Comparing the Thought of Hannah Arendt with That of R.G. Collingwood: Some Surprising Similarities--Part 1

[N.B. This is a work in progress, shared at this point to focus my thinking and, I hope, to elicit suggestions and criticisms. When circumstances allow (I hope no later than mid-July), I plan to return to this essay and continue the exploration in more depth.]

Hannah Arendt (`906-1975)

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) 

The focus of this blog post is to explore the similarities and differences (to a lesser extent) between the thinking of Hannah Arendt and R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood died before Arendt gained her fame as a political thinker and before she'd published anything of significance in English (if anything at all). In all likelihood, Collingwood had no acquaintance whatever with Arendt, and he didn't engage directly with her mentors Heidegger and Jaspers. Neither have I found Arendt engaging Collingwood, although I'd be surprised if she was not aware of his posthumously published work The Idea of History (1946), which became the most important work about the philosophy of history in her lifetime. Her peers, such as Leo Strauss, reviewed Collingwood's The Idea of History. But as yet I've found no reference by Arendt to Collingwood's work. But despite their lack of direct engagement, I contend that these two thinkers, informed and prompted by the Great War, the Crisis Years (1919-1939), and the Second World War, share a great deal in common, especially in their understanding of politics and related matters, such as the importance of thinking, freedom, action, speech and other topics within the sphere of politics and life. It's my intention in this post to begin this exploration and then in later posts drill down into their similarities---and differences--as they become apparent. This initial blog includes some background about both thinkers that readers may already know.

I offer this summary of points of similarities between these two thinkers that I intend to explore in this post and one or more later posts:

1. Background
1. Both report an early interest in Kant that led to an interest in philosophy in general.
2. Both exhibited a deep desire to understand from an early age.
3. Both pursued an early interest and aptitude for learning Greek and Latin that resulted in profound knowledge of classical culture.
4. Both displayed an early interest and commitment to thinking.
5. Both thinkers report that they were prompted to action in response to the political turmoil caused by the rise of fascism in the 1930s,
6. Both shared deep and perceptive readings of Marx, although neither was a Marxist.
7. Both thinkers were deeply steeped in the Western philosophical tradition.
2. Mature thinking 
1. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on action.
2. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on freedom, especially freedom as exhibited in thought and action.  Collingwood often refers to action as res gestae. 
3. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on the importance of speech.
4. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on the political community (Collingwood preferred the term "society" but he uses it in a sense quite distinct from Arendt's formulation of the term).
5. Both thinkers placed a premium on thinking.
6. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on practice informing theory.
7. Both were critical of traditional Western metaphysics.
8. Both opposed illiberalism (with liberalism understood in its original sense of emphasizing individual liberty and dignity, the rule of law, etc.).
9. Both acknowledged the importance of the state.
10. Both were outspoken in their profound critiques of fascism. 
3. Miscellaneous topics
1. Both were critical of psychology as a field of study and of psychoanalysis in particular.
2. Both wanted to separate "economics" from politics, although Arendt is much stricter in her desire for separation, while Collingwood seems to want only to emphasize the distinctness of the two fields. 
3. Both often sprinkled their texts with ancient Greek and Latin words and phrases, which can prove daunting for the reader. (Query: why doesn't Kindle have a translator function at least for Latin?)
4. Both were wary--and at times downright dismissive--of academia and academic discourse. 
5. Neither of these thinkers founded a school of thought in any traditional sense, although both had (and have) those who've hailed and extolled their work. Neither thinker seems to have desired to found or foster any unique school of thought, nor did either of them adhere to any particular school. In short, both thinkers are unique. But neither founded a school, unlike some of their illustrious processors, like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, or their peers, who promoted schools of thought like phenomenology, logical positivism, pragmatism, and such. 

[N.B. You can skip the next two paragraphs if you choose, these simply recount my path to these two thinkers and how I now see each in light of the other. In other words, it's a "how I got here" narrative. I (sometimes) appreciate a writer's personal narrative about how she or he came to a topic and the path of the writer's inquiry, but you may not.]

As an undergraduate student in political theory, I developed an intellectual crush on Hannah Arendt. I become quite enamored of her thought, even to the point that in a class in which her work was only one of many considered, the instructor had to remark on my final evaluation that he'd have preferred that I'd not focused my interest so markedly on Arendt. And while you might say that I outgrew my intellectual crush, her thought continues to inform my thinking about politics (and law) over the years. The advent of Trump and his despotic, authoritarian bent--perhaps we might even say his fascism--sent me back to thinking about Arendt and referencing her insights. 

Also, while an undergraduate, I was exposed to the thought of R.G. Collingwood in a philosophy of history class. That exposure didn't take. I believe that I read the assigned piece taken from Collingwood's The Idea of History, but it didn't sink in, and I came away with only a name in the back of my head. Now fast-forward from my undergraduate days at the University of Iowa in 1974 to 2012, when I took up residence for about a year in Jaipur, India. Not far from where we lived in Jaipur was an Oxford University Press bookstore with relatively cheap "South Asia" editions of many titles, including Collingwood's The Idea of History (rev. ed.). I bought it, knowing that it was a classic in the field of thinking about history. Politics and history are two topics that had intrigued me since I was a kid (the law came later). I bought a copy. I didn't really dig into the book until we were living in China in 2014-2015, but when I (finally!) read IH for the first time, I was quite taken with both the book and with Collingwood. I've been reading and re-reading Collingwood since then, delving into his work not only about history, but also his work in moral theory, politics, art, religion, anthropology, and metaphysics. (He published widely in Roman history and archeology as well, but the prior topics are quite enough for me.) If Arendt was a youthful crush, Collingwood has proved a late summer romance. (I don't want to admit to autumn just yet.)

This spring, under the cover of the pandemic, I returned to Arendt via a Virtual Reading Group sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Thus, I've been reading Arendt along with Collingwood (primarily his The New Leviathan, his volume dedicated to thinking deeply about politics), and I've been struck by the many similarities in their thinking. Thus, I propose in the remainder of this post to explore some of the similarities (and differences) that I've noticed. I'll start on the surface and then work my way down into some of the particulars of the intersections of their thought.

R.G. Collingwood was born in the Lake Country in northern England near Connistan Lake in 1889. He was "home-schooled" until he departed for Rugby School at age 13. Collingwood describes his schooling in his Autobiography:

UNTIL I was thirteen years old I lived at home and was taught by my father. Lessons occupied only two or three hours each morning; otherwise he left me to my own devices, sometimes helping me with what I chose to do, more often leaving me to work it out for myself. It was his doing that I began Latin at four and Greek at six; but my own that I began, about the same time, to read everything I could find about the natural sciences, especially geology, astronomy, and physics; to recognize rocks, to know the stars, and to understand the working of pumps and locks and other mechanical appliances up and down the house. 

Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

Here is one particular event that struck young Collingwood and that stuck with him. He reports the incident and reflects upon its effect:

My father had plenty of books, and allowed me to read in them as I pleased. Among others, he had kept the books of classical scholarship, ancient history, and philosophy which he had used at Oxford. As a rule I left these alone; but one day when I was eight years old curiosity moved me to take down a little black book lettered on its spine ‘Kant’s Theory of Ethics’. It was Abbott’s translation of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; and as I began reading it, my small form wedged between the bookcase and the table, I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand. Then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them. Disgraceful to confess, here was a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baffled me. Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own. It was not like the common boyish intention to ‘be an engine-driver when I grow up’, for there was no desire in it; I did not, in any natural sense of the word, ‘want’ to master the Kantian ethics when I should be old enough; but I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed. 

There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think.’ What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absent-minded in company, or sought solitude in order to think without interruption, I could not have said, and still cannot say, what it was that I actually thought. There were no particular questions that I asked myself; there were no special objects upon which I directed my mind; there was only a formless and aimless intellectual disturbance, as if I were wrestling with a fog. [Emphasis added.]

Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

In this extended quote, make a mental note of Kant, understanding, thinking, and solitude.

Collingwood went on to Oxford before The War and then to the Admiralty during The War (because of a bad knee). Collingwood completed his undergraduate work (before the War) with flying colors. Classicist Mary Beard describes Collingwood's educational experience at Oxford:

But it is surely crucial that [Collingwood] was a product of the old Oxford ‘Greats’ (that is, classics) course, which focused the last two and a half years of a student’s work on the parallel study of ancient history on the one hand, and ancient and modern philosophy on the other. Most students were much better at one side than the other, and most stories tell of the desperate attempts by would-be ancient historians to cram enough Plato, Descartes and Hume to get their high-flying pass in the final exams (or alternatively of desperate attempts by would-be philosophers to remember enough of the Peloponnesian War or Agricola’s campaigns in Britain to do the same). In the context of Greats, Collingwood was not a maverick with two incompatible interests. Given the educational aims of the course, he was a rare success, even if something of a quirky overachiever; his combination of interests was exactly what Greats was designed to promote.

Later, Collingwood would hold not only the Waynflete Chair in Metaphysical Philosophy but also positions in Roman history and archeology. Collingwood spent many summers working at archeological sites around Britain.  The takeaway here: Collingwood was extremely well versed and active in classical studies.

Let us now turn to the background of Hannah Arendt. Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, making her almost a generation younger than Collingwood. Arendt lost her father at a young age, and she was raised in Konigsberg, Germany, the lifelong residence of Immanuel Kant. She was raised in an assimilated Jewish family, although she reports "I did not know from my family that I was Jewish. My mother was completely a-religious." (Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 6). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition). Yet she became aware from an early age--because of anti-Semitic comments made at school--that her Jewish background made her "special" in some ways. As to her education and interests, Arendt reported the following in an interview on German television with Gunter Gauss broadcast in 1964:

GAUS: You studied in Marburg, Heidelberg, and Freiberg with professors Heidegger, Bultmann, and Jaspers; with a major in philosophy and minors in theology and Greek. How did you come to choose these subjects?
ARENDT: You know, I have often thought about that. I can only say that I always knew I would study philosophy. Ever since I was fourteen years old.
GAUS: Why?
ARENDT: I read Kant. You can ask, Why did you read Kant? For me the question was somehow: I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself, so to speak. But not because I didn’t love life! No! As I said before—I had this need to understand.… The need to understand was there very early. You see, all the books were in the library at home; one simply took them from the shelves. [Emahasis added.]

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (pp. 8-9). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Later, to complete her graduate studies under Karl Jaspers, Arendt wrote her dissertation about the concept of love (caritas) in St. Augustine, which she continued to revise even after her emigration to the United States. (This book was translated and published in English in 2014 as Love and Saint Augustine.)

Finally, I should note that Arendt reported that "I have always loved Greek poetry. And poetry has played a large role in my life. So I chose Greek [as a topic of study] in addition [to philosophy and theology]. It was the easiest thing to do, since I read it anyway!" Id. (p. 9).

Collingwood's education at Oxford in the pre-war period, in addition to his work in "the Greats," was overseen by professors who came to be labeled the "Oxford realists," who had displaced the British idealist tradition of Green, Bosanquet, and Bradley from the summit of British philosophy. Collingwood later came to sharply criticize the Oxford realist school of philosophical thinking. Collingwood taught himself Italian to read Dante in the original, and his fluency in Italian allowed him to be greatly influenced in his early years by the contemporary Italian philosophers Benedetto Croce (whom he translated), Guido De Ruggiero, and Giovanni Gentile (although Collingwood came to distance himself from Gentile's work, which turned overtly fascist after The Great War and the rise of Mussolini). After the War, Collingwood took up teaching at Oxford, and he eventually ascended to the Waynflete professorship in 1935. But despite his long tenure at Oxford and the prominence to which he rose there, he issued some sharp criticisms of academia. And despite his pleasant demeanor and popularity as a lecturer, Collingwood remained a philosophical lone wolf. Starting in the 1920s and growing in the 1930s, British philosophy was marked by the rise of logical positivism and linguistic analysis with the likes of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein (early and late), J.L. Austin, A.J. Ayer, and Gilbert Ryle starting to come to the fore and establish schools of thought that took the main stage. And the philosophy of history, one of Collingwood's long-running topics of investigation, was shunted to the side by followers of the new mainstream of thought. Collingwood had many readers and admirers, but no followers or successors in the sense that there is a Collingwoodian tradition in philosophy.

While Collingwood was establishing himself in Oxford in the 1920s, Hannah Arendt was beginning her collegiate education. Her education included studying with some of the biggest names in German thinking at the time: Heidegger, Jaspers, Bultman, and Husserl, along with a cohort of exceptional peers. She was matriculating through the German academic system until the Depression arrived in 1929 when a new round of anti-Semitism wouldn't allow a young Jewish woman to gain an academic position. The 1933 Reichstag fire sealed her fate. She was arrested but released after eight days. She fled Germany and went to Paris. There she became active in a Zionist organization, although she herself was not a Zionist. With the successful invasion of France by Germany in 1940, Arendt escaped France and proceeded to the U.S., where she lived and worked for the remainder of her life. Upon settling in the U.S., she turned her attention to the politics and realities of totalitarianism and published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1950, which brought her into the limelight. After the events in Germany in 1929 and the early 1930s, she abjured the label "philosopher," and she came to call herself a "political theorist," although her last work, The Life of the Mind, which was published after her death in December 1975, seems to have marked a return to philosophy. At no time in her life did she hold a tenure track professorship, keeping her distance from the formalities and practicalities-- and what she believed to be the pitfalls--of academia.

The final surface similarity that I want to touch upon is perhaps the key one; that is, the impingement of events upon these two individuals from the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the outbreak of war. In Arendt's case, the effect upon her is obvious and easily understood: a young Jewish woman fled the Nazi regime in 1933 after her arrest, becoming a refugee in France before fleeing (one may say in a nick of time) to the U.S.  Arendt's young life was totally upended and altered by the course of political events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. That she should turn to political action (especially in France before the war) and then to political theory to understand what happened is not surprising.

Collingwood's case, however, is more complicated. Through most of the 1930s, Collingwood was deeply engaged in his work as a philosopher at Oxford. Like Britain as a whole, many in the community at Oxford were not keen to become involved in international affairs or to push Britain into a more active role in opposing the rise of Hitler. But by 1937 both the affairs of the world and Collingwood's health were declining. Collingwood suffered from uncontrolled high blood pressure, and the only recognized treatment at the time was "the rest cure," which Collingwood undertook by sailing and also taking a long voyage to Indonesia. Despite these steps, he began to suffer a series of increasingly serious strokes. Collingwood traveled in addition to his seafaring, visiting Catalonia and the Mediterranean in the 30s and seeing first-hand the effects of the civil war in Spain and the rise of fascism in Italy. But the public didn't learn of his thoughts about the crisis in Europe until he published his An Autobiography in 1939 (written in 1938). In that remarkable work, Collingwood wrote about his upbringing and education and his thoughts about philosophy and philosophers. He also revealed his newfound political ardor. In his Autobiography, he frames his new political consciousness as a part of his effort to reconcile theory and practice. He writes:

I can now see that I had three different attitudes towards this survival [of the medieval distinction between contemplation and action]. There was a first R. G. C. who knew in his philosophy that the division was false, and that ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, being mutually dependent, must both alike suffer frustration if segregated into the specialized functions of different classes.  

There was a second R. G. C. who in the habits of his daily life behaved as if it had been sound; living as a professional thinker whose college gate symbolized his aloofness from the affairs of practical life. My philosophy and my habits were thus in conflict; I lived as if I disbelieved my own philosophy, and philosophized as if I had not been the professional thinker that in fact I was. My wife used to tell me so; and I used to be a good deal annoyed.

 But underneath this conflict there was a third R. G. C., for whom the gown of the professional thinker was a disguise alternately comical and disgusting in its inappropriateness. This third R. G. C. was a man of action, or rather he was something in which the difference between thinker and man of action disappeared. He never left me alone for very long. He turned over in his sleep, and the fabric of my habitual life began to crack. He dreamed, and his dreams crystallized into my philosophy. When he would not lie quiet and let me play at being a don, I would appease him by throwing off my academic associations and going back to my own part of the country to address the local antiquarian society. It may seem an odd form of ‘release’ for a suppressed man of action; but it was a very effective one. The enthusiasm for historical studies, and for myself as their leader in those studies, which I never failed to arouse in my audiences, was not in principle different from the enthusiasm for his person and his policy which is aroused by a successful political speaker.

 Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

Collingwood continued his reflection by noting his enthusiasm when reading Marx:

The third R. G. C. used to stand up and cheer, in a sleepy voice, whenever I began reading Marx. I was never at all convinced either by Marx’s metaphysics or by his economics; but the man was a fighter, and a grand one; and no mere fighter, but a fighting philosopher. His philosophy might be unconvincing; but to whom was it unconvincing? Any philosophy, I knew, would be not only unconvincing but nonsensical to a person who misunderstood the problem it was meant to solve. Marx’s was meant to solve a ‘practical’ problem; its business, as he said himself, was to ‘make the world better’. Marx’s philosophy would necessarily, therefore, appear nonsensical except to a person who, I will not say shared his desire to make the world better by means of a philosophy, but at least regarded that desire as a reasonable one. According to my own principles of philosophical criticism, it was inevitable that Marx’s philosophy should appear nonsensical to gloves-on philosophers like the ‘realists’, with their sharp division between theory and practice, or the ‘liberals’, such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that people ought to be allowed to think whatever they liked because it didn’t really matter what they thought. In order to criticize a gloves-off philosophy like that of Marx, you must be at least enough of a gloves-off philosopher to think gloves-off philosophizing legitimate. 

Id.

Collingwood interrupted the recounting of his newfound creed by reporting that

My attitude towards politics had always been what in England is called democratic and on the Continent liberal. . . . I thought that no authoritarian government, however strong, could be so strong as one which rested on a politically educated public opinion. As a form of government, I thought its essence lay in the fact that it was a nursery-garden where policies were brought to maturity in the open air, not a post office for distributing ready-made policies to a passively receptive country . . . . I did not think that our constitution was free from faults. But the discovery and correction of these faults was the function of governments, not of individual voters. For the system was a self-correcting one, charged with amending its own faults by legislation. . . . 

The whole system, however, would break down if a majority of the electorate should become either ill informed on public questions or corrupt in their attitude towards them: by which I mean, capable of adopting towards them a policy directed not to the good of the nation as a whole, but to the good of their own class or section or of themselves.

Id.  

Collingwood continued his account by discussing changes in British politics during his lifetime and the rise of socialism and fascism on the continent. Collingwood looked favorably upon socialism in its striving for the "collective good," but he disdained fascism:

The great exponents of Fascism have been specialists in arousing mass-emotion; its minor adherents, tacticians and plotters.

Id.

He moved to a discussion of the Spanish Civil War and arrived at the conclusion that

The Spanish civil war was a straight fight between Fascist dictatorship and parliamentary democracy. The British government, behind all its disguises, had declared itself a partisan of Fascist dictatorship. 

Id. 

Collingwood concluded his work with these words:

Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.  

Id. 

More of the same attitude and an even deeper look at politics came from Collingwood's The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (1942), the last work published during his lifetime. (Collingwood died in January 1943.) The New Leviathan furthers the intent laid down in the Autobiography to gain a greater understanding of political life. In the preface to The New Leviathan Collingwood states:

My own book [in distinction from Hobbes's work] is best to be understood as an attempt to bring the Leviathan up to date, in the light of the advances made since it was written, in history, psychology, and anthropology. The attempt was undertaken, and the writing of the book begun, almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war; when first it became evident that we did not know what we were fighting for, and that our leaders were unable or unwilling to tell us. 

Collingwood, R. G., The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

I will not go into further detail about that book here except to say that it lays out a very complete statement about non-social and social (political) life. (If you're worried about his selection of Hobbes as a role model, please take a look at my recent review, where I quote Collingwood about his selection of a role model, which he addresses in his Preface.)

[End of Part 1. Because of my commitments over the next couple of weeks or more, it will probably be a week or more into July before I can return for another post that will drill down into the particulars of each thinker's ideas about politics in general and particulars such as thinking, understanding, freedom, and so on.]

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

In order to survive, we all need to eat, sleep, exercise, breathe, and maintain friendly relations. Books about exercise abound, and sleep itself has become a popular topic for authors with advice to give. And eating--oh, my goodness!--what a mess! Author after author after author tells us what we should and shouldn't eat, no two authors seeming ever to agree. And will they ever agree? Between human ignorance and fallibility and the profit motive, the idea of any consensus about the human diet seems a distant Shangri-La that exists in legend but that eludes us in practice. And, given the variety of human diets from the beginning of our species, this may not prove so surprising. Humans have existed on a variety of diets to fit the climate in which they live. About diet, about the only definitive conclusion that we can reach about diet is that our current Standard American Diet (SAD) is crap and it's killing us slowly.

At least we don't have to go to the store (yet) and buy whatever air we choose to breathe, thus avoiding the incentives that food producers have to persuade us by deception that their products are healthy and wholesome. And while the quality of the air that we breathe also affects us in subtle, long-term ways, let's set that aside for now as the topic of many other worthy books. Author James Nestor has chosen to focus on just this one topic in his book: how we breathe. Nestor examines how we breathe and how it makes a difference in our health and quality of life. And what makes reading this book an entertaining as well as an educational experience is the fact that humans have been experimenting and cultivating breathing techniques for thousands of years and have gained immense practical knowledge that we are now confirming and better understanding through scientific research. For instance, pranayama, the yoga of breathing, goes back thousands of years, and so do Taoist breathing techniques from China. Different as the cuisines of China and India are, for instance, when one looks at their interest in the breath and breathing techniques, we see distinct similarities (some no doubt indigenous to each culture and shared through cross-cultural exchange). But we in the West, especially in the modern, industrial West, have forgotten much of the lore about breath that developed on this side of the world and--at least until recently--we've ignored much of what we could have learned from traditional Chinese and Indian culture if we'd have had the good sense to do so (and a few did have such good sense, such as the explorer Alexandra David-Neel and Harvard physician Dr. Herbert Benson, to name just two who pop to mind).

But although we in the contemporary world have been dismissive and ignorant about the proper mechanics and potential benefits of breathing, we can make up for lost time quickly with this book. Nestor has combined in-depth scientific research and first-hand reporting about those teaching and exploring breath, and he conjoins his reporting with recounting his experiences about practicing a wide variety of breathing techniques. In an act of journalistic heroism perhaps second only to Morgan Spurlock's one month of eating only at McDonald's (for his documentary Supersize Me!), Nestor and a Sweedish student of breath (or "pulmonaut," as Nestor dubs those who experiment with breath), Anders Olsson, had their nostrils sealed by a physician for ten days, allowing them to breathe only through their mouths. Like Spurlock's experience, the toll on their health and well-being was dramatic and frightening. But also, like Spurlock, the return to normalcy (nose-breathing in Nestor's and Olsson's case) allowed a quick and marked return to health and well-being. All by just breathing through their noses!

Nestor reports on a variety of breathing techniques, such as those of Wim Hof and Buteyko, all of which provide different benefits.  Nestor also attends in detail to the science and to me, the most interesting science in the book (and all of it is interesting), is the change in human anatomy in the last three hundred years--since the advent of industrialism and significant changes in the human diet. During this time, it seems primarily because of softer foods (processing), the size and position of our jaws, facial bones, and nasal passages have shrunk. We didn't use it--our chewing capacity--and we lost bone and breathing capacity because of it. Humans around the globe almost all had straight teeth and enough room in their jaw for all their teeth (wisdom teeth included!). We don't. Also, the loss of bone density in our face, volume in our nasal cavity, and narrowing in our throats have led to snoring and sleep apnea that did occur much less in the past. Sometimes Mother Nature evolves very slowly, but sometimes she seems positively Lamarckian in her speed to drop that which we don't use the way originally intended (metaphorically speaking, of course).

This book is chock-full of information, experiences, and advice, and of value to any potential reader. I highly recommend it. But until you read it, let me leave you with Nestor's list of do's and don'ts about breathing. So simple and yet so important!

• Shut Your Mouth!
• Breathe Through Your Nose!
• Exhale!
• Chew!
• Breathe More, On Occasion!
• Hold Your Breath!

[N.B. I added the exclamation marks for emphasis and to convey a sense of the imperative of following these simple guidelines.]

By the way, the book includes valuable instructions about a wide variety of breathing techniques that Nestor has sampled and recommends as well as thorough notes and links to sites that provide video demonstrations and instructions. 

The Secret Body: Erotic & Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey Kriipal

Something's happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear

This book continues my reading of Jeffrey Kripal, whose insights and speculations I find intriguing. This is my fourth book by Kripal that I've read, and each one has intrigued me. The Secret Body (2019) is unique because it serves as a summary of his work to date. It consists of a series of diverse essays with commentary about this personal and scholarly journey. As I mentioned in my review of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge, Kripal grew-up in a small town in southeast Nebraska, which is the middle nowhere by most people's reckoning. I grew up in southwest Iowa, on the other side of the Missouri River, which is a fraction less of a nowhere than southeast Nebraska. (But, of course, in growing-up, one thinks of one's home turf as the Middle Earth, the Center of the Known Universe.) Anyway, that someone from such a bland background could go on to have such adventures (of the mind) as Kripal has serves as a reminder of what we are capable of in our capacities to grow and experience the larger world. Indeed, another particularly personal source of enjoyment in reading The Secret Body comes from reading about Kripal's Catholic boyhood and upbringing. I'm about nine years older than Kripal, and I grew up (in part) in the pre-Vatican II Church, an even more exotic experience than Kripal's post-Vatican II experience. Vatican II "Protestantized" the Ameican Catholic Church in many ways. (For a spot-on account of the pre-Vatican II American Catholic experience see Garry Wills's Bare-Ruined Choirs (1972).) So although Kripal missed out on what I might label "the full Catholic experience," his faith nevertheless provided a formative experience that set him on his way to his intellectual adventures. Finally, also in a personal vein, Kripal describes his visits to his home town and family in Nebraska as an adult, academic scholar of religions. These visits constitute a trip to an outwardly familiar but also alien world, almost as alien (or exotic) as his experiences with Hindu culture and religion and his investigations of paranormal experience. Kripal recognizes both the goodness of the folks who live there and their stubborn insularity that has allowed politicians--and especially the Great Orange Menace (my term, not Kripal's)--to act to the detriment of those good folks. Again, Kripal's experience resonates with me. One needn't be a wild-eyed radical (I'm certainly not) to see that many of the attitudes held by these folks "are neither [as] pure, nor wise, nor good" as they would believe, and their attitudes and decisions also hurt those of us who share this planet with them. Kripal is justly blunt but loving in his critique. 

Kripal's scholarly journey provides the backbone of his book, and while it may seem an esoteric topic--well, it is. During the time that Kripal spent as a monk, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis to deal with anorexia (disguised as ascetic holiness), and he came to the realization that the monastery was in some sense a gay institution, although homosexuality was officially condemned by the Church. Kripal describes his transformation after his successful psychoanalysis and his insight into the monastic life: 

By the end of that year, the analyst, the buxom women, and I had cured the anorexia. 

 And I was really hungry. I ate everything in sight. I gained about seventy pounds over the next few months. I was a new man at twenty-two. Suddenly, I was also a sexual being.  

The seminary community was a hotbed of psychosocial exploration, but which I do not mean anything explicitly sexual, much less genital. I mean that those years constituted a four-year initiation in the sexual roots of the spiritual life and the spiritual roots of the sexual life. The basic point is this; I came into my early psychological awakening and intellectual calling as a confused and repressed straight man in what was, more or less (mostly more), a gay religious community.

Kripal goes on to ponder the implications of all this, and he recognizes (among many things) the deep debt he owes to both Jesus and Freud for coming to a greater understanding of his world. Indeed, these insights into sexuality became the basis of Kripal's early scholarly work, which he pursued via a doctorate in comparative religions at the University of Chicago and that he parlayed into a successful academic career (he's been at Rice University of many years now). Each of Kripal's first three books deals with mysticism and sexuality. (I've read The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2008) and it's a duzzy--perhaps my excuse for not having reviewed it yet.) As you may imagine, some people don't like to think about the sexuality of Jesus or of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and Kripal has drawn the wrath of fundamentalists in both the U.S. and India for his explorations and explications. And, of course, it's all fascinating. 

After becoming a persona non grata to Hindu fundamentalists, Kripal turned closer to home to explore what is often described as the "paranormal," and what he  has come to term the "super natural." This takes him into the world of Esalen (the counter-culture capital on the Big Sur), comic books, and UFOs, among other topics. And if you think that these topics are far from religion, then you haven't read enough Jeffrey Kripal. With each new topic, Kripal further explores and refines his thoughts as "the human as two." In fact, he develops twenty theses that he labels "gnomons," which Kripal describes as "a short aphorism and maxim . . . that [are] "gnostic" in nature," along with other enticing associations, including gnomes, those little creatures of the earth whose statues populate our gardens with their pointy hats. These brief statements provide a series of stations or markers that provide some conclusions or working hypotheses that Kripal has arrived at during the course of his investigations. He reveals each gnomon as his account progresses. But to be clear: this is not an intellectual biography as such. While Kripal includes aspects of his personal and scholarly biography along with way, he also includes a number of short scholarly articles he's written on various topics that highlight and explore his scholarly inquires. This interspacing of reminisces with articles written along his scholarly journal works well, each perspective casts further light on the other. 

As I reflect on this work, I'm struck by what a fun and exciting read this book provides. Perhaps Kripal's a little crazy, but perhaps not; perhaps his ideas are too out there; but perhaps not. I'm not sure if Kripal is chasing phantoms, and I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that the line between phantoms and "reality" is a thin, permeable line, which we can only intuit by extraordinary glances. In Kripal's persuasive view, we are "the human as two," with a whole lot going on that we as a species have been trying to understand and appreciate for our entire history. And it seems we're just getting going. 

Part 5: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

Jonathan Swift, to whom we owe the term Yahoos

 The final installment of R.G. Collingwood on Yahoos. 

30. 7. In the foregoing paragraphs I have outlined a picture of the Yahoo herd. From what sources have I drawn it? Partly from Hobbes; partly from Swift; partly from Dr. Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War; partly from Tarde’s Les Lois de l’imitation; partly from other books. But that is not the point. There is a thing which each of these authors has described in his way and I have tried to describe in mine. What is that thing? 

30. 71. The Yahoo herd is not a fact. It is not a state of human life known to historians by interpretation of evidence as having existed at some time in the remote past, like the Beaker Civilization. It is not a state of human life discovered by anthropologists as existing in their own time among members of some outlandish tribe like the Arunta. 

30. 72. The Yahoo herd is an abstraction.In painting a picture of it we have been trying to describe what human life would be like if men were not social. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization & Barbarism by R.G. Collingwood, rev. ed. David Boucher

The last work by Collingwood published before his death

The New Leviathan is the last book Collingwood published before his death at age 53 in early 1943.  Collingwood had suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes secondary to uncontrolled high blood pressure (for which doctors at the time could only prescribe "the rest cure"). In a race against death, Collingwood attempted to make sense of the political world in which he was then living, marred as it was by fascism and war. He did so by taking the architectonic work of modern political thought, The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, as his model. Let me introduce my brief consideration of this work with Collingwood's reflection on his project of building an understanding of politics from the ground up. I find it quite pertinent today.

12. 9. Our favourite nightmare in the twentieth century is about our powerlessness in the giant grip of economic and social and political structures; the nightmare which Professor Arnold Toynbee calls ‘The Intractableness of Institutions’.  

12. 91. The founders of modern political science made it clear once for all that these Leviathans are ‘Artificial Animals’, creatures formed by the art of man, ‘for whose protection and defence’ they were intended. 

12. 92. This is the ground of the nightmare. Oppression and exploitation, persecution and war, the torturing to death of human beings in vast helpless masses, are not new things on the face of the earth, and nobody thinks they are; nor are they done in the world on a greater scale or with more refinement of cruelty than they have been done in the past; nor have we grown more sensitive, to shrink, as men once did not, from blood.  

12. 93. But Hobbes (and others, but especially Hobbes) has for the first time in history held up a hope that there would be ‘protection and defence’ against these things; and by now the hope has sunk into our common consciousness; so that when we find it to be precisely the agents of this longed-for safety that are the chief authors of the evils for whose ending we have made them, hope turns to despair and we are ridden by another Frankenstein-nightmare, like Samuel Butler’s nightmare of humanity enslaved to its own machines, only worse.  

12. 94. But the despair, once more, is parasitic upon the hope.  

12. 95. If the hope went, the despair would go too. If we believed Marx’s monstrous lie that all States have always been organs for the oppression of one class by another, there would be nothing to make all this fuss about.  

12. 96. To strengthen the hope until it overcomes the nightmare, what must be done is to carry on the work, sadly neglected since Hobbes and a handful of successors began it, of constructing a science of politics appropriate for the modern world.  

12. 97. Towards such a science this book is offered as a contribution.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (All quotes to numbered paragraphs are in the Revised Edition edited by David Boucher published in 1992.)

Collingwood is known to most readers--if he's known at all--for his work in the philosophy of history. But his most comprehensive publication work in that field, The Idea of History, wasn't published until 1945, and it was in some measure incomplete because of the editorial choices of Collingwood's literary executor, T.M. Knox. Collingwood had also published in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics (and archeology). In short, in some ways--but not in others--he was a traditional academic philosopher, educated and then later employed at Oxford University, finishing his career as the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. But in the late 1930s, his attention turned to the political world around him, which was marked by the rise of fascism and increasing violence. He shocked and disturbed some of his more staid colleagues by growing a beard and declaring in his Autobiography (1939), his intention to dive into contemporary political issues. He closed his Autobiography with these words: 

I am writing a description of the way in which those events [the rise and response to Fascism] impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight. 

Collingwood, R. G. An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Having laid down his gauntlet, and in the face of his declining health, Collingwood embarked on his final work, which became The New Leviathan.  

In approaching this work, I have to admit I was a bit puzzled at the choice of Hobbes's great work as a model. My admittedly incomplete reading and knowledge of Hobbes pegged his work as solitary, nasty, brutish, but not short. And absolutist to boot. But Collingwood has earned my respect, and he addresses the issues concerning his role-model up-front. In his Preface, Collingwood writes: 

A READER may take the title of this book in whichever way he pleases. If he is one of those who think of Hobbes’s Leviathan as the classical exposition of a classical type of despotism, namely seventeenth-century absolutism, the portrait and anatomy of ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall’, he may take it to mean that I have set out in this ‘New Leviathan’ to portray and anatomize the new absolutism of the twentieth century, based (like that which Hobbes described) on the will of a people who in thus setting up a popular tyrant gave into his hands every right any one of them has hitherto possessed. For the immediate aim of this book is to study the new absolutism and inquire into its nature, causes, and prospects of success or failure; success, I mean, in either destroying all competitors and becoming the political form of the future, or at least contributing to the political life of the future some positive heritage of ideas and institutions which men will not forget.

Collingwood continues to defend his choice:

If he thinks of the Leviathan as a book which is unique in dealing with the entire body of political science and approaches its colossal subject from first principles, that is, from an examination of man, his faculties and interests, his virtues and vices; a book dealing first with man as such, then with political life as such, then with a well-ordered political life or a ‘CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH’, and lastly with an ill-ordered political life or ‘KINGDOME OF DARKNESSE’; then he may take my title to mean, not that I have in fact dealt with these vast subjects exhaustively, but that in this book I have set out to deal with the same groups of problems in the same order, calling the four parts of my book ‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’. Readers of the second school (though I have no quarrel with the others) will of the two be nearer to my own way of thinking. It is only now, towards the middle of the twentieth century, that men here and there are for the first time becoming able to appreciate Hobbes’s Leviathan at its true worth, as the world’s greatest store of political wisdom. I say that this is only now beginning to happen. From the time of its publication, when it impressed every reader with a force directly proportional to his own intelligence as the greatest work of political science the world had ever seen, but pleased nobody because there was no class of readers whose corns it left untrodden upon or whose withers it left unwrung, it fell more and more deeply into disfavour beneath a rising tide of ethical and political sentimentalism. Hardly a single political writer from the seventeenth century to the present day has been able so to clear his mind of that sentimentalism as to look Hobbes in the face and see behind those repellently grim features what manner of man he was; or to see behind the savage irony of his style how deeply he understood himself and his fellow men.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (Revised ed. ilx-lx)

(I'd apologize for the long quotes, but Collingwood is also a master prose-stylist whose pithy remarks I have a hard time trimming.) 

Collingwood thus proceeds to build his New Leviathan from the ground up, beginning with "Man," his term for individual psychology. In taking this course, Collingwood follows Hobbes's example in delving into the basics of the human animal. Unlike any of his earlier works, Collingwood works in numbered paragraphs (similar, for instance to Wittgenstein's Tractatus but without the austerity of style and expression). (One may see the numbered paragraphs in my quotes from this work, except in the Preface.) It is as if Collingwood wanted to make sure that he completed his foundation before moving on to the next level; he wanted to denote his thoughts as if they were a part of a schematic or engineering diagram. Happily, while this keeps his thoughts somewhat artificially separate and short, it doesn't necessarily reduce the felicity of his prose, metaphors, and analogies, which he deploys with such great effect. But it does serve to remind the reader of what a careful and thorough construction Collingwood is providing his reader. When needed, Collingwood can analyze and talk logic with the best of them. 

Because this is an architectonic work, it isn't easy to summarize. Each of the four parts into which he divides the book, "‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’" are set forth at length and sometimes include some intriguing digressions. But for purposes of this review, let me only point to a couple of highlights to give a sense of where Collingwood takes his readers. For instance, he borrows the terms "Yahoos" from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to great effect. (I've previously posted a series of quotes on this blog, beginning here.) In another section, he sets forth what he describes as the "Three Laws of Politics," which, when I first read them, struck me as a bit simplistic, but which, upon further reflection, strike me as capturing some essences of political life. Collingwood describes his three laws as follows: 

25. 7. The FIRST LAW OF POLITICS is that a body politic is divided into a ruling class and a ruled class.
25. 8. The SECOND LAW OF POLITICS is that the barrier between the two classes is permeable in an upward sense.
25. 9. This brings us to the THIRD LAW OF POLITICS: namely that there is a correspondence between the ruler and the ruled, whereby the former become adapted to ruling these as distinct from other persons, and the latter to being ruled by these as distinct from other persons. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Collingwood's use of the term "ruling class" may jar some ears, but if you chose, you can substitute "elites," but the point remains. To Collingwood the (classical) liberal and democrat, the key fact isn't the existence of a ruling class, but that it is "permeable in an upward sense." But it is the Third Law that strikes me as most important today: the existence of a "correspondence between the ruler and the ruled." Collingwood elucidates his Third Law in the following: 

25. 91. Working directly, or from the ruling class downwards, the ruler sets the fashion, and the ruled fall in with his lead.  

25. 92. But the Third Law also works inversely, from the ruled class upwards, and determines that whoever is to rule a certain people must rule them in the way in which they will let themselves be ruled.  

25. 93. Both setting the fashion and following it may be done either consciously or unconsciously; but the process is most likely to take the inverse form when it originates unconsciously in the mere, blind, unpolitical stupidity of the ruled, imposing limits on what their rulers can do with them.  

25. 94. An example of this law occurs when vigorous rulers teach the ruled to co-operate with them and to develop, under their tuition, a vigorous political life, a similarity in political enterprise and resource, like their own. In this way that portion of the ruled class which is more closely in contact with the ruling class receive a training for political action which enables them to succeed, in time, their rulers. Here the freedom whereby the rulers rule percolates, owing simply to the process of ruling, without any intention that it shall do so, downwards through the strata of the body politic.  

25. 95. But this only happens when the rulers are vigorous. Let the rulers be of a slavish sort, and what will percolate is slavishness.  

25. 96. When that happens in a body politic, it is hard to say whether the percolation is downward or upward; and the inquiry has little importance.  

25. 97. What is important is to know whether the process to which the body politic is subject is increasing or diminishing. Here is a ruling class, of one or more: to what does its rule tend? To the advancement of freedom, and therefore the ability to cope with political problems, or to its diminution? It is no use raising the question whether freedom is a good thing or not: freedom in the ruling class is nothing else than the fact that the ruling class rules, and the cry against freedom which accompanies the rise of Fascism and Nazism is a confused propaganda for the abolition of one thing (freedom for the ruled) where the distinction between that and another thing (freedom for the ruler) is overlooked. Of course no Fascist or Nazi protests against freedom for the ruler!  

25. 98. In Plato’s Republic the ‘tyrant’ is not a skilful and determined politician who seizes power for himself, but a piece of flotsam floating on the political waves he pretends to control, shoved passively into power by the sheer lowness of its own specific gravity. This is quite possible by the inverse working of the Third Law of Politics. Hitler, referring to Plato’s sense of the word ‘democracy’, claims to be a democratic ruler. He claims that he has been, so to speak, ejected by the automatic working of a mob, which elevates to a position of supremacy over itself whatever is most devoid of free will, whatever can be entirely trusted to do what is dictated by the desires which the mob feels. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

I can't read the words above without thinking about the current state of affairs in the U.S. without thinking about how our current "ruling class" (or the visible part of it), the Trump administration, has infected our entire body politic. When I first completed a reading of The New Leviathan in January 2016, I didn't know that the U.S. would elect a populist demagogue who would promote authoritarian values from the White House. I didn't appreciate the worldwide tide of authoritarianism abroad throughout the world. With this most recent reading, this book came alive to me in a new way. The words above (and others that I've quoted in earlier blog posts) speak to the world in which we live. Look again at Para. 25.98 (above) and tell me that you don't think of Trump! 

I intend to offer further reflect further upon Collingwood's The New Leviathan in a series of blog posts, but I want to address one other point before I close. As an undergraduate, I developed what I came to refer to as an "intellectual crush" on the work of Hannah Arendt. And with the election of Trump, I immediately turned to her work as a benchmark for attempting to come to grips with our predicament. Of late, this turn back to Arendt has been enhanced by joining a Virtual Reading Group sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. As to Collingwood, I didn't "discover" his work until around 2015, although I'd had a brief exposure as an undergraduate to his work in a Philosophy of History course. The exposure didn't take. (Dumb kid.) Now, as I've delved deeply into Collingwood's work, I perceive a number of similarities with Arendt's project. Both were what we might term "pure philosophers" during the early portions of their careers, but the events of the 1930s and 40s compelled both of them to turn their thoughts toward politics. Both were deeply schooled in the traditions of Greek and Latin antiquity, as well as modern philosophy. But most importantly, both emphasize the importance of speech, thought, and action in political affairs. I intend to explore the similarities between these two thinkers in the future. (N.B. I don't think that there are any direct connections between the two, but perhaps Arendt had some familiarity with Collingwood's work.) Both Arendt and Collingwood provide me with insights and models of politics that I find crucial in our dark times. 

sng 9 June 2020