Dr. Hilton's Writing-to-Learn Adventures in New Concepts.

I am a Jane Austen fan. For decades, I read her novels — all of them — a couple of times a year or more. But her six novels have been turned into such excellent visual productions that I watch DVDs now instead of reading.

The DVD version of Pride and Prejudice from A&E/BBC is my favorite (although the lack of closed captioning is a real flaw).

You will learn a lot at this Web site about egocentricity because you have to thoroughly understand the concept in order to sort out other people and the organizing adventures of their lives.

That is the reason for the emphasis on Jane Austen here. She was the world's greatest authority on the subject. She explored and delineated the widest variety of egocentric behavior in the characters that she created.

Most of the problems that her heroines have to deal with originate in someone else's egocentric behavior. She knew the subject from A to Z, and reading her novels a number of times is probably the best and easiest way to get an education on the subject.

You do, of course, learn things better when you learn them the hard way. But hard experience is a hard teacher.

One of the most useful things about Jane Austen is that she makes the driving, habitual mindset of her characters absolutely clear in terms of the way it affects their behavior — and she also frequently gives us the rationalizations that they use to conceal their motives from themselves. This clarity about the motivating drives of behavior and the masks of rationalization is important here because it is the thing that makes it so easy to understand so many of her characters in terms of the organizing adventure of their lives.

Applying the organizing adventure concept to Mr. Darcy, for example, is very straightforward. In the first part of Pride and Prejudice, he organizes his life in terms of the social status adventure. He considers personal relationships, especially in the matter of marriage, strictly in terms of social repercussions, family social position and reputation, and the potential for one to to enhance, or at least publicly confirm, one's social position.

With this point of view firmly fixed as his automatic frame of reference, he simply can't wrap his mind around the possibility that anyone would choose to marry into a family with the obvious social and economic handicaps of the Bennetts — not to mention the fact that marriage to any of the Bennett women would involve becoming related to the mother of the family, who seems to have a complete void where one expects to find the social and personal graces.

Such considerations as how intelligent, attractive, socially accomplished, and downright decent Jane and Elizabeth might be are completely irrelevant to Mr. Darcy in the first part of the work. Indeed, he is astounded and dismayed, right through his first marriage proposal to Elizabeth, to find that he is irresistibly attracted to her. His own actions disturb him.

What he discovers is that Elizabeth isn't going to have anything to do with anyone as shallow and insensitive to the needs of other people as he has become. It is, of course, the organizing adventure that Mr. Darcy has chosen to guide him through life that has made him as shallow and insensitive as he is.

We see very little of the process of his transformation from one organizing adventure to another, but the final result is dramatic. Over a period of some months, he does manage to change himself. He makes the love adventure the organizing adventure of his life and comes to terms with what that means in the way of new attitudes and habitual patterns of behavior.

Why does he do it?

It almost certainly isn't just the fact that he can't get Elizabeth to marry him in the sorry inner state that he has fallen into. The source of his transformation is most likely the concatenation of that fact with other facts: The fact that Elizabeth so firmly and positively rejects him, the fact that she so clearly does not regard him as a decent sort of person and can give him her reasons in such unsettling detail (misguided as she is in some parts), the fact that he is profoundly unattracted to women (like the sisters of his friend Mr. Bingley) whose perceptions are governed by the same organizing adventure that he has adopted, and the fact that his organizing adventure has led him to stoop so such miserable behavior as actually concealing matters from his friend Mr. Bingley (specifically, the information that Elizabeth's sister Jane was in London all winter, where Mr. Bingley was, too.)

Sorting through all of these things, Mr. Darcy seems to have asked himself, "What the hell have I been doing?" And he seems to come to the conclusion that he just doesn't want to be the kind of person he is. What he discovers that he wants most out of life is a woman to love whom he can respect and admire for her intelligence, taste, and general good sense, instead of for the superficial qualities that he has fallen into the habit of focusing upon.

He discovers upon reflection that he has found in Elizabeth Bennett exactly the woman who suits him and changes the organizing adventure of his life to a love adventure — which in turn changes his attitudes and values and behavior and the choices that he makes.

As his new character unfolds, Elizabeth Bennett is in a position to witness the fruits of his transformation and to benefit from them. Her opinion of him changes dramatically, he offers again to marry her, and she accepts his second proposal.

Elizabeth Bennett has chosen love as the organizing adventure of her life long before the story opens. She tells her sister that she will only marry for love, and she makes the point absolutely clear in her refusals, first of Mr. Collins and then of Mr. Darcy. In contrast, her friend Charlotte Lucas (who married Mr. Collins) is willing to marry strictly for social position and economic security, which is obviously the organizing adventure of her life.

Elizabeth also makes it clear in her first attitude towards Mr. Wickham that she is not insensitive to economic necessities. As attracted to Mr. Wickham as she is in the early part of the work, she has no interest in marrying him, purely as a practical economic matter. Unlike her youngest sister (who does marry Mr. Wickham), she is aware that a happy marriage requires a certain minimum of economic resources to support it. Without that prospect, she is unwilling even to think about marriage.

She pursues the ideal of her love adventure consistently throughout the novel and winds up with what she wants, once she unwittingly drives Mr. Darcy to adopt the love adventure as the organizing adventure of his life, too, and become the sort of person she can love.

Mrs. Bennett is a more interesting case than she may seem to be on the surface. She is, I admit, an obnoxious, overbearing, irritating, tasteless, stupid person. The organizing adventure in her life, as she appears in the novel, is raising her daughters and getting them married, and like most stupid people, all of her efforts are counterproductive. Having her on your side is just about equivalent to having two people of average intelligence who are out to do you harm.

There are two basic distinctions that apply to all of the adventures in life:

(1) Whether they are carried out intelligently or unintelligently and

(2) Whether they have a purely egocentric focus or are at least tempered by some real concern for the welfare of others.

Mrs. Bennett is not only just about as unintelligent as people who can still function in society get to be. She is also almost purely egocentric. In her own view, of course, she isn't that way. She is working as best she can to help her daughters do well in life. But as you would expect of an egocentric, she is totally incapable of understanding that her version of what her daughters need to do well in life may not be what they want (as her behavior when Elizabeth rejects Mr. Collins' proposal clearly shows). And matters go just about the way you would expect them to go for a pure egocentric who is on the stupid side of the dividing line in humanity: Her efforts to help her daughters do them more harm than good.

In her egocentric behavior, she is very much like the early Mr. Darcy, who knows what is best for his friend Bingley and manipulates Mr. Bingley's life accordingly. The difference is that the early Mr. Darcy is an intelligent egocentric. But his own organizing adventure at that stage (the social status adventure) points him exactly in the wrong direction to be of any real benefit to his friend. All he manages to do is to make his friend miserable.

As for Mrs. Bennett, the thing that makes her case more interesting than it might be at first glance for most people is the fact that her concern for her daughters' welfare has a solid basis. She and her daughters do face the prospect of being penniless in life, if Mr. Bennett dies before the daughters are married. In the early nineteenth century, medicine was much more primitive than it is today; life spans were very short by modern standards; and there was an almost total lack of meaningful economic opportunities for women.

In short, living under the kind of pressure that Mrs. Bennett must have felt could undermine the mental functioning of almost any woman, without having five daughters to provide for.

To be sure, the woman is repugnant. I would hate to be related to her (although I actually was related to a very similar woman with none of Mrs. Bennett's real excuses — a woman whose demise, incidentally, was welcomed by all concerned). But I still feel more than a touch of sympathy for Mrs. Bennett because of the real threat of disaster that was a daily part of her life.

When it comes to historical figures, opinions about their organizing adventures may depend on the biographical materials you consider.

In putting together this brief case on Ben Franklin's organizing adventure, I have limited myself to these short selections from the Web:

The Electric Franklin

Benjamin Franklin — Wikipedia (also see History of Meteorology)

Benjamin Franklin: Man of Letters

Time: The Amazing Adventures of Ben Franklin: Why He Was a Babe Magnet (Note: This was free content when I read it but may not be free by the time you read this case.)

Ben Franklin and his wife, Deborah, were a very enterprising pair. Their union was a common-law affair, never recorded in any church records, but they owned and ran a newspaper, a publishing business, a store, and a book shop. Ben also wrote a lot.

He put together many companies and organizations to meet public needs, and many of them exist today (the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, a public library, and an insurance company, etc.).

He was an inventor and did scientific research in electricity and meteorology. (He invented the Franklin Stove, the lightening rod, and the first postmasters' rate chart. His kite experiment and other work in electricity made him an international celebrity. He was the first American to keep detailed, accurate daily weather records and was among the first Americans to make daily weather forecasts. His interest in anatomy may even have led him to purchase cadavers to dissect while he lived in England.)

He was a public servant, a politician, and one of the founding fathers of our nation (Postmaster General of Philadelphia, a member of the Second Continental Congress who helped draft and signed the Declaration of Independence, our ambassador to France, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention who signed the Constitution).

He pursued women with notable success before, during, and after his marriage. He fathered a son out of wedlock before he was married, and he and his wife raised the child along with two children of their own.

In short, Ben Franklin lived life to the hilt in so many directions that all we can do in making a fair guess about the organizing adventure of his life is to look at the choices he made when push came to shove in his affairs.

Here are some of the pertinent facts from the biographical sources I cited above:

(1) He ran away from home and from an apprenticeship under his abusive brother to escape physical mistreatment.

(2) He and Deborah spent 18 years of their 44-year marriage apart. (Deborah refused to travel abroad.)

(3) He invented a heat-efficient stove (the Franklin stove) but refused to take out a patent on it because he intended it purely as a public benefit.

(4) He retired from printing in 1748, but engaged in other businesses, in public affairs, and scientific pursuits.

(5) He lost his Crown appointment as Postmaster General of Philadelphia in 1774 because of his highly vocal support of independence for the colonies.

(6) When he lost his Crown appointment, Franklin left behind him "a legacy of postal roads stretching from Maine to Florida, regular mail service between the colonies and England, and a system for regulating and auditing post offices." (Benjamin Franklin: Man of Letters)

(7) He incurred the wrath of the British Government because he exposed the duplicity of the English Governor of Massachusetts in dealing with the people of that state.

From these facts, we can reasonably infer that the love adventure was not his Franklin's organizing adventure. Neither was the pursuit of money or sex, although he had a healthy interest in these activities. And too much of his life was spent in public affairs after he achieved significant economic success for us to say that the pursuit of knowledge or of scientific knowledge was the organizing adventure of his life.

What we can say about him is that he saw social problems and fixed them. But he functioned as so much more than a politician that trying to think about his life as organized around politics doesn't seem to work, either. In fact, to see Franklin clearly, we may have to move up a level: Ben Franklin lived in a time that invited new ways of doing things in all areas of life, and he pursued targets of opportunity in every area of life that moved him to action.

I put it this way to myself in thinking about Ben Franklin: He was a pure beneficent change-maker. He saw so many opportunities to improve his own life and the lives of others that he moved from project to project in the direction that he saw the greatest need for change to be. He was one of the movers and shakers of his age and a prime facilitator of change. He was fortunate in having the mental equipment and other inner qualities that made this kind of life possible for him.

In the way of the usual organizing adventures of life, these observations pretty much leave us with only one choice:

We have to say, or at least consider the possibility, that the organizing adventure of Ben Franklin's life was the marriage adventure.

The marriage adventure is an adventure in which two people commit themselves to become a single social, economic, and psychological unit. They bind themselves together to make the best life for themselves that they can. They work together, and they share the burdens and the benefits that come their way. It is the most intimate of partnerships.

The general expectation is that they will love each other and limit their sex lives to each other and they will probably have children and raise them.

When this is the case, the marriage adventure is still a different thing from these other adventures. The love adventure, for example, may die a natural death within the marriage adventure and still leave the marriage adventure pretty much intact as a matter of convenience or necessity. Two people whose marriage adventure is the organizing adventure of their lives may agree by mutual consent to live their sexual adventures outside of marriage, and this may not necessarily destroy the marriage. It could depend on the people involved. And the adventure of having and raising children may not even materialize within a marriage without having any great effect on the quality of the marriage. Again, it depends on the people involved.

The Franklins certainly fit the profile here. Indeed, they were so successful in their partnership early on in life that their resources gave Ben in particular a base to work from in pursuing his other interests.

Indeed, we almost have to say that Ben Franklin's later life grew up from the base of his successful marriage adventure. Or we might put the matter this way: Ben Franklin's marriage adventure with Deborah was so successful as the early organizing adventure of his life that he was able to go on in his later life to make a larger public adventure the organizing adventure of his life. And he was able to do so without abandoning his marriage adventure or even undermining it in any substantial way.

And so we might say that:

(1) The organizing adventure for Ben Franklin, at least in his later life, was the pursuit of changes to improve the general quality of life in his society, watershed changes that the nature of the times made possible for the first time in human history.

Or we could say that:

(2) The organizing adventure for Ben Franklin, at least in his later life, was the satisfaction of his curiosity on a grand scale with a careful balance between satisfying his own needs and promoting the general good of his society. He seems always to have been asking himself, "How does this work and how can we make it work better?" "Why can't we do things this other way instead of what we do now?" And he had a happy knack for asking questions about matters of consequence, as well as generally coming up with answers.

I rather like this way of thinking about Ben Franklin in terms of successive organizing adventures.

But it may well be fair to say that the organizing adventure of his life was always something like one of these last two ways of thinking about it and that his successful marriage adventure was always a secondary adventure. It was just the way he went about establishing a base to work from.

In any case, the range and substance of Ben Franklin's contributions to our society suggest to me that he may have been the greatest person of his age, and simply saying that he created a successful organizing adventure in his marriage doesn't quite seem to do him justice.