The Truth of Art, History, and Duty

For my friend Collingwood, art, history, and what he calls 'duty' all offer access to a form of truth.

The artist is one who is accessing the truth of his own heart by using his imagination to transform a difficult emotion into a clear and expressible 'idea'.  The artist is one who learns a truth about himself through the use of consciousness and expression.  It is through expression alone that the artist learns about himself.  Prior to an emotion being expressed, it existed in a different form.  It was dormant, existing at a lower state of consciousness, existing as a trace.  Through the act of expression, these traces are pulled to a higher level of consciousness, being transformed into something new in the process.  The truth of art is thus an emotional and mental truth becoming known through the transformative power of conscious expression.

Through art we learn something about ourselves we already knew, we just come to know it with greater clarity.

The historian, on the other hand, is one who accesses truth not only about himself, but about people in the past.  The historian, in some ways, is also an artist.  He, too, uses his imagination to elevate an impression into an idea.  He, too, uses consciousness to learn something through the process of expression.  What the historian wants to know, however, is not the truth of his own heart and mind, but the truth of other hearts and minds.  What the historian expresses then must be something external to himself.  The traces the historian seizes upon are not the traces of thought and feelings in his own heart, but the traces of thought and feeling left behind by people in the past.  This is why Collingwood claims that the historian is merely recreating past thought in his own mind; understanding past actions by rethinking the thoughts that made those actions possible and necessary.  The truth of history is thus aesthetic truth applied to the actions of the past; that is to say, in thinking historically we learn about the hearts and minds of past actors by becoming those minds, and expressing for ourselves what those minds expressed through their actions.

Through history we learn something about past actors that they already knew about themselves, that they expressed in their actions.  In thinking historically we are already thinking aesthetically: we are knowing something that is in a sense already known; we are simply knowing it with greater clarity.

We see this link in Collingwood's aesthetics and in his philosophy of history.  The unifying factors are how we use consciousness to understand the relationship between thought and action.  I think, however, that the concept of necessity also binds the two together.  What we feel, and thus what we learn about ourselves, is not something we asked for: it was simply something in our hearts, something necessary.  In history, too, we are not choosing what we learn about: we are learning about what happened.  And in learning about history, we see why it had to happen the way it did.

Now, these ideas become more difficult when we try and parse Collingwood's concept of duty.  The more I think about him the more I see that duty was what his thought was building towards.  It is duty that would bind his aesthetics, his philosophy of history, and his philosophical method, into a coherent moral concept.

To act dutifully, Collingwood would say, is to treat action in the present in the same way that we treat the actions of the past.  That is, as necessary.

The consciousness of duty is the consciousness that says 'This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do'.  Dutiful action needs no utilitarian analysis, and it needs no reference to a rule.  Dutiful action requires no explanation at all.  It is simply what must be done, it is what we owe ourselves.

We begin to act dutifully, he argues, when we appreciate ourselves as unique beings acting in a unique situation, having only one course of action open to us.  That course of action is the only one open to us because it is the one that emerges organically from the unity of our heart, mind, and circumstance.

That dutiful action is necessary, however, does not compromise the idea of freedom.  Freedom, Collingwood argues, is incorrectly identified with caprice.  Someone acting dutifully, doing what they know they have got to do, has arrived at a fully free and rational conclusion. "A man's duty on a given occasion," he argued, "is the act which for him is both possible and necessary: the act which at that moment character and circumstance combine to make it inevitable, if he has a free will, that he should freely will to do" (The New Leviathan, 17.8, his emphasis).  In acting dutifully, we already know what it is that we must do.  All that stands in our way are misconceptions about the nature of our character and our circumstances.

The truth of duty, then, just like art and history, is a truth that is already known.  To act dutifully we only need to know more clearly what it is that we already know.

Duty is some kind of form of consciousness in which we move forward into the future perceiving ourselves like historians perceive the people of the past, like artists perceive themselves.

Duty is some sort of aesthetic-historical morality.

How odd.

There is something in duty that lines up with my current attempt to write about the West's relationship with predictive knowledge, and Taleb's claim that we need to cultivate a nonpredictive view of the world.

This writing was an essay, an exploration to help me get there.

I'm pleased with what has happened here.