Thoughts for the Day: Friday 13 November 2020

 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[Quoting Dr. Donald Stuss is the vice president of research at the Rotman Research Institute, Toronto] “Our studies with the elderly show that the one thing you get with age is wisdom. You’ve got this affective responsiveness, this emotional experience. Somebody once asked me whether there was any benefit to aging, because there seems to be little that’s positive about the body’s physical deterioration. I answered by saying that there is something positive, but it’s more spiritual than physical. If your physical stuff gets peeled away, what do you have left? You have your self, your memories, and your history; and those are your spiritual parts. What is a midlife crisis—it’s preparation for aging. Some people say it’s an assessment of ‘What have I done?’ I would say it’s an assessment of ‘Who am I?’ You are forced, if you can meet the challenge of aging, to develop truly as a human being.”

The above gets personal at my age.

Sugar Nation

Jeff O'Connell

Here's the truth: Unless accompanied by a heavy carb load, fat shouldn't make you fat. Carbs are the perpetrator of our obesity and diabetes epidemics.

I believe that the above statement is likely accurate. Damn!

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

Science, the form of immediacy perception par excellence, can never answer this question. It can never tell us why a sunset or a string quartet is beautiful. This is no argument against science, merely an acknowledgment of its limits.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

Writing biography becomes another “impossible profession,” Janet Malcolm’s characterization of psychoanalysis. Impossible, because the person whom biography purports to be about is not altogether a person, as the case an analyst works with is the invisible psyche, brought in by a person. Biographers are ghost writers, even ghost busters, trying to seize the invisible ghosts in the visibilities of a life. A biography that sticks to the facts as closely as it can finds ever clearer traces of the invisible, those symptoms, serendipities, and intrusive inventions that have led, or pursued, the life the biography recounts.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

In order to talk about imagination we must use imagination and in order to talk about language we must use language. We can’t get behind them or stand apart from them, as detached observers, as we can with something in the physical world, but must understand them from ‘inside’. That, in fact, is what Barfield set out to do.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 22 September 2020

 

How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson

Thus, at times when it seems as if people of color or women will become equal to white men, oligarchs are able to court white male voters by insisting that universal equality will, in fact, reduce white men to subservience. Both slaveholders in the 1850s and Movement Conservatives a century later convinced white American men that equality for people of color and women would destroy their freedom.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

The business of history proper is to do with action, not natural event.

The Presence of the Infinite

Steve McIntosh

Postmodernists can be prone to narcissism, value relativism, a return to magical or mythical thinking, and intense forms of antimodernism that threaten to undermine the social foundations upon which postmodern culture itself ultimately depends.

History Man

Fred Inglis

There is never much point, whether in aesthetic or philosophic criticism, in arguing for coherent patterns of thought in the life’s work of a thinker or a poet. The history of all thought is broken up into new starts, blind alleys, reactionary retreats, fake advances, whether in one person’s work or in a collective movement. Yet in a life, as in an epoch, we search out form and direction. A biography is an attempt to place a life against a moral horizon, to frame it with its recognisable landmarks and pathways. One such framing was for Collingwood the long journey to make philosophy and history synonymous.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Pythagoras seems to have interposed numbers between the One and the Many, formulating for seemingly the first time the One-Few-Many which Empedocles would transpose into his theory of elements and Plato would expand into his Theory of Ideas. This doctrine is expressed in a range of ways which embody the transition from mythology to philosophy. There is a more imagistic mythological mode of expression, in which the idea of the Cosmic Person is used, perhaps under Orphic influence, and a more abstract structuralist mode, in which mathematics takes the place of myth.

And if the above wasn't deep enough for you, here's Hannah Arendt for the deeper dive, but I'm happy to report, quite succinct today:

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Popular language, as it expresses preliminary understanding, thus starts the process of true understanding.

Trump's Biographer: Who Will Answer the Call?

This article (below), which actually provoked some sympathy from me for Jeff Sessions (no mean feat), also provoked a larger reflection. Who will be Trump's biographer? Who will provide an account of this incoherent man and our times? 

Two names jump to mind, but I have to assume they're not available: Robert Caro and Garry Wills. Caro wrote highly acclaimed The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York about Trump's fellow New Yorker, and of course he's written the magnificent multi-volume work The Years of Lyndon Johnson. But he's still working on the final volume (go, Robert, go!), and he's not so young. Wills is the author of terrific books about Nixon, the Kennedys, and Reagan, as well as John Wayne, Washington, Lincoln, Madison, Henry Adams, and St. Augustine. His work always provides deep insights. His classics background and (presumably) a knowledge of Suetonius (The Lives of the Twelve Caesars) could prove a useful referent. But, Wills, too, is not so young and he's now got a book about the Koran due out this fall. Clearly, Trump, told well, would prove a HUGE undertaking. We need someone who can take up this mantle. 

So who? This is a call for nominees: who has the insight into contemporary politics, the ability to doggedly pursue the story of a man that won't provide a pleasant journey and almost certainly won't have a happy ending. This biographer will also need mastery of psychology without psychobabble and exceptional literary skill.

Nominations, please.

Trump Humiliated Jeff Sessions After Mueller Appointment

President Trump’s dressing down of his attorney general at a meeting in May was the beginning of a tumultuous summer for the two men.

NYTIMES.COM

Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith

Yes, he looks a bit like my dad, and he said this:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” “Is there no other way the world may live?”

I must admit it upfront: I like Ike. I’ve always liked Ike.

It might be in part because he was the first president I knew was in office. But more likely because my parents were “Eisenhower Republicans” (later referred to as “moderate Republicans,” an extinct species today). In fact, in the year before my birth, my prematurely bald father (only about 30 at the time) was outfitted with an Army uniform and played the role of Ike in a local Republican victory parade to celebrate Ike’s election in 1952. And, yes, my dad and Ike do bear a resemblance. Even over the intervening years when my political views have changed (for the better, of course), my admiration for Ike has held firm. After reading Smith’s fine biography, that opinion has been deepened, not dampened.

As historian Garry Wills put it, Ike was a political genius. “It is no mere accident that he remained, year after year, the most respected man in America.”

Before this I’d read the second volume of Stephen Ambrose’s two-volume biography, the second volume dealt with Ike’s presidency and post-presidency, and so this was a first extended exposure to Ike’s early life and military career. From this period, I learned from fascinating aspects of Ike’s life. For one, Ike had a reputation for luck, and luck certainly played a contributing role in his success. Also, he had mentors—General Fox Conner, General Pershing, and General George Marshall—who boosted his career at crucial times. But while luck and patronage certainly helped Ike along his path, he worked hard and grew in his assignments. He was never a combat commander in war time (at the fighting level), but he honed a variety of skills that made him indispensable. For instance, while working for General Fox Conner at a Panama Canal posting during the 1920s, he took advantage of the General’s extensive library to extend his knowledge of history and military affairs. While serving General Pershing in Paris, he learned a great deal about the French countryside. (Ike missed combat during WWI.) He also served under Douglas MacArthur in Washington, D.C. (during the sad conduct of MacArthur and the political leadership in its treatment of the Bonus Army), and Ike served again under MacArthur in the Philippines in the 1930s. (Reading about MacArthur in this book, I better understand why William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur was entitled American Caesar; he was a pompous, ambitious man. George Patton, Ike’s slightly older peer, was as gung-ho and sanguinary as the George C. Scott bio-pic portrayed him to be.) The most surprising thing about Ike was that in WWII, when he took direct control of field operations as the Allies prepared for the final push into Germany, proved wasn’t much of a military strategist. The British general Montgomery did a much better job of that, although, he, like MacArthur and Patton, was a prima donna. But when it came to the incredibly challenging task of keeping an international coalition functioning with the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Charles DeGaulle to please, Ike was a miracle-worker.

While certainly ambitious, Ike remained an uncertain office-seeker. Former general Lucius Clay, along with New York lawyer Herbert Bromwell (later Ike’s Attorney General) and Thomas Dewey, were all needed to propel Ike into the presidency. Ike was uncertain, and he was probably wary of the dirt that might be slung at him. (He mistreated his predecessor Harry Truman, although Truman admired him, and unbeknownst to Ike on inauguration day—when Ike snubbed Truman—Truman has removed a very damaging letter from Ike’s army file that concerned Ike's relationship during WWII with Kay Summersby, his driver, aid, and lover.) But none of this came out, and the nation loved him, giving him a sound victory over the Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson.

“Someday there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in [the Pentagon’s] estimates can be made with little or no damage. If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen to this country.”

After his election, Ike mostly left the choice of his cabinet to his chief advisors (listed above). It wasn’t that Ike was indifferent, but he delegated to subordinates and trusted them to take charge of what they could while leaving the final, big decision to him. Thus, they recommended Nixon as vice-president (as a sop to the Republican right that Ike—in the person of “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft—had defeated for the nomination.) He also accepted John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State. Like Nixon, Dulles proved very un-Eisenhower-like. Dulles had a Manichean, Cold War mentality, while Nixon was a shifty—even then—political animal. But Ike managed both, along with a gung-ho military. I was shocked about how on various occasions Ike refused the advice of the military to use nuclear weapons. In fact, Eisenhower wanted peace and to limit the arms race. If there is one fact to take away about his Administration, it’s that after the Korean armistice in July 1953, no American troops were killed in combat during the remainder of his presidency. And he deployed troops overseas only once, in Lebanon, without loss of life and only for a limited duration (to counter Arab nationalist sentiment). He declined to try to deliver the French from their defeat at Dien Bien Phu, to attack the Chinese over islands around Formosa, to aid the British-French-Israeli coalition to take the Suez Canal from Egypt, or to actively intervene in the Hungarian uprising in 1956. 

On May 1 [1953], Robert Cutler, the president’s national security assistant, presented Eisenhower with the Joint Chiefs’ plan for Operation VULTURE [in Vietnam]. Ike dismissed it out of hand. “I certainly do not think that the atomic bomb can be used by the United States unilaterally,” he told Cutler. “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.”

“I believe hostilities are not so imminent as is indicated by the forebodings of a number of my associates. I have so often been through these periods of strain that I have become accustomed to the fact that most of the calamities that we anticipate really never occur.”

This is not to say Ike’s judgment was flawless. Ike approved of covert activities in Guatemala and in Iran that deposed legitimate governments that were pursuing policies that didn’t endanger U.S. security, but that endangered U.S. and U.K. multinational corporations with financial interests. In the case of Iran, a line can be drawn from the U.S. role in deposing the Mossadegh government and imposing the Shah and the 1979 Iranian Revolution that brought to power the current regime.

The GOP majority in the Eighty-third Congress seemed less interested in grappling with the problems of the day than in repudiating the work of Truman and Roosevelt. [Sound familiar?]

But in two other areas where some of criticized him, Eisenhower, Smith argues, called the right plays. Before becoming president and after his service in WWII, Eisenhower served as Columbia University’s president (a fine place, I’m told). And while Ike wasn’t very attuned to the academic world, he resisted those who wanted to limit free speech or engage in witch hunts. 

 “Don’t join the book burners,” he said. “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend your own sense of decency. That should be the only censorship.… How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is?"

This attitude continued into his presidency. He declined to take McCarthy head-on, not wanting to give McCarthy a stage and not wanting to get into a brawl with a skunk. Although McCarthy and his fellow-traveling anti-Communist radicals (and cynics) did a lot of damage, McCarthy and his movement crashed as Ike had predicted. One could argue that a frontal attack was called for, but I think that Smith’s assessment makes sense. 

Ike always believed that if he had attacked McCarthy directly, the Senate would never have taken action. Later he wrote, “McCarthyism took its toll on many individuals and on the nation. No one was safe from charges recklessly made from inside the walls of congressional immunity.… Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.”

Ditto with civil rights. Ike was not a crusader for civil rights (it was not an issue that he faced directly before becoming president), but Brown was decided on his watch after his appointment of Chief Justice (Earl Warren), and Ike would have none of the insubordination to the law that so many in the South were willing to pursue. His showdown with Arkansas governor Orville Faubus was a masterpiece of Eisenhower maneuvering and political skill, augmented by the 101^st Airborne. In the end, Little Rock High was integrated.

Adam Clayton Powell—scarcely anyone’s Uncle Tom—put it best in a speech to his constituents on February 28, 1954. “The Honorable Dwight D. Eisenhower has done more to eliminate discrimination and to restore the Negro to the status of first-class citizenship than any President since Abraham Lincoln,” he said.

A few days before he left office, Ike addressed the nation in a farewell address, just as Washington had done after his two terms in office. The concerns of Eisenhower for peace and against militarism had not changed much. His words are worth noting at some length, as Smith does. Smith describes and quotes the address: 

“Our military organization bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime.” Until World War II, “the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could … make swords as well.” But now, because of the Cold War, “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend more on military security than the net income of all United States corporations.” Eisenhower’s voice continued with somber intonation. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new to the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” Then, in the most widely quoted passage, Ike said: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” 

Then, in a timeless warning for the future, Eisenhower said America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” [Emphasis added.]

After learning a great deal more about this man—warts and all—I do so we wish we will soon have again a person serve as president who can provide the level of leadership, dignity, skill, and wisdom as did this man from Abilene, Kansas 

Hannah Arendt: The Conscious Pariah by Anne Heller

"Conscious pariah" is an apt title

Of late I've been thinking a great deal about Hannah Arendt. I recall first reading her work Between Past and Future in the fall of 1974. I was fascinated and baffled. But the fascination overcame my bafflement to prompt me to go on to read all of her major works, and some lesser known works as well. I even sat in on an undergraduate class when I was in law school that was all about her work. Now, all these years later, I find it necessary to think once again about her powerful legacy. 

Heller's work is a short biography of Arendt. It does an admirable job of packing in a good deal about Arendt's life as well as providing some insight into her project. The book opens with the extremely controversial reports that she published of the Eichmann trial. In her New Yorker articles and the later book, she labeled Eichmann as "banal" and coined the term "the banality of evil." Some thought that she was in some way excusing Eichmann; she was not, and she concurred with the death penalty imposed upon him. The other great controversy in the book was her contention that Jewish councils in Eastern European ghettos aided the Nazis in organizing and executing the Holocaust. Arendt argued that a firmer, more principled resistance would have been more efficient. Her contention led some in the Jewish community to vilify her. The fact that she, too, was Jewish and that she'd worked in Zionist organizations before the war gave her no shelter. The idea that some Jewish leaders were in any way complicit in the Holocaust was too much for many. Arendt's point is one that must be considered by any person or organization that deals with an evil sovereign authority: to collaborate and thereby hope to ameliorate, or to resist and risk a higher, quicker body count. 

But while the Eichmann trial is the most famous instance in her career, I don't' believe it the most important. Her works The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution, and On Violence are all among the outstanding and exemplary works of political thought in the post-war era. Heller's biography is too light on these matters (and thus not a very helpful  consideration of her thought). Instead, Heller focuses a good deal on Arendt's relationship with Martin Heidegger, her teacher and, for a time in her youth, her lover. While not inconsequential, I'm not sure that a lot of attention to this relationship pays much in the way of dividends in coming to grips with Arendt's legacy. 

Heller's book provides a satisfactory introduction to Arendt's work, but don't be satisfied just to read this short biography. Read Arendt's works and experience a public display of a mind immersed deeply in thought and concern.

History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood by Fred Inglis

Book under review

The merits of Amazon, online shopping, and e-books certainly deserves debate and consideration. How does an e-book differ from paper in how we perceive and appreciate a book? And will paper bookstores eventually die out under pressure from giants like Amazon? All good questions, but for me, here, now, it’s a lifesaver. Instead of the serendipity of the bookshelf, a computer algorithm led me to this and many other books. “R.G. Collingwood” as a search subject gave me not only Collingwood’s works but this biography as well. Also, while I could not browse the whole thing, I did download the sample and learn that the work intrigued me. Ah, not-so-dumb luck is my friend! 

Inglis, a fellow Brit academic with a wide array of interests and publications, proves himself an excellent biographer of the elusive figure of R.G. Collingwood. As befits Collingwood, Inglis eschews a cut-and-paste biography, opting instead to comment upon Collingwood’s work, thought, and intellectual progeny in addition to recounting the events of his life. The outline of Collingwood’s life is relatively simple, although his youth already raises possibilities. His parents were disciples of their Lake District neighbor, John Ruskin. Collingwood grew up with a musician mother and an artist father who pursued archeology, writing, and folklore. As a youth, Collingwood was off to Rugby school and then Oxford. Following the tradition of the time, he was immersed in the classics of Greece and Rome and the Western tradition as a whole. He graduated before the outbreak of the War, and (happily for him and us), he served in Naval Intelligence in London rather than in the trenches. After the War, he returned to Oxford and served as a professor of philosophy. He was perceived (broadly speaking) to lie within the British idealist tradition, seemingly out of step with the likes of Russell, Wittgenstein (at least of the Tractatus), Ayer, and the logical positivists. Despite his relative isolation, and his devotion to archeology—he was active in excavating Roman ruins in Britain and elsewhere—he received an endowed chair in philosophy at Oxford in the early 30s. 

While at the peak of his powers, Collingwood began suffering severe health problems caused foremost by uncontrolled high blood pressure. He became aware that he’d not lead a long life. This, along with the unfolding events in Europe (Nazism, Fascism, and Communism), and a breakdown of his marriage, led him to become as a man possessed, going on a writing and publishing frenzy before his death in January 1943. Alas, he was not able to bring his greatest work (or certainly most influential) work to publication, The Idea of History, but it did get published in 1946. It was but one part of his large output in the last decade of his life.

Collingwood's best-known work

Inglis takes us through these events, almost making the transformation of the man appear before our very eyes. In the early years, Collingwood comes across as unexceptional, almost bland. But then he brings forth a torrent of unique and invaluable thoughts on history, art, and Nature, as well as on current events. One of my few complaints is that Inglis, probably from a lack of access to more personal sources, doesn’t delve deeply into the breakdown of his first marriage and subsequent marriage and fatherhood (again) on what was, as he knew, very near his deathbed. I can’t help but wonder about this, not as a matter of prurient interest, but as to how a man of deep and profound thought (his chair was in moral philosophy) thought (or didn’t) through these issues. But this is a minor issue because Inglis does more than justice to Collingwood’s professional life and publications. 

For anyone interested in or wondering about Collingwood, I can’t imagine a better place to start. Collingwood isn’t a rock star of philosophy like Russell, Wittgenstein, or Ayer, to name but three fellow (British-based) academics, but his influence, especially in the realm of history, has been significant. Inglis explores his influence on Charles Taylor, Peter Winch, Quentin Skinner, and Alastair McIntyre, among others. (I’d add Owen Barfield and John Lukacs). In doing so, Inglis provides a running commentary not only on Collingwood but also on the relation of his thought to the world around us that I both appreciated and enjoyed. 

Following are quotes that I excerpted from the book, a Cliff Notes of sorts of important points that I took from this most engaging book about this rather extraordinary man. 

From History Man:

The moral point of a biography is not to add a figure to some gallery of model lives for imitation, but to take from the bequests of the past lines of force for transformation.

Inglis, Fred (2009-07-06). History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood (p. 62). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition, citing Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), 98.

There is never much point, whether in aesthetic or philosophic criticism, in arguing for coherent patterns of thought in the life’s work of a thinker or a poet. The history of all thought is broken up into new starts, blind alleys, reactionary retreats, fake advances, whether in one person’s work or in a collective movement. Yet in a life, as in an epoch, we search out form and direction. A biography is an attempt to place a life against a moral horizon, to frame it with its recognisable landmarks and pathways. Id. p. 81 [N.B. Collingwood was critical of the idea of a "biography" in general and denigrated most of its manifestations. Writing anything approaching a biography certainly invites the possibility of becoming haunted by Collingwood's ghost!]

My plan was to concentrate on the question, “What is Aristotle saying and what does he mean by it?” and to forgo, however alluring it might be, the further question “Is it true?” Id. 86, quoting Collingwood, Autobiography [A] (27)

[Y]ou cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer. It must be understood that question and answer, as I conceived them, were strictly correlative. A proposition was not an answer, or at any rate could not be the right answer, to any question which might have been answered otherwise. . . . “you cannot tell what a proposition means unless you know what question it is meant to answer. . . . No two propositions . . . can contradict one another unless they are answers to the same question.” Id. 88-89, quoting RGC.

If we do not learn from the past—“ and we cannot otherwise learn at all”—we merely practise what Collingwood called “pseudo-history,” a wandering narrative in which there is no conception of purpose, and therefore no exercise of mind. Id. 155, quoting Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 89.

[I]n his best-known [Collingwood] aphorism “all history is the history of thought,” which he took to mean that political theory is not an interminable anecdote summarising a sequence of remarks on politics made by consecutive theorists— by seven league boots from Plato to Nato, as the old joke has it— but is “the thought which occupies the mind of a man engaged in political work: the formation of a policy, the planning of means to execute it, the attempt to carry it into effect, the discovery that others are hostile to it, the devising of ways to overcome their hostility, and so forth.” Id. 155

 

For Churchill’s rhetoric in the House of Commons in 1940 turned precisely on the uncertain morale of his listeners, in the House and in the nation. That rhetoric was inseparable from the reasons for his policies. Reason and rhetoric were at one. Id. 155-156

 

Knowledge for the historian is not the ordering and verification of propositions and statements, but the derivation of these from questions to which they serve as answers. Id. 156

 

[W]hat Collingwood commends is not so much a method or a technique for the historian of thought to follow as it is an understanding he or she will command of the constitution of the knowledge arrived at. What we know is constitutive of ourselves: historical self-knowledge (the construction of the Roman wall, the construction of Marx’s Capital, the decline and fall of the British Empire) goes towards the statutes of the human constitution. Id. 157

The history of art, the history of metaphysics, the history of the Roman wall are the same kinds of intellectual venture , and we shall only summon up the temerity to face down Collingwood’s terrific disdain when we add to the question-and-answer complex the necessity to determine enough of what the original agents felt as part of their thought. For it will become a premise of our revisions of Collingwood that all history is the history of thought inseparable from the moral sentiments that give it form. Id. 158

Fifteen or so years later and after Collingwood’s death, eighty miles east of Oxford, Wittgenstein was inaugurating his revolution in philosophy from a bare room above Trinity Street, Cambridge. His racy, conversational wisdom matches with a startling likeness Collingwood’s ideas couched in such a very different idiom, though by a not dissimilar man. “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false”— It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements. This seems to abolish logic but does not do so. It is one thing to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state results of measurement. Hence the sociability of inquiry, the congeniality of judgement, the intractability of truth. Id. 158-159

It is a point to labour, as being the very purpose of writing a fully historical biography; one, that is, that manages to re-create how a life was lived and then takes its moral measure again, two generations later. The mind searches for a style (in Nietzsche’s usage), shaped and reshaped by certain passions, which it struggles to make congenial to thought, and applies this style to the comprehension of its experience and the knowledge it will yield. Id. 192

 “History . . . cannot avoid the character of thought,” the inevitability of human judgement turns the mere succession of events into a world, and not only a world in implying a narrative, “but a world of ideas.” Oakeshott’s historian is a scholar rather than a plain person, a scholar putting herself or himself under the stern discipline never to suppose that the past is like the present, but one for whom the knowability of the past moves it into the present, renders it mobile and changeable, varying as the evidence for it increases, obliging us to interpret and believe it differently. Id. 194

A principle, rather, is an originary bearing provided for the mind; it is a primary orientation for thought; it is formative of the faculty of reasoning on a particular subject and as such will vary from time to time. Insofar as a body of principles provides a foundation for coherent thinking, it is not a foundation one can get to the bottom of (“After that, it is elephants all the way down”). The absoluteness of its presupposition is shadowy and guarded. In the play of principles, the passions form and inform the understanding. Passion has always been a difficulty for philosophers, and even Descartes’ great essay on The Passions of the Soul while paying homage to their power, leaves him with the old dualism, passion and reason. Id. 209

 

As the image of a personal God recedes from the Western academies, so too does the feasibility, let alone the desirability, of the “view from nowhere.” If all moral and intellectual meditation and judgement must take place somewhere, and that somewhere is the spot on which the thinker lives and thinks, then having thought (including the re-enactment of the thoughts of others) sufficient unto the day will not be best accomplished by trying to expunge all feeling. It will be a matter of having the feelings best suited to the occasion in which one finds oneself. The hermeneutician seeks for those feelings that best enfold or comprehend the (historical) experience in view. Right feeling and just interpretation unite in a single action of mind. Id. 209

The historian’s picture of his subject, whether that subject be a sequence of events or a past state of things, thus appears as a web of imaginative construction stretched between certain fixed points provided by the statements of his authorities; and if these points are frequent enough and the threads spun from each to the next are constructed with due care, always by the a priori imagination and never by merely arbitrary fancy, the whole picture is constantly verified by appeal to these data, and runs little risk of losing touch with the reality which it represents. Id. 211, quoting Collingwood, The Idea of History, 241-242.

The good historian and the fictional detective think alike. From indications of the most suggestive kind— not so much the given as the found— each constructs an imaginary picture of what happened, an event conceived as the expression of the thoughts of those who acted it out. The facts, such as they are, are placed in an interpretative order by historian or detective. Their validation is consequence of the narrator’s plausibility and imaginative forcefulness. The sources, the facts, or— such a final-sounding word— the data are only as good as the historical hermeneutician can make them. “The a priori imagination which does the work of historical construction supplies the means of historical criticism as well.” [IH 245] Thus the usual opposition between criticism and creation is dissolved. As imaginative works of art, novel and history are indistinguishable. As a mode of thought with its own principles, however, the history must be truthful, and its story must be true. Id. 212

 

The historian . . . is investigating not mere events (where by a mere event I mean one which has only an outside and no inside) but actions . . . his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent. . . . For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it. To discover that thought is already to understand it. . . . The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind. . . . It is not a passive surrender to the spell of another’s mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking. The historian not only re-enacts past thought, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in re-enacting it, criticises it, forms his own judgement of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it.” Id. 213-216, quoting IH.

So it is, I remind my readers, that a biography is always in danger of becoming mere description, of forgetting the old saw of creative writing classes, “show, don’t tell,” of failing Henry James’s injunction, “dramatise, dramatise.” Expression in the art of biography, as in all the other arts, individualises; in our master’s voice, “Expression is an activity of which there can be no technique” (my italics), hence it is not an activity in the service of truth and truthfulness, it is those qualities actualised, individualized. Id. 235

 “A true consciousness is the confession to ourselves of our feelings; a false consciousness would be disowning them . . . soon we learn to bolster up this self-deceit by attributing the disowned experience to other people.” Spinoza is his master here, for whom the problem of ethics was the mastery of one’s feelings such that passio (undergoing things) is transformed into actio (doing things). Once a passion is clearly understood it ceases to be a passion. Id. 235

 

Its [Principles of Art] tests of truthfulness in consciousness apply as much to politics and history as to art; if corruption of consciousness is widespread (it was then, it is now), “Intellect can build nothing firm. Moral ideals are castles in the air. Political and economic systems are mere cobwebs. Even common sanity and bodily health are no longer secure. But corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art.” Id. 236-237, quoting Collingwood, Principles of Art [PA], 265 

[A]ny one who is reasonably well acquainted with historical work knows that there is no such thing as an historical fact which is not at the same time a complex of historical facts. Such a complex of historical facts I call a “constellation.” If every historical fact is a constellation, the answer to the question “What is it that such and such a person was absolutely presupposing in such and such a piece of thinking?” can never be given by reference to one single absolute presupposition, it must always be given by reference to a constellation of them. Id. 260, quoting Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics [EM], 66

 

[G]ood historians . . . ask questions which they see their way to answering. It was a correct understanding of the same truth that led Monsieur Hercule Poirot to pour scorn on the “human blood-hound” who crawls about the floor trying to collect everything, no matter what, which might conceivably turn out to be a clue [as police searches unfailingly do]; and to insist that the secret of detection was to use what, with possibly wearisome iteration, he called “the little grey cells.” You can’t collect your evidence before you begin thinking, he meant: because thinking means asking questions (logicians, please note), and nothing is evidence except in relation to some definite question. Id. 266, quoting Collingwood, Principles of History [PH] 37

Action expresses itself in language (including gesture— Res Gestae as he says), and “the business of language is to reveal thought.” For “That great and golden-mouthed philosopher, Samuel Alexander . . . wished philosophers to learn . . . the all-importance of time, ‘the timefulness of things.’ Id. 266, quoting PH, 56

[R]e-enactment (to use once again the confounded term left unused throughout The Principles of History) is a matter of matching thought to feeling and vice versa, each as formative as the other. The interpretative task is to bring the play of thought and feeling into an inferred pattern; the historian replays feeling and thought (much as a musician replays a score) within as large a comprehending framework of human sympathy as he or she is capable of. Id. 267

"What man, at any stage of history, thinks of himself as dealing with, when we say that he is dealing with nature, is never nature as it is in itself but always nature as at that stage of history he conceives it. All history is the history of thought: and wherever in history anything called nature appears, either this name stands not for nature in itself but for man’s thought about nature, or else history has forgotten that it has come of age, and has fallen back into its old state of pupilage to natural science." Id. 268, quoting PH, 98

Collingwood mounts . . .  one of the most pungent of the critiques of modern utilitarianism, pursuing the infinite regress of the utility test (this is useful because it leads to that which is useful, which leads to that which is useful . . . and so on).  Sooner or later, something is worthwhile for its own sake. Id. 281

[H]is [Collingwood's] firm little lesson to his shipmate students brings out happily for my purposes just why and how the story of a thinker’s thought may be read in his brief friendship with an Orthodox priest to whom he spoke classical Greek, and in his admonitions to the young men— admonitions that Ruskin and T. S. Eliot would have endorsed— to dissolve secularism and utilitarianism into a love of the past-in-the-present and to envision the common good as a web of many significances. Id. 281

Probably there is never any point in contriving a perfect projection of the order of the books for the sake of biographical shapeliness. The unity he sought and I aim to reconstruct is the unity of his character in life and work, its style (in Nietzsche’s strong sense), and that way of thinking and feeling he worked at constructing on the page, and which could then bring together the man and his history such that each comprehended the other. It is a colossal ambition, of course, and in the end it breaks your heart. But not always the spirit. If that survives, the work and the man who made it live on in the lives and thought of those who follow. Which strong-sounding chord is not a finale; it merely returns us to that crux in the bequest of his thinking that he called “re-enactment”: the re-enacting of past thoughts (in this case his) in a different present. A properly historical biography will so re-enact the thoughts that we understand what he meant then, when he said it; thereafter the right biography will make it possible to turn those thoughts, resurrected from so different a moment, into something practical and rational now. Id. 284

Re-enactment is a matter of understanding the conventions of an historical argument in such a way as to recover the intentions of the writer. Those intentions will be apparent and re-creatable insofar as the writer writes well; well-made art, whether in prose, paint, or music, speaks with certitude. Id. 286-287

The past makes the present. As Louis Mink puts it in a neat little saw, we must understand backwards in order to think [or plan] forwards. Re-enactment is no more than thinking what has been thought exactly as it was thought then, so that the historical past can yield its lessons of difference, contrast, comparison, and does so as its differently ground optics show us contrastive and contradictory signification. Hobbes’s liberty is not ours, nor Cromwell’s pacification, whether of the Irish or the Levellers. Yet both have deposited their residue in our political formation. Our applications of the science of human affairs starts with a sufficiency of these reenactments, faithfully performed. This is the first form of the new science, history its content. Of itself, of course, it runs practice into theory. For history, the paramount form of theoretical knowledge, teaches understanding of how matters came to be the way they are. Duty, its corollary as dominant form of practical knowledge, teaches us freely to will what must be done. Id. 287

But it may be doubted whether the author of The Essay on Metaphysics and New Leviathan would have so disapproved of [Wittgenstein's] Philosophical Investigations. They shared a joint conviction that propositions have no common essence and doubted that truth is a correspondence between proposition and fact. They were at one in rejecting an account of knowledge as a blank apprehension of the facts. They both argued that inner states were only knowable, by oneself and others, by the making of outer expression. And they both thought that to demand something called “proof” for everything one believes is to sentence oneself to sterility. Id. 295-296

 

“A man’s duty on a given occasion 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.” Id. 298-299, quoting Collingwood, New Leviathan [NL], 124

To have rendered these things on the page is not to have expounded a thinker’s thoughts but to have dramatised a life. A biography— this biography—then attains the condition of art and further aspires to the condition of history. It is not likely that I have brought this off, but this is my ambition. Id. 313

In unacknowledged tandem with Wittgenstein, John Austin was, as his famous book puts it, teaching How to Do Things with Words, and dividing the practices (rather than the functions) of language into three: the locutionary (propositional), perlocutionary (performative), and illocutionary (effective). Id. 319

Adding J. L. Austin to Collingwood, [Quentin Skinner] wished to pursue not only what they said, but what they were doing as they said it. Were they persuading, affirming, subverting, or revising, when they rehearsed their doctrines to decidedly touchy and unpredictable princes? Hobbes’s truculence, More’s innocence, Machiavelli’s moral revisionism were all intentional devices purporting to win the intellectual day for their side. This goes deep. For once you radically historicise author and argument in this way, you hit hard against their sheer incommensurability with contemporary certainties about what really matters. Skinner returns to the arguments of the past in order to bring back to the present disconcerting truths (true, that is, as being part of a factual historical record) about the way, for example, people in the Italian city-states of the early Renaissance thought about what is right rather than about rights, about the common good rather than private pleasure, about their duty to maintain the conditions of liberty rather than about their licence to do what they liked. Id. 335