticism, without which serious philosophy is impossible. (I speak of real philosophers, of course, and not mere paid professors of it.) Good philosophy is necessarily technical, often mind-numbingly so. (The reader may verify that the converse of this proposition does not hold.) Only a lover of truth will put up with what Hegel called die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the concept. On the other hand, religious sentiments and practices occur in a context of beliefs that are formulated and defended in rational terms, including those beliefs that cannot be known by unaided reason but are vouchsafed to us by revelation. So in pursuit of taxonomy we must not fall into crude compartmentalization. The philosopher has his devotions and the religionist has his reasonings.

Mysticism

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs. You should think of the the Latin intuitus as used by Descartes, and the German Anschauung as used by Kant. The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition. The possibility of intellektuelle Anschauung was of course famously denied by Kant.

Wisdom

The ultimate goal for a human being is wisdom which could be characterized as knowledge of, and participation in, the saving truth. One who attains this goal is a sage. No philosopher is a sage, by definition. For a philosopher, as a lover (seeker) of wisdom, is not a possessor of it. One does not seek what one possesses. The philosopher's love is eros, love predicated on lack. At most, the philosopher is a would-be sage, one for whom philosophy (as characterized above) is a means to the end of becoming a sage. If a philosopher attains the Goal, then he ceases to be a philosopher. If a philosopher gets a Glimpse of the Goal, in that moment he ceases to be a philosopher, but then, after having lost the Glimpse (which is what usually happens) he is back to being as philosopher again.

At this point a difficult question arises. Is philosophy a means to sagehood, or a distraction from it? I grant that the ultimate Goal cannot be located on the discursive plane. What one ultimately wants is not an empty conceptual knowledge but a fulfilled knowledge. Some say that when a philosopher seeks God, he attains only a 'God of the philosophers,' an abstraction. (See my Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.) The kernel of truth in this is that discursive operations typically do not bring one beyond the plane of discursivity. One thought leads to another, and another, and another . . . and never to the Thinker 'behind' them or the divine Other.

And so one might decide that philosophy is useless — "not worth an hour's trouble" as Pascal once said — and that one ought either to follow the path of religion or that of mysticism. That is not my view, for reasons I will need a separate post to explain.

For now I will say only this. Philosophy is not enough. It needs supplementation by the other paths mentioned. Analogy. You go to a restaurant to eat, not to study the menu. But reading the menu is a means to the end of ordering and enjoying the meal. Philosophy is like reading the menu; eating is like attaining the Goal.

But it is also the case that religion and mysticism require the discipline of philosophy. There is a lot to be said on these topics, and it will be the philosopher who will do the saying. The integration of the faculties falls to philosophy, and an integrated life is what we aspire to, is it not? We seek to avoid the onesidedness of the philosopher, but also the onesidedness of the mystic, of the religionist, of the moralist, not to mention the onesidedness of the moneygrubber, the physical fitness fanatic, etc.

The Wild Diversity of the Solutions to the Problem of Human Existence

How wildly diverse the concrete solutions to the problem of life that each works out for himself!

There was Leon Trotsky the professional revolutionary who worshipped life-long at the altar of politics. Politics was his substitute for religion. (If religion is the opiate of the masses, revolutionary politics is the opiate of the intellectuals.)

And then there was Trotsky's secretary and bodyguard Jean van Heijenoort who, after finally seeing through the illusions of Communism after years of selfless service to its cause, renounced politics entirely and devoted himself to mathematical logic, becoming a distinguished historian of the subject. One is struck by the extremity of this turn away from something of great human relevance to something of almost none. A retreat from messy reality into a realm of bloodless abstractions. An escape from the bloody horrors of politics into the arcane. At the same time, a turn from devotion to a great but ill-conceived cause to bourgeois self-indulgence in sex, 'romance,' and love affairs. Sadly, his fatal attraction to Ana Maria Zamora got him killed in the same place, Mexico City, where Trotsky met his end at the point of an ice axe wielded by a puppet of Stalin. Zamora shot van Heijenoort with her Colt .38 while he slept . From revolutionary to bourgeois professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. But he was never so bourgeois as to respect the bourgeois institution of marriage.

Dr. George Sheehan's escape was into running to which he ascribed a significance it could not bear. He was an inspiration to a lot of us with his 1975 On Running. But then came a string of rather more fatuous and portentous titles, starting with Running and Being. As if der Sinn von Sein is poised to disclose itself to the fleet of foot. All due praise to running, but homo currens qua currens is not on the way to Being.

And then there are those who went from politics to religion. Unlike van Heijenoort who moved from leftist politcs to mathematical logic, Simone Weil went from leftist politics to religion. "The great error of the Marxists and of all of the nineteenth century was to believe that by walking straight ahead one had mounted into the air." Exactly right.

Edith Stein, another very bright Jewish philosophy student, went from philosophy to religion. Seeking total commitment she fled to a Carmelite monastery. She was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz as Trotsky was murdered by the long arm of Stalin in Mexico City. When I say that Stein went from philosophy to religion, I do not mean that she abandoned the first for the second: she wrote weighty tomes in the convent, Finite and Eternal Being and Potency and Act, to name two. But they were written under the banner, philosophia ancilla theologiae.

It is fruitful to compare Weil and Stein. The former, despite her attraction, kept her distance from the Roman church — Kenneth Rexroth speaks of her "tortured prowling outside the doors of the Catholic Church" – while the latter embraced it in the most committed way imaginable. There is a 'logic' to such commitment, one that is operative in the lives of many a convert, Thomas Merton being another example: if it is The Truth that one has found, then surely it demands and deserves total commitment. Religion really embraced and made existential make a totalitarian claim — which is why the totalitarians of the Left must make total war on it.

But these days I've been reading the slacker poet, Charles Bukowski, so perhaps he deserves a place in this little incomplete catalog. His epitaph reads, Don't try." He avoided bourgeois mediocity, no doubt, but along a path that cannot be recommended: one of piecemeal physical and spiritual suicide. Whatever you say about Trotksy, van Heijenoort, Sheehan, Weil and Stein, they were strivers. They understood that a life worth living is a life of relentless effort and exertion and self-overcoming. It is about subduing the lower self, not wallowing in it.

When I was a young man I came to the conclusion that I had three choices, three paths: suicide, mediocrity, striving. A lifetime later I verify that my choice of the third was best.

Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil

Both refused to live conventionally. The Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin. Both said No to the bourgeois life. But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed. Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent. For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church and state and family values, is the low life: drinking, gambling, fornicating, drug-taking, petty crime like busting up a room and skipping out on the rent, barroom brawling. Not armed robbery, rape, and murder, but two-bit thievery, whoring and picking fights in dingy dives. Nothing that gets you sent to San Quentin or Sing-Sing.

For the other the true life is not so readily accessible: it is the life in pursuit of the Higher, the existence and nature of which is only glimpsed now and again. (GG 11) The succor of the Glimpse — this is indeed the perfect word — is unreliable, a matter of grace. One is granted a glimpse. A matter of grace, not gravity. It is hard to rise, easy to fall — into the the bed of sloth, the whore's arms, the bottle. The pleasures of the flesh are as reliable as anything in this world. In that reliability lies their addictive power. Satisfaction of crass desire breeds a bad infinity of crass desires. Desire is endlessly reborn in each satisfaction. One is not granted the rush of the lush-kick by a power transcendent of the natural nexus; it is a matter of determinism once you take the plunge. Drink, snort, shoot and the effect follows, which is not to say that one does not freely decide to drink, snort, shoot. The point is that the free agent's input sets in motion a process utterly predictable in its effect. Not so with the "lightning flashes" (GG 11) that reveal the Higher.

At best, one positions oneself so as to enjoy the gusts of divine favor should any come along. Like al-Ghazzali in search of a cooling breeze, you climb the minaret. There you are more likely to catch the breeze than on the ground, though there is no guarantee. One cannot bring it about by one's own efforts, and the positioning and preparing cannot be said to be even a necessary condition of receipt of the divine favor; but the creaturely efforts make it more likely.

Bukowski versus Weil. The Dean of Dissipation versus the Categorical Imperative in skirts. Self-indulgence versus self-denial as opposed paths to the truer and realer life. Dissipation versus concentration, versus Weil's attention. "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." (Gravity and Grace, p. 106)

The low life (Buk) will not renounce but dives head first into the most accessible goods of this world, the lowest and basest and commonest. The angel in him celebrates the animal in man thereby degrading himself and 'gravitating' towards food and drink, sex and drugs. You just let yourself go and gravity does the rest. The fall is assured. No self-discipline in matters of money either. Our man worships at the shrine of Lady Luck, betting on the horses at Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Hollywood Park, all within striking distance of his beloved Los Angeles.

The spiritual aspirant who aims high and beyond this life, though tempted by booze and broads and the whole gamut of the palpable and paltry, seeks the Good beyond all finite goods. Pursuit of the Good demands detachment from all finite goods (GG 12 ff.).

The Aporia. Positivistic dissipationism versus a concentrationism that is hard to tell from nihilism. Self-loss via dissipation, the dive into the diaspora of the sensory manifold versus self-loss by absorption into a Transcendence that cancels individuality. Salvation of the self by annihilation of the self. ". . . the object of all our efforts is to become nothing." (GG 30)

Charles Bukowski

October's scrounging around in used book dens for Beat arcana uncovered Barry Miles' biography of this laureate of low life. It has been holding my interest. Bukowski, though not an associate of the Beat writers, is beat in the sense of beaten down and disaffected but not in Kerouac's sense of beatific. A worthless fellow, a drunkard, a lecher, a misogynist, a shameless user and betrayer of his benefactors, Bukowski (1920-1994) is nonetheless a pretty good scribbler of poetry and prose. (I call him a worthless fellow, but child is father to the man, and Bukowski had a terrible childhood.) If I need an excuse to poke into the particulars of his paltry life, there is my masthead motto, "Study everything, join nothing," and the Terentian homo sum, nihil humani, etc. The other night I read about him in bed, a mistake, since the night mind should be primed for its nocturnal preconscious ruminations with ennobling rather than debasing images. In compensation I read Simone Weil in the predawn hours of the next day. A comparison of the two would be an interesting exercise.

The Dean of Dissipation versus the Red Virgin. A celebration of the base, sordid, cheap, tawdry, depraved, degraded, of the complete abdication of the spirit to the flesh and its lusts, versus an anorexic asceticism bordering on nihilism.

How wild the diversity of human types! How impossible to be bored in a world so populated. How should we live? There is no substitute for finding your own path.

A Map of Bohemia

Originally published in 1896 by Gelett Burgess in The Lark, the following curiosity I found on the inside front cover of Albert Parry, Garretts and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, 1933, rev. 1960 with a new chapter "Enter Beatniks" by Henry T. Moore (New York: Dover Publications). The Book Gallery on Mesa Arizona's 1950s-reminiscent Main Street wanted ten dollars for this 50 year old paperback, but I gladly paid it particularly because of the 'new' chapter. I was disappointed, however,by the exiguous coverage of Joe Gould on pp. 148 and 346.

Kerouac October Quotation #27: Jack on Robert Lax

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet — tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)

And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:

I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes — but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.

"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."

See you in the world,

Jack K.

For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here and here.

Finally, Visions of Tom for the Merton-Kerouac connection.

Ned Polsky, Maverick Sociologist

Reader Ray Stahl of Port Angeles, Washington, kindly mailed me a copy of Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others. It is a work of sociology by a maverick sociologist, academically trained, but decidedly his own man. I wasn't aware of it or him until a few days ago. The preface already has me convinced that this is a book I will read and digest. A writer who writes like this is a writer to read:

Many readers of this book will feel that I object to the views of other scholars in terms that are overly fierce. These days the more usual mode in academia, thronged as it is with arrivistes aspiring to be gentlemen, is to voice such objections oleaginously. But luckily I cut an eyetooth on that masterpiece of English prose, A. E. Housman's introduction to his edition of Manilius, and so am forever immune to the notion that polemical writing and scholarly writing shouldn't mix. I believe that polemical scholarship improves the quality of intellectual life — sharpens the mind, helps get issues settled faster — by forcing genteel discussion to become genuine debate.

(Hyperlinks added. Obviously. But it raises a curiously pedantic question: By what right does one tamper with a text in this way? Pedantic the question, I leave it to the pedants.)

Polsky died in 2000. Here is an obituary. You will have to scroll down to find it.

Dorothy Day on Max Bodenheim

I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put their own inimitable stamp on themselves. The creatively maladjusted and marginal who do duty as warnings more often than as exemplars.

Joe Gould, Greenwich Village bohemian, is an example. His story has been told by that master of prose, Joseph Mitchell. More on Gould and Mitchell later. Here you can read Dorothy Day on Max Bodenheim, another luminary in the firmament of early 20th century Greenwich Village bohemia.

Douglas Hyde: From Communist to Catholic

I am now reading Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (HarperCollins 2009). Over 700 pages. The author's name is hardly donnish, but he is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University. There is a chapter entitled "The Appeals of Communism," and in it I came across a reference to Douglas Hyde:

For some who joined the Communist Party, a search for belief and a craving for certainty were important parts of their psychological make-up. One English Communist, Douglas Hyde, moved from being a young Methodist lay preacher, with an interest also in other religions, to becoming a Communist activist for twenty years, finishing up as news editor of the CPGB party newspaper, the Daily Worker, before resigning from the party in 1948 to become a proselytizing member of the Catholic Church. Although Hyde's political memoir, I Believed, written in the late Stalin period, is also a reasoned attack on Communist Party strategy and tactics, it holds that a majority of those attracted to Communism in those years were 'subconsciously looking for a cause which will to fill the void left by unbelief, or, as in my own case, an insecurely held belief which is failing to satisfy them intellectually and spiritually.' (p. 125)

People have strong doxastic security needs. They need a system of belief and practice to structure their lives. Few can tread the independent path. In the 2oth century many bright and earnest young people sought meaning and structure in Communism. In the 21st century radical Islam fills a similar need. Both snares and delusions, of course. It is arguably better to have no ideals rather than the wrong ideals, no beliefs rather than false and pernicious ones.

Another Strange Tale of the Superstitions

The Superstition Mountains exert a strange fascination. They attract misfits, oddballs, outcasts, outlaws, questers of various stripes, a philosopher or two, and a steady stream of 'Dutchman hunters,' those who believe in and search for the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. This nonexistent object has lured many a man to his death. More men than Alexius von Meinong's golden mountain, for sure. Adolf Ruth, for example, back in the '30s.

Such appears to be the case once again this last week. Three Utah prospectors, their brains addled by gold fever, entered this wild and unforgiving inferno of rocks and rattlesnakes unprepared and appear to have the paid for their foolishness with their lives. Here is the story.

Or at least that is the story so far. But there has to be more. Why July when the temperature approaches 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the monsoon humidity adds a further blanket of discomfort? It is not as if they haven't been here before. A couple of them were rescued last year.

And how do you get lost, if you are not totally stupid? The central landmark of the entire wilderness is Weaver's Needle depicted in the first shot above. It is visible from every direction, from the Western Sups to the Eastern Sups. To orient yourself, all you have to do is climb up to where you can see it. And then head for it. To the immediate west and east of it are major trails that lead to major trailheads.

And why was no trace of them found despite intensive searching with helicopters and dogs? It is possible to fall into an abandoned mine shaft. But all three at once? Their plan, supposedly, was to search by day and sleep in a motel at night. But then they wouldn't have gotten very deep into the wilderness and the chances of finding them dead or alive would have been pretty good.

Maybe it was all a scam. Maybe they never entered the wilderness at First Water. They left their car there and hitchhiked out in an elaborate ruse to ditch their wives and families and their pasts. But I speculate. (If a philosopher can't speculate, who the hell can?)

I've hiked out of First Water many times, winter and summer. I know a trail that you don't and is not on any maps that leads to Adolf Ruth's old camp at Willow Springs. I've got half a mind to take a look-see . . .

B. Traven

The initial is not the start of a name but another false clue to throw the curious off the scent — while piquing their curiosity. B. Traven, you be one clever dude.