On Studies, Or, A Disclaimer

While discussing the idea of producing a large painting, several people have proposed that I conduct a few 'studies'. That is, smaller drawings and paintings that would prepare me to tackle a larger one.

I remember when I saw the Picasso exhibit at the SAM (which was amazing) many of the pictures were said to be 'studies' of the human form or something of the like.

This idea of a smaller project being a 'study' is very interesting to me. I find it a very helpful way to think about creativity. A very practical exercise. You do a small, unambitious piece of drawing or writing, just with the idea of clarifying the process, gaining experience with it. These smaller 'studies' are always meant to contribute to a larger project.

I've never purposefully engaged in 'studies' of drawing or painting. That is all very new to me.

But when it comes to my writing I think I have engaged almost exclusively in these types of 'studies'. Every essay I have ever completed is my attempt to isolate a certain problem, to do work on a small issue, with the hope of moving towards a larger issue.

Everything I have ever written is a mere study.

I have never produced anything that I would proudly stand by as representative of my thinking.

When it comes to history and philosophy (and art for that matter), I can only study.

I cannot yet properly create.

At this point, I can only prepare myself to create the creations that I will ultimately create.

A Big Painting

I want to make a big painting.

One about Janus.

One with all kinds of small boxes containing different worlds.

All being carried away by a hobo.

It would be large and strange.

People would be fighting.

I thought of it this afternoon and I can't let it go.

A big picture of the angel of history as a hobo carrying away an agonistic world.

Clearly I have some issues with history and life.

But I want this to be like a 3 foot painting.

For real. Something big.

Welcome to Erf

We all love Will Smith.  We all remember him from that brilliant moment where he punched that alien in the face, welcoming it to our planet with three words, 'Welcome to Erf'.

Who doesn't love the planet?

I painted this the other day. I had fun with it. My dad told me I wasn't afraid of colors like he was. I like bright colors.

This painting came out quickly and mindlessly.

I just did it.

But as I was doing it I was experiencing all kinds of thoughts about nature. Cosmological thought or natural thought is very foreign to me. I think mostly about people, about history, about minds. I don't think a ton about natural process.

Although I do think about it some.

One friend in particular has definitely pushed me to think about the universe, to think cosmologically. But it isn't what I think about of my own accord.

Well. That isn't true. My own reading and thinking is often occupied with questions about the natural world. There is one major difference, perhaps, between the way I approach nature and the way my friend does. I don't approach nature as an object in itself, but as something that humans have thought about. So if I am concerned with nature, I am not concerned if our thoughts about it are accurate, I am concerned with how those thoughts have affected us personally and culturally.

In other words, I'm concerned with how natural thinking infects practical or social thinking.

This is Collingwood's claim. He believes that views of the natural world always have a counterpart in our views of people and ourselves. That if we explain the natural world in terms of teleology, that is, in terms of ends, as the ancient Greeks did, then our practical thinking will most likely be utilitarian, that is, also in terms of ends and means. Or if we explain the natural world by reference to natural 'laws' then our morality, too, will center around adherence to rules or laws. But if we think of the world around us as unique, as expressive of human thought, that is, if we think about the world historically, we will also paint ourselves and others in this light. We will not try to understand people by reference to means/ends analysis or to a rule or law. We will understand that people are unique, acting in the way that they had to act given their unique situation and character.

This is the notion of duty that I am working so hard to explore. I know I'm not making this super clear right now, but the concept of duty, and the concept of history, both need to liberate themselves from natural ways of thinking.

And these are the things I thought about while I painted this.

I thought about how I've been told that the earth is full of layers, each hotter and denser than the rest. That these layers can reach the surface through tunnels, and that they can explode and send crazy stuff everywhere. I have been told that nature is much larger than humans.

Who knows what I was thinking about. But I sure know that it had something to do with history and nature.

Watercolor

I did this water color a while ago and I failed to share it on here. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Watercolors are still new to me. I don't do it very often.

I started doing it in February when my thinking was really stale. I wanted to find some way to get away from reading and writing. So I did a few. They were fun. I haven't done one for a bit. But I finished this one three weeks ago probably.

My thinking has been really strong in the last few weeks. Reading some Collingwood, reading MacIntyre, reflecting on things I already know.

I keep blogging about this coming plateau. About the next wave of substantial writing will arrive. But I feel pretty good waiting for it. I even started a new painting today. I'm letting it dry right now and I'm thinking about what else to do to it. I'm trying to use some brighter colors. The one I'm posting now is pretty dark. All black and greens and stuff. But hey whatever. I just kinda did it.

I don't have many thoughts about this one.

The one I started today, however, gave me some ideas.

Something about cosmology and the world and thinking. A lot of my thinking lately is about science, about the relationship between nature and mind. Thinking about nature. Thinking about people. Thinking about people thinking about nature.

Who knows. Just thinking about the natural sciences as I paint sloppy natural landscapes.

Reclaiming Scientific Thought

1

The word 'science', for me and everyone I know, simply means natural science. We seem to think that there can only be one science. That science is, and can only be, the systematic study of the natural world. Hypotheses, experiments, theories, models, simulations, forecasts, predictions, prescriptions. All that good stuff.

But there was a time when the word science did not simply mean natural science. There was a time when the word science applied to many disciplines, including aesthetics, ethics, and history. Once there was a time when these disciplines could legitimately claim to be ‘human sciences’. Once it was possible to pursue knowledge about moral, political, and social problems and still be called a scientist. That is, they could claim to be legitimate sources of rational truth about the human world. Science once meant more than natural science. ‘Science’ is of much greater scope and importance than just the natural sciences. 

The word science, in fact, was once interchangeable with the word philosophy. As Collingwood argues, "The idea that philosophy and science are two different things or alternatively that philosophical sciences are sciences of a peculiar kind, is a modern idea of recent origin, later than the time at which these old-established names became traditional. When these names were established, science meant nothing more (and also nothing less) than organized and systematic thought, directed towards the discovery of truths concerning a definite subject-matter." Thus what we call physics once "was called natural philosophy... and what the same fashion calls ethics was similarly moral philosophy" ('Goodness, Rightness, Utility', in The New Leviathan, 391). To use the word 'science' to refer to the natural sciences is a mere slang usage of the term. Originally, it referred to any organized pursuit of truth about a subject.

2

Many other disciplines deserve the name science. It is not only the natural world that needs to be studied. And it is not only the natural sciences that seek truth through systematic thinking.

Yet we refuse to dignify these disciplines with the term science. We reserve it exclusively for the natural sciences. We scoff at the arts and humanities, denying their claims to truth. We debate whether or not sociology or political science deserve the label. Madness. Absolute madness. But as Collingwood says, over "the past three centuries, the natural sciences have established themselves in a position of intellectual authority,” and that this authority “is the central fact about modern European civilization" (The Principles of History, 80).  We are the civilization that has sought to dominate nature. That has furiously developed technology. We are the (natural) scientific civilization.

3

Limiting the use of the word science as such may lead to some negative consequences. I believe that the marginal position of moral philosophy and history may have something to do with our restriction of the word science.

I'm returning to my reading of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. MacIntyre is convinced that modern forms of morality are necessarily flawed. MacIntyre argues that the challenge of modern ethics was to find a rational basis for morality. The goal of this was to bring philosophy closer to the methods of the natural sciences. In seeking a rational basis for morality modern philosophers (he discusses Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume, and Smith) destroyed a fundamental component of ancient Greek morality, the teleological component. That is to say, philosophers were no longer conceiving of man in his practical daily existence, there was no telos, no definite moral end to which philosophy was working. Rather, philosophers pursued timeless truths about morality, hoping to create rational laws "that any rational agent is logically committed to" (After Virtue, 66). As soon as you start talking about 'Man' instead of 'this particular person or group' your philosophy is lost. As MacIntyre puts it, "Morality which is no particular society's morality is to be found nowhere" (Ibid., 265-66). In other words, while moral philosophy once explained action by “reference to the virtues and vices which they have learned or failed to learn and the forms of practical reasoning which they employ,” it gradually became about “laying bare the physiological and physical mechanisms which underlie action” (Ibid., 82). The natural scientific paradigm of mechanistic explanation thus infiltrated moral philosophy, destroying our conception of man as a being capable of inherently good action and instead forcing us to conceive ourselves as physical automatons. For the mechanistic explanation of human action is no explanation at all.

Moral philosophy’s attempt to bring itself closer to the method of the natural sciences thus resulted in the destruction of its foundation, in the end of its connection to the practical concerns of the world. 

History, too, suffers from this limited definition of science. Historical study is so often regarded as inaccurate or ‘subjective’, as a mere collection of facts, as something that fails to provide definite or useful knowledge about ourselves or our world. History, Collingwood believed, was faced with the difficult task of freeing itself from the pupilage of the natural sciences. He believes that the natural sciences have a “well-deserved reputation,” but that unfortunately that reputation is often “used to enforce exorbitant claims, now against the growing, but immature science of history, now against the ancient sciences of logic and ethics... into which that same prestige forbade inquiry, not only as to whether they were justified, but as to what they were” (The Principles of History, 88, my italics). I think I can grant myself the point that the natural sciences have a unique monopoly on ‘knowledge’ in the West, and that this has led to the reduction and humiliation of disciplines like history and moral philosophy. We no longer think of history and philosophy as sources of genuine knowledge. But parlor games, the asking of questions that might be fun to think about but which have no practical purpose. 

4

The natural sciences, however, cannot answer the questions that history and moral philosophy attempt to answer. The reason for this is that history and philosophy are sciences of the mind, they deal with Man as a thinking being. The natural sciences can only deal with Man as a biological being. Body belongs to the realm of natural sciences. Mind belongs to the realm of history and philosophy. There are two further reasons the natural sciences are inappropriate for the study of Man. First, natural science is by its nature non-criteriological, it does not make judgements about right and wrong, which a human science must necessarily do. Second, natural science is focused on generalization, while the science of mind is more focused on particularization. 

The first reason natural science cannot handle the question of mind is because it is a non-criteriological science. That is, there is no need in the natural sciences to distinguish between what is good or what is bad. Nature is assumed to have its own organic unity. Scientist’s of the 1700s “believed in the universality and inviolability of ‘natural laws’ and the improbability of dividing nature’s successes from nature’s failures....” (The Principles of History, 83). Human sciences, on the other hand, are always criteriological, they always try to “distinguish successes from failures in the respective fields of theory and practice” (Ibid., 84). The task of the human sciences is thus unique in that it deals with the criteria by which we judge minds. Any understanding of mind has to go through this process of defining criteria. 

The second reason that the natural sciences are inadequate is that they are based primarily on generalization. Understanding mind, however, involves a focus on particulars, on why this thing is exactly what it is and not anything else. Collingwood sums up the argument well: Natural science cannot explain human action because “it explains every case of the kind indifferently, does not explain this case in its concrete actuality, but only those features of it in which it resembles the rest. In short, if I am content with a scientific explanation of a natural fact, the reason is that I am content to think of it not as the unique fact which it is, but merely as an example of a certain kind of fact” (Principles of History, 181). Any study of mind must therefore be concerned with practical criteria and valuation, and must be able to study things in their concrete particularity, understanding what makes them individual and unique, not general and classifiable. 

5

The natural sciences, however, still attempt to lay claim to the study of thought. Psychology is probably the discipline that works hardest to study Man at the level of natural science. Collingwood is adamant, however, that psychology cannot be anything more than the study of feeling and sensation. Its contributions to the study of thought and mind are minimal. Again, Collingwood insists, “To study thought without taking into account the fact that people sometimes think truly and sometimes falsely; to study conduct without taking into account the fact that people sometimes act wisely or effectively or honourably, and sometimes in ways the opposite of those; this is no study of thought or conduct at all....” (Ibid., 85). To this day psychologists are insisting that the domain once belonging to history and philosophy will now be answered by modern scientific techniques. In particular, one company believes that we can only obey the Greek maxim ‘Know Thyself’ with the aid of a brain scanner. Ariel Garten, CEO of InteraXon, claims that the technology they are developing will for the first time give us insights into our subconscious patterns that will truly allow us to know ourselves. Madness, I say. Collingwood’s argument that psychology is the science of feeling seems to hold strong in this case. Because all Garten’s technology can supply is statistical information about our stress and anxiety, our heart rate, the connections between brain activity and sensory experience. These machines cannot tell us anything about thought proper. 

Garten’s claims, while shocking, are helpful in that they let me see that psychology is still indeed arrogantly trying to move into the territory rightly occupied by history, philosophy, and the humanities. It helps me understand that Collingwood’s concerns are still alive and well. History still needs to be justified as the science of human affairs. 

6

This is the task I am slowly but surely pursuing. These days my thinking is revolving around the concept of the science of human affairs. That method of learning that would  help us deal with the social world. “How could we construct a science of human affairs, so to call it,” Collingwood asked in his Autobiography, “ from which men could learn to deal with human situations as skilfully as natural science had taught them to deal with situations in the world of Nature?” (An Autobiography, 115). That history is the science of human affairs was obvious to Collingwood. How, precisely, historical study was to be wielded to these ends, he was not able to fully say. His health was ill, his thinking not fast enough.

I am thus sitting here in the wake of Collingwood’s death. Wondering about how to do this. How to construct a science of human affairs. I am slowly but surely working on this statement. 

But one thing is clear, one thing has to happen if we are to construct this science of human affairs: We must reclaim, re-appropriate the word science. We cannot hope to vindicate history as the science of human affairs so long as we let the natural sciences distort the words true meaning. We need to reclaim scientific thought, assert to the world that we can have knowledge of the human world. That not all explanation is mechanistic explanation. And that mind, and not just nature, can be known. 

I am a scientist. A human scientist. Don’t tell me I’m not. Because I want to be. I want the title because I want to seek truth about a definite subject matter. And I don’t care that I am pursuing knowledge about mind and not nature. There is a science of mind. And it sure as hell isn’t psychology. We can indeed learn to know ourselves. Not with a brain scanner. But with historical study and philosophical reflection.

Please

Just gotta spit hot fire for a second here.

Don't have anything real to say.

No focused statement or definite idea I want to talk about.

Just kidding.

I need to talk about what I've been talking about.

Collingwood's attempt and failure to complete his treatise on the science of human affairs. It wasn't his fault. His body gave out.

But now it is my problem.

Today it was so obvious to me that I needed to become a historian. And that military history would be the best and most interesting way to do it. I think it is probably one of the most important and under examined fields. I think that it would be a more marketable phd than philosophy or some other type of history.

What can historical thinking really teaching me? Do I really know what historical thinking is?

I have an idea. I have a history degree. I read a lot about the philosophy of history. But I don't really read a ton of history these days. I'm reading Alasdair MacIntyre and he is writing historically. But it isn't history through and through. A sort of historical-philosophical narrative. I've read a lot of Foucault. But he is just pseudo-history philosophy madness. Great stuff, no doubt. But not necessarily proper history. I should read Collingwood's proper history books.

I digress.

I feel a plateau approaching.

A new clarity of thought that will allow me to produce some substantial writing. Something lengthy and exciting.

But I can't do it yet.

I continue to wait and read and live.

I Can Still Write That Way

It turns out I'm working on a 10-15 page essay.

The title is 'reclaiming scientific thought'.

The argument is that it is bullshit that only the natural sciences can claim to be sciences.

We have so much to learn from so many disciplines.

And those disciplines deserve the label 'science'.

Because science is just systematic inquiry meant to produce truths about a definite subject-matter.

We need human sciences.

If you think we don't, you have mistaken the difference between the natural and the human world.

I'm happy to be writing the way I am.

An Age of Civility

Yes yes I've decided to change the link to my blog.

Two years ago I was far more occupied with savagery. With the ways in which raw emotions needed to play a role in my life. The ways in which my thought could best interact with raw emotions.

But now I feel much more concerned with thought. I still believe that thought has to appeal to the emotions. Thought still has to ground itself in emotions. But what I really do, and what I really want to think about, is thinking. Not feeling.

Perhaps this is a way of committing to Collingwood more fully. For it is his concept of civility that I am pointing to with this new address. Collingwood believed that civilization was a very real process that communities go through, and that it needed to be defended at all costs. For someone to use dialectical thought to reduce the amount of force in relationships was the greatest thing a person could strive for. To be civil was to be good.

I want to be civil. I want to work out a philosophy of civility. A philosophy of history that is also a philosophy of civilization.

Freedom, Character, and Circumstance

Ohhhhh the concept of freedom is always a difficult one. What does it mean to be free? Blah blah blah.

Two things that stand in the way of freedom are character and circumstance. We often just have emotional reactions and can't do anything but follow our character. It seems like that could interfere with freedom. Also circumstance. It determines our character and much else about us.

Either way, Collingwood says that both character and circumstance are compatible with freedom. In fact, they depend on them. He claims that "man is never more free than when he acts in accordance with his character, and think[s] it absurd to maintain that an honest man shows his freedom by acting dishonestly but not by acting honestly. Indeed, character, so far from hampering freedom, confers it: or rather, confers not freedom in general but the special freedom to act in this or that way" (The Principles of History, "Reality as History," 290). Reminds me a bit of Collingwood's sense of duty. That freedom is not to be identified with capricious action, but with an individual sticking to their guns, obeying their character, following their unique path to act in the way that they must act in that moment.

Circumstance, too, therefore, is not a hindrance to freedom. It is, in fact, the only thing that can possibly enable freedom: "But essentially to be unhappy is to be in the power of circumstances, things other than oneself standing round oneself, constricting one's movements by their presence, forbidding one to do anything except what they permit.... Happiness and unhappiness are not the consciousness of freedom from passion or the force of circumstances, and of subjection to these things, respectively; they are that freedom itself and that subjection itself. As we shall see, so far from being states of consciousness they are not even first-order objects of consciousness: they are second-order objects, the terminal and initial points of desire, abstractly considered... The fundamental form of happiness is not being forced by circumstances to behave viciously, it is being forced by circumstances at all. Happiness is a condition in which the self not only rises superior to the passions which are provoked in it by circumstances, but to force of circumstances as such. The happy self is master of circumstances" (The New Leviathan, 84).

Ohhhh boy. What the hell are you talking about, bro?

What is this master image Collingwood was working towards? This fusion of history and philosophy? This overcoming of the traditional distinction between subject and object, between theory and practice.

What the hell was all this about?

How were you to lay the groundwork for the science of human affairs? Why did you die before you told me this? Why do I feel so compelled to chase your dead thoughts? To bring them back to life.

Why do I want so badly to carry Collingwood's torch?

I Can't Write Like That Anymore

I used to just puke out 10-15 page essays. I was so content to just explore a book or two. Use some quotations. Argue some basic points. Just flip around in a pleasant abstract world.

But it takes so much more for me to do really serious writing now. I have to have a real problem to work on. I need to have a bunch of evidence pushing me in a similar direction.

Right now I'm reading a lot of Collingwood. I'm working on connecting his moral and political philosophy to Clausewitz and John Gray.

Slow going.

I'm moving through The Principles of History and the essays and notes published with that volume.

It is soooooo obvious that Collingwood's morality hinges on a proper conception of history and historical education. There is a total vision in Collingwood that was never actualized. It would benefit so much from a well reasoned comparison to Clausewitz and Gray.

Let me share a lengthy quotation for you. This is found in Collingwood's notes on the philosophy of history. It comes from his notes on 'Scheme for a Book: "The Principles of History"'. In this note Collingwood lays out tentative outline for the book and its main points. I'll pick up about halfway through after Collingwood declares that history must be the human sciences. That is, only history can provide human's with self-knowledge: "The main idea here is that history is the negation of the traditional distinction between theory and practice. That distinction depends on taking, as our typical case of knowledge, the contemplation of nature, where the object is presupposed. In history the object is enacted and is therefore not an object at all. If this is worked out carefully, then should follow without difficulty a characterization of an historical morality and an historical civilization, contrasting with our 'scientific' one. Where 'science' = of or belonging to natural science. A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a[n] historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy). A[n] historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them" (The Principles of History, 246).

A long quotation that has a ton going on it.

Collingwood didn't get anywhere near addressing all this stuff. The idea of a historical society, one that seeks to understand people seems revolutionary.

I'm trying to work this stuff out. Historical morality. Historical civilization. Historical education.

Yeahhhhh.

I don't know what to do.

But I am moving on this shit. Trying to get it clear. Trying to write what Collingwood would have written.

Modest Writing.

Ok ok my writing isn't terrible. I am just writing in a way that I haven't been writing for a while. I'm trying to do a pure exposition of The New Leviathan. I'm doing my best to just grapple with the book as it is. Trying to understand its content, its structure, and its context (both in the author's life and in history). It is challenging. It is a very confusing book. And I'm really trying to work with it.

I might get crazy with it. Really dig into it.

It feels like a much more modest task. The writing I'm doing isn't about my ideas. It sort of is. But I'm trying to just describe Collingwood's book. Render it in different or more general terms. I'm not sure if I'm doing it well. I think I'm working towards something.

But it feels a lot more challenging than it would.

Dealing with serious books is hard.

I already know this. Sort of.

I understand 'the task' intellectually. I haven't really grappled with books on the level that I'll need to in the future. But I'm getting there.

And I think it is a good idea to start taking The New Leviathan seriously, to spend the time with it that it demands.

*Le Sigh*

Gonna take some time.

OH Man

Mannnn I'm trying to write right now and it feels terrrrrible.

Not that I dislike writing. It feels fun to write right now in this blog.

But my writing just sounds so terrible to me. I am doing bad writing.

I'm trying to write about The New Leviathan and I don't understand why it is so difficult.

It has turned out to be a much more pivotal moment in my reading through Collingwood than I thought it would be. I don't know why, but I didn't think that TNL would occupy my thinking so much. I thought for some reason the stuff in The Idea of History, An Autobiography, The Idea of Nature, The Principles of Art, and The Principles of History would occupy me the most.

I guess I just didn't see TNL coming. This bizarre political treatise. So elusive in its purpose. So suspect in its context. The question: Is this the book of a dying man? The answer is definitely yes. But does that detract from it? What does it say about it?

It means it might be hasty. Might be shrill.

Someone described An Essay on Metaphysics as shrill. I thought it was interesting.

There certainly is something fierce and desperate in the late Collingwood. But I don't think shrill sounds right.

But boy howdy am I struggling on writing about The New Leviathan. I think I should just push it all out and see what is there. Puke out a bunch of stuff without concern for its coherence or order. Then I can sort it all out later. Because I'm definitely not able to sort it out in my head.

Gotta externalize this stuff.

Emotionally

I declare.

The natural sciences will not provide adequate self-knowledge.

For this we can only turn to history, philosophy, and the rest of the humanities.

Such a foreign idea.

To love the humanities so much.

To see in them such potential.

Criticizing Collingwood

The task for me is to get myself into a position in which I am able to criticize Collingwood.

Right now I am too busy immersing myself in his thinking, trying to arrive at some kind of clearer picture of his mind.

For a long time this is how I felt about Foucault. I felt like I was in a position where I was totally dominated by his books. I couldn't begin to criticize them because I was fully involved in understanding them. I got to a much better position with Foucault. I certainly don't completely command Foucault's oeuvre. But I certainly have spent enough time with it that I feel comfortable making certain criticisms, or appropriating him in ways that I see fit. I feel like I grasp him enough to criticize him at times. I grasp enough to use him as a tool.

I'm not quite there with Collingwood yet.

I'm reading The Principles of History and that is helping. But it is so short and some of it I've read before.

I want to read The Idea of Nature.

I was glancing at his Essay on Philosophical Method.

I'm curious about it.

I'm ready to keep reading him.

I'm about to begin writing on his notion of duty and its role in The New Leviathan.

I'm ready to keep working with him.

Scoff.

I'm such a Collingwood hipster.

I'm so irked that somebody wrote another book called 'The New Leviathan'. This one has the subtitle: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future.

Written by some conservative folks.

Blech.

Didn't you know Collingwood already wrote The New Leviathan and no one is paying enough attention to it anyways.

Thx.

Thx a lot.

You've ruined the title now.

Blarg blarg blarg Collingwood is the best blah blah blah.

It Begins Again

I've begun another one. A new essay. Wrote the first page and a half last night. Feel pretty good about it.

I have been hinting at it on the blog for the last few weeks, but I haven't been able to make any kind of actual progress.

The main title, as I have said, is 'Duty, Agonistic Pluralism, and Historical Pedagogy'. But I've added a subtitle. " Collaborating With Collingwood’s ‘Science of Human Affairs’ "

For a while I was trying to find a way to pull all these ideas together. A way to synthesize the work of Collingwood, Gray, and Clausewitz. For a little I thought maybe I could talk about the counter-enlightenment as a way to introduce all these ideas. So I did some very quick research on the counter-enlightenment and found that I don't know enough to really begin on that topic.

Then I remembered Collingwood's idea of the science of human affairs. His attempt to invent a method of study by which people "could learn to deal with human situations as skilfully as natural science had taught them to deal with situations in the world of Nature?” (An Autobiography, 115). It turns out the science of human affairs, for Collingwood, is history.

This is the claim that I really intend to explore in this upcoming essay. I want to understand how history can become a form of study that would improve our capacity for dealing with the social world.

Sounds fun to me.

I look forward to getting this essay underway. But I can already tell that it is going to get a lot longer than I am thinking.

Further, I believe that this essay might be the thing that lets me finish AZI.

Shocking, Indeed.

I am still on the cusp of some large writing.

I can't grasp it yet.

But I certainly know that Collingwood is who I want to be reading and who I want to be thinking like.

I feel so involved with him, so familiar and connected with him as a thinker. I quite like it. He is the thinker I feel most committed to. This may be due to a lack of exposure. Perhaps far down the road Collingwood will be a marginal figure in my thinking.

But right now he is my man.

My intellectual idol.

And I immediately scoff at the idea of him assuming a marginal position in my thinking.

Who knows what will happen in my thought.

But I want to keep him central.

I really want to understand him.

A Shocking Discovery!!!

Oh my! Oh. Well then.

I'm starting to dig in to Collingwood's unfinished final book, The Principles of History. Very interesting.

And then I ran into something veryyyyyy exciting. Something that feels very significant to me.

Collingwood claims that aesthetics and historical thought are inextricably related, and that "a science of aesthetic is an indispensable precondition to any science of historical method..." (The Principles Of History, 52). How interesting. The union between aesthetics and history comes from the fact that historians gather evidence by reading documents and things. Historians work exclusively through language. All language, according to Collingwood, belongs to the realm of aesthetics. Thus the historian must necessarily pass through an aesthetic stage of reading and understanding a text before he can set about his task of understanding its historical significance. Historical thinking thus involves a 'literary' process. To think historically is to "do something of exactly the same kind as reading a work of fiction or a warning to trespassers. Investigations concerning the nature of this process are carried out by the science of language, which is not philology but aesthetic" (Ibid.). Very interesting indeed.

This may have some potential relationship with Schiller. The idea that someone must pass through a stage of aesthetic education if he is to be able to move on to other forms of education.

This is most exciting for me because it gives me the possibility of completing AZI. Because I will be able to successfully connect the whole idea of the aesthetic existence to the dutiful consciousness, which is simultaneously the historical consciousness. Thus properly uniting all of Collingwood's work.

I think I'm starting to see more of the whole that Collingwood intended his oeuvre to be. The intersection of aesthetics, metaphysics, history, duty, and political rationality are all coming together.

I'll try to explore all this in much longer form soon.

Every day I feel like I'm gaining momentum on this thinking. Strange, how my thought seems to be coming on so heavily these days. It felt stagnant for a while but now I've got so much to think about.

The Counter-Enlightenment

I am slowly beginning to identify myself with thinkers of the so-called 'counter-enlightenment'.

Chief among them is John N. Gray. But I've also read and enjoyed Isaiah Berlin, Gray's mentor, and the coiner of the phrase 'counter-enlightenment'.

Generally, it refers to attempts to abandon or do away with the flaws of the Enlightenment project.

The main things that counter-enlightenment wishes to overcome (among others), are the Enlightenment's philosophical anthropology and its philosophy of history. In particular, we need to adopt a historicized view of life, meaning that we can't assume that local/traditional identities are not transient, but are rather constitutive of individuals and communities. Communities cannot subsist on reason alone. They need tradition. Overcoming the Enlightenment's philosophy of history removes removing any idea that history inevitably moves towards progress, or that it moves in any other direction.

I'm not sure what all this means. Or why I'm identifying with it.

But I intend to explore it in my new essay, 'Duty, Agonistic Pluralism, and Historical Pedagogy'.

All of the writers I'll be drawing on present a different form of morality, one not grounded in the Enlightenment, or in utilitarian or regularian analysis.

Who knows.

Either way. I really like John Gray, Isaiah Berlin is cool, and what I know of Alasdair MacIntyre is very exciting. Collingwood seems to have traces of this stuff, although probably not appropriate for him to be called counter-enlightenment.

Undirected Emotion

Sometimes when I walk and sit and live I feel a sort of intensity that I have no way of expressing.

I've got this ball in my heart that shakes in every direction, threatening to explode at any moment.

But it never does.

My chest always stays in tact.

My body never breaks under the pressure of my emotions.

My mind shakes and wavers, but it never breaks.

I want so badly to find a way of expressing the intensity that I feel. My mind, my heart, my thoughts, my emotions.

They don't come out easily.

Especially when my primary medium is language.

Especially when I am so aware of the limitations of my primary medium.

I wonder about poetry.

I wonder about painting.

I wonder about language.

I wonder about art.

I feel all this emotion that I don't know how to express or direct.

I know I don't really understand that emotion, because I can't understand it unless I express it.

A serious challenge.

These emotions.

These mediums.

This idea of expression.

I am typically bursting at the seams.

Don't think I'm not.

Finishing AZI

I have an idea about how I am to finish the AZI project. It involves an essay that could stand alone, but that will also fit directly onto the end of the project.

It is the essay I have been hinting at in a few posts, tentatively titled 'Duty, Agonistic Pluralism, and Historical Pedagogy'.

The problem I am encountering is one of ordering. How exactly to fit it into the project?

Because the last thing I was doing in AZI was a survey of political themes in Collingwood's final books.

I stopped working on that survey about three months ago when I reached The New Leviathan, which just so happens to be the final book in the survey. I didn't understand crucial things about the book. I am still missing certain things. But I now have a grasp on a few of the central ideas that were eluding me. In particular, I now understand what it means for Collingwood to develop a concept of duty that is disentangled from conceptions of right and utility.

There are a few other things that I don't really understand, still.

But I still think I grasp the concept of duty enough to write about it. Well, almost.

The question, however, is how grasping TNL will leave me in a position to finish AZI.

It seems that TNL and the ideas I'm having now are really pushing at the limits of the project. I'm not sure if they really fit in there. Or if the project is really coherent at all.

Because what the whole thing is ending on is this idea of an aesthetics of decision making. That it is appropriate to think of a certain attitude towards decision making as 'aesthetic'. The analogy is still legitimate. Still makes sense in some ways. I have some evidence for this. But I dunno.

I don't understand how I can make this new series of ideas fit into AZI.

Maybe I should just write it straight up on its own, as a sort of laboratory for AZI. Because the truth is that the essay is different enough from AZI that it should be written separately, but similar enough that it could go in.

I think I should write it separately, then decide what to do. If I feel like it I can just tack it on to the end of AZI. Or I can use it as a starting point for more writing.

Who knows.

BAHHHHH!

RAHHHHHHH!

Sometimes I want so badly to get my hands on a book but it is expensive and the library doesn't have it and I'm not a student so I can't use ILL!

WHYYYYYY!

Currently that book is Collingwood and the Crisis of Western Civilization: Art, Metaphysics and Dialectic.


RAHHHHHHH!

I can tell from the title, the covers, and the snippets I can read, that it is a supremely interesting book. Totally situates Collingwood in a way that makes sense to me: approaching the crisis of Western civilization from a variety of angles, such as art, metaphysics, and dialectics.

I want it!

It is new!

2008!

Written as a dissertation and published as a book!

I want to be the best Collingwood scholar ever! I need this book!

Philosophical Courage

I've started readings some Schopenhauer. I'm pretty excited about it.

He is often labeled as a pessimist. But I'm not sure what I'm seeing in him so far.

I've definitely seen a concise defense of compassion in his essay 'On The Suffering Of The World'.

But what I'm really gaining from him is courage.

Courage to keep going on thinking and living and choosing.

Sometimes things are confusing.

But it helps to commune with these dead minds that had the courage to ask the tough questions, to face the meaninglessness of life, to look into the abyss.

I recently also read Collingwood's lecture 'Goodness, Rightness, Utility'. It was most excellent, and has greatly improved my grasp on the main arguments of The New Leviathan.

As I was reading it I would occasionally remember that it was delivered as a lecture. I couldn't help but imagine myself sitting in a room, listening to Collingwood speak. It was so interesting. I've seen pictures of him. I roughly know what he looked like in 1940, when the lecture was delivered. He even tells you that he is wearing a cap and gown, as the occasion required.

Reading that lecture, gave me a sort of energy, a sort of courage, a much needed breath of fresh air into my thinking.

Because lately my thinking has felt stale. I didn't know what I was thinking about. I wasn't reading anything in particular. Glancing at a book, Women, Fire, And Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind. I was looking at it today. Interesting sort of linguistic cognitive science from 1987. Prototype theory. Expanding on prototype theory with the theory of mental modeling.

Mental modeling is something I've already explored in Claxton, Humphrey, and Frith. Very interesting stuff.

I digress.

My recent reading of Collingwood and Schopenhauer has given me a remarkable intellectual energy. I can feel all kinds of thoughts moving towards something more coherent.

It gives me hope for my thinking. And for the possibility of some serious writing in the near future.

But I'm not sure what it means for my graduate school decision making.