Maverick Philosopher

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.

More on Douglas Hyde.

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 . . .

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.

Walter Morris: Bourgeois Bohemian

Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks.  Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal.

I have already presented his thoughts on solitude.  That post also provided some information on the man and his writings. What follows is part of an entry from 8 February 1947. (Notebook 2: Black
River, limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood NJ, 1949. It contains journal entries from 25 June 1942 to 3 August 1947.)

The Bohemian way of living has its points, but I am unable to appreciate Bohemia at full tilt. I have never had it that way and, except for a very youthful period, I have never much wanted it that way. I like cleanliness of body and living quarters, not a fanatical 100% cleanliness, not a sterile and perfect order, but such cleanliness as is compatible with normal comfortable living. I dislike messy emotional relationships and all kinds of exhibitionism. I dislike vomiting drunks, people with the monkey on their backs, flaunting homosexuality, financial dishonesty, irresponsibility, and puerile minds posing as advanced and liberated. This is the measure of my Respectability and middle-classness. Otherwise -- in being devoted to my own pattern, in quietly ignoring some White Cows instead of ostentatiously mounting a rebellion -- I don't mind at all being called Bohemian. Our family dish, as a matter of [f]act, could stand a dash of that kind of sauce. (p. 206)

I recall a quotation from Gustave Flaubert along similar lines: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Jabez Clapp: A 'Philosopher' of the Superstitions

The mountains attract misfits, oddballs, outcasts, outlaws, questers of various stripes, and even a few 'philosophers.'  Here is the story of one of them, one of many who found his way into the mountains but never found his way out.  He who marches to the beat of a different drummer, in the famous phrase of Henry David Thoreau, runs certain risks.  He may march himself right into Kingdom Come.  But the very same Thoreau also observed that a man sits as many risks as he runs.

Which risks to sit and which to run is for the individual to decide.  There is  no algorithm.

Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold

Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. And out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to meeting was Richard Peck, but by the time I found out about his passion from his wife, Joan, he had passed away. Sadly enough, Joan unexpectedly died recently.

Joan had me and my wife over for dinner on Easter Sunday a few years years ago, and my journal (vol. XXI, pp. 34-35, 28 March 2005) reports the following:

Joan's dead husband Rick was a true believer in the Dutchman mine, and thought he knew where it was: in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle, and accessible via the Terrapin trail. A few days before he died he wanted Joan to accompany his pal Bruce, an unbeliever, to a digging operation which Bruce, a man who knows something about mining, did not perform. Rick to Joan, "I want you to be there when he digs up the gold."

Via the wonders of the Internet I found a Time Magazine article, "Adventure and the American Individualist," dated 19 November 1965. On p. 4, we read about Richard Peck:

Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."

What a story! A successful, educated, 44 year old man, possibly in the grip of a midlife crisis, spends 16 months and $80,000 grubbing around in wild and unforgiving (but not "barren"!) country searching for an almost certainly nonexistent mine. Unlike Adolph Ruth, another white-collar type who sought adventure in them thar hills, Peck came out of the mountains alive. And that was back in the '60s. Peck, whose name was shortened from 'Peckstein' according to Joan, lived on for another 40 years or so. It thus appears that the quest for the lost gold was the main passion of his life. He believed in its existence until the end of his life.

As I write this, I look out my window at Superstition mountain wreathed mysteriously in low-lying clouds and reflect that to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.

Dis-tracted

We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph -- in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course' and 'it comes with the terrain.' There's no turning back now. We must advance.

The Supreme Enigma

Paul Brunton, Notebooks II, 4:

Every puzzle that fascinates innumerable persons and induces them to attempt its solution -- be it mathematical and profound or ordinary and simple -- is an echo on a lower level of the Supreme Enigma that is forever accompanying man and demanding an answer: What is he, whence and whither? The quester puts the problem into his conscious mind and keeps it there.

Who Are the Oddballs?

Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. II, The Quest (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1986), p. 24:

We are regarded as odd people because we trouble our heads with the search for an intangible reality. But it never occurs to our critics that it is much more odd that they should go on living without pausing to inquire if there be any purpose in life at all.

A Note on Into the Wild, the Movie

Into the Wild, the movie, impressed me and held my attention for its two and a half hours. But I'm understating: it moved me and ought to  be added to my list of most memorable movies, there to rub shoulders with the likes of Zorba the Greek and La Strada. Not that I would rate it as high as those two classics. Here is a reviewer who didn't get it:

Krakauer and Penn see themselves as kindred spirits to McCandless, rugged individualists seeking the fullness of life in nature. And that probably explains why they both attribute McCandless' reckless adventures to a philosophical quest rather than to what appears to be an obvious act of youthful rebellion.

No doubt McCandless was reckless, and his recklessness got him killed. But only someone who is spiritually dead could dismiss McCandless' quest as a mere act of youthful rebellion. The jaded, the security-obsessed, and those devoid of all idealism will find it easy to mock as hyperromantic and melodramatic the posturings of "Alexander Supertramp." But unlike them, the living dead, he was searching for something more, for the Real, for the truth of his existence. Life without a quest for the Real beyond the sham taken-for-real of one's society is just not worth living. Either you see that or you are spiritually blind.

Only someone who, like Krakauer, sees a bit of himself in McCandless will be able to appreciate what was genuine and worthwhile in him. That is one reason why Krakauer's book is so good. I was pleased to see that the movie stays very close to the book.

Faith and Prayer: The Case of Ron Franz

One of the minor characters of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild  is the old man to whom Krakauer gave the name 'Ron Franz.' He was 80 years old when his and Christopher McCandless's paths crossed. McCandless made indelible impressions on the people he met, but he affected Franz more than anyone else, so much so that the old man with no surviving next of kin wanted to adopt the 24 year old as his grandson. The story of their encounter is recounted in the chapter entitled 'Anza-Borrego' and is also well told in the movie version of Krakauer's book. Franz came to pin his hopes on the remarkable young man and longed for his return from Alaska. When he heard from a hitchhiker that McCandless had died, he and his faith were shattered:

The Strange Case of Gene Rosellini

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild  is not just about Chris McCandless and the people he met during the two years he was incarnating 'Alexander Supertramp.' It also about other oddballs such as Gene Rosellini. The term 'oddball' is not necessarily one of disapprobation in my mouth: most of the people I remain in contact with I would classify as oddballs. And of course it takes one to know (and appreciate) one. Here is a passage about Rosellini lifted from the essay Anarchism Versus Primitivism:

The Seeker

What is the seeker after? He doesn't quite know, and that is part of his being a romantic. He experiences his present 'reality' as flat, stale, jejune, oppressive, substandard. He feels there must be more to life than work-a-day routines and social objectifications, the piling up of loot, getting ahead. He wants intensity of experience, abundance of life, even while being unclear as to what these are.  He casts a negative eye on the status quo, the older generation, his parents and family, and their quiet desperation. He scorns security and its living death.

Christopher J. McCandless was a good example,  he whose story was skillfully recounted by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild.    In McCandless' case, the scorn for security, his fleeing a living death, led to a dying death. In an excess of self-reliance he crossed the Teklanika, not realizing it was his Rubicon and that its crossing would deposit him on the Far Shore.  Be bold, muchachos, be bold; be not too bold.