Explaining Me. Explaining You.

"I'm not a loser!" he screamed at the disinterested pedestrians. "God doesn't think I'm a loser! He created me!" he desperately asserted. "I'm a winner!" he exhaustedly claimed.

I was an interested pedestrian. His shouting was painful to listen to, and I was thankful that my comfortable life afforded me a distance from his experience. I don't want to know that pain. But I suspect that his pain was very real.

There is a continuity, I believe, between how we explain our own behavior and how we explain the behavior of others. When we habitually explain our own behavior in terms of reason and rational accomplishment, we tend to habitually explain other people's behavior in the same terms. Their failures become failures of reason, their successes accomplishments of rational work. As Collingwood said, we paint the outer world with the same palette with which we paint our inner world. We explain other people's behavior with the same terms we explain our own.

History, for Collingwood, is a story of necessity, of why things had to happen in the unique ways that they did.

There is something moral, he believed, in seeing our own lives in terms of necessity.

Not the necessity of determinism (whether divine or biological), but the necessity of self-knowledge, of the debt that we owe to our sense of reality.

For what he was after was a unified mind, one that could bring itself fully to a decision, to a moment, to a life.

The unified mind is one that knows what it must do. It ignores the clean logics, favoring instead the difficult decisions that preserve the rough edges of reality.

I will not remove my edges in favor of cleanliness.

I want the jaggedness.

I don't believe that man on the street was crazy, as I heard some folks giddily remark.

I believe that man on the street was an explicable being, acting as he needed to act.

It hurts me to believe so. Yet I know of no other adequate explanation.

It cannot simply be a failure of reason, a lack of intellect.

A late night rant like that can only be explained in terms of clusterfucks, that is, complex intersections of particular circumstances.

I want to explain him this way because I want to experience choice in this way. I want to see his expression as necessary because I so often feel my own expressions to be necessary.

I want to paint him in a loving light because I need to paint myself in a loving light.

Be careful how you explain human behavior.

You may end up as one of the monsters that surround you.