Girls are a remarkable band.
I still remember the night that my friends went to see them and I declined to go.
It was September of last year. I was working at Belle Epicurean and wasn't receiving many hours. I hated the job and wanted out of it.
Also, I simply hadn't learned to appreciate Girls yet. I had heard their albums, but hadn't really listened to them yet.
Then something clicked and Oh!
What excitement they gave me! What emotional release they enabled me to experience.
Girls truly helped me express myself.
Lately I find myself dwelling on their lyrics.
In particular, the song 'Broken Dreams Club'.
Which I will now turn on and listen to.
The lyrics express things like
"There's still so many people poor.
Can't get my head around these wars.
All of this senselessness.
I'm feeling so helpless.
So many people live and die.
And never even question why.
All of their dreams are gone.
How do they carry on?"
And then we really feel the pain with this line:
"I would like some piece of mind
I've got such a heavy heart.
You were broken down before
You had a chance to start
And I just don't understand
How the world keeps going nowhere"
Oh, the pain.
You can tell they are down about some stuff.
Oh well!
I am and I'm not.
I feel great about my life. I do great work at my jobs. I try to do good work on my own at home. I try to do the right thing for myself and for others.
Sometimes I mess up and I complicate someone else's life or hurt someone's feelings.
But so what.
I have my own things going on.
And gosh is my intellect on fire these days. My reading my writing my madness.
All of it is taking off pretty hard.
I can't escape my thoughts. They are tearing each other apart, rendering themselves into new things all the time.
I'm still so close to writing.
Still so close to doing such good things.
I still love learning.
But I would be lying if I told you that my intellectual productivity wasn't accompanied by personal and emotional tumult.
Because it is.
I feel very emotionally volatile. My life feels very unstable. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing in the coming year or two.
And I'm okay with that. I know that I just have to keep pushing forward. No choice in that matter.
My heart won't stop beating for a long time (hopefully), and the sun won't stop moving for even longer.
I intend to keep living as passionately as I can.
Because I'm fine with the fact that intellectual productivity and creative output might sometimes be accompanied by bouts of instability or volatility.
Poets often go mad.
Good. Sometimes I feel like a madman.
I'm crazy as hell, and I'm not gonna keep it in anymore.
For now I'll just lament with Girls:
"I just want to get high
But everyone keeps bringing me down.
If you know something I don't
Come on and help me out
Cause' I just don't understand
How the world keeps going nowhere"
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Addendum
After some reflection, I don't entirely agree with what I wrote yesterday.
I, personally, intend to pursue this double bind of repetition and newness. It is the double bind that I want to play within.
Spivak's ultimate double bind of the ab-use of the Enlightenment, I said, was secondary to this double bind of repetition and newness.
But that is pretty silly. It is a more general way of rendering the same problem.
In some ways repetition and newness is the universal of Spivak's particular interest in the Enlightenment in post-colonial countries.
So, I didn't quite mean what I said last night.
Not all of it at least.
I meant most of it, I think.
I, personally, intend to pursue this double bind of repetition and newness. It is the double bind that I want to play within.
Spivak's ultimate double bind of the ab-use of the Enlightenment, I said, was secondary to this double bind of repetition and newness.
But that is pretty silly. It is a more general way of rendering the same problem.
In some ways repetition and newness is the universal of Spivak's particular interest in the Enlightenment in post-colonial countries.
So, I didn't quite mean what I said last night.
Not all of it at least.
I meant most of it, I think.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Repetition and Newness as Double Bind
The principle concept in Gayatri Spivak's new anthology, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, is that of the 'double bind'. The notion of a double bind encompasses dichotomies like such as man vs woman, planet vs globe, modern vs traditional. In other words, a double bind appears to be something like a Kantian antinomy: the point at which two perfectly logical but incompatible ideas cannot be synthesized any further. A double bind is thus a position between two concepts that cannot be further synthesized or made any more compatible with one another.
Spivak claims that the humanities are the disciplines that commonly seek to resolve double binds. This is evident in disciplines like the study of gender or post-colonial studies. In both instances the humanities seek to mitigate the divide between the concepts of man and woman, or the notion of Otherness. Spivak uses Schiller as a prime example of the way in which aesthetic or humane education usually attempts to synthesize or overcome a double bind. Spivak quotes Schiller's claim that aesthetic philosophy often fails because "either the investigation did not start with a sufficiently strict distinction, or it was not carried through to a pure and complete synthesis" (Quoted in Spivak, 2012, 19).
According to Spivak this attempt at synthesis is an inadequate way to deal with a double bind. Rather than pushing for ultimate synthesis, Spivak argues, one should seek to 'play' a double bind. One must try to navigate an antinomy not through synthesis, but through a sort of balancing act that arrives at something new. One must 'ab-use' the double bind that one is presented with.
Spivak chooses to use the term 'ab-use', which is entirely different from abuse. This notion of ab-use comes through most clearly as a way of using other people's ideas. To 'ab-use' an idea is to approach it knowing that you are going to distort it in the process of using it. You know that you will never completely or accurately engage with the idea as the author intended, so you approach it with the idea of making an intentional mistake. You use the idea, but you distort it in the process, bending it to your own purposes. In essence, you decide to live in a double bind by bending it to your own purposes.
For Spivak, the ultimate form of playing the double bind today comes from the ab-use of the European Enlightenment. She believes that post-colonial peoples need to find a way to reinvent the Enlightenment, to ab-use the Enlightenment "to expand the scope of this by an 'intended mistake': to bequeath a geography to it" (Ibid., 20). In other words, Spivak wants to "make the Enlightenment open to a(n) (ab)-use that makes room for justice, because it takes away the absoluteness of guarantees and secures it from the moderant satire of a Candide?" (Ibid., 21). Damn you and your damn parenthetical silliness, Spivak.
Moreover, Spivak claims that this double bind can also be rendered in terms of "the contradiction between planetary poiesis (imaginative making) and a named faith with an inherited record" (Ibid., 346). The problem is between making something new in the present out of the materials that we have inherited from the past.
This double bind of present and past is a huge one for me.
For Spivak too.
Unfortunately, I am out of time.
I have to go meet a friend.
But I intended to tell you how there is a way to collapse the double bind of past and present into another double bind: that of repetition and newness.
Because this is really the problem with the relationship between past and present. How is one to go on creating something new (the present-becoming-future) while still staying true to tradition (past-becoming-present)?
To me, this is a false problem.
Nothing will ever stay the same. We live in a Heraclitan world. Everything moves and nothing stays still.
Theory, too, must move with the world. As Spivak says, "All communicated action, including self-communicated action, is destined for errancy. This is so commonsensical a point that it is almost not worth making. Yet it is so hard to make this enter into theory. In order to conserve felicitous cases, we seem to be obliged to ignore destinerrancy" (Ibid., 28). I believe with Zizek and DeLanda's reading of Deleuze, combined with my reading of Collingwood and Clausewitz, I can create a theory that accommodates the movement of the world. A theory of practice that will train people's minds to operate with the mechanisms and technologies of the present, like Spivak wishes to do, but without a firm structure that could lead to a sort of doctrinaire self-deception. Instead, I propose Collingwoodian-Clausewitzian science of human affairs.
I believe this type of theory needs to hinge on the double bind of repetition and newness. That is, the paradoxical idea that newness can only emerge through repetition.
In order for this to be clear I will have to adequately explain historical thinking. I will have to explain simulation theory of mind and how historical thinking is about simulating past thoughts in the context of your present mind. I will have to explain how this simulation amounts to a repetition, and how that repetition can only lead to something new. I'll have to show that history is a branch of literature. I'll have to show that being a form of literature is partakes primarily of narrative. I'll have to demonstrate the capacity of narrative to not only generate understanding, but to generate our selves as well.
The double bind that an aesthetic education must deal with, I believe, is not the one of Enlightenment and the Other's ab-use of it. Nor is it the tension between tradition and modernity. Both of these are indispensable concepts, unavoidably real double binds.
But it seems to me that they both collapse into a larger double bind: That of Repetition and the New.
All of this will hopefully become much clearer in my essay on historical morality and the science of human affairs as anti-regularian morality.
Spivak claims that the humanities are the disciplines that commonly seek to resolve double binds. This is evident in disciplines like the study of gender or post-colonial studies. In both instances the humanities seek to mitigate the divide between the concepts of man and woman, or the notion of Otherness. Spivak uses Schiller as a prime example of the way in which aesthetic or humane education usually attempts to synthesize or overcome a double bind. Spivak quotes Schiller's claim that aesthetic philosophy often fails because "either the investigation did not start with a sufficiently strict distinction, or it was not carried through to a pure and complete synthesis" (Quoted in Spivak, 2012, 19).
According to Spivak this attempt at synthesis is an inadequate way to deal with a double bind. Rather than pushing for ultimate synthesis, Spivak argues, one should seek to 'play' a double bind. One must try to navigate an antinomy not through synthesis, but through a sort of balancing act that arrives at something new. One must 'ab-use' the double bind that one is presented with.
Spivak chooses to use the term 'ab-use', which is entirely different from abuse. This notion of ab-use comes through most clearly as a way of using other people's ideas. To 'ab-use' an idea is to approach it knowing that you are going to distort it in the process of using it. You know that you will never completely or accurately engage with the idea as the author intended, so you approach it with the idea of making an intentional mistake. You use the idea, but you distort it in the process, bending it to your own purposes. In essence, you decide to live in a double bind by bending it to your own purposes.
For Spivak, the ultimate form of playing the double bind today comes from the ab-use of the European Enlightenment. She believes that post-colonial peoples need to find a way to reinvent the Enlightenment, to ab-use the Enlightenment "to expand the scope of this by an 'intended mistake': to bequeath a geography to it" (Ibid., 20). In other words, Spivak wants to "make the Enlightenment open to a(n) (ab)-use that makes room for justice, because it takes away the absoluteness of guarantees and secures it from the moderant satire of a Candide?" (Ibid., 21). Damn you and your damn parenthetical silliness, Spivak.
Moreover, Spivak claims that this double bind can also be rendered in terms of "the contradiction between planetary poiesis (imaginative making) and a named faith with an inherited record" (Ibid., 346). The problem is between making something new in the present out of the materials that we have inherited from the past.
This double bind of present and past is a huge one for me.
For Spivak too.
Unfortunately, I am out of time.
I have to go meet a friend.
But I intended to tell you how there is a way to collapse the double bind of past and present into another double bind: that of repetition and newness.
Because this is really the problem with the relationship between past and present. How is one to go on creating something new (the present-becoming-future) while still staying true to tradition (past-becoming-present)?
To me, this is a false problem.
Nothing will ever stay the same. We live in a Heraclitan world. Everything moves and nothing stays still.
Theory, too, must move with the world. As Spivak says, "All communicated action, including self-communicated action, is destined for errancy. This is so commonsensical a point that it is almost not worth making. Yet it is so hard to make this enter into theory. In order to conserve felicitous cases, we seem to be obliged to ignore destinerrancy" (Ibid., 28). I believe with Zizek and DeLanda's reading of Deleuze, combined with my reading of Collingwood and Clausewitz, I can create a theory that accommodates the movement of the world. A theory of practice that will train people's minds to operate with the mechanisms and technologies of the present, like Spivak wishes to do, but without a firm structure that could lead to a sort of doctrinaire self-deception. Instead, I propose Collingwoodian-Clausewitzian science of human affairs.
I believe this type of theory needs to hinge on the double bind of repetition and newness. That is, the paradoxical idea that newness can only emerge through repetition.
In order for this to be clear I will have to adequately explain historical thinking. I will have to explain simulation theory of mind and how historical thinking is about simulating past thoughts in the context of your present mind. I will have to explain how this simulation amounts to a repetition, and how that repetition can only lead to something new. I'll have to show that history is a branch of literature. I'll have to show that being a form of literature is partakes primarily of narrative. I'll have to demonstrate the capacity of narrative to not only generate understanding, but to generate our selves as well.
The double bind that an aesthetic education must deal with, I believe, is not the one of Enlightenment and the Other's ab-use of it. Nor is it the tension between tradition and modernity. Both of these are indispensable concepts, unavoidably real double binds.
But it seems to me that they both collapse into a larger double bind: That of Repetition and the New.
All of this will hopefully become much clearer in my essay on historical morality and the science of human affairs as anti-regularian morality.
A More Robust Concept of Responsibility
Aha!
Morality without rules!
Anti-regularian morality!
Gayatri Spivak, too, has helpful words for me!
I recently received a copy of her newest book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. I read the introduction. Quite dense.
I mean like Loling by myself in my room dense.
Like silly ass dense.
References abound.
Still, I am gleaning some crucial things from her.
One is the confirmation that the aesthetic education needs to be focused on cultivating the habit of ethical thought.
More importantly, however, is her suggestion that an aesthetic education should end in a more robust conception of responsibility.
She knows that one of the great problems of Modernity is that we have very few ways of conceptualizing responsibility without reference to rules or laws.
Still, she believes, there were forms of responsibility that used to exist in the past, and there are other forms of responsibility that we can create now.
In other words, it seems like Spivak, too, is working on a form of anti-regularian morality that finds its primary reference in aesthetics.
Blah blah blah.
Something like that.
Either way, I am finding some support in her work, despite of its extreme density.
Spivak insists that a more "robust notion of responsibility is the one practiced by most precapitalist high cultures of the planet," and that one of the only ways out of the modern "conflict between right and responsibility" is the cultivation of such a form of responsibility (Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 341, 342).
Blah blah blah.
I don't know if I'll get any work done on my essay today.
But this essay on anti-regularian morality is sure as hell gaining some momentum in my mind.
When I finally get it on paper it will be fun.
Morality without rules!
Anti-regularian morality!
Gayatri Spivak, too, has helpful words for me!
I recently received a copy of her newest book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. I read the introduction. Quite dense.
I mean like Loling by myself in my room dense.
Like silly ass dense.
References abound.
Still, I am gleaning some crucial things from her.
One is the confirmation that the aesthetic education needs to be focused on cultivating the habit of ethical thought.
More importantly, however, is her suggestion that an aesthetic education should end in a more robust conception of responsibility.
She knows that one of the great problems of Modernity is that we have very few ways of conceptualizing responsibility without reference to rules or laws.
Still, she believes, there were forms of responsibility that used to exist in the past, and there are other forms of responsibility that we can create now.
In other words, it seems like Spivak, too, is working on a form of anti-regularian morality that finds its primary reference in aesthetics.
Blah blah blah.
Something like that.
Either way, I am finding some support in her work, despite of its extreme density.
Spivak insists that a more "robust notion of responsibility is the one practiced by most precapitalist high cultures of the planet," and that one of the only ways out of the modern "conflict between right and responsibility" is the cultivation of such a form of responsibility (Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 341, 342).
Blah blah blah.
I don't know if I'll get any work done on my essay today.
But this essay on anti-regularian morality is sure as hell gaining some momentum in my mind.
When I finally get it on paper it will be fun.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Aha!
The essay on anti-regularian morality is mostly outlined!
Huzzah!
It was such a thing for the last few months.
I had no idea how to write it.
Duty, history, all these things.
Confusing.
But now I'm ready.
Almost.
Huzzah!
It was such a thing for the last few months.
I had no idea how to write it.
Duty, history, all these things.
Confusing.
But now I'm ready.
Almost.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Morality Without Rules
Morality without rules is basically what I'm working towards writing about.
Seems like a strange notion to me.
How does one conceive of morality without rules?
There must always be room for rule-like propositions.
I, for one, cannot help but abstract.
I am always inclined to make general propositions about things.
But I don't regard those propositions as 'rules'.
That is, I don't expect them so hold any predictive or prescriptive power.
I suspect that my moral character cannot be developed strictly according to rules.
I must rely on myself.
I ought to claim responsibility for my actions.
I should regard my actions as a creative expression of my being.
I want my actions to be authentic expressions of my character.
I don't want to act based on a strategy or a plan.
I don't want to act based on some rule or law.
I want to act based on what I know is right.
I want to be good without rules.
Seems like a strange notion to me.
How does one conceive of morality without rules?
There must always be room for rule-like propositions.
I, for one, cannot help but abstract.
I am always inclined to make general propositions about things.
But I don't regard those propositions as 'rules'.
That is, I don't expect them so hold any predictive or prescriptive power.
I suspect that my moral character cannot be developed strictly according to rules.
I must rely on myself.
I ought to claim responsibility for my actions.
I should regard my actions as a creative expression of my being.
I want my actions to be authentic expressions of my character.
I don't want to act based on a strategy or a plan.
I don't want to act based on some rule or law.
I want to act based on what I know is right.
I want to be good without rules.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Yes.
Moments ago I finished After Virtue.
Very exciting.
It took me quite a long time.
I'm not sure why.
I just wanted to take my time with it.
I think I got a lot out of it.
Seems as though I might be able to produce an essay now.
Reading the conclusion I had all kinds of ideas on how to frame it all.
The central thesis would be that any attempt at reinvigorating moral philosophy from its present dilemmas will requite a thorough reworking of the philosophy of history and the humanities. MacIntyre insists that modern liberal individualism, which he is arguing against, finds its philosophical support in the claims of social science. That the issue of moral philosophy concerns "the understanding of human action" in general, and therefore that an adequate moral philosophy will explore "such topics as those of the concept of fact, the limits of human predictability in human affairs and the nature of ideology" (MacIntyre, 259).
In other words, to revamp our moral philosophy we must revamp our understanding of how we understand people in general. I think that the philosophy of history can help a good deal with this. Because if MacIntyre is right when he claims that our stock of moral concepts come from the social science's and their claims at law-like generalizations, then the introduction of historical concepts (which are thoroughly anti-law-like) into moral philosophy may have some interesting results.
In particular, we may find ourselves embracing forms of morality that are expressly anti-regularian, that is, that do not find their justification in a set of existing rules. Rather, we would claim responsibility for acts of creative judgement.
Yeah all of this is starting to sit pretty firmly in my mind.
I need to start working on this outline.
It looks like I'm going to be able to collapse two possible essays into one.
'Duty, Agonistic Pluralism, and Historical Thinking', and 'Art, History, and Narrative Self-Creation', will have to become one essay. I totally see how I can do it.
Hermmmmmm.
Very exciting.
It took me quite a long time.
I'm not sure why.
I just wanted to take my time with it.
I think I got a lot out of it.
Seems as though I might be able to produce an essay now.
Reading the conclusion I had all kinds of ideas on how to frame it all.
The central thesis would be that any attempt at reinvigorating moral philosophy from its present dilemmas will requite a thorough reworking of the philosophy of history and the humanities. MacIntyre insists that modern liberal individualism, which he is arguing against, finds its philosophical support in the claims of social science. That the issue of moral philosophy concerns "the understanding of human action" in general, and therefore that an adequate moral philosophy will explore "such topics as those of the concept of fact, the limits of human predictability in human affairs and the nature of ideology" (MacIntyre, 259).
In other words, to revamp our moral philosophy we must revamp our understanding of how we understand people in general. I think that the philosophy of history can help a good deal with this. Because if MacIntyre is right when he claims that our stock of moral concepts come from the social science's and their claims at law-like generalizations, then the introduction of historical concepts (which are thoroughly anti-law-like) into moral philosophy may have some interesting results.
In particular, we may find ourselves embracing forms of morality that are expressly anti-regularian, that is, that do not find their justification in a set of existing rules. Rather, we would claim responsibility for acts of creative judgement.
Yeah all of this is starting to sit pretty firmly in my mind.
I need to start working on this outline.
It looks like I'm going to be able to collapse two possible essays into one.
'Duty, Agonistic Pluralism, and Historical Thinking', and 'Art, History, and Narrative Self-Creation', will have to become one essay. I totally see how I can do it.
Hermmmmmm.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Mind. Blown. Constantly.
Moonface's song 'Quickfire, I tried' has been blowing my mind for the last month or two.
The song is filled with lines that begin with 'Quickfire, I tried....'.
Endings such as '... to be romantic', or '... to be your solitude'.
If you've followed this blog at all (lol) you may have noticed that the reference to Quickfire has ended up in some of my poems.
The line that makes me the most emotional goes: 'Quickfire, I have tried to settle down, but I am lifted by the Sirens in my blood. And they are not done their song'.
The delivery is incredible. It is one of the final lines and it just kills me every time.
Oh I remember when I realized what the words were. I had heard the song many times and loved that particular moment, that particularly delivery.
Oh and what wonder the lyrics bring to the entire moment.
I love the moment so much more knowing what those lyrics are.
Because I can identify with that lyric so much.
I have tried to settle down. I'm still trying to calm myself down. But my thinking and living is always so exciting. Everything that happens to me is so remarkable and unique that I don't know what to do with it. I, too, am lifted by the Sirens in my blood. And they aren't done their song either.
I'm dumbfounded in both my working and thinking life.
My jobs are both amazing for different reasons.
One a family of sorts that has fun feeding people, often friendly, sometimes not.
Either way, it doesn't matter because everyone there is excited to be doing what they are doing.
My other job is also a family or community of sorts.
We are close.
We are dealing with similar stresses.
But it isn't the stress of a small, emotionally rich business.
It is the stress of feeling alienated from a large business.
It can be difficult to deal with high volumes of people that you've never seen before and will never see again.
Very little customer regularity can be difficult.
But me and my coworkers stick together.
Always having a good time with one another even if we aren't always having fun with customers.
Thinking is also feeling crazy right now.
I've been ever so slowly working my way through After Virtue.
What an important book it seems to be.
I feel like it is expressing so many things I've thought before.
The end of the book is near now. 40 pages or so.
It is a tough book so I won't rush it.
But man.
I don't know what to do about it.
Just looking at the table of contents I feel that it is so far reaching.
Truly an invaluable book for me to have read.
Plus I'm working on all my own thinking.
I think one thing really prodding at me now is the task of incorporating MacIntyre into my other thinking.
I'm working.
It'll happen.
The song is filled with lines that begin with 'Quickfire, I tried....'.
Endings such as '... to be romantic', or '... to be your solitude'.
If you've followed this blog at all (lol) you may have noticed that the reference to Quickfire has ended up in some of my poems.
The line that makes me the most emotional goes: 'Quickfire, I have tried to settle down, but I am lifted by the Sirens in my blood. And they are not done their song'.
The delivery is incredible. It is one of the final lines and it just kills me every time.
Oh I remember when I realized what the words were. I had heard the song many times and loved that particular moment, that particularly delivery.
Oh and what wonder the lyrics bring to the entire moment.
I love the moment so much more knowing what those lyrics are.
Because I can identify with that lyric so much.
I have tried to settle down. I'm still trying to calm myself down. But my thinking and living is always so exciting. Everything that happens to me is so remarkable and unique that I don't know what to do with it. I, too, am lifted by the Sirens in my blood. And they aren't done their song either.
I'm dumbfounded in both my working and thinking life.
My jobs are both amazing for different reasons.
One a family of sorts that has fun feeding people, often friendly, sometimes not.
Either way, it doesn't matter because everyone there is excited to be doing what they are doing.
My other job is also a family or community of sorts.
We are close.
We are dealing with similar stresses.
But it isn't the stress of a small, emotionally rich business.
It is the stress of feeling alienated from a large business.
It can be difficult to deal with high volumes of people that you've never seen before and will never see again.
Very little customer regularity can be difficult.
But me and my coworkers stick together.
Always having a good time with one another even if we aren't always having fun with customers.
Thinking is also feeling crazy right now.
I've been ever so slowly working my way through After Virtue.
What an important book it seems to be.
I feel like it is expressing so many things I've thought before.
The end of the book is near now. 40 pages or so.
It is a tough book so I won't rush it.
But man.
I don't know what to do about it.
Just looking at the table of contents I feel that it is so far reaching.
Truly an invaluable book for me to have read.
Plus I'm working on all my own thinking.
I think one thing really prodding at me now is the task of incorporating MacIntyre into my other thinking.
I'm working.
It'll happen.
History, Aesthetics, and Simulative Thought
There is one problem I keep encountering in my current attempt to synthesize/differentiate my thinking on history and aesthetics.
The problem is that of simulative thought.
Simulation theory of mind is the most persuasive account of minds that I have yet to read. Mirror neurons, the E-imagination, all that good stuff. I find it all very interesting.
I believe that art, fiction, the humanities, and history, all depend on simulative thought.
That is to say, they depend on our ability to understand another mind by recreating that mind inside our own mind. The type of understanding delivered by the humanities depends on our ability to simulate other minds within our own.
In my thinking, however, I should be careful not to reduce anything too much.
It would be unwise to reduce these complex phenomena to a single mode of thought.
Because while they may depend on simulative thought, there may be major differences worth focusing on.
I already prompted this question in my essay on the civil-aesthetic-zen attitude in Colingwood and Foucault. I think it is an important question. But I shouldn't be reductive.
Still, a question very worthy of my attention.
Does civility, history, art, and zen all rely on the human minds capacity for simulative thought?
Is simulative thought the linchpin of other humane forms of thinking?
I wonder.
Don't wonder what it means for me to wonder, R-dawg.
I always wonder.
The problem is that of simulative thought.
Simulation theory of mind is the most persuasive account of minds that I have yet to read. Mirror neurons, the E-imagination, all that good stuff. I find it all very interesting.
I believe that art, fiction, the humanities, and history, all depend on simulative thought.
That is to say, they depend on our ability to understand another mind by recreating that mind inside our own mind. The type of understanding delivered by the humanities depends on our ability to simulate other minds within our own.
In my thinking, however, I should be careful not to reduce anything too much.
It would be unwise to reduce these complex phenomena to a single mode of thought.
Because while they may depend on simulative thought, there may be major differences worth focusing on.
I already prompted this question in my essay on the civil-aesthetic-zen attitude in Colingwood and Foucault. I think it is an important question. But I shouldn't be reductive.
Still, a question very worthy of my attention.
Does civility, history, art, and zen all rely on the human minds capacity for simulative thought?
Is simulative thought the linchpin of other humane forms of thinking?
I wonder.
Don't wonder what it means for me to wonder, R-dawg.
I always wonder.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
From Aesthetics to History and Back
My current intellectual task is to build a bridge between my work on aesthetic morality and my current attempt to think about historical morality. I want to see how the aesthetic concepts I developed can apply to history.
Something about MacIntyre on conversation as the human activity. Something about narrative and human understanding. Something about social roles, their history, our history, and craft. Something about history as a form of literature. Something about an aesthetic theory being the prerequisite of historical theory. Something about the virtues as some kind of historical-aesthetic living. Something about Absolute Mind and forgiving everyone for everything (while still punishing them for crimes). Something about historical civilization being committed to understanding people.
I've decided to write a small essay on a few things Alasdair MacIntyre said. It turns out that MacIntyre's description of the virtues in After Virtue has some similarities to my description of aesthetic morality. They both focuses on the cultivation of habits; they both think that historical knowledge (both of the world and of personal history) is a prerequisite to morality; they both think that social rules and regulations need to be obeyed and used creatively, not rejected; they both approach morality from the point of narrative self-creation, and not as adherence to a set of rules.
Some other stuff maybe.
The main thing connecting all of this is the idea that history is a form of literature. At some point I'll have to take seriously the relationship between history and literature.
I'm trying to think about all this now but it is early and I'm not thinking clearly. I'm thinking I might be able to do some writing tonight after work. Not sure. I'll try to get some done before I go to work.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Friendship
One of my favorite friends is moving far away soon.
Huge shout out to J-dawg.
We hung out tonight.
Talked as we normally do.
Perhaps the only thing that was different was that I was feeling more reflective.
Reflective about our friendship and the city where we met one another.
I'm unsure about this city I'm living in.
I think I want to leave it.
I'm not sure why i want to leave. But that doesn't matter so much seeing as how I don't really know why I moved here.
I now know.
More than I did.
I know that I needed to push myself to become someone different.
I know that I was suffocating in my own past and that I needed a way out.
I needed to learn things about myself. And I have learned things.
One thing I really know now is how much I care about friendship.
Friendship is one thing that I have definitely succeeded at. I've found it wonderfully rewarding.
My mind is particularly sensitive to the idea of friendship because of my reading of MacIntyre. He talks about Aristotle's conception of friendship. For Aristotle friendship can only be about the mutual pursuit of goodness. True friends share a quest for a moral life.
I love to have friends like those.
I love goodness.
And I love those that love it too.
Huge shout out to J-dawg.
We hung out tonight.
Talked as we normally do.
Perhaps the only thing that was different was that I was feeling more reflective.
Reflective about our friendship and the city where we met one another.
I'm unsure about this city I'm living in.
I think I want to leave it.
I'm not sure why i want to leave. But that doesn't matter so much seeing as how I don't really know why I moved here.
I now know.
More than I did.
I know that I needed to push myself to become someone different.
I know that I was suffocating in my own past and that I needed a way out.
I needed to learn things about myself. And I have learned things.
One thing I really know now is how much I care about friendship.
Friendship is one thing that I have definitely succeeded at. I've found it wonderfully rewarding.
My mind is particularly sensitive to the idea of friendship because of my reading of MacIntyre. He talks about Aristotle's conception of friendship. For Aristotle friendship can only be about the mutual pursuit of goodness. True friends share a quest for a moral life.
I love to have friends like those.
I love goodness.
And I love those that love it too.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Black.
I dreamt of clean spaces.
I hoped for white to define itself.
I wanted there to not to be a darkness.
But then I saw the darkness.
I knew this slate was already marked.
I'm out.
I'm gone.
I hoped for white to define itself.
I wanted there to not to be a darkness.
But then I saw the darkness.
I knew this slate was already marked.
I'm out.
I'm gone.
Monday, May 14, 2012
White.
White rooms.
White hallways.
Brightly lit by light that emanated from nowhere.
They were steadfast in their structure.
Being as they were without pretense.
Then I would wake up to find them New.
A new corridor.
A titled doorframe.
A line of flight emerging from nowhere.
Sometimes I took them.
Sometimes I didn't.
At my worst I would gaze at these novelties with horrible curiosity. I would ask myself what could possibly be down them. Then, often, I wouldn't even explore them. Sometimes I was too afraid. Sometimes I was just indifferent. Sometimes I didn't even see them for what they were.
In this clean white space.
Everything can't be good.
Only certain things can be chosen.
And hopefully only those things are good.
White hallways.
Brightly lit by light that emanated from nowhere.
They were steadfast in their structure.
Being as they were without pretense.
Then I would wake up to find them New.
A new corridor.
A titled doorframe.
A line of flight emerging from nowhere.
Sometimes I took them.
Sometimes I didn't.
At my worst I would gaze at these novelties with horrible curiosity. I would ask myself what could possibly be down them. Then, often, I wouldn't even explore them. Sometimes I was too afraid. Sometimes I was just indifferent. Sometimes I didn't even see them for what they were.
In this clean white space.
Everything can't be good.
Only certain things can be chosen.
And hopefully only those things are good.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Means and Ends in Morality
After talking to a friend, I feel quite confident about what I wrote last night.
Not about aesthetic morality as character development. (I still believe that, but I don't think my writing last night demonstrated it).
But I do think that my writing demonstrated the importance of privileging means over ends.
Proper means will always lead to proper ends.
Proper ends will not always lead to proper means.
So simple.
Commit to means.
Do not commit to ends.
Commit to being polite, kind, empathic, and organic.
Your ends will take care of themselves.
Just adopt loving means and the rest will take care of itself.
That is why I refuse to behave inorganically. I refuse to approach this girl when you tell me to. I refuse to order that sandwich when you challenge me to.
I live my life organically.
I live my life lovingly.
I live my life in pain.
And I am confident that my commitment to those means will produce any end that I desire.
Oh.
The pain.
Not about aesthetic morality as character development. (I still believe that, but I don't think my writing last night demonstrated it).
But I do think that my writing demonstrated the importance of privileging means over ends.
Proper means will always lead to proper ends.
Proper ends will not always lead to proper means.
So simple.
Commit to means.
Do not commit to ends.
Commit to being polite, kind, empathic, and organic.
Your ends will take care of themselves.
Just adopt loving means and the rest will take care of itself.
That is why I refuse to behave inorganically. I refuse to approach this girl when you tell me to. I refuse to order that sandwich when you challenge me to.
I live my life organically.
I live my life lovingly.
I live my life in pain.
And I am confident that my commitment to those means will produce any end that I desire.
Oh.
The pain.
Aesthetic Morality and Character Building
The key feature of the 'aesthetic morality' I've tried to developed is that it aims for character building as opposed to the construction of a set of moral rules.
I don't just want to devise the perfect moral system, the perfect set of rules that much of moral philosophy strives for.
What I want to do is change my deepest habits and practices. Which I haven't done very well. But I'm trying.
I want to ask not, 'What is good?'
But, 'How does one become good?'
This may seem like the wrong order for these questions. For how does one know how to become good unless one knows what good is? Doesn't one need to have the end in mind before one devises the means?
I don't think so.
It seems strange. But somehow I think that talking about means, about the conduct of a process, might be a better way of achieving an end than talking about the end itself.
Means very well may be what Gandhi called 'ends in the making'.
The type of end that you would want is contained in the proper means.
If you try to devise the end, however, you run the risk of reverting to means that are not worthy of your end. If you decide you want to be class president, for example, and pursue that end by any means necessary, including lying and cheating, then you run the risk of corrupting the end (blowing the election or getting disqualified) by the reversion to those dubious means.
But if we ask ourselves first and foremost about means then our ends can only embody those means. If we commit to certain principles of action and thought, such as kindness or compassion, then our ends will naturally be in line with those means.
What I'm trying to say is that moral means will always lead to moral ends, but moral ends do not necessarily lead to moral means. Just because we ultimately want to do good for the world doesn't mean that we will pursue that good by noble means. We may become a murderer with good intentions. But if we put means first, and we choose nonviolence, compassion, forgiveness, empathy, and so on as our proper means, then our ends will most likely end up being good.
Proper means lead to proper ends.
Proper ends do not necessarily lead to proper means.
Aesthetic morality, then, is a means focused morality. That is, it puts the questions of means first. How do I become good? How do I become expressive and kind?
Somehow I decided that the means to moral living was habit formation. If I want to live well, I have to change my pre-reflective, unconscious thought and behavior. I have to go to my habitual core.
And I guess somehow that involves the question of ends more than the question of means. Because I never quite say what the end of moral living is. There is no end other than itself. It is a constant means. An end in the making.
Because what is the point of life other than to live it well? To love yourself and others? To try and help as many people as possible and hurt as many people as possible, all while sticking true to your character.
Maybe that isn't what life is about.
Sometimes that isn't what my life is about.
Sometimes it is about all sorts of confusing things.
Sometimes it is all about the angry customer in front of me that I'm dealing with.
Life grows and more often shrinks in size.
But in my best moments I'm seeing a big picture. I'm sticking close to my desired means. I'm acting in the ways that I know I want to act, without knowing what result they will produce. At my best I am smiling, eyebrow flashing, head tilting, making eye contact, and listening or talking.
I'm not sure what the end of all this is. But those are the means I most often want to use.
And somehow I think that aesthetic morality has something to do with this means focused thought.
I said that it is really all about character development. It is.
That sounds like an end.
But it can only be a means. Because one only becomes something by being it. One is only what one does. So there can be no end conception at the outset. One can only choose the means, and become through action.
Hmmm. Getting lost. I think I'm onto something here that I'll work out someday.
I don't just want to devise the perfect moral system, the perfect set of rules that much of moral philosophy strives for.
What I want to do is change my deepest habits and practices. Which I haven't done very well. But I'm trying.
I want to ask not, 'What is good?'
But, 'How does one become good?'
This may seem like the wrong order for these questions. For how does one know how to become good unless one knows what good is? Doesn't one need to have the end in mind before one devises the means?
I don't think so.
It seems strange. But somehow I think that talking about means, about the conduct of a process, might be a better way of achieving an end than talking about the end itself.
Means very well may be what Gandhi called 'ends in the making'.
The type of end that you would want is contained in the proper means.
If you try to devise the end, however, you run the risk of reverting to means that are not worthy of your end. If you decide you want to be class president, for example, and pursue that end by any means necessary, including lying and cheating, then you run the risk of corrupting the end (blowing the election or getting disqualified) by the reversion to those dubious means.
But if we ask ourselves first and foremost about means then our ends can only embody those means. If we commit to certain principles of action and thought, such as kindness or compassion, then our ends will naturally be in line with those means.
What I'm trying to say is that moral means will always lead to moral ends, but moral ends do not necessarily lead to moral means. Just because we ultimately want to do good for the world doesn't mean that we will pursue that good by noble means. We may become a murderer with good intentions. But if we put means first, and we choose nonviolence, compassion, forgiveness, empathy, and so on as our proper means, then our ends will most likely end up being good.
Proper means lead to proper ends.
Proper ends do not necessarily lead to proper means.
Aesthetic morality, then, is a means focused morality. That is, it puts the questions of means first. How do I become good? How do I become expressive and kind?
Somehow I decided that the means to moral living was habit formation. If I want to live well, I have to change my pre-reflective, unconscious thought and behavior. I have to go to my habitual core.
And I guess somehow that involves the question of ends more than the question of means. Because I never quite say what the end of moral living is. There is no end other than itself. It is a constant means. An end in the making.
Because what is the point of life other than to live it well? To love yourself and others? To try and help as many people as possible and hurt as many people as possible, all while sticking true to your character.
Maybe that isn't what life is about.
Sometimes that isn't what my life is about.
Sometimes it is about all sorts of confusing things.
Sometimes it is all about the angry customer in front of me that I'm dealing with.
Life grows and more often shrinks in size.
But in my best moments I'm seeing a big picture. I'm sticking close to my desired means. I'm acting in the ways that I know I want to act, without knowing what result they will produce. At my best I am smiling, eyebrow flashing, head tilting, making eye contact, and listening or talking.
I'm not sure what the end of all this is. But those are the means I most often want to use.
And somehow I think that aesthetic morality has something to do with this means focused thought.
I said that it is really all about character development. It is.
That sounds like an end.
But it can only be a means. Because one only becomes something by being it. One is only what one does. So there can be no end conception at the outset. One can only choose the means, and become through action.
Hmmm. Getting lost. I think I'm onto something here that I'll work out someday.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Done
Soon I'll be posting all of AZI as a pdf. In some kind of final formatting, final organization.
I look forward to just putting it up here and saying goodbye for now.
Because I need to move on.
I look forward to just putting it up here and saying goodbye for now.
Because I need to move on.
Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change in the Aesthetic Existence Part IV.4 (The Unfinished Bits).
This is what I have written of Part IV.4. of the AZI project. I intended to begin the whole section with a survey of Collingwood's late work. I got through his last books except for The New Leviathan, which occupies me at present. The purpose of this survey was to distill the political implications of his work so as to connect it all to his work on aesthetics. But that didn't work out. The New Leviathan is way harder and way more important than I thought it was going to be. I have just received Collingwood's political essays and his history of Roman Britain. So I have quite a lot of work left to do on his politics. But I humbly offer my failed attempt at a survey of Collingwood's late work. I am also including all the notes and quotations that I pulled in preparation for the section.
IV.4. The Aesthetic Existence And Politics Proper
1. Introduction: Politics In Collingwood, 1937-42
The point of this project is to understand if the ethical or good life can be conceptualized as an aesthetic life. After some work, I feel confident that the aesthetic existence is indeed a viable ideal. I now want to know if the aesthetic life was to be thought of as a political project. Because Foucault insists the aesthetic existence is politically charged. Collingwood, too, believes in the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is very clear about the cultural and political importance of art, but only implies a relationship between politics and the aesthetic existence. I intend to take their claims seriously. So, this is the chapter where I attempt my most full dissection of the relationship between politics and the aesthetic existence. I’ll miss a lot of things, obviously, but I believe I have enough evidence to show some relationships between politic ideals and the ideal of the aesthetic existence.
Foucault provided the concept of the aesthetic existence, but it was Collingwood’s Principles Of Art that really set this whole project going. It was the book that really forced a lot of my thinking together and created some kind of loose idea pool that has been growing with the project. So, I think it would be wise for me to begin this inquiry into the relationship between aesthetics and politics by returning to Collingwood.
I think that there is a consistent relationship between aesthetics and politics in Collingwood’s final books (The Principles of Art, An Autobiography, An Essay on Metaphysics, The New Leviathan, and The Idea of History). I’m going to give these books a close look in this section to understand more fully the patterns and trends of his late work. Collingwood’s premature death makes it difficult to know what conclusions to draw from his late work. Starting in 1937 he suffered a series of strokes that led to his death in January of 1943. He never completed ‘The Principles of History’, the book he hoped would be his chief work. So what to do with this increasingly ill thinker. In particular, what to make of The New Leviathan? How am I to view his the preceding work on history, metaphysics, and aesthetics. I have to ask myself about the relationship between all of these books. I have to try and see what Collingwood’s thoughts would have been had he not died. Because I want to try and recover those thoughts that Collingwood would have expressed would he have lived. I want to see if I can carry his work one step further. See if I can help with his project of showing how “what have hitherto been regarded as philosophy and history might now be synthesized in a new study transcending and incorporating both” (NL, xxi). A well phrased statement of the style of philosophy that interests me most. I’m tempted to quote Zizek here. He has a relevant insight. While discussing this very issue of gauging an author’s oeuvre, Zizek takes the example of Kant and says, “there are two modes of repeating him: either one sticks to the letter and further elaborates or changes his system, in the spirit of neo-Kantians...; or, one tries to regain the creative impulse that Kant himself betrayed in the actualization of his systems (that is, to connect to what was already ‘in Kant more than Kant himself,’ more than his explicit system its excessive core” (IDOLC, 140, my emphasis). This is in some ways my challenge with Collingwood. I need to extract the part of him that was more Collingwood than Collingwood could be in his lifetime and make something new with it. And I believe that there are ways that I can push at Collingwood like this, try to betray him in the best sense. In particular, I think that the themes of Collingwood’s late monographs (art, culture, economics, politics, history, etc.) can only coalesce into a concern for political education for both elites and the citizenry. Further, I’ll try to show how his interests in politics and education logically lead to the need for a theory of individual decision making.
The book that inspired this project, The Principles of Art, is a clear example of the intersection of aesthetic and political themes in Collingwood’s late work. I have spent so much of this project explicating that book, wondering about its political implications, and asking questions about the politics of art in Collingwood. I think that I highlighted the main political implications of The Principles Of Art in Part III.1 and Part IV.2. To very briefly rehash, in III.1 I argued that if we believe Collingwood’s claim that there is a ‘technical theory’ of art (in which art is identified merely with craft) that prevents us from grasping the true nature of the aesthetic, then the aesthetic existence, too, might be hindered by something like a ‘technical theory of life’. A technical theory of life would be one that told you that your life should be approached as a craft: that life should be lived according to plans, a life in pursuit of a definite end through definite means. But I don’t want to live my life that way. I want my life to be more dynamic, more reflexive than that. I don’t want to come up with a plan on how to make money or get a career. Although I do have to do that stuff. But I also want to express myself and change myself in the process and see what I can become. Life should be a conscious attempt to illuminate vague truths in the mind, to express oneself and know oneself in every action. Maybe? I’m not sure about all this. But it seems to me that life is more identified with craft than with art. I also think this has some political implications. Most of the ‘technical theories’ of life that we have access to, the ideas or narratives that give us the means to pursue life's business, happen to be narratives that support the dominant political-economic situation. The ideal of the American dream presupposes the existence of capitalist democracy, the political value of consumption and reproduction. The whole idea of college, of getting a job, it all presupposes a certain political-economic climate. If we only have access to those conceptions of life, those technical theories of existence, then imagining political and personal alternatives becomes a serious challenge. I don’t know how to conceptualize a life beyond this political system, or another political system that would somehow change me. No clue. What a feat of imagination that would take. But anyways, that is one potential set of political implications that emerges out of The Principles Of Art.
The second set of implications were laid out in IV.2. I argued that Collingwood’s notion of ‘the corruption of consciousness’ was a valuable concept that links aesthetic, personal, economic, and political issues. Collingwood believes that a corrupt consciousness is one that is distracted or ‘bribed’ from its proper task of gaining self-knowledge by turning difficult impressions into ideas (see IV.2). Instead, the mind allows itself to be distracted, to find refuge in the amusement that flourishes in the modern world. The amused mind has no need to also be the inquiring mind, the reflective mind. The uncorrupt consciousness, however, is essentially the aesthetic consciousness: it is a consciousness that focuses itself on difficult emotions so as to transform them into something more manageable, as an expressed work of art or a clear idea. I then drew out the political implications of this by examining the role of amusement in American culture. With the help of Sheldon Wolin I concluded that the connection between American culture and politics consisted of a body of distracted and corrupt consciousnesses that supported a corrupt corporate democracy. The only outcome, I believe, is the politicization of the aesthetic consciousness. Which sounds Benjaminian, but I’m not sure if it is. But I ended IV.2 by claiming that we must try to educate our political elite and our citizenry so as to instill in them a consciousness that pursues truth, a consciousness that doesn’t give in to easy answers, a consciousness that seeks to simultaneously express and create itself, in short, an aesthetic consciousness. Again, I’m merely summarizing IV.2, so check it out.
Thus The Principles Of Art produces at least two relationships between politics and aesthetics in Collingwood’s work. First, there is the political danger of a technical theory of life that prevents us from imagining other ways of life, and thus other political-economic conditions. Second, there is the political implications of the corruption of consciousness. The danger of losing aesthetic consciousness, slipping into an amused state, and of witnessing a corrupt political spectacle. The Principles, however, is not a thoroughly political book. It only contains political implications. In his work after The Principles Collingwood began to pursue political questions more explicitly, while leaving references to aesthetics at a minimum. The question about the relationship between aesthetics and politics thus needs to be reversed. I need not ask ‘what are the political implications of this work on aesthetics?’ I need to ask ‘what are the aesthetic implications of this work of political thought?’ I intend to do that with four of his final books.
It is with the publication of An Autobiography in 1939 that we first see Collingwood become explicitly political. After suffering a stroke in 1937, Collingwood said his Autobiography was intended “to put on record some brief account of the work I have not yet been able to publish, in case I am not able to publish it in full” (118). Collingwood was becoming increasingly aware of his mortality, and knew that his life may be cut short. His tone in An Autobiography expresses urgency: “I am nearly fifty, and cannot in any case hope for more than a few years in which I can do my best work” (Ibid.). Collingwood’s recognition of his own mortality pushed him to draw the full implications of his work: it forced him to reckon with the politics of his own thought. It is in the final chapter of An Autobiography, titled ‘Theory and Practice’, where Collingwood most fully states his desire for political thought and action. Collingwood claims that the philosophers of his day, the ‘realist’ school (which I know far too little about), was advocating a morally bankrupt doctrine when they claimed “that moral philosophy does no more than study in purely theoretical spirit a subject-matter which it leaves wholly unaffected” (147). Clap-trap, Collingwood says. Dangerous poppycock, he asserts. It is obvious to him that every person “in his capacity as a moral, political, or economic agent... lives not in a world of ‘hard facts’ to which ‘thoughts’ make no difference, but in a world of ‘thoughts’; that if you change the moral, political and economic ‘theories’ generally accepted by the society in which he lives, you change the character of his world; and that if you change his own ‘theories’ you change his relation to that world; so that in either case you change the ways in which he acts” (147). Not only is it erroneous to believe that moral philosophy has no connection to moral action, it is dangerous.
Collingwood takes his political stances a step further by identifying with Marx’s ethos. He confesses that a a part of him “used to stand up and cheer, in a sleepy voice, whenever I began reading Marx.” And that even though he was never “convinced either by Marx’s metaphysics or by his economics” he still admired him because “the man was a fighter, and a grand one; and no mere fighter, but a fighting philosopher.... Marx’s was meant to solve a ‘practical’ problem; its business, as he said himself, was ‘to make the world better’” (152). What Collingwood found in Marx was a raw, practical, and above all a political philosophy. He knows that a part of him wanted “a gloves-off philosophy.... a philosophy that should be a weapon” (153). But Collingwood had to reckon with his own thought, he had to understand how to become a thoroughly political thinker, how to transform his academic work into something practical and political. He had to figure out how to follow Marx’s spirit in his own way.
He then spends a number of pages reflecting on the role of democracy in England from WWI up until his time (1939). He truly believes that English democracy is to be pursued, that it is a worthwhile political system, but one that needs to be augmented and worked on. This discussion of European politics culminates in a discussion of Fascism and the danger it presents to society as he knows it. He ends the book with a powerful paragraph, expressing his desire to fight Fascism the only way he knows how, by thinking and writing clearly about it. “I know now,” he confesses, “that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight” (167, my emphasis). Collingwood here makes me want to stand up and cheer. Makes me want to say yes! Let us fight this type of thinking! Let us overcome the dangers of politicians that ‘appeal to our emotions’ and work us up into an irrational frenzy! Leading us to war, inequality, poverty, madness!
Thus with An Autobiography we see a new Collingwood emerge. A Collingwood snapped into urgency by his impending death. A Collingwood invigorated by the example of Marx. A Collingwood eager to understand the political implications of his thought. What we must ask, therefore, is whether or not Collingwood kept his promise to himself. Do his final books seem like an attempt ‘to fight in the daylight’? I will now ask this question of An Essay On Metaphysics, The New Leviathan, and The Idea Of History.
Collingwood followed 1939’s An Autobiography with 1940’s An Essay On Metaphysics. In this book we see Collingwood intensely philosophical yet attempting to access a wider audience. Collingwood, however, manages to be clear and concise despite his philosophical style. There are only certain moments when Collingwood becomes densely philosophical, such as the chapter ‘On Presupposing’. That chapter, however, is one of the most important in the book. There he first introduces the major argument of the book: that metaphysics is the science of absolute presuppositions, and that it is by necessity a historical science. An absolute presupposition is one that serves as the foundation for all other questioning, it always “stands, relatively to all questions to which it is related, as a presupposition, never as an answer” (31). To put it another way, to ask a natural scientist “ ‘But how do you know that everything that happens has a cause?’,” they would likely reply “ ‘That is a thing we take for granted in my job. We don’t question it. We don’t try to verify it. It isn’t a thing anybody has discovered, like microbes or the circulation of blood. It is a thing we just take for granted.’ “ (31). In any society, Collingwood argues, thinking is always made possible by a ‘constellation’ of absolute presuppositions. Meaning that a thought “can never be given by reference to one single absolute presupposition, it must always be given by reference to a constellation of them” (66). Furthermore, Collingwood argues that “the absolute presuppositions of any given society, at any given phase of history, form a structure which is subject to ‘strains’... of greater or less intensity, which are ‘taken up’... in various ways, but never annihilated. If the strains are too great, the structure collapses and is replaced by another, which will be a modification of the old with the destructive strain removed; a modification not consciously devised but created by a process of unconscious thought” (48). In short, we can only think with a constellation of absolute presuppositions that is subject to unconscious change.
This means that all thinking has an unconscious foundation. This is why our knowledge often appears so intuitive that “we are not even aware that whatever we state to ourselves or others is stated in answer to a question, still less that every such question rests of presuppositions, and at least of all that among these presuppositions some are absolute presuppositions” (43). If all thought rests upon absolute presuppositions, and we are often unaware that we are making these absolute presuppositions, what hopes do we have for clear, orderly thinking? Well, Collingwood claims that this is precisely where metaphysics becomes important. If one is to think clearly, to solve the right problems by asking the right questions, then one needs to know what they presuppose absolutely. The metaphysician’s business, according to Collingwood, is, therefore, to “find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking” (47). Because unless we know the absolute presuppositions of the past and the present we have no hope of clear and orderly thinking. Metaphysics, furthermore, must be a historical study. “When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions,” Collingwood claims, “it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member. This, of course, is already an historical inquiry” (56-57). How is one to have any sense of your own absolute presuppositions unless you know the absolute presuppositions that were made during the times prior to your own? Because those absolute presuppositions of the past obviously mutated from one constellation into the current one. The discovery of your own absolute presuppositions, therefore, must be a historical study that begins with past thought and traces its development to the present.
In any case, this is Collingwood’s definition of metaphysics, which he believes has the potential to revolutionize metaphysical study. Now, I must ask: What are the political implications of Collingwood’s work on metaphysics? Does Collingwood follow through with the promise he made in An Autobiography? Is he now ‘fighting in the daylight’? I think the answer is yes. Through his philosophical style a political vision starts to emerge. We see the politics of metaphysics first emerge in chapter thirteen, ‘The Propaganda of Irrationalism’, and we find Collingwood even more political in the book’s epilogue.
‘The Propaganda of Irrationalism’ is contained in Part II of An Essay Of Metaphysics, which is called ‘Anti-Metaphysics’. The title of this chapter is not to be overlooked. Recall that at the end of An Autobiography Collingwood argued that the Realist philosophers “were the propagandists of a coming Fascism,” and that “Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism” (167). Collingwood is clearly picking up on that theme again. Indeed, by discussing anti-metaphysics Collingwood is trying to explain the relationship between certain philosophical beliefs and the political-cultural decline he perceives in European civilization. According to Collingwood, anti-metaphysics is “a kind of thought that regards metaphysics as a delusion and an impediment to the progress of knowledge, and demands its abolition” (81). Furthermore, Collingwood believed that the most dangerous form of anti-metaphysics in his time was to be found in psychology. Psychology as a discipline, during Collingwood’s time, apparently claimed to “usurp the field of logic and ethics in all their various branches, including political science, aesthetics, economics, and whatever other criteriological sciences there may be, and finally of metaphysics” (142). The bulk of Part II, therefore, is devoted to refuting psychologist’s claims about the uselessness of metaphysics. He argues that psychology, which claims to be the science of thought, can only be the science of feeling. History, he argues, is the only true science of thought. This is because all thought is necessarily historically situated. Metaphysics, therefore, as the historical study of absolute presuppositions, can be the only true science of thought. Psychology is thus a pseudo-science of thought because it has not grasped its proper role as the science of feeling. Moreover, he believes that psychology’s desire to destroy metaphysics amounts to a covert assault on the foundation of European civilization. Because according to Collingwood, “In the interests of science it is absolutely necessary that the work of metaphysics should be done” (84).
Without metaphysics, systematic and orderly thinking is impossible. If we have no form of study to make us aware of our absolute presuppositions we can never be sure if we are really thinking in an orderly manner. Without metaphysics we run the risk of holding erroneous presuppositions. And, for Collingwood, this is why psychology may corrupt the foundations of European civilization. He asks the reader to hold a series of suppositions, claiming that 1. Europe has operated “on the belief that truth was the most important thing in the world, and that consequently scientific thinking, systematic, orderly thinking, theoretical and practical alike, pursued with all the energy at his disposal, was the most valuable thing a man could do” (133); 2. that “within this same civilization a movement grew up hostile to these fundamental principles” (135). Not that there is a conspiracy, but that “something less conscious, less deliberate” was going on, “something more like an epidemic disease: a kind of epidemic withering of belief in the importance of truth and in the obligation to think and act in a systematic and methodical way” (Ibid.). He believes that “Such an irrationalist epidemic infecting religion would turn it from a worship of truth to a worship of emotion and a cultivation of certain emotional states” (Ibid.). This epidemic would infect European culture from top to bottom, in our homes, our schools, and even our political system. This epidemic, however, would disguise itself in the clothes of scientific thought while secretly harboring irrational elements. And this is precisely what Collingwood thought psychology was doing. He believed that psychologists were “in open defiance of the recognized canons of scientific procedure” and that they regard scientific thought as “an obsolete mentality and a thing to be treated with obloquy and contempt, not as a criticism which they must meet by reforming their work or else by abandoning it” (142). Instead, psychologists continue their work unabashed, continuing their “attempt to discredit the very idea of science,” continuing to exist as “the propaganda of irrationalism” (Ibid.). Collingwood, therefore, believes that psychology is a dangerous form of anti-metaphysics that threatens to undermine European civilization’s faith in scientific thinking, which may lead to the collapse of European civilization. For “If European civilization is a civilization based on the belief that truth is the most precious thing in the world and that pursuing it is the whole duty of man, an irrationalist epidemic if it ran through Europe unchecked would in a relatively short time destroy everything that goes by the name European civilization” (140). But how, precisely, would an irrationalist epidemic destroy a civilization?
Collingwood believes that the irrationalist epidemic has had direct effects in the political world. He claims that in a culture that values truth above all else, both political and educational institutions will reflect that desire for truth. He says that “Politics would be predominantly the attempt to build up a common life by the methods of reason (free discussion, public criticism) and subject to the sanction of reason (i.e. the ultimate test being whether the common life aimed at is a reasonable one, for for men who... agree to think in an orderly way). While “Education would be predominantly a method for inducing habits of orderly and systematic thinking” (134). Collingwood claims, however, that European civilization has shied away from these tasks. Furthermore, that we witness the power of the irrationalist epidemic at the intersection of education and politics. It is worth quoting Collingwood at length here: “And has there been a tendency of late years,” Collingwood asks, "to become impatient with the work of politically educating an entire people; to choose leaders not for their intellectual powers but for their ability to excite mass-emotions; to induce in followers not an ability to think about political problems, but certain emotions which in persons untrained to think will explode into action with no questions asked as to where such action will lead; and to suppress discussion and information in favour of what is called propaganda, that is, statements made not because they are true but because they generate these emotions that spark them into action? And have these changes gone so far that even the characteristic facial expression of a political leader has changed from the expression of a thinker (the mathematician-thinker’s face of a Napoleon, the humanist-thinker’s face of a Gladstone) to the expression of a hypnotist, with scowling forehead and glaring eye?" (139). Anti-metaphysics, therefore, is no small matter. It is of the highest importance. For if European civilization is founded upon systematic, orderly, scientific thinking (from out politics to our education), then an irrationalist movement that chides metaphysical work has the potential to undermine the foundations of our civilization. So Collingwood believes.
The politics of Collingwood’s metaphysics comes through even more explicitly in the book’s epilogue. As if his statements in Part II weren’t strong enough, Collingwood ends the book by declaring that European civilization needs a renewed commitment to scientific thinking, and that this must involve a renewed commitment to metaphysical study. He says that the irrationalist movement has created “in the body politic a demand that scientific thinking should be put down by force,” and that it is secretly working “unconsciously perhaps but still working, to obstruct [scientific] advancement and weaken the resistance with which that body is bound in honour to confront the onslaughts of irrationalism” (342). Collingwood ends the book by saying that he knows that no one is consciously working against reason, but that they have been led “blindly into the ranks of that army” because there is “a misunderstanding as to the nature of the issues they have discussed,” and that “These issues are metaphysical” (343). By misunderstanding these metaphysical issues, philosophers have been led to take pseudo-metaphysical questions for true metaphysics. And given that metaphysical work is a prerequisite of scientific work, these philosophers have tried “with a clumsy hand to put back the clock of scientific progress, [they have] have in reality stopped it” (343). Collingwood’s treatise on metaphysics is, therefore, nothing less than an attempt to reinvigorate European civilization’s commitment to truth. It is a call for the use of reason in educational, and most importantly, in the political world. The final paragraph of the book reads: “This is my reason for offering to the public what might seem essentially an academic essay, suitable only for readers who are already, like myself, committed to an interest in metaphysics. The fate of European science and European civilization is at stake. The gravity of the peril lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and gown and fed at a college table; but cackling is my job, and cackle I will” (343). Collingwood knows his professorial duty (to think clearly), and wishes to think about things that will not simply delight his fellow philosophers, but things that matter in the life of a civilization. Things like politics, culture, and education.
In An Essay On Metaphysics, I claim, Collingwood lives up to his promise to ‘fight in the daylight’. He explicitly calls out psychology as compromising the standard procedures for scientific thinking. He explains how this threat to reason, this epidemic of irrationality, has manifested itself at multiple levels of society, including the political, cultural, and educational. And, ultimately, he believes that it constitutes a threat to the foundations of European civilization. In many ways we are seeing his work in The Principles Of Art and An Autobiography carried even further, this time through the topic of metaphysics. Despite the shift of topic, the themes are relatively consistent. He still fears that European civilization has been infected with a mental disease. That this disease is somehow connected to our relationship with truth (because aesthetics and metaphysics, for Collingwood, are both means of accessing truth). And he believes that our relationship towards the idea of truth is fundamentally connected to our political-economic culture. So far, from 1937 onward, Collingwood appears to be consistent in his political concerns. It is always, however, a constellation of concerns, never a static or vague concern for European civilization. But, as I said, always a concern about the relationship between truth, science, politics, economics, and education. First he approached these problems from the point of view of aesthetics. Then he pondered them from the point of view of his own life and thinking. And now we have just seen him approach the same constellation of problems from the point of view of metaphysics. Now, I’d like to see how Collingwood approaches these political problems in The Idea Of History, how he believed history could shed light on these problems.
Approaching the political implications of Collingwood’s work on history is tricky for several reasons. On the one hand, we must do it, for Collingwood claimed that history was the highest form of knowledge, and no analysis of Collingwood’s oeuvre would be complete unless it took his claims about history seriously. The deeper difficulty, however, surrounds the status of his books that expressly deal with history. The Idea Of History, for example, was compiled from manuscripts by a student, and some have criticized his arrangement of the material. The Idea Of History, therefore, cannot be considered an authoritative statement of Collingwood’s conclusions about historical knowledge. Furthermore, the recovery of lost manuscripts and their publication as The Principles Of History complicates this task even further. In short, Collingwood didn’t live to complete his work on history. Drawing certain conclusions from this writing, therefore, is a difficult task. In this section, however, I’d like to look at the material in The Idea Of History that is expressly political, just to provide a tentative statement about the politics of Collingwood’s history.
So, then, what precisely is political in The Idea Of History? I would like to focus on one of Collingwood’s claims from The Idea Of History. That “the revolutionary can only regard his revolution as a progress in so far as he is also an historian, genuinely re-enacting in his own historical thought the life he nevertheless rejects” (326). This statement is quite dense and rests on several prior claims. Namely, 1. that progress is the replacement of the good by the better, and 2. that history is only the re-enactment (simulation) of past thoughts in the mind of the historian. “In order to conceive a change as progress,...” Collingwood asserts, “ the person who has made it must think of what he has abolished as good, and good in certain definite ways. This he can only do on condition of his knowing what the old way of life was like, that is, having historical knowledge of his society’s past while he is living in the present he is creating: for historical knowledge is simply the re-enactment of past experiences in the mind of the present thinker. Only thus can the two ways of life be held in the same mind for a comparison of their merits, so that a person choosing one and rejecting the other can know what he has gained and what he has lost, and decide that he has chosen the better” (Ibid.). There is a lot going on here. But I believe these claims about the relationship between historical knowledge and political action is essentially an epistemological argument.
For Collingwood history is the science of mind and the epistemological foundation of all knowledge. The supreme historical question is thus an epistemological one. It is, ‘How do I have knowledge of a mind?’ For historical study is simultaneously about gaining access to other mind’s while learning about your own mind. He believed that without historical knowledge we will be unable to know ourselves: “Men ill supplied with historical knowledge,” he claims, “cannot tell whether a habit they possess was imposed upon them lately by a divine autocrat or long ago by a divine ancestor in whom the wisdom of the tribe was incarnate” (An Essay On Metaphysics, 271). Thus man requires some historical knowledge of himself, because without this self-knowledge he would have no firm epistemological foundation. Collingwood says that “his knowledge of other things is imperfect: for to know something without knowing that one knows it is only a half-knowing, and to know that one knows is to know oneself” (TIOH, 205). Thus we can see, roughly, how history must be the epistemological anchor of all knowledge. No knowledge without self-knowledge. No self-knowledge without historical knowledge. Therefore all knowledge depends on historical knowledge. Simple enough. But how is this historical-self-knowledge achieved? By what methods or means is the mind able to understand past minds?
The answer to this question is to be found in Collingwood’s notion of re-enactment. Collingwood believed that historical knowledge can only be achieved if a historian is able to re-think past thoughts in his own mind, or, as Collingwood puts it: “the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind” (Ibid., 282). Simply put, re-enactment is a process of using evidence to recreate, rethink, a thought that someone expressed in the past. We ‘encapsulate’ their past thoughts in the present context of our own mind. But why would this process of re-enacting other people’s thoughts result in an understanding of ourselves? Collingwood answers this question very clearly: "It thus may be said that historical inquiry revels to the historian the powers of his own mind. Since all he can know historically is thoughts that he can re-think for himself, the fact of his coming to know them shows him that his mind is able (or by the very effort of studying them has become able) to think in these ways. And conversely, whenever he finds certain historical matters unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind; he has discovered that there are certain ways in which he is not, or no longer, or not yet, able to think" (Ibid., my emphasis, 218). I would like to express this same idea using some of my own language.
I think that I can identify two distinct moments in the re-enactment of thought that would contribute to self-knowledge in two different ways. I express them in two phrases, ‘the collision of encapsulated thought’ and ‘the diffusion of encapsulated minds’. The collision of of thought refers to the moment when a new thought jars you with its capacity to challenge the way you think. When you successfully re-enact another person’s thoughts and encapsulate them in your own mind, the encapsulated mind does not just gently appear in your mind, it crashes into the sea of your thoughts, creating waves and ripples. Some thoughts are commonplace or less jarring and create tiny little ripples, hardly even noticeable sometimes. But other thoughts have a heaviness that can revolutionize your thinking and living. A collision of thought like that can force you to learn something very serious about the way you think. A collision like that forces you to discover the limits of your capacity for thinking and empathizing. This collision of thought is the first way that re-enactment can provide you with self-knowledge.
The second way that re-enactment could lead to self-knowledge is this idea of the diffusion of encapsulated minds. The successful encapsulation of someone’s thought is a conscious and controlled process. You manage to use consciousness and your imagination to form another person’s thoughts into a firm object in your mind. It feels appropriate to refer to it as an orb of sorts, a physical capsule created by consciousness that keeps a persons thought distinct in the sea of your thoughts. But when consciousness ceases to maintain that firm capsule that mind does not simply disappear. It leaves a residue in your mind that mingles into the sea of thought. It is as if another person’s thoughts arrive encapsulated in our mind from elsewhere, they crash into the sea of thought and create the waves they do. But after arriving their thought leaks out of the capsule and into the pool of our mind. Consciousness is the stuff that brings these encapsulated minds into the sea of our thought, but forms of consciousness always decay, inevitably diffusing these encapsulated minds into our own. This is much like Nicholas Carr’s claim that when we learn other people’s ideas they mingle in our memory and create a unique form of thought that is your own. Seeing as how Collingwood declares all reading to be a matter of re-enactment, it is safe to say that Carr’s argument about memory can be assimilated into my description of re-enactment. The process he describes, too, can be explained in terms of re-enactment, and the collision and diffusion of minds. The process of re-enactment, therefore, can lead to self-knowledge both in that it can shock us into thinking new ways thus exposing our limitations, it forces minds to collide, and in that those minds then diffuse into our own, giving us new material with which to form our own thinking, thus coming to know ourselves by creating ourselves.
To these we must add Collingwood’s claim that re-enactment is the best way to go about making political decisions. He claims that only through re-enactment can a revolutionary be sure they were truly bringing about progress: “Only thus can the two ways of life be held in the same mind for a comparison of their merits, so that a person choosing one and rejecting the other can know what he has gained and what he has lost, and decide that he has chosen the better” (326, my emphasis). Forgive the repeated quotation, but it’s a strong one. The political implications of historical thinking (re-enactment) thus become clear if we highlight these three ways it affects the mind. It forces people to come to terms with the limitations of their own thinking through collisions of thought, it gives people enriched minds through the diffusion of other minds into their own, and it gives us a powerful way to make comparisons, not only in large political situations, but in every day social situations. I will venture to say that both populations and politicians should to be willing to engage in these effects of re-enactment. If we want to bring about progress or change things we need to be open to the colliding with, diffusing, and comparing of minds. We need that sort of historical-self knowledge. ‘Revolutionaries ought to be historians’. What an interesting thing for Collingwood to say.
These are the only political implications of Collingwood’s historical work that I want to explore. I need to read a few essays on it, I need to read The Principles Of History. I know, for example, Collingwood believes that Duty is the highest form of practical reason, and that its theoretical counterpart, that is, the highest form of theoretical reason, is history. Duty, Collingwood believed, was the proper foundation for morality. Historical thinking, therefore, is somehow the proper basis of morality or something. I’m not sure how this works. But, as you can see, there are plenty of things political about Collingwood’s historical thinking. I’m just not there yet with him.
The last book left in this survey is The New Leviathan. There is much to say about its political implications because it is Collingwood’s most sustained effort to write on political issues. One of the most important questions to ask, however, is about the relationship between TNL and TIOH. In particular, I would like to explore three elements of TNL: 1. Collingwood’s claims that duty is the highest form of practical thinking, and that historical thinking is its theoretical counterpart (that is, the highest form of theoretical reason); 2. The relationship between his work on the problem of civilization and his idea of historical re-enactment; 3. Finally, the possibility that TNL implies the need for a historical-philosophical pedagogy. These are the main three things that I would like to distill out of The New Leviathan for the purposes of this larger project.
Notes and quotes:
“In the interests of science it is absolutely necessary that the work of metaphysics should be done: done not in the sense of being carried to completion, for it is a work which in the nature of it can never be completely, but done as required, piece by piece, when the need arises” (84-85).
92
Essay on metaphysics quotes
“And has there been a tendency of late years to become impatient with the work of politically educating an entire people; to choose leaders not for their intellectual powers but for their ability to excite mass-emotions; to induce in followers not an ability to think about political problems, but certain emotions which in persons untrained to think will explode into action with no questions asked as to where such action will lead; and to suppress discussion and information in favour of what is called propaganda, that is, statements made not because they are true but because they generate these emotions or spark them into action?” (EOM, 139). ‘To induce in followers not an ability to think about political problems’. This has a clear connection to reenactment/simulation. Collingwood never lived to pull out the implications of reenactment, the political nature of it is here in this passage.
IV.4.1
What I really want to do here is to apply the conclusions of Part III.3 to an analysis of individual minds. In particular, Scarry’s work on how habit is a necessary part of good decision making. So it will be Scarry as a corroboration of politics. We should also discuss more macro issues like common culture, the collapse of magic, the mass corruption of consciousness, etc.. SO, there should be two parts, one having to do with those macro issues, and one about individual political decision making as an aesthetic process.
For the section on Habit: In a society that seeks only truth and orderly thinking, “Education would be predominantly a method for inducing habits of orderly and systematic thinking” (Essay on Metaphysics,134).
IV.4.2
17. Art As A Source Of Common Culture and Politics
“Now, in so far as the activity of expression creates a deposit of habits in the agent, and of by-products in his world, these habits and these by-products become things utilizable by himself and others for ulterior ends” (275).
“Words in their entirety are coming to resemble the formulae which used to be reserved for greeting and leave-taking.... Spontaneity and objectivity in discussing matters are disappearing even in the most intimate circle, just as in politics debate has long since been supplanted by the assertion of power. Speaking takes on a malevolent set of gestures that bode no good” (Adorno, 90) - Fits here because the economic system is our source of common culture and it structures how we talk to people. Art could maybe do that for others.
“We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society, that the principal work of art which one has to take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence” (Foucault Reader, 362).
“Words in their entirety are coming to resemble the formulae which used to be reserved for greeting and leave-taking.... Spontaneity and objectivity in discussing matters are disappearing even in the most intimate circle, just as in politics debate has long since been supplanted by the assertion of power.
Speaking takes on a malevolent set of gestures that bode no good” (Adorno, 90) - My language is politically conditioned in that it is conditioned by the economic system and stuff. But that doesn’t mean that changing it is political
10. Zizek And Foucault On The Politics Of Language And Habit
- The issue of habit in general has to be brought up here, the political implications of habit, the violent (and linguistic? categorical?) destruction of the self that has to accompany political and personal change. I want to use both Zizek and Foucault to talk about habit. With Zizek we see that habit is a politicized thing because it is the fundament of ideology. So does Foucault’s attempts to change habit constitute something political? This seems like an allusion to what we will discuss once again in IV.3. Need to deal with Hegel as a reference. Mainly prepare for IV.3 here, allude to it.
- Zizek says that all language is violent. That language creates habits. That habits are the foundation of ourselves, our identities, and our societies. He also says that people don’t want to change their habits because they are changing themselves. This is so Zen and so war. We need to change ourselves so that we can change our society. We need to destroy ourselves so that we can enact social change.
- Habit as ‘depersonalized’ willing - “And the same goes for my emotions: their display is not purely natural or spontaneous, we learn to cry or laugh at appropriate moments (recall how, for the Japanese, laughter functions in a different way than for us in the West: a smile can also be a sign of embarrassment and shame). The external mechanization of emotions from the ancient Tibetan praying wheel which prays for me to today’s "canned laughter" where the TV set laughs for me, turning my emotional display quite literally into a mechanic display of the machine) is thus based in the fact that emotional displays, including the most "sincere" ones, are already in themselves "mechanized." - However, the highest level (and, already, self-sublation) of a habit is language as the medium of thought – in it, the couple of possession and withdrawal is brought to extreme. The point is not only that, in order to "fluently" speak a language, we have to master its rules mechanically, without thinking about it; much more radically, the co-dependence of insight and blindness determines the very act of understanding: when I hear a word, not only do I immediately abstract from its sound and "see through it" to its meaning (recall the weird experience of becoming aware of the non-transparent vocal stuff of a word – it appears as intrusive and obscene…), but I have to do it if I am to experience meaning.”
“This means that habit also complicates the relationship between possibility and actuality: habit is stricto sensu the actuality of a possibility.”
“The conclusion is thus clear, almost Sartrean: man does not have a permanent substance or universal essence; he is in his very core a man of habits, a being whose identity is formed through the elevation of contingent external accidents/encounters into an internal(ized) universal habit.” Neuroplasticity, also.
From Madness and Habit In German Idealism.
- This is like on page 112 when he talks about generalizing vs. individualizing
“‘the artist’s powers can be displayed only when he uses them upon a subject that is worthy of them’.... It regards the subject as an integral element in the work of art; it holds that, in order to appreciate any given work of art, one must be interested in its subject for its own sake, as well as in the artist’s handling of it” (71) I suppose in this section what I’m really after is the use of art for cultural change, which happens through subversion. The question is of metaphors of war.
We need a section called (or just addressing) the violence of art.
“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order” (Adorno, 222).
“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime” (Adorno, 111).
18.Fighting The Collapse of Magic: Reinvigorating Ritual and Small Talk
“Ours is an age when people pride themselves on having abolished magic and pretend that they have no superstitions. But they have as many as ever. The difference is that they have lost the art, which must always be a magical art, of conquering them. So it is a special characteristic of modern European civilization that metaphysics is habitually frowned upon and the existence of absolute presuppositions denied. This habit is neurotic” (Essay On Metaphysics, 46).
“Magic is a representation where the emotion evoked is an emotion valued on account of its function in practical life, evoked in order that it may discharge that function, and fed by the generative or focusing magical activity into the practical life that needs it. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotion current that drives it. Hence magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for a lack of interest in its own maintenance” (69). The question is what constitutes a useful means of improving our social existence. I believe we have relied too much on the technical theory of life and the technical theory of society.
“I have insisted that magic is a thing which every community must have; and in a civilization that is rotten with amusement, the more magic we produce the better. If we were talking about the moral regeneration of our world, I should urge the deliberate creation of a system of magic, using as its vehicles such things as the theatre and the profession of letters, as one indispensable kind of means to that end” (278).
“A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for a lack of interest in its own maintenance” (69). The question is what constitutes a useful means of improving our social existence. I believe we have relied too much on the technical theory of life and the technical theory of society.
In this section we need to draw on Zizek’s analysis of politeness in chapter 1 of IDOLC - he explains how the collapse of politeness and ritual leads to things like torture.
19. Gandhi As Politico-Existential Aesthetician
20. Zen, Simulation Theory, and Intellectual Insurrection: Battling the ‘Corruption of Consciousness’
“The effect of this experience on the feelings themselves is to make them less violent.... their violence, or power of determining our actions (including our thoughts, so far as we can be said to think at this primitive stage), is abated. They are no longer like storms or earthquakes, devastating our life. They become domesticated; real experiences still, and experiences of the same kind as before; but fitted into the fabric of our life instead of proceeding on their own way regardless of its structure.... in asserting ourselves as against our feelings we have asserted in principle a structure of some kind, though as yet an indeterminate one. In becoming aware of myself I do not yet know at al what I am; but I do know that I am something to which this feeling belongs, not something belonging to it” (209). This also belongs in the section on insurgency and mindfulness.
When we begin attending to a feeling and then choose to ignore it we are dealing with the corruption of consciousness. “I call this the ‘corruption’ of consciousness; because consciousness permits itself to be bribed or corrupted in the discharge of its function, being distracted from a formidable task towards an
easier one. So far from being a bare possibility, it is an extremely common fact” (217).
These feelings that we find difficult to ignore, the feelings that corrupt our consciousness are not ignored, they are disowned. “Very soon we learn to bolster up this self-deceit by attributing the disowned experience to other people. Coming down to breakfast out of temper, but refusing to allow that the ill humor so evident in the atmosphere is our own, we are distressed to find the whole family suffering agonies of crossness” (218).
“When consciousness is corrupted, imagination shares the corruption” (218). We need to write about egocentric simulations and simulations as the battle grounds. Just like in Foucault’s DnP.
Collingwood says that Spinoza’s problem with ethics was “the question how man, being ridden by feelings, can so master them that his life, from being a continuous passio, an undergoing of things, can become a continuous actio, or doing of things” His solution is that “As soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of a passion, it ceases to be a passion” (219). The task is to dominate your emotions.
“A man whose consciousness is corrupt has no mitigations, either within or without. So far as that corruption masters him, he is a lost soul, concerning whom hell is no fable. And whether or no the psycho-analysts have found the means to rescue him, or to save those in whom this evil has advanced less far, their attempt to do so is an enterprise that has already won a great place in the history of man’s warfare with the power of darkness” (221).
“his knowing of this new world is also the making of the new world which he is coming to know. The world he has come to know is a world consisting of language; a world where everything has the property of expressing emotion.... He is not god, but a finite mind still at a very elementary stage in the development of his powers. He has made it ‘out of’ what is presented to him in the still more elementary stage of purely psychical experience” (291).
Page 292 also has some stuff about creating the world.
21. Synthetic Experience and Creativity
“A fit of anger, passing away, leaves a fading trace of itself in our actual feeling, progressively swamped beneath feelings of other kinds, for an indeterminable length of time. So long as any such trace remains, attention may single it out and, by a similar process, reconstitute, the original feeling in the shape of an idea” (211). Empathy and traces. Synthetic traces would be valuable in real life.
“To sit in this way is to be Buddha himself, to be as the historical Buddha” (160). Zazen as synthetic exp of Buddha.
22. Revolution And Synthetic Experience: Collingwood On Progress In History
23. Art As A Source Of New Status Function Declarations
24. Collingwood, Philosophy as Art, and the Reinvigoration of Moral Politics Through Moral Philosophy
“Whatever you do, it should be an expression of the same deep activity” (Suzuki, 50). - This is what we should use when we first define the content of action. Then we can go into the stuff about creating habits to talk about the modification of the content of our action.
“An activity in ourselves which produces a change in us but none in our environment we call theoretical; one which produces a change in our environment but none in ourselves we call practical” (289). Art is both theoretical and practical. When we have a moral problem we are dealing with something both practical and theoretical. “But if I solve this difficulty the result will not be a change in myself only. It will involve changes in my environment too; for out of the new character which I shall acquire there will flow actions which will certain to some extent alter my world. Hence morality belongs to a region of experience which is neither theoretical nor practical, but both at once” (289-90). sounds like modifying the content of action for the future to me. Also sounds ‘political.’
25. Art As A Source Of Mindfulness
26. The Artist As Modifying The Capital Of The Economy Of The Imagination
27. Copyright Law And Creativity: David Shields And Economic Analysis Of Art
In order for artists to be supported they often find they must renounce “his calling and uses the art which he has acquired in a way which negates its fundamental nature, by turning journalist or advertisement artist or the like a degradation far more frightful than the prostitution or enslavement of the mere body” (34).
“A new code of artistic morality grew up in the nineteenth century, according to which plagiarism was a crime. I will not ask how much that had to do, whether as cause or as effect, with the artistic barrenness and mediocrity of the age (though it is obvious, I think, that a man who can be annoyed with another for stealing his ideas must be pretty poor in ideas, as well as much less concerned for the intrinsic value of what ideas he has than for his own reputation); I will only say that this fooling about personal property must cease. Let painters and writers and musicians steal with both hands whatever they can use, wherever they can find it” (320).
“The aesthetic activity is an activity of thought in the form of consciousness, converting into imagination an experience which, apart from being so converted, is sensuous. This activity is a corporate activity belonging not to any one human being but to a community. It is performed not only by the man whom we individualistically call the artist, but partly by all the other artists of whom we speak as ‘influencing’ him, where we really mean collaborating with him” (324).
“we must get rid of the conception of artistic ownership.... the reason why our artists are in such a poor way is because of that very individuals which these laws enforce.... If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting” (325).
“If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert him” (326).
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