Just Writing.

Only boredom has prompted this writing.

I don't know what to do with myself right now. I'm going out in a little bit. But not yet.

Today was an amazing day at work.

Amazing because I'm still amazed by the way that every day is different, the way that every person always has something new for me, the way that I continue to learn about people and to appreciate them more.

There are many people I work with. Tonight I worked with two of my favorites. They were excellent.

They are both lively, thoughtful, genuine people.

But in different ways.

W and G. Great working with you tonight.

I can't tell you guys I'm writing about you. I can't direct a piece of writing towards you.

But that is the depth I feel talking with you. Tonight. Other nights.

I feel there are these moments where we drift back and forth from being emotional, being silly, and everything in between.

So much respect for that kind of feeling.

Finding depth in laughter. Because we laugh about things that are hard. We talk about things that are very real and very confusing. And then we laugh.

I often have to distract myself with laughter.

I can't just face things straight on.

These days I really don't want to face things straight on.

I'm not very mature yet.

I'm not yet mature enough to do what I need to do.

But I still marvel at my life.

Rilke couldn't have been more right when he said "If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it, blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place" (Letters to a Young Poet, 8). This statement has limits, of course. But still, I think the point is a powerful one: there is so much going on around us, so much depth in ourselves and in the people around us. I want to appreciate everything in its richness. I don't want to be overrun by drudgery. I don't want to be numbed by routine.

I want to be a poet.

I want to be a creator.

Chris Hedges.

I'm super pumped because I'm going to go see Chris Hedges speak on Friday at Seattle's Town Hall.

I love Town Hall. They frequently have very smart people speaking and you can see them for only $5. Also, I used to work for the company that co-hosts events. This means that I can sometimes get my name put on a list, and I can get into the event for free.

Huzzah for networking!

Indeed, this is the way that I am able to get into the Hedges talk. It sold out! But I still get to go! And I get to bring a family member!

That's right! A PLUS ONE! WIMMIE WAM WOZZLE!

I was deeply effected by both of Hedges' books that I read, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and Empire of Illusion.

Both excellent books.

Excellent not so much for their erudition (though he is clearly well read), but for the spirit that animates them. Hedges sets the pages ablaze. Such strength in his writing. Such fire in his voice.

I shouldn't make it sound too dramatic.

But I just want to communicate the force with which those books struck me. I am very grateful to have encountered them. His writing is both intellectually powerful and emotionally moving. I dig it.

I very much look forward to seeing him speak on the issue of poverty in America.

Thanks for the French Press

I love a good French press!

I love love love a good cup of coffee!

French pressed or otherwise!

WHOOOOOO!

But this morning I am particularly thankful for a french press that was given to me as a gift by my now Hawaiian friend.

It is an excellent press, J-dawg.

I have just finished brewing some excellent Ethiopian in it. Tastes like blueberries yo. Blueberries.

Soon it will be cool enough for me to sip it.

It is nice that I can brew this excellent cup of coffee and be reminded of a friend at the same time.

YOLO

YOLO (You Only Live Once) has become a pretty popular internet meme. I've enjoyed seeing all the different ways that people have rendered this acronym. Often very funny. Sometimes even insightful or enlivening. 

I have, however, just encountered the first instance of an 'anti-YOLO' meme. I'm not sure what to make of it. The meme itself is a bit silly. I don't think that this really points to the true meaning of the YOLO thing. But at the same time the YOLO thing, the attitude that it expresses, is a bit problematic. 

I'm not sure how much I want to say right now. I'm tired.

I was at Top Pot downtown today and it was the Pride parade. So things were a bit nuts. Just constant lines constant work. But it was good because I did get to work the espresso bar for most of the time. Madness.

The phrase YOLO, I think, is about having a certain attitude towards decisions that comes from one's awareness of mortality. I know that I am only going to live once, that I will die and I will not be reincarnated or live in after-life. Therefore the decisions that I make in my life ought to be bold, they ought to be daring, because death will ultimately obliterate me and any trace of my embarrassment, shame, fear, or any of those other temporary mental processes that often discourage me from making a decision that I know, somewhere in me, I want to make.

Steve Jobs, interestingly, has a very poignant way of putting this whole mess: 
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ... Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Very odd, indeed.

But all of this YOLO business is all up in this quotation. The awareness of mortality, the imperative to follow one's heart, the insistence on there being nothing to lose. 

All of that stuff is great. I have personally tried to use death as an impetus for action and appreciation. So, YOLO: I understand it and I identify with it. 

But I also have a problem with it.

The thing I'm still working hardest on is working on a conception of historical morality. I know one of its major hallmarks will be the commitment to working within the customs and mores of my historical era. I am bound to use the words, walk the streets, work the jobs, and jump through the institutional hoops that are all unique to my age. 

Recognizing these fundamental elements of life as historical can be a painful process. Everything I love and do and interact with is a passing trend of history. None of it has this universality. It has only a historical flow. This recognition has led some folks to conceptualize morality as a rejection of history and tradition, and instead making a radical break that somehow launches a new kind of path. And of course this has to happen one way or another, new things must always happen, new decisions must always be made, and we should be active in the creation of our own history.

But I don't think that the best way to go about creating our own future-history is to reject our actual, concrete history. Because our existence can only be historical, we can only live if we are willing to accept that the most important elements of our lives, including our 'self', are riding on a historical wave, forever changing, never to be still and never to stay the same.

My claim is that the best way to go about creating our own historical life, the best way to be free, is to come to terms with ourselves as historically constituted beings, ones incapable of living in any world other than the historical one in which we find ourselves. Moreover, I believe that this type of commitment to historical living, binding oneself to the  habits and traditions of one's time, is also the best way to go about creating something new. 

This has to do with some ideas about repetition, culture, and newness. All culture, I have begun to think, is a form of repetition. Everything we do, every word we use, is something that we have seen or heard someone else do and that we are repeating. But every time we repeat we never repeat it quite 'right'. Something is always a little different. Something always changes.

This means that I want to use repetition as an to approach decision making and newness in life. I want to go about creating myself as something new by repeating the people or ideas that are most appealing. 

I'm not sure what this all means.

But it definitely means that part of me is hostile to the YOLO sentiment because I think it encourages the idea that freedom is achieved through a radical break with habits or traditions, and is thus tacitly anti-historical. And there is definitely something to be said about freedom and breaking habits. There is something in all of this stuff.

But at the same time we do owe something to our history. We have a unique duty to our families, to our friends, and to our communities, that can't be fully explained by rational thinking. There is an importance to these customs, these rituals, these ways of living that we cannot reject. 

Our history is the only water through which we can swim, the only medium through we can hope to understand ourselves and create something new.

A Breakthrough

Of sorts.

Since I completed an essay in February I've been brewing on some other major stuff that I can't get my head around.

These things takes time.

And I'm so young.

My thinking will (hopefully) have so many more years to develop.

I've been working on the idea of historical morality. I'm trying to ask, "Why is it that certain thinkers insist that cultivating the habit of historical thinking will also produce the habit of moral thinking?"

Because this is what my boy Collingwood says.

He says that if we really truly understand what historical thought is all about then historical morality should be easy for us to see.

I am now starting to understand that what Collingwood intended to explicate in The Principles of History was converted into The New Leviathan. That is to say, if I want to know what Collingwood meant in his outline for The Principles of History, then I need to think about The New Leviathan. I have been trying to think about it for the last six months or so. It is a seriously challenging book.

I'm not yet sure how it fits into his thinking as a whole.

The minor but important breakthrough I've made has to do with the relationship between moral thought and narrative.

MacIntyre, Collingwood, Gaddis, others, insist that human action only becomes intelligible when told as a story, when placed in a narrative that renders it understandable. No time for demonstration of this point. If it does't immediately make sense to you and you care then check out Gaddis or something.

If the understanding of human action depends on narrative, and if moral thought depends on our capacity to explain and think of behavior in certain ways, then the cultivation of a moral attitude might hinge on our ability to construct more forgiving or compassionate narratives.

I have been struggling to place the issue of narrative in my thinking about historical morality.

But this makes sense to me.

It is a starting point, at least.

I can see now that aesthetic/historical education are morally valuable in that they train the imagination to be capable of constructing different types of narratives, thus occupying different moral positions.

Roger Smith is very concerned with narrative and self-creation.

I, too, am concerned with this issue.

I'm still not sure how to resolve that relationship, or even state it as a problem.

But I think that clarifying this relationship between morality and capacity for narrative explanation is a step in the right direction.

Hmph!

We shall see!

Personal Stuff.

Yo.

Pretty soon I'm gonna be dropping some real talk on this blog.

I got ten pages of writing sitting in a word document and one of these days I'm gonna go BOOM!

There it is.

In your face.

It is a memoir of sorts, but almost an essay.

I'm writing a bit like David Shields does in The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead.

Trying to blend memoir, philosophical reflection and personal reflection.

I'm excited.

A very dramatic bit of writing, of course.

All kinds of hyperbole and exaggeration and stuff.

But I'm gonna continue to work on it today. I'm anticipating twenty pages when finished.

I've never written anything quite like it.

Tautology.

This is what I have to do because it is what I have to do.

Ain't nothing to it but to do it.

Both infinitely wise phrases.

I am slowly working on understanding the importance of tautological thought.

I doubt it is of real significance.

But these are fun examples that point to something larger.

So maybe it has real significance. I'm not sure.

I Have Never Thought About Your Toes.

And I bet you have never thought about mine.

Unless you've seen them.

Or we talked about them.

I messed up my pinky toe real bad. I was playing frisbee and with my usual reckless style I slammed my foot into my friends heel. We were running after the disc, he had position, but I refused to give it up. He said to me, "you gotta give it up. I had position."

Truth.

But I run recklessly, son!

I've got to watch out for my body. I shouldn't just let myself go as hard as I do.

Last summer I hurt my ankle right as summer began, leaving me unable to run for two of the months of the summer. And the Seattle summer can be so short! How unfortunate.

Oh well.

I don't think that this will take a long time to heal. Although I am concerned because I have a strange red bruise. Oh well.

I took off my socks a minute ago and looked at it. I imagined myself going to work tomorrow. I thought about telling people about this weird redness on my injury. Like, deep, deep redness. It immediately struck me that it would be so strange to take my shoes and socks off at work. I would be sitting in the office. My manager would be there. Maybe another coworker. I would take my sock off and be like oh man.

The office air would feel so foreign to the skin of my foot. I would assure my manager that I was off the clock, so that I wouldn't be causing a health risk. Because feet are gross, of course. If I were to touch my foot I would have to wash my hands before I served someone food. Washington has very strict food service laws, after all.

The foot does not belong in the coffee shop. It belongs in the shoe that is in the coffee shop.

Then I started thinking about all my coworkers feet.

How silly feet are. And how silly it would be to see all my coworkers feet. All their toes, just like mine. Immediately I think of all of us on the beach. Because bare feet belong in the sand. At least in contact with the planet. Grass, dirt, sand, the rest of it.

Interestingly, when I hurt my foot I was playing frisbee barefoot on astroturf. Not quite Earthy material. But still very nice on the feet.

Until you slam your pinky toe into someone's heel at full speed.

Friendship and Loss

Ladies and gentlemen, Seattle lost an excellent person this morning.

He boarded a jet plane and he flew across the ocean.

Damn you, J-dawg.

Seattle lost a gentleman, and I lost a (emotionally and geographically) close friend.

A particular type of friend, though.

Not just any friend. But then again no friend is just any friend. All my friends are friends of particular kinds. I have my drinking friends, my talking friends, my catch-up-over-lunch friends, my work friends, so on.

But this type of friend that I've lost is of a special kind. For he was a philosophy-friend.

We willingly brought our minds together. We thought together. We read together. We talked and (drank) together.

I remember when I first realized that I may have found a new philosophy friend. I was reading Joan Bondurant's Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. We had been making small talk in our place of work. He asked me what I was reading. I told him.

His reply: "that seems like something I would read."

My thought: "Oh, really?"

Why oh why would you want to be reading about Gandhian political philosophy, stranger?

Slowly our conversations became longer. We started chatting more.

Then we decided to take the next step: a full fledged bro-date.

I suggested we meet at a place that had a bar, have some food and some drinks.

How funny that on that night the bar was full, so we ended up sitting at a table in this nice restaurant! A server and everything! He drank well whiskey on the rocks, I know I had a maritime red ale, and probably a few others. We ate food.

We talked about John Searle, about Zen, about other things.

I remember how tentatively my words came out of my mouth.

It can be hard to speak honestly when you encounter a new philosopher. I have to be much more careful with my words, because we have not yet worked out our terms.

When meeting a new philosophy friend I never casually use words like 'metaphysics,' 'post-modern' or 'nihilism' or this or that. Because I fear that my understandings of those words are different.

But that night we had fun. We talked. We would return to that same restaurant many times. Exchanging  ideas over drinks. Laughing at the sight of us in our nearly identical glasses. Laughing at our garbled use of words like becoming, being, and emergent property.

Lol. Reading Manuel DeLanda with someone will do that to a conversation.

Either way, this is my tribute to you, Jeremy.

I'll miss having you in this city with me.

But I know you wanted to get out for good reasons.

Onward and upward.

I promise to keep thinking and writing on here.

I know you intend to do the same.

I look forward to seeing the ways in which our thoughts diverge and converge.

Natural Science and the Anchoring Effect.

I'm currently reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I'm a quarter of the way through, and so far I think Kahneman has written a deceptively complex book. He is very capable of simplifying complex ideas.

I already feel like he is providing me with precise terms for discussing problems of minds, decision making, and the training of intuition and judgement.

Right now I'd like to employ Kahneman's concept of the anchoring effect. The anchoring effect refers to the idea that the framing of an issue effects the way that an answer is given, because the initial presentation of a question or idea serves as a reference point or anchor from which all answers are given.

If, for example, you were asked 'Was Gandhi more or less than 144 years old when he died?', then asked 'How old was Gandhi when he died?' The age 144 is obviously absurd, but the high number encourages one to guess that Gandhi died at an old age, maybe in his 80s or 90s. It feels harder to guess that Gandhi died in his 50s or 60s because the initial suggestion of 144 is the anchor point from which we are basing our guess.

The anchor effect is something that is frequently used in the context of negotiation. While negotiating a price, for example, you can purposefully underbid so that all the subsequent bids will be lower than they would have been otherwise. If I initially offer you 10$ for a pair of glasses, which I know to be worth $30, then the negotiations are more likely to end with a price closer to $15 or $20. But if my initial bid is $20 then we are much more likely to end up at $25 or even $30.

These are simple examples, but Kahneman is convinced, and I believe him, that the anchoring effect is very real. The initial framing of a problem or question undoubtedly influences subsequent answers by serving as the anchor from which all other answers are gauged.

But now I have a question: In what way is natural science anchored into our culture, our collective thinking? In what ways, and why, do we assume that the pursuits of the natural sciences are valuable in themselves?

I saw a comic that was making fun of the big bang, and in particular, of researchers looking into the big bang. I wish I could find it. But the basic idea was that even when we discover what caused the big bang we are going to end up pursuing the question of what came before the big bang. The comic concluded that natural science had essentially launched a line of investigation that would never be complete and that probably wouldn't produce any useful knowledge.

But none of us scoff at the idea of space travel or the continued attempts to understand the nature of the universe, these attempts to find a so-arrogantly-called 'theory of everything'.

Unfortunately, this 'theory-of-everything' would leave crime rates unchanged, would social and political problems untouched, and maybe even exacerbated.

I am a bit hostile towards the natural sciences, as you can tell.

I think that they unfairly dominate so much of our spending and thinking.

But we flinch and cringe when someone suggests, as John Gray has, that our scientific pursuits are morally bankrupt mutations of the Christian imperative for salvation. That is to say, that science has unwittingly inherited the Christian hope that all can be saved. Salvation is no longer to come from god, but from our power to dominate and manipulate the natural world.

Look at people like Ray Kurzweil, Mr. Technological-Immortality. He freaks me out. His refusal to accept death, to push onward into the natural sciences with the belief that we will someday be technological gods.

Why do the natural sciences loom so large in our view of the world? Why are we so epistemologically committed to the study of the natural world? Why do all of our answers about the nature of knowledge and study anchor themselves to the natural sciences?

This is one way that I think the anchoring effect is a valuable concept. It explains why it is so hard to vindicate forms of knowledge other than those of the natural sciences. I.e., it explains why the humanities and history have such a hard time vindicating themselves. Because we already have accepted that the natural sciences provide us with the best model of knowledge, and we use it as our anchor or starting point for all further reflection on knowledge.

This is a problem for me.

I'm in the business of justifying the humanities and history as the science of human affairs, the way in which we can learn to deal with the human world more skillfully. Because as Collingwood knew so long ago, "In dealing with their fellow men, I could see, men were still what they were in dealing with machines in the Middle Ages. Well-meaning babblers talked about the necessity for a change of heart. But the trouble was obviously in the head. What was needed was not more goodwill and human affection, but more understanding of human affairs and more knowledge of how to handle them" (An Autobiography, 92).

I fear that we are still in the same situation.

Our commitment to the natural sciences continues to impoverish our approach to the world of human affairs. We continue to ignore the value of history and the humanities.

I have to go to work now.

But the anchoring effect is an interesting way of analyzing our commitment to the natural sciences and our unwillingness to embrace historical, human knowledge.

On Struggin

We all strug through life.

It isn't always easy.

Emotions are wild and volatile.

Circumstances are unpredictable and confusing.

I break my mind over myself.

I strug.

I work.

Family, friends, acquaintances, customers, peripheral faces.

I see them all.

I often remember their names.

Even more often I remember their smiles.

Sometimes I marvel and love it all.

Sometimes it doesn't mean a god damn thing.

'How are you?' the rare customer asks and means.

I appreciate you.

I say 'I'm great'.

I say 'I'm okay'.

And I mean it.

Either way I mean it.

Sometimes I'm okay.

Sometimes I'm great.

Often I feel good about it.

But I just know that life isn't this one particular thing.

Life isn't a state.

It is a process.

It is an ebb and flow, not a beach.

Struggle isn't what it seems to be.

Struggin isn't what it seems to be.

Pain isn't what it seems to be.

Loneliness isn't what it seems to be.

A kind of action is never what it seems to be.

Why A Blog?

Why don't I just write in word documents or notebooks?

Why is it so important that I put my thoughts 'out there'?

Rilke reminded me why.

Mr. Kappus, the young poet to whom he was writing, sent him a poem.

Rilke, interestingly, decided to transcribe the poem, sending it to Mr. Kappus in his own handwriting.

"I have copied your sonnet...," he explains, "because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your most innermost being how very much it is your own...." (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 67).

My blog feels this way sometimes.

I deposit my thoughts here.

I express myself and confide into this funny little digital window.

Then I come back and I read it.

And I, too, rediscover my own thoughts.

I see them rendered in an external space, accessible to anyone, and suddenly I can imagine other people encountering my writing. Suddenly I can imagine reading my writing as if someone else had written it.

I could just write into a word document.

But it wouldn't be the same.

Thank you, Rilke, for making this clearer for me.

How remarkable to imagine Rilke transcribing someone's poem with the intention of making them aware of its novelty, its depths.

To rediscover your own thoughts in the handwriting of another.

To appreciate your own thoughts as if from the outside.

How odd it all is.

How excellent Rilke's letters are.

My Progress. I Share It With You.

This is the work I have finished on my latest essay on anti-regularian morality. It is titled, "Historical Morality, Historical Civilization, and The Science of Human Affairs: A Collingwoodian Model of Political Judgement and Education"


Perhaps a silly title. It might change.


But here is what I have so far.


This writing might also be silly and will likely be edited and changed. 


But here it is:


1. Introduction: Historical Morality and The Science of Human Affairs
2. The European Enlightenment and Modern Regularian Morality, and Nihilism

- Nature and Rules (feedback between practical and theoretical reason).

3. Anti-Regularian Morality 

- MacIntyre, Gray, Zen, Aesthetics (myself as well as Schiller and Spivak) Duty and transition to history

4. Historical Morality as Anti-Regularian Morality

5. Historical Morality and The Science of Human Affairs

- It appears as though the science of human affairs would be the method behind both historical morality and historical civilization

I. Introduction: Collingwood, Historical Morality, Historical Civilization, and The Science of Human Affairs

At the time of his death, Collingwood had made it clear that he intended his intellectual career to culminate with The Principles of History, which he “for 25 years at least, looked forward to writing as [his] chief work” (The Principles of History, 3n). In that book, which he unfortunately never completed, Collingwood hoped to bring about a rapprochement between history and philosophy, synthesizing them “in a new study transcending and incorporating both” (The New Leviathan, xxi). This synthesis of history and philosophy, moreover, was to be a union of theory and practice. It was a type of study that would provide both a foundation for morality and a method of (political) education. Collingwood called these things historical morality and historical civilization, respectively. 

These concepts of morality and civilization were the main thrusts of his argument about the importance historical thinking. This comes out most clearly in his note from September 2nd, 1939, ‘Scheme for a book: ‘The Principles of History’. It is worth quoting the note at length:

"The main idea [of book III] is that history is the negation of the traditional distinction between theory and practice. That distinction depends on taking, as our typical case of knowledge, the contemplation of nature, where the object is presupposed. In history the object is enacted and is therefore not an object at all. If this is worked out carefully, then should follow without difficulty a characterization of an historical morality and an historical civilization, contrasting with our ‘scientific’ one. Where ‘science’ = of or belonging to natural science. A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a[n] historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy), A[n] historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them." (The Principles of History, 246).

In this sketch for book III, the final, unwritten chapter, we see the main aspects of Collingwood’s philosophy of history. His thought is not merely a matter of methodology and the proper writing of history. It is about the development of a novel form of morality that will translate into a new type of civilization, a new type of historically minded political elite and citizenry.

Collingwood, however, never completed The Principles of History, and it isn’t clear how he would have developed these ideas. How precisely was a historical morality or a historical civilization to come about? What are the historical methods by which individuals could become such a thing? How is historical morality and the historical civilization to be embodied and expressed? How does one learn to embody and express such a thing? Because Collingwood did not live to complete his work, I feel that I must try to answer these questions for myself. In this essay I want to try and work out these ideas of historical morality and civilization by connecting them with Collingwood’s other work and other thinkers. In particular, I want to draw on his claim that history was ‘the science of human affairs’, that is, the method by which people “could learn to deal with human situations as skilfully as natural science had taught them to deal with situations in the world of Nature...” (An Autobiography, 115). I believe that this idea of history as the science of human affairs holds the key to understanding the possibility of a historical morality and civilization. For historical morality/civilization are both things that need to be learned, processes that need to be taught, and the science of human affairs is the method by which we can be taught to embrace historical morality/civilization. 

This is what this essay is all about. I want to analyze Collingwood’s writings on history and politics in order to elaborate the idea of a historical morality and a historical civilization. I’ll be paying special attention to the idea that history is the science of human affairs which leads to historical morality and civilization. The science of human affairs is the method in which the end of morality and civilization are contained. 

I am not pursuing Collingwood’s philosophy just for the fun of it, however. Rather, his thought serves as an antidote to the major problems in contemporary political and moral philosophy. For contemporary political and moral philosophy are hindered, above all, by there emphasis on the importance of rules and doctrine. Finding an anti-regularian morality, that is, one that finds its primary justification outside the realm of rules, is a major task for contemporary philosophy. Collingwood’s concept of historical morality, I will argue in this essay, is the strongest non-regularian philosophy yet developed.

So We Will Become

A happy ending.

Fire come and carry us.

Make us shine.

Tell us that you care for us.

Chariot.

You swing for us.

You think that you can carry all of us?

Because I don't need a happy ending.

Expansive solitude might be enough.

Minor protection and greeting might be enough.

Epistemological Idealism

I am often concerned with the distinction between idealism and materialism (or idealism and realism).

Idealism, in the way I understand and appreciate it, means that we take the mind and ideas to be our primary object of study.

Materialism, on the other hand, chooses to analyze the world as a form of matter. We pay less attention to thoughts and ideas and choose to explain things by reference to natural, material process.

Of course the mental world wouldn't exist without the material world. The brain clearly creates mental life, and mental process is thus in someways subservient to material process.

But I still think it is useful to make this distinction between the ideal and the material.

It would be a mistake, I believe, to try to explain everything in the human world with references to the material world.

History and process are not synonymous, no matter how much people like to think so. Collingwood believed that Alexander and Whited were making the mistake of conflating history and process in the early 20th century. And I believe that Manuel DeLanda and other's are making that same mistake today.

You cannot reduce my life to my brain, as much as you try.

Idealism is strongest as an epistemological claim.

That is, idealism is most useful when we ask ourselves, What can I know and how can I know it?

Because at the end of the day all we can have true knowledge of is the mind.

'But we understand all kinds of things about the natural world. Is it not fair to say that we have knowledge of natural laws and processes?' one might ask.

Yes, it is true, we have learned many things about the natural world.

But it is always a mind, subjectively confined, doing its own thing, that is capable of knowing those things about the world.

Thus if we do not know that we know, or how we know, then we cannot claim to have a full knowledge.

In other words, to have true knowledge we must have a knowledge of the mental faculties that allow us to know at all.

The conclusion is unavoidable: The only type of knowledge can be knowledge of mind. For knowledge of the natural world without knowledge of the fact that we are knowing is not true knowledge.

Thus Collingwood is able to argue in his essay 'Human Nature and Human History': "Without some knowledge of himself, 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. Self-knowledge is desirable and important to man, not only for its own sake, but as a condition without which no other knowledge can be critically justified and securely based" (The Idea of History, 205, my emphasis). Self-knowledge of mind, therefore, can be the only form of knowledge.

And how does one achieve self-knowledge of mind? Through history, Collingwood claims.

History, thus, for Collingwood, is the only form of true knowledge. Moreover, history is always ideal.

Idealism's true strength is therefore epistemological.

If we want to have a secure foundation for knowledge we must commit above all to knowing ourselves, our own minds.

It is all well and good to pursue knowledge of the material world, but only if we recognize that that knowledge is always built on a foundation of historical knowledge of mind.

This is in not meant to suggest that scientist's or other disciplines should drop what they are doing and become historians, or that historians are the only one's capable of having this kind of historical self-knowledge. This type of knowledge is open to all. It isn't as unusual as I might be making it sound.

I need to find more ordinary words to express all of this in.

I am just beginning Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

He is great with ordinary language.

I'll try to learn from him in both style and content.

Quickfire and Rilke

Moonface's 'Quickfire, I Tried' is the song of the year. I'm calling it now.

Especially because I just learned that the opening line to the song is a reference to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Which I read twice on my trip East. Once on the plane ride there. Once on the ride back.

Oh!

Oh my.

I find it hard to express the things it made me capable of expressing.

Collingwood says that we know an artist is expressing himself because he makes us express ourselves.

And my god Rilke expresses intense things and I feel like I expressed them right along with him.

I plan on doing some writing about it.

It fits in surprisingly well with a lot of my thinking about aesthetic/historical morality.