A Rough Outline

Hmmm, I like typing into blog space more than I like typing into a word document. Perhaps it has a feeling of finality, or it gives me a sense of directness. This writing is going somewhere in that it literally will be deposited into the void of the internet as soon as I click 'publish'. Word documents just sit there.

I've got some juices flowing on an essay on Bergson, Collingwood, and Clausewitz. I love dramatic and involved titles, naturally, so this one is tentatively titled 'Political Education in Bergson's Universe: Collingwood and Clausewitz on Preparing for the Unforeseeable'.

The thread that ties these three together is their insistence on the unpredictability of the world. They all reflected seriously on the shortcomings of predictive knowledge and the consequences of novelty and the unforeseeable. In fact, I dare say that prediction (or novelty) was the central problem that all three of these thinkers grappled with. Yet each of these thinkers explored the question of prediction in different domains. Clausewitz thought of war, Collingwood of history, and Bergson of the natural world. All three of them, naturally, were intelligent and diverse enough to reflect on all of these topics. Clausewitz spoke of history and natural science; Collingwood of natural science and war; and Bergson of history and war. They merely had different emphases.

One problem I'm trying to explore in this writing is Leo Strauss's claim that Bergson didn't produce a political philosophy. Apparently Bergson's final book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion did indeed elaborate a moral and political philosophy (centered on love, I hear). I will have to suss out that claim for myself at some point. In the meantime, however, I believe I can take some steps to understanding how Bergson's philosophy is at the very least compatible with things I already understand in moral and political philosophy.

Indeed, Collingwood and Clausewitz offer a moral and political philosophy that I believe is compatible with Bergson's thinking.

That's enough for now. These are the notes I took today:

"Bergson

- Generally outline the idea of the universe as pure becoming, pure novelty

- Identify the problem that our habitual modes of thought stabilize, do not think with movement, cannot often perceive the novelty around us

- Thought as the extension of our perceptions. Space and the manipulation of matter as default state of thinking. Spatial thinking and division as the normal mode of our thinking and what stands between us and the novelty of things. Mind and time as the realm of novelty more purely.

- The importance of engaging with mind and its unity with time and thus the importance of breaking with the habit of thinking spatially and learning to think in terms of time, learning to think in terms of unity, difference and not identity

- The method of developing this kind of consciousness of duration as the image, as purposeful perspective taking, images as prompting an intuition

What we will find in Collingwood and Clausewitz is Bergson’s task of intensifying inner life by plunging ourselves into the duration, the expansion of our sensory apparatus, put towards explicitly moral and political goals."