King George III (1738-1820)
One of my favourite stories concerns George III who, on July 4, 1776, wrote in his diary with regal indifference to unfolding events in the Colonies: Nothing important happened today.
Royal biographers and historians - overly concerned with the facts as these people often are - insist that this is entirely false; one of those apocryphal stories that enters and continues to circulate within the popular imagination simply because people wish to believe it to be true. King George didn't even keep a diary, they protest, but, sadly for them, to no avail; even former Deputy Director of the FBI, Alvin Kersh, referenced this fictitious journal entry.
I suppose, philosophically, why it interests is because it makes one question what constitutes an event of any description; that is to say, what has to happen for something to be recognised as a happening?
Without necessarily wanting to posit an absolute ontological distinction, it's tempting to think of events as things that occur dynamically in time, contra objects that exist concretely in space. The cat that sits on the mat is an example of the latter; his grin, or the flick of his tail as he leaves the room, might better be thought of in terms of the former. But it could well be that events are simply unstable objects and objects monotonous events and that there is thus no essential metaphysical difference.
For Deleuze and Guattari, whom we might characterize as philosophers of the event, the task of philosophy is to invent concepts which express events, or, more precisely, extract them from the material facts of the world; i.e., concepts that allow one to engage with social and political reality in such a manner that one challenges received ideas and royal prerogative.
No wonder, then, that George was thought keen to turn a blind eye to (revolutionary) events ...
