Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 20 December 2020

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The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

It has sometimes been said that what we feel is always something existing here and now, and limited in its existence to the place and time at which it is felt; whereas what we think is always something eternal, something having no special habitation of its own in space and time but existing everywhere and always.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

For every selfish creep, there are many who use business entrepreneurship to make the world better in some way. Also, selfishness can be a good thing. Adam Smith was right that the individual’s pursuit of self-interest can, when directed through a well-functioning market, hugely benefit broader society. Modern market economies are prodigiously creative; and that creativity, when pointed in the right direction, can be an extraordinary force for good.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The fourth principle that should be at the center of any positive vision of the future and worldview is a strong commitment to a shared identity that encompasses not just all of humanity, but in some respects all life on the planet too. This is the matter of who we see as “we.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Neuroscientists and lifelong meditators have long known that our minds slip from past to present to pondering the future, often without any obvious connection between reference points.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The important thing about positive feedbacks is that they are inherently unstable: they create self-reinforcing spirals of behavior, and can cause systems to become overextended or unbalanced.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Where the new way of knowing demanded that the observer remain detached, isolated from the observed, so as to capture it in complete ‘objectivity’, thereby making what was under observation an ‘object’ – denying it had any ‘inside’ – Goethe knew that such objectivity was impossible. Well before Werner Heisenberg, Goethe had grasped this central truth, that ‘the phenomenon is not detached from the observer, but intertwined and involved with him’.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“Socrates himself fell victim to the popular prejudice against philosophy.” There was worse. Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The Nazis distributed photographs of Hitler’s hands with the caption, “The Führer’s hands organize his speech.” Memorably, the philosopher Karl Jaspers asked his friend Martin Heidegger, Germany’s most influential philosopher, how he could support a philistine like Hitler. “Culture is of no importance,” Heidegger replied. “Just look at his marvelous hands.” The friendship did not last.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 15 September 2020

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

To be a monad, as opposed to an atom; to be a world in itself unconnected with an indefinite number of other such worlds, each windowless and ignorant of a whole whose parts they nevertheless are—this is to be a work of art.

The Presence of the Infinite

Steve McIntosh

Comparing Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion with the premises of the evolutionary method, we can detect the influence of goodness, beauty, and truth on his overall categorical scheme. Specifically, ethos is most closely connected to the virtue or goodness of the speaker; pathos employs style or beauty to move the audience; and logos is about the actual message content or truth of the communication itself.

How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci

Michael J. Gelb

Long-term studies by Dr. Martin Seligman and many others show that the critical determinant of success in business and life is resilience in the face of adversity. Awareness, deep contemplation, and a sense of humor are your best friends in attempting to learn from difficult experiences.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Burke’s horrified reaction to the killing of the French king and queen helps point us toward another, far fiercer right-wing critique of liberalism. That assault finds in liberalism a fatal overreliance on reason. It shares Burke’s sense of the chaos that could follow from the belief that society should be remade all at once on the basis of a big idea, with tradition and custom annihilated.

And for the finale:

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

[W]eapons and fighting belong in the realm of violence, and violence, as distinguished from power, is mute; violence begins where speech ends.

Collingwood on Magic, Art, Emotion & Utilitarian Civilization

Another quote today from Collingwood. Reading Collingwood reminds me of when I first read Hannah Arendt over 40 years ago--the feeling of reading by lightning--being struck with flashes of deep insight. Insights that alter the way that I perceive the world leap-up from the page. Having read a great deal more and pondered about how the world works over that period since first encountering Arendt, it shocks me a bit to have a such an experience again. But Collingwood, whom I've only begun to explore in the last few years, has provided a deeper, richer vein of insight than I had anticipated. The quote below comes from his essay "Magic." I have some sense of Collingwood's take on the subject from having read his Principles of Art (1938), but this particular essay digs deeply into the relation of magic and emotion and how our utilitarian civilization has attempted to suppress emotion and magic. To read and appreciate this, you must--at least temporarily--set aside your belief that magic is simply crude or distorted science. (Read Collingwood's full treatment of the topic in this book, and I suspect he'll permanently dissuade you from that misconception.) Also, for the curious, compare Collingwood's insights and argument with the work of Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary). I believe that they arrive at very similar conclusions. 

After a long and hideous experiment in suppressing [magic] by force, by burning witches, we came to see that burning witches means believing in them, and that their victims’ belief in them, what I have called emotional vulnerability, was the source of their power. So we changed our own attitude towards them: replaced persecution by ridicule, and gradually developed a whole system of education and social life based on the principle that magic was not a crime but a folly, whose success depended on a like folly in its victims.

            The hard-headed or thick-skinned or rationalistic attitude towards life, which our civilization invented in the seventeenth century, worked out in the eighteenth, and applied to all aspects of human affairs in the nineteenth, is the dominant factor in modern civilization. The best single-word name for it is utilitarianism. Our civilization prides itself in being sensible, rational, businesslike; and all these are the name for the same characteristic, namely the habit of justifying every act, every custom, every institution, by showing its utility. The doctrine that utility is the only kind of value that a thing can have is called utilitarianism; and it is obvious to anyone who reflects on the general character of our civilization that it is, characteristically, a utilitarian civilization. . . .

            This utilitarianism is more than a principle; it is an obsession. Whatever cannot be justified in this way our civilization tends on the whole to suppress. In general, it discountenances emotion and the expression of emotion; in particular it distrusts art and religion as things not altogether respectable. To live within the scheme of modern European-American civilization involves doing a certain violence to one’s emotional nature, treating emotion as a thing that must be repressed, a hostile force within us whose outbreaks are feared as destructive of civilized life. We have already had occasion to observe that our horror of savages is really a horror of something within ourselves which ‘the savage’ (that is, any civilization other than our own) symbolizes. We are now finding reason to think that this thing is emotion: for magic, which sums up all that we dislike in savage life, is beginning to reveal itself as the systematic and organized expression of emotion.

R.G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology (ed. David Boucher, Wendy James, & Phillip Smallwood), (2005; note, however, that the book is based on manuscripts written by Collingwood in the 1930s but not published—and largely forgotten—until long after his death).

The Principles of Art by R. G. Collingwood

"Art is the community's medicine for the corruption of consciousness"

I decided to read R.G. Collingwood's The Principles of Art (1938) to move toward rounding out my reading of Collingwood, having recently completed his Autobiography and his The New Leviathan (reviews forthcoming on both). I started The Principles of Art thinking I might learn about beauty in music, painting, or literature and some such. Having read a good deal of Collingwood by now, I should have known better. 

Collingwood is not a systems thinker in the way of many great philosophers, such as Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, to name but a few in the history of philosophy who have constructed philosophic edifices with a room for every major issue. No, Collingwood isn't a system builder, but his is a systematic thinker. When he approaches a topic, be it history (The Idea of History) or civic life (The New Leviathan) or art, he lays his foundations very deep, sufficient to support the heavy weight of argument that he places upon those foundations. For instance, in The Principles of Art, he considers the history of analyzing sensation (Hobbes to Kant) and the innate expressiveness possessed by every human being and how that innate expressiveness prompts the unique human capacity for language. 

In the first part of the book, Collingwood distinguishes art from craft, and he discusses the creations that we often refer to as art but that he excludes from the domain of art, such as amusement and magic. "Magic"? Yes, magic. But here we learn from Collingwood the archeologist and folklorist that magic isn't for the manipulation of creation by some mystical force (although some few may have believed this), but he describes it as an enactment of rituals to arouse certain emotional responses from those performing or observing the rituals. Magic uses a representation of reality to arouse emotions important for various undertakings. Collingwood's argument is an intriguing and persuasive understanding of what we would otherwise consider irrational and useless behavior. 

Collingwood's explication of magic is but one of the distinctions and definitions that Collingwood makes in the first section of the book. Early on we're introduced to the carefully drawn distinctions that he makes with his lucid prose. Indeed, I'd like to quiz Collingwood about his writing: Is it art? Or is it a craft? Is all rhetoric a craft driven by the end of exhortation? In any event, he writes engagingly (except when he drops in obscure Latin phrases), and his use of everyday examples and metaphors makes his prose not only readable but entertaining. 

But while the first part of the book is intriguing, it's only a prelude to deep dive found in Part II. In the second part of the book, he delves into issues of sensation, emotions, imagination, experience, attention, consciousness, thought, intellect--and then the foundations of language! He also discusses what he describes as "the corruption of consciousness" (shades of Aristotle, Sartre (who published later), and C. Terry Warner here). But we can follow Collingwood through this palace of complex terms because he constructs his arguments brick-by-brick on top of his deep foundations. He thereby creates a substantial work of . . . well, art, even if he would disagree with my use of the term. As readers of his work on history might not be surprised to learn, he concludes that art is found in the mind of the artist who seeks to express (not just arouse) emotions. All art--and not just literature--is an expression of emotions that uses a form of expression, a language, if you will. he argues that language grows out of expression and that art is a language of expression (whether words, music, painting, etc.). His contention strikes me as brilliant and insightful. 

In the third part of the book, Collingwood ties up some loose ends. He refers only rarely to actual works of art, although he does spend some time discussing and praising T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as an exemplary work from the time Collingwood was beginning his career as an academic philosopher. 

I could go on at some length about this book, as I've only given the briefest tour of Collingwood's creation that I think merits careful study. A student of philosophy tells me that Collingwood is considered outdated in his analysis of these issues. Perhaps so. I'm not in a position to judge because I'm not widely read in this field. But even if so, I contend that Collingwood has laid down too many fundamental and fortified arguments to ignore. If there are more persuasive thinkers writing about these issues, I want to read them. In the meantime, I'll appreciate and benefit from this Collingwood masterpiece.