Thoughts for the Day: 31 August 2020

 

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

There have always been people who saw that the true ‘unit of thought’ was not the proposition but something more complex in which the proposition served as answer to a question. Not only Bacon and Descartes, but Plato and Kant, come to mind as examples. When Plato described thinking as a ‘dialogue of the soul with itself’, he meant (as we know from his own dialogues) that it was a process of question and answer, and that of these two elements the primacy belongs to the questioning activity, the Socrates within us.

"...the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear." Hannah Arendt

War and Peace and War

Peter Turchin

The rise and fall of the dukes of Buckingham and de Guise graphically illustrates the dangers of extreme inequality for the social order. Rampant inequality feeds into the perception of the extant social order as unjust and illegitimate, and creates excellent breeding conditions for the rise of revolutionary ideologies. In the early modern period, these ideologies took the religious form. Later, the dominant revolutionary ideologies were nationalistic and Marxist. Today, we are seeing the rise of religious-based revolutionary ideologies again, such as the Wahhabism. There are huge differences between the English Puritans, the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks, and the Islamic Al Qaida, but there is at least one common thread running through all these ideologies and movements associated with them—a burning desire for social justice.

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." ― George Orwell

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world ... is being destroyed." Hannah Arendt

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 30 August 2020

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

It [the "fall" of China to the Communists] caught this country psychologically unprepared. It was natural for a confused country to look for scapegoats and conspiracies; it was easier than admitting that there were things outside your control and that the world was an imperfect place in which to live.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

The further back you can reach in imagination, the more extended you become.

Impeachment

Cass R. Sunstein

Whether we are bound by the original understanding depends on whether we conclude, on principle, that we should be bound by the original understanding. Those who reject originalism believe that our constitutional order is far better if we conclude that we are not bound. They believe that at least with respect to individual rights (where circumstances and values change), and perhaps with respect to constitutional structure more broadly (where again, circumstances and values change), we do much better to follow the text and pay respectful attention to the original understanding—without being rigidly constrained by it. In my view, that’s Justice Kennedy’s best argument. He is claiming that our system of rights is better if we take the Constitution to set out broad principles whose particular content changes over time.

Philosophy for Life

Jules Evans

They all follow these three Socratic steps: 1) Humans can know themselves. We can use our reason to examine our unconscious beliefs and values. 2) Humans can change themselves. We can use our reason to change our beliefs. This will change our emotions, because our emotions follow our beliefs. 3) Humans can consciously create new habits of thinking, feeling and acting. These three steps are, in essence, what CBT teaches.

There are a host of other differences, but they can effectively be boiled down to two things: fear and reality. Amateurs believe that the world should work the way they want it to. Professionals realize that they have to work with the world as they find it.

— The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals (Courtesy of Farnum Street blog newsletter)

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 29 August 2020

 

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

Charismatic authority is constructive only when it builds order from chaos. When it tries to supersede continuing forms of authority, it destabilizes despite itself. The more insistent became Kennedy’s personal call to follow him, the less compelling was any order that did not issue directly from him. The nontransferability of such personal authority was evident in the refusal of many Kennedy followers to treat President Johnson as fully legitimate. Johnson’s authority came from procedures and legal precedent, not from the personal charisma of his predecessor.

World Order

Henry Kissinger

...on April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved MacArthur of his military command for making statements contradicting the administration’s policy. On substance, Truman stressed the containment concept: the major threat was the Soviet Union, whose strategic goal was the domination of Europe. Hence fighting the Korean War to a military conclusion, even more extending it into China, was, in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, a combat leader in the war against Germany, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

Bonds That Make Us Free

C. Terry Warner

Though none of us is responsible for the misfortunes that befall us, we are, thankfully, responsible for how we use those misfortunes. We cannot alter past events, it’s true. Not having been responsible for them, we cannot take responsibility for them. But we are responsible for the effect they have upon us—for the meaning we assign to them and the way we remember them. And we can learn and grow from them.

A Few Lessons From Sherlock Holmes

Peter Bevelin

“It is of the first importance...not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities...The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.” (Holmes; The Sign of the Four)

The Songlines

Bruce Chatwin

“If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.”

Thoughts of the Day: Friday 28 August 2020

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Forbidden Hypnotic Secrets! - Incredible Confessions of the Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

If you have a seemingly unsolvable problem forget about it. If you wish, imagine you have a note with your problem written on it. Next imagine you put it in a bottle and throw it behind you 'into your subconscious.' Get on with your life and sooner or later the solution will present itself when you least expect. Relax. The subconscious/unconscious is fully capable of solving problems when you focus on something else. It doesn't need the help of the conscious mind which is far too limited for such a task.

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
“The truth doesn’t change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” - Flannery O’Connor ​​

The Art of Travel

Alain De Botton

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Shar

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The Metaphysical Club

Louis Menand

The pragmatists wanted a social organism that permitted a greater (though by no means unrestricted) margin for difference, but not just for the sake of difference, and not even because they thought principles of love and fairness required it. They wanted to create more social room for error because they thought this would give good outcomes a better chance to emerge. They didn’t just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to get to a better place.

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 27 August 2020

 "A million years ago, during the George W. Bush administration, a White House official dismissively told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” meaning that they believed solutions to the nation’s problems came from studying reality and finding answers. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” the official told Suskind. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

--Heather Cox Richardson. (N.B. Not all thoughts offered here are those that I agree with but sometimes "bad thoughts" (like examples of hubris) can spur deeper and, one hopes, better thoughts. 

The Force of Character

James Hillman

In many indigenous societies, the deeper instructive and affective connections skip a generation. Since both grandparents and grandchildren are partly marginalized, the young fantast joins the old eccentric against a common opponent, the adult generation between them.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

All our historical sources are based in this way on testimony: all testimony tells us not what happened but what its author wanted us to believe, or wanted to believe himself. In this way the uncertainty of history is contrasted with the certainty of perception and memory. But neither the criticism nor the contrast is well founded.

"Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not…" — Hannah Arendt

"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it." ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 26 August 2020

 “Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.” 

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

In Secular Cycles (2009), the Russian historian Sergey Nefedov and I have examined in detail eight such waves of instability, brought on by the loss of cooperation: the civil wars of the late Roman Republic and the collapse of Roman Empire, the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses in medieval England and France, the French War of Religion, the English Civil War, the Time of Troubles in Russia, and the Russian Revolution and Civil War that ended the Romanov dynasty. In each case, we found that unraveling cooperation was a lead indicator of social collapse.

The Anatomy of Peace

The Arbinger Institute

So self-betrayal —this act of violating my own sensibilities toward another person—causes me to see that person or persons differently, and not only them but myself and the world also. When I ignore a sense to apologize to my son, for example, I might start telling myself that he’s really the one who needs to apologize, or that he’s a pain in the backside, or that if I apologize, he’ll just take it as license to do what he wants.

Collingwood's The Idea of History: A Reader's Guide by Peter Johnson

 

Collingwood in summary and in-depth

A preliminary observation: reading R.G. Collingwood is not a chore; in fact, it's a pleasure. Collingwood made a point of making his work accessible, and he succeeded. He addressed the issue of writing style in his Essay on Philosophical Method, where he argues that philosophy needn't--shouldn't--be difficult to read and fathom. Now, having read all of his major works at least once, I can attest to his writing acumen. But, make no mistake, what Collingwood writes requires close attention and a determined effort on the part of the reader to match Collingwood's mind. And he wrote a lot. The Oxford paperback copy of The Idea of History (rev. ed.) runs to 496 pages of text. In such a case, a guide can prove quite useful; someone who identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the book's arguments in a succinct and organized manner. Peter Johnson's Collingwood's The Idea of History: A Reader's Guide does just this, and by doing so, he provides an indispensable guide for anyone wanting a better grasp of Collingwood's thought about history as a discipline. 

Johnson's book only addresses Collingwood's The Idea of History and related texts in the revised edition of IH (OUP, 1993), not the entire body and development of Collingwood's thought. Johnson's text is relatively short at 196 pages, which includes a glossary of terms. Collingwood's terms, like "re-enactment," "encapsulation," and "inside/outside," for instance, are not terribly difficult to comprehend, but Collingwood deploys these terms in very specific ways, so the glossary proves useful. Indeed, the glossary defines its terms by quoting Collingwood directly. Johnson also provides a very detailed bibliography ("Reading Guide") of secondary works, both in general and relating to specific topics. This work was published in 2013, so the bibliography and reference to secondary works are reasonably up-to-date and quite thorough. 

The best aspect of this book, among its many merits, come from Johnson's splendid job of laying out Collingwood's main ideas with deftness and economy. He mixes quotes from Collingwood with his own concise summaries and comments about Collingwood's arguments. He also addresses criticisms of Collingwood's positions with the same sense of thoroughness and with an admirable degree of impartiality. Johnson (who's written an early book on Collingwood) is obviously an admirer, but he also sees the weaknesses or points of contention raised by other qualified readers. Collingwood, a careful and precise thinker, doesn't need a great deal of help in defense, although his inability to oversee the publication of IH (published posthumously) and his other ideas about history in the manner in which he planned, did leave some uncertainties and ambiguities about his positions, although the discovery and release of previously unpublished works, such as Collingwood's draft of The Principles of History (1999), have done much to alleviate this problem. 

The only slight criticism I have of Johnson's work is that he doesn't address Collingwood's use of res gestae, which I believe is necessary to fully understand--or at least not misunderstand--Collingwood's contention that "all history is the history of thought." It seems that some readers of Collingwood, including some otherwise perceptive and sympathetic, come to the conclusion that "all history is the history of thought" means that history is only a matter of intellectual history or the history of ideas. But this is not so, as Collingwood's use of res gestae demonstrates. Older lawyers (like me) will recognize the term res gestae is a part of the phrase the "res gestae exception to the rule against hearsay." The literal translation is "thing done." In short, Collingwood acknowledges that "things done" reflect the thought of the actor and therefore provide evidence of the actor's thought. "Thought" as Collingwood uses it in IH isn't limited to formal thinking, concepts, or such, but the everyday workings of the human mind as it attempts to solve problems and take action. Collingwood first references res gestae in IH here: 

What kind of things does history find out? I answer, res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past. Although this answer raises all kinds of further questions many of which are controversial, still, however they may be answered, the answers do not discredit the proposition that history is the science of res gestae, the attempt to answer questions about human actions done in the past.

Collingwood, R. G.. The Idea of History. Albion Press. Kindle Edition. 

In short, res gestae are those thoughts that humans have turned into actions. Thus, the scope of human history as Collingwood defines it consists of those thoughts that have been turned into actions as established by evidence available in the present. The wishes, daydreams, private, unrecorded thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and emotions that leave no mark in the world (via some res gestae) are not a part of history as Collingwood defines it because these unrecorded or unacted upon thoughts leave no traces in the present, although such states of mind certainly existed in the past. Johnson spends some time addressing Collingwood's exclusion of emotions from history, as emotions serve as the fuel of human action. However, Collingwood is not quite as dogmatic and abrupt in his distinction between "thought" and "emotions" as he may seem in IH. In his Principles of Art Collingwood considers the emotions more thoroughly and with, I think, a greater appreciation of the sliding scale in the mind between emotion and thought that binds them together in some measure. 

In sum, Peter Johnson has written his own "indispensable" guide to Collingwood's The Idea of History, one of the seminal works--perhaps the seminal work--about history written in the twentieth century. To return to the beginning, there's no compelling reason not to read Collingwood's book, but then to experience it again with the aid of an accomplished and informed guide is a genuine boon. I appreciate Collingwood's masterpiece even more after having considered it again with Johnson's guidance. 

sng

12 August 2020

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

Published in 1958

The flyleaf in my copy of this book records that I bought this book on 12 October 1974 for the cover price of $3.75. I was taking off a year from college before the start of my senior year in 1975.  I don't recall if I read it before I returned to school the next fall, but I do know that I read Arendt, either this The Human Condition or her Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (or perhaps both). I'd taken a couple of courses in political thought and hadn't done all that well, but the topic drew me in and has never left me. The Human Condition was assigned for a contemporary political thought class that I took the following fall, and then I sat-in on an entire class about Arendt in the fall of 1978 while I was in law school. So, I estimate that I'd read the book at least twice before--and last about 42 years ago. 

But while I don't believe that I've read The Human Condition completely since 1978, Arendt's work and thought stayed with me, fermenting as I've considered it and as I've continued to refine my political thinking. 

With the election of a right-wing authoritarian as president 2016, my mind turned once again to Arendt and to her thought. And with the great pandemic of 2020, I joined the Virtual Reading Group" at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College (remote, of course). I'm now back again exploring works of Arendt that I'd not read before, such as Men in Dark Times and Essays in Understanding: 1930-1964. But Arendt provides more than emergency reading--the value of her insights transcend the "times of troubles" from which so much of it arose. 

When I first read Arendt, I recall the sensation of reading by lightning flashes. So many of her insights remained hidden or obscure to me, but these obstacles were interspaced with flashes of insight that prompted me to press on. Now, after four more decades of reading and learning, I can read her works with a greater appreciation and at least a pretense of comprehension. The Human Condition is a brilliant book. Brilliant not simply in the sense of sharp or engaging, but in the sense that it sheds an intense, revealing light upon politics, labor, work, and the Modern Age. By engaging with this book, one cannot but help but coming to a deeper understanding and engagement with the world. Despite having been written in 1958 (a very different time!), it helps us comprehend our current situation by grounding her analysis within the framework of the human condition (a term she unpacks in the book).

In this book, Arendt lays out some of her most important and enduring ideas. These include three attributes of "the human condition:" natality, mortality, and plurality (which entails a type of equality). In brief, natality refers to the fact that each human person is born into the world. As Arendt notes, this fact gives rise to newness, the initiation of something (someone) unique and therefore underlies the basis of freedom. On the other end of each human life is mortality, that each person will die. We enter and exit. So what do we leave behind? Plurality reflects that we each are born into a human community, of which we are but one among many. Plurality gives rise to political and social life. 

The main emphasis of the book is upon what Arendt labels the vita activa, the Latin phrase that we can understand as the active life. This form of life, with its three components, contrasts with the vita contempletiva, the life of contemplation that developed in late antiquity with Stoicism and Epicureanism and that was adopted Christianity and became the ideal way of life in the world of  Medieval Christianity. But with the rise of the Modern Age, the vita activa took the preferred role, but with an inversion of the classical hierarchy of action, work, and labor. The three modes of life within the vita activa include action, work, and labor, which Arendt identified as going back to ancient Greece and that survived well into the Roman period. For the Greeks of the city-state during the flowering of democracy, action was the most highly valued way of life. Action consists of speech and deeds done in public among one's peers; to wit. politics. Work consists of the making of items that were durable and not for consumption; tools and tables and works of art, for instance. Arendt argues that these items provide a continuing presence to human life that no individual life or consumable good could provide. I venture that these items produced by work are the cultural artifacts of archeologists, the pottery shards and bits of papyrus that allow us to see the physical world of ages past. The third activity in the vita activa is labor. In the ancient Greek world, this was the lowest form of life, mostly addressed by slaves. It represents the necessity of certainty activities and functions that allow the continuation of a human life. However, with the advent of the Modern Age, with the coming of more advanced technologies and new forms of life and production, labor gained a new level of importance. Economic and socio-political thinking came to place the greatest values on consumption and the processes of life and therefore labor became more highly valued. This trend was especially important in the work of Karl Marx (whom Arendt addresses at length in this book and whose importance she recognizes without adopting Marxism). 

The description above is a brief summary of the guiding concepts upon which the remainder of the book rests. What Arendt does with these concepts is quite amazing. For with these fundamental insights, she comes to grips with ideas and events that have created our world. In addition to Marx, Arendt draws deeply upon the classical world and modern thought, often citing Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, in addition to the likes of Kant, Hegel (not much), Nietzsche, Bergson, and Whitehead. (Of note here is the fact that Arendt cites her teacher Heiddegar not at all in this book (perhaps for obvious reasons) and her other teacher--and friend--Karl Jaspers only in two footnotes, both related to Descartes.) To be clear, despite her firm grounding in the Western philosophical tradition, her thought is unique and original in a stunning way. Also, I should note, her mastery of issues outside of philosophy, such as economics and economic history and political and social history are astonishing. But be forewarned: reading her work is often not easy. To fully grasp everything that she wrote in this book, one would need to prove the master of five languages: English, German, French, ancient Greek, and Latin. (Happily, the body of the text is in English with Greek and Latin occasionally interspersed, while the French and German are mostly restricted to footnotes!)

As I look back upon this work that has influenced me so much, I have to address the question of "why?" I came to college very interested in politics (declaring my major upon my first registration). Both of my parents were active in politics, especially my father, although he was not a politician. By the time I went to college, acting as my father's apprentice, I'd already been to two national political conventions, attended meetings with governors and senators, and sat through all manor and level of political meetings. I gained a sense of what ground-level politics consisted of in the United States. In college, my freshman year, I took a survey course on political thought: Plato, Machiavelli, Mill, Marx, and contemporary developments. It was perhaps in this class that I first heard of Arendt. In any event, as I related above, I eventually came to read her on my own before any class requirement. What I discovered was a sense of politics that conferred upon political activity (Arendt's "action") a sense of dignity that one wouldn't intuit from my earlier ground-level experience. Speech and action based on thought, deeds that were worthy of history. The creation of a polity in which one could express oneself and one's insights and have an opportunity to act in concert with others to create something that, while certainly ephemeral, could nevertheless prove worth remembering. For some, politics could prove a calling, a way to be in the world. I never "went into politics" (ran for public office), but I've remained outspoken about political issues, and I've actively supported candidates. And, for a career, I pursued the law, which is the use of speech to attempt to avoid and resolve conflicts and to refine the daily operations of politics have been resolved in some measure (but not completely) by the adoption of laws. Speech and that actions that arise from speech are certainly among the highest and most distinctive human traits, and no one has made this more clear to me than Hannah Arendt. No gift is more valuable to have received in this age of increasing authoritarianism and deception in the public realm than Arendt's guidance about the value of speech and action in the public realm.