Steve_Bamlett_blog

The word ‘stranger in English appears to have either already been a word in Middle English ‘or else’ derived from a word in Old French, itself derived from Latin. It seems to me that the ‘or else’ alternatives might still all account for some common origin, though in Latin not Greek:

stranger (n.): late 14c., straunger, “unknown person, foreigner, one who comes from another country,” from strange + -er (1) or else from Old French estrangier “foreigner” (Modern French étranger), from estrange. Latin used the adjective extraneus as a noun to mean “stranger.”

By 15c. as “not a citizen of a nation, not a member of a religious group, craft, family, etc.” The English noun never picked up the secondary sense of the adjective. Also from late 14c. as “traveler, transient,” As a form of address to an unknown person, it is recorded from 1817, American English rural colloquial. The meaning “one who has stopped visiting” (often with reminder to not be one) is recorded from 1520s.

The issue of the stranger in our lives is the issue of the ‘other’, that unknown named from not being the known that we consider ‘known’ only because we consider it to be ‘like’ ourselves’ and therefore known by that analogy. But do we in fact know ourselves. In Ancient Greek the equivalent of the first commandment is the statement supposed to have come from the oracle at Delphi: ‘Know Thyself‘ (Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnōthi seauton). The first implication of this wisdom is that the primary ‘other’ is the very self which has become our standard of the known but is in fact ‘a stranger’ to ourselves. Thus it is used by Lear’s calculating daughter of her father, with the addition that there there is no self-stranger as extreme as an aged one in which ignorance of the self is anyway ‘long-engraffed’.:

REGAN  ’Tis the infirmity of his age. Yet he hath ever
but slenderly known himself.
GONERIL  The best and soundest of his time hath been
but rash. Then must we look from his age to
receive not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed
condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness
that infirm and choleric years bring with
them.

(King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1)

But my favoured Shakespearean maxim on this is that of the narrator of his long poem The Rape of Lucrece. In that Tarquin is making his way stealthily to Lucrece’s bed to violate her, and the narrator feels a maxim coming on about how little like himself, even the self he likes to believe that he knows he is, is Tarquin:

There follows the maxim:

Then where is truth if there be no self-trust?
When shall he think to find a stranger just
 When he himself himself confounds, betrays
 To sland’rous tongues and wretched hateful days?

How can we find a ‘stranger’ just, if we know we can be so other to the self we want to be or think ourselves to be for we are the primary stranger. At the root of the prompt question there is surely too a recognition that the process of ‘completely’ restoring faith in humans is some forgiveness for our own self-estrangement, the source of all our error and our sin. For me, with no belief or need for the idea of a consistent self – or belief that that people won’t find you wanting according to their agenda of wants without you confounding yourself with otherness, all this is about social control – self-regulation doing the policing of communal injustice in unjust and self-centred societies – those set up up on that principle of self-interest as the chief agent of all ‘good’, ‘wealth” and society.

In fact in Greece the term used that is usually translated as stranger had even greater resonance with the view of the self, as Wikipedia shows:

Xenos (from Ancient Greek ξένος (xénos); pl. xenoi) is a word used in the Greek language from Homer onwards. The most standard definition is ‘stranger’. However, the word itself can be interpreted to mean different things based upon context, author and period of writing/speaking, signifying such divergent concepts as ‘enemy’ or ‘stranger’, a particular hostile interpretation, all the way to ‘guest friend’, one of the most hallowed concepts in the cultural rules of Greek hospitality

The term is so plastic in Greek that all those meanings might be used at once, as it ought to be even if it it isn’t, in the scene in which Athena is in disguise in order to assist at the murder of the xenoi who had overstayed their welcome in house of Penelope and Odysseus in The Odyssey. Everyone is a stranger to themselves, even perhaps Odysseus – the archetype of the ‘stranger’ who disrupts the homes he visits.

Albert Camus in his novel L’Étranger insists that we all are strange and unknown (or masked) to ourselves and go on to continue to act the ‘other’ in mauvaise foi to ourselves until we find the action that we invest with the authenticity of our own ‘good faith’ in them. To be authentic is difficult and embraces the misunderstandings of others in the certainty of self belief, as in Orestes in Sartre’s The Flies (see my blog).But it insists that the other is ourselves until we find our own authenticity. Is it right to care for our parent in their dying days when our heart and belief lies in flight to Algeria to fight against one’s own country in a colonial war? Ay, there’s the rub. What is right is to know thyself – to do what measures up to the standard of authenticity, which might be either of these tasks as long as it is done because it renders you true to tour authentic beliefs and the wants they engender.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxxxxx