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!