Hermitary – hermit's thatch

In his felicitous essay titled “Walking,” published posthumously in 1862, Henry David Thoreau approximates a historical practice that he recognizes by analogy. Thoreau presents walking not as the taking of exercise but of deliberate “sauntering.” He repeats the formula of Samuel Johnson that the notion of sauntering is taken from the medieval sense of leisurely walking (i.e., “sauntering” to the “sant terre,” the Holy Land). The idea of walking should be a significant spiritual expression. Or is made so, by Thoreau.

Such is the idealized version of the term, which even in medieval times came to represent first the idea of pilgrimage or crusade, but then, among the common people, the freer notion of what idlers and vagabonds pursued in their poverty, simply walking idly, anywhere, for everywhere is holy land, after all. And here the parallel assessment of the hermit is approximated. Thoreau is aware of this nuance, and embraces it fully.

While Thoreau is the more familiar popularizer of walking for its own sake, other modern thinkers have expressed the same sensibility, as Rebecca Solnit describes in her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking and Frédéric Gros in his A Philosophy of Walking (2008, translated 2015). Notes Solnit: “The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as welll as in songs, streets and almost everyone’s adventures.”

Or, potentially everyone’s adventures, from which is crafted the advocacy of walking, the philosophy of walking. Philosopher Gros concentrates on Thoreau, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. Solnit highlights Rousseau, Kierkegaard, the Chinese hermit Cold Mountain and the British Romantic poet Wordsworth, who composed the famous “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Wordsworth’s is the image of the wanderer, clearly alone, in a natural setting, who delights that the “crowd” is thankfully not of people but of flowers!

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Thoreau makes a further reference to Wordsworth: “When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered,’Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’”

Thoreau also refers to the medieval ballad “Gest of Robin Hode,” the stanza wherein Robin Hood sighs upon seeing the green forest and hearing birdsong. Here is the potential for both vagabonding and freedom. But, back to walking.

Thoreau tells us, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Thoreau dismisses the question of where one should walk, it being obvious to his reader that he intends wilderness, not town or city; in the latter one encounters a stultifying image of self and not the liberating one embodied in nature. He entertains the notion of walking in specific directions, perhaps to emphasize the priority of intellectual and cultural self, telling us that one should walk westward towards California, not southward towards the Confederacy, and not eastward where New England already lies. Westward, too, in his mental geography, is the Amazon, the Orinoco, ultimately Africa and Asia, India and China, the lands of the future, as he understood them.

But for the moment, Thoreau tells us, he is noticing the brilliant golden sunset, the oaks, the meandering brook, a marsh hawk.

“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.”

URL (original June 1862 Atlantic article): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/

Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) is known for his multi-volume work: The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion. Although often described as anthropology, the voluminous title better represents the genre of folkloric anthologizing, collecting of stories and myths, more akin to Andrew Lang than Claude Levi-Strauss, Mircea Eliade, or even Joseph Campbell. The title was first puboished in1890,eventually appearing in three editions, twelve volumes, and a supplement, the last publication being in 1936.

With so many volumes and years for further research and emendations,then, why are there only two instances of “hermits” mentioned? The strange tales are both set in Southeast Asia, and repeated several times in subsequent volumes. Here they are:

1. In volume 1 of the first edition, in a chapter labeled “Departmental Kings of Nature” is the following:

“In the backwoods of Cambodia live two mysterious sovereigns known as the King of the Fire and the King of the Water. Their fame is spread all over the south of the great Indo-Chinese peninsula; but only a faint echo of it has reached the West. Down to a few years ago no European, so far as is known, had ever seen either of them; and their very existence might have passed for a fable, were it not that till lately communications were regularly maintained between them and the King of Cambodia, who year by year exchanged presents with them. Their royal functions are of a purely mystic or spiritual order; they have no political authority; they are simple peasants, living by the sweat of their brow and the offerings of the faithful. According to one account they live in absolute solitude, never meeting each other and never seeing a human face. They inhabit successively seven towers perched upon seven mountains, and every year they pass from one tower to another. People come furtively and cast within their reach what is needful for their subsistence. The kingship lasts seven years, the time necessary to inhabit all the towers successively; but many die before their time is out. The offices are hereditary in one or (according to others) two royal families, who enjoy high consideration, have revenues assigned to them, and are exempt from the necessity of tilling the ground. But naturally the dignity is not coveted, and when a vacancy occurs, all eligible men (they must be strong and have children) flee and hide themselves. Another account, admitting the reluctance of the hereditary candidates to accept the crown, does not countenance the report of their hermit-like seclusion in the seven towers. For it represents the people as prostrating themselves before the mystic kings whenever they appear in public, it being thought that a terrible hurricane would burst over the country if this mark of homage were omitted. Like many other sacred kings … the Kings of Fire and Water are not allowed to die a natural death, for that would lower their reputation. Accordingly when one of them is seriously ill, the elders hold a consultation and if they think he cannot recover they stab him to death. His body is burned and the ashes are piously collected and publicly honoured for five years. Part of them is given to the widow, and she keeps them in an urn, which she must carry on her back when she goes to weep on her husband’s grave.”

2. In the first edition of volume 2, in a sectiopn titled “External Soul in Folktales,” is the following:

“In a Siamese or Cambodian story, probably derived from India, we are told that Thossakan or Ravana, the King of Ceylon, was able by magic art to take his soul out of his body and leave it in a box at home, while he went to the wars. Thus he was invulnerable in battle. When he was about to give battle to Rama, he deposited his soul with a hermit called Fire-eye, who was to keep it safe for him. So in the fight Rama was astounded to see that his arrows struck the king without wounding him. But one of Rama’s allies, knowing the secret of the king’s invulnerability, transformed himself by magic into the likeness of the king, and going to the hermit asked back his soul. On receiving it he soared up into the air and flew to Rama, brandishing the box and squeezing it so hard that all the breath left the King of Ceylon’s body, and he died.”

For centuries, Western intellectuals have centered public culture around the triumvirate of Homer, Socrates, and Plato. In Homer they placed the origins of Greek tragedy and extended its ethos to popular cultural sentiment in the arts. In Socrates they centered rationality and public discourse. In Plato they centered metaphysics and the origins of Western cultural bounds of expression.

Thus reflections on Homer have historially revolved around the so-called “ Homeric question”: Was Homer one person or two? Or, perhaps, a school? Was the author of the Iliad the same author of the Odyssey? Such were the innocuous inquiries of the academics and literati.

But in the twentieth century, French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), praised by thinkers as diverse as Albert Camus and T.S. Eliot, overthrew the vacuities of the academics in a searing essay titled “The Iliad, Poem of Force.” The essay maintained that the West constructed its institutions on the ethos of a grand seminal premise, on the foundational values expressed in the Iliad, a foundation based on force, coercion, and violence.

Weil did so without pedantic argument but simply by presenting the text itself and letting the passages and descriptions speak for themselves. Her commentary is simple and illustrative. In the Iliad, the poem of war, the paean to violence, elite men slaughter one another, and elders, women, and children suffer in agony and resignation.

Notes Weil:

“The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

“To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.“

Weil goes on to quote the text of the Iliad and to comment briefly on the given passage. Here is the first such passage, with comment:

Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground Lay,
dearer to the vultures than to their wives.

“The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:”

All around, his black hair
Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies
Defile it on his native soil.

“The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero’s head no washedout halo of patriotism descends.”

His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades,
Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and its vigor.

Plato dismisses this sentiment angrily, objecting to Homer’s sense of resignation. A magnificent military sacrifice is belittled by Homer as meaningless death. For Plato, death means glorious afterlife and, therefore, a purpose and value to war. For Plato, useless slaughter was not in vain but was patriotic service, redeeming itself of horror. This is Plato’s bequeathment to Western culture. Weil merely points out that the lessons in the core literary document of Greek antiquity have been dismissed from the beginning of formal philosophizing. Greek tragedy is evident in the Gospels but noticeably absent in Rome.

The Western defense of the glory of war and death begins with Plato. In Book 3 of his Republic, Plato avers (through Socrates): “Can he [the citizen-warrior] be fearless of death. Will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery? We must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales … and beg them … to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.”

The warrior class must see Hades as redemption and glory not as bleak darkness. Indeed, not just the warrior class but the entirety of society must be instructed accordingly. The first step is to be rid of Homer, to be rid of the poem exposing the absurdityof violence. The first step toward accomplishing social and political control is to justify, extend, and praise war as virtue. And so Plato gives us the Republic and, later, the Laws, the origins of authoritarian thought in the West.

The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 BCE) is usually described as a hermit, complete with representative anecdotes and ubiquitous lantern as a symbol of the search for knowledge and wisdom. There were no “official” hermits in ancient Greece, of course, but Diogenes captures the image of eccentric gadfly that is the “genre” of philosophical hermit in the Western world.

But overlooked as another potential hermit is the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500 BCE).

Heraclitus wrote a long and complex tome titled On Nature. Here he presented his ideas of flux or flow and his idea of “unity of opposites.” Like so much of the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the work is now in fragments. The most familiar fragment is no. 12: “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Another rephrased fragment (49) says: “We step and do not step into the same river; we are and are not.” These and other ideas expressed by Heraclitus were both quietly approved in part by contemporaries and later thinkers, including Plato, though opposing the basic notion of flux and the premises of the unity of opposites.

What annoyed contemporaries of Heraclitus — like those of Diogenes — was his outspoken criticism and disdain of others. His biographer Diogenes Laertius described Heraclitus as “hard to please,” “over-weening,” and “lofty-minded beyond all other men.”

Heraclitus did not think much of the classical thinkers: “Much learning does not teach understanding, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” Heraclitus went further, commenting that “Homer should be turned out of the lists and whipped, and Archilochos likewise.” He provoked and ridiculed his fellow citizens, as when he “would retire to the temple of Artemis and play at knuckle-bones with the boys, and when the Ephesians stood round him and looked on, Heraclitus would say to them “Why, you rascals, are you astonished? Is it not better to do this than to take part in your civil life?”

Finally, he dismissed his contemporaries peevishly: “Heraclitus am I. Why do you drag me up and down, you illiterates? It was not for you I toiled, but for such as understand me. One man in my sight is a match for thirty thousand, but the countless hosts do not make a single one. This I proclaim, you in the halls of Persephone.”

Heraclitus lived simply, in a rude hut. When a delegation of visitors came to see him one day, they looked about his quarters disdainfully. Heraclitus perceived their scorn and said quietly: “Here, too, the gods dwell.” (He used the term daimon, referring to spirits of beneficence). Finally, Diogenes Laertius tells us, Heraclitus in old age “became a hater of his kind and wandered in the mountains, and there he continued to live, making his diet of grass and herbs.”

Hut-dweller? Wanderer in the mountains? Eater of only plants — a vegan? These details alone may assure his status as hermit, a nay-saying, grumpy, but philosophical hermit.

Heraclitus was called the “dark” philosopher and the “weeping” philosopher beause of his philosophy of change, impermanence of self and universe, implying pessimism. In Raphael’s famous painting “The School of Athens, Heraclitus separates himself from all the assembled philosophers and thinkers, looking melancholy and aloof. But not far from him, also aloof but perhaps more defiant, is Diogenes of Sinope.

The Kano School of painters dominated Japanese artistic expression for over three hundred years, from the 15th to early 19th century. Among the school’s cultural work is the painting titled “The Vinegar Tasters. “

The painting depicts three sages, icons of Chinese thought (Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tzu) sitting around a barrel of vinegar. Each has poked a finger into the batch and tasted the vinegar, eliciting a facial expression of sourness, bitterness, or sweetness. The reactions to the taste of the viengar reprsent the philosophy of each taster, and thus each school of thought. Confucius has a sour expression, the Buddha has a bitter expression, and the Taoist Lao-tzu has a n expression of sweetness. Confucius is sour because everything in society is wrong and requires an autocratic intervention to straighten out human folly. To the Buddha, life is suffering and thus bitterness. To the Taoist, harmony with nature and acceptance of its ways releases the self for contentment and tranquility.

Is there a Western equivalent of “The Vinegar Tasters”? Raphael’s “The School of Athens”mat be. With its array of historical Western philosophers of the day, the work reveals not reactions to vinegar (i.e., life and the world) but the weight of each man’s thought — if not reaction to rubbing shoulders uncomfortably with rivals. Being that the figures represent ancient philophical schools, the shear number of them makes the painting a busy Western equivalent.

A wary Plato and Aristotle dominate, each pointing confidently in opposite directions (Plato up and Aristotle down), representing the distinction between metaphysics and natural science. A pedantic Socrates emphatically lectures a young listener.

A melancholy Heraclitus slouches far from the crowd, as does the sour hermit Diogenes.

Art is easily reduced to caricature in the search for gesture or facial expression that reduces thought or priciple to a single word or taste. We can pursue portraits and photographs of thinkers into the modern era in search of reducing their philosophies to moods, dispositions, and personalities.

No school of painting in the West pursued the formulaic Kano school. But some paintings — not revealing facial expression but relying on gesture and posture — can identify phiolosophers and philosophies. One of the more famous is David Friedrich Caspar’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” which commentators have identified as a portrait of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord,
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
— from Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen.

Music has long taken a central role in the public expression of culture. Music is a product of culture, like ritual (religious and agricultural), in art, food, ceremonies (marriage, birth, death), and war.

Just as historical religions reflect the particular geography and environment of the given culture (gods of deserts, mountains, ocean, etc.), so too music can represent the psychological and physical circumstances of a culture in its instruments, choirs, singers, and in the rhythms and tones of vocalizations, the compositions and tones. Ultimately, music can represent an instrument of culture representing what is taken to be particular social and economic norms.

The philosopher Plato maintained that the music of the era has the important function of supporting the ethos of the state. Thus, in Republic, Book IV, Plato argues that the vigilant ruler will retain the original forms of music, and that  new songs or compositions conform not only in lyric but in form, what he calls “rhythm.”

Centuries later, St. Augustine notes, in his essay De musica the dualism that the Christian era music proposes, the connection between music that bolsters the institution and its narrative (lyrics adhering to strict theology) versus music that addresses the individual emotionally and pychologically, especially through what Augustine himself calls “lovely chants.” Where Plato would advocate a music that sustained the state, Augustine effectively (or inadvertently) notes that Christian era permits both official music but also and emotional genres, based on “rhythm,” as forms of communication with God.

Through the Middle Ages in the West, religious music came to reflect forms that centered on doctrine and liturgy, paralleled by subjective forms in chant and other song. This was the equivalent official music of Plato. Of course, popular and folk music thrived among peasants, laborers, and non-elites. Skeptical clerical views spread quickly in the late Middle Ages, discretely amused by the provocative songs and themes of minstrels and troubadours. The overlap of Plato and Augustine reached a high point in the central medieval period. The split between official ecclesiastic and moderated popular is seen in 12th-century bishop John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, where he denounces minstrels as demons. Their songs do not support the institution nor the morals of the lay person.

With the modern music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, the disputing duality of purpose accelerates. Music primarily served to bolster the institutional, social, and personal elite classes of ecclesiastics and aristocrats. The composers are tempered by their patrons, the equivalent of Plato’s music monitors. Thus the music of the era is not viable without the assent of the patrons, who in turn supports the state, culture, and morals of the era.

J. S. Bach composed for churchmen, dukes, a prince, and a king. Handel served his patron King George III of England, who was also patron to Purcell. Telemann, close friend of Bach, served both church and secular patrons by composing in both forms (as did Bach). Monteverdi, composer of madrigals, was employed by several Italian cities. The unfortunate Vivaldi did not receive regular commissions due to his eccentricities, and sustained himself by teaching music to pupils of orphanages. Haydn enjoyed lifetime commission to the wealthy Esterházy family. With Mozart the transition to the classical era begins. Mozart outnumbers all the composers dependent on patrons, enjoying the patronage of Holy Roman Emperor to prince, to countess, to archbishop, to wealthy amateurs.

The patronage of classical music largely remained the expression of elite class and cultural education without conscious attention to classical composers are prerequisite to social polish. In that sense, the composers of this era, culminating in Mozart, designate the music of Plato’s dictum. But the Baroque style was broken by both new composition and new social and economic phenomena.

With the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, its ideas and impulses spreading throughout Europe, the signal cultural dominance of aristocracy began to wane. The influence of emotion, sentiment, and morals rises. The first composer of the era to represent these changes is Beethoven, whose compositions throw themselves into expressible themes provoking listeners to new openness. Beethoven chronicles the passions of society and the souls of its modern protagonists. Ironically, Beethoven enters music as a work of honor, having suffered trauma at the hands of his abusive father, who beat him as a child, with blows to the head, leading to the young Ludwig’s deafness at a young age, but provoking an irrevocable desire to excel in musical composition. From Beethoven we have symphonies portraying politics, nature, and the celestial, and in the sonatas deep philosophizing.

Most importantly here, perhaps, is the fact that Beethoven suffered only three patrons, a count, a baron, and a prince, each with his own eccentricity, his music remained as free and emotive regardless of his patrons’ pretenses. Beethoven’s patrons were music enthusiasts but not composers, performers, or aesthetes, one described by a contemporary (enemy?) as “a cynical degenerate and a shameless coward.”

With Beethoven and going forward, the Romantic era is full of brilliant sentiment. Sentiment is dominant and no obvious attempt by aristocrats arises to bolster institutions in the Platonic sense. The composers simplify. Franz Schubert, for example, held few published works, very little patronage, and no public life. Chopin eventually withdrew from public performance, his sustenance coming from sale of compositions and in teaching piano. The work of the Romantics, even when grandiose as in Rossini, Berlioz, or Wagner, quickly gathered emotional elements, excluding rationality as present truth. Drama and myth, not logical presentation, dissolved the classical sense of stability and control. Patronage relationships continued to diminish. Wagner prospered only under one patron, the King Ludwig of Bavaria. The extremely popular Rossini — wealthy from commissions from the French government — retired from music at an early age when the commission was suddenly dropped. Rossini had combined Plato and Augustine, in effect serving the remnant aristocracy of Europe as well as its growing bourgeoisie. Tchaikovsky had one patron, whom he never met: business woman Nadezhda Von Meck, whose funding over thirteen years granted Tchaikovsky years of full-time composition. But by this time, we may say that the era of traditional music intended to entertain the elite of society, had dissipated.

What is today called “classical music” (as in “classical music radio station”) refers to centuries of music and even contemporary music crafted to echo the music of the centuries. But how many listeners realize that that they are listening to music entirely intended to amuse and entertain the economic and social elite of another era? Or does such listening srve to perpetuate this attitude of elitism? We can wonder if we lived as contemporaries with those composers what our music listening would have been? Or what it should be today?