Sunday, January 31, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 31 January 2021

 

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exist.


— Hannah Arendt


Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.


Social theorists have a name for smart people motivated solely by greed and fear—“rational agents.” It turns out that a group consisting entirely of rational agents is incapable of cooperation. In particular, such people will never manage to put together a fighting troop.


Socrates, in fact, became the primary saint of the ethics of imperturbability in later Greek philosophy, the model on whom the Cynic and Stoic sophoi, or wise men, are based.

God is not a “being” at all, not even an infinite one. God is Be-ing in the sense that without God, nothing can be. The “being” of God is verbal and transitive‒ the being of God makes everything else be. God says “Be!” and things spring into existence.

Western psychiatric medicine is often hard to distinguish from pharmacology. Most antidepressants aim to suppress moods—to bring them into a narrow range of experience, removing both the highs and lows. We reduce symptoms of an affliction to make it invisible.

The ultimate end of an evolution of consciousness into self-consciousness is total self-consciousness: the movement is from potency to act, from passivity to power.




Saturday, January 30, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 30 January 2021

 

Published 2019


The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
--George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
. . . .
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
--Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (1965).

Not content with being taught how to think without being taught a doctrine, they changed the non-results of the Socratic thinking examination into negative results: If we cannot define what piety is, let us be impious—which is pretty much the opposite of what Socrates had hoped to achieve by talking about piety.

Where does this leave us in regard to one of our chief problems—the possible interconnectedness of non-thought and evil? We are left with the conclusion that only people inspired by the Socratic eros, the love of wisdom, beauty, and justice, are capable of thought and can be trusted. In other words, we are left with Plato’s “noble natures,” with the few of whom it may be true that none “does evil voluntarily.” Yet the implied and dangerous conclusion, “Everybody wants to do good,” is not true even in their case.

Hitler also had an above-average and keen intelligence and a genuine, if very limited, faculty of judgment, which functioned well within its limits. Hitler’s assessments of international relationships in Europe were almost always correct. His comments on European history were often truly excellent—especially his comments on the mistakes of Napoleon I, who ought never to have exchanged the title first consul for that of emperor, nor mixed family matters with politics. His judgments of people were often perceptive and amusing, but his judgment failed completely where the Anglo-Saxon countries were concerned. There he misunderstood every event and every situation. His views of America were so unrealistic that they caused him to slap his hand on his knee with pleasure when he heard that America had entered the war. He did not even understand the most primitive power relationships. How could he have understood that for Anglo-Saxon peoples treaties are by no means mere scraps of paper?

The mind of Adolf  Hitler was a very powerful instrument To deduce from his awesome defects of the heart that he was wanting insight or intelligence is the commonest mistake most people make about him. Nor was he mad. This is the simplistic interpretation to which Americans are especially prone: It corresponds to the modern American inclination to believe that the presence of evil in men is an abnormal condition . . . . Sad, cold, cruel: But not mad. 

Lukacs, John, The Last European War: September 1939--December 1941 (1976)





Metaphysic, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood by James Connelly

 


Early in this book Professor Connelly (now Emeritus),  makes an important point, remarking that this work doesn't replicate the territory covered by David Boucher's earlier work, The Social and Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. I'd already read Boucher's work less than a year ago, and I found it quite useful. When I purchased Connelly's work, I must admit a bit of trepidation that it would in fact cover the same ground as Boucher's. Mind you, both men are two of the most important contemporary scholars addressing Collingwood, especially Collingwood's politics (Giuseppina D'Oro also deserves a shout-out.) In fact, according to Connelly's website, he and Boucher have collaborated on a new edition of Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (1924), Collingwood's first mature work and one that sets the terms for his future philosophical investigations (and a book that, according to Louis Mink in his Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, provides the key to understanding Collinwood's entire project.)* Thus, I hope that you get a sense of both my enthusiasm for the work of these two established scholars yet my not wanting to simply have them both write books on the same points. But in fact, Connelly was correct in his contention, and his work is indeed different from Boucher's; of course, there is some overlap, but Connelly approaches the topic from a different perspective and maintains a different approach throughout the work. 

Connelly begins his work by demolishing the contention by some, including T.M. Knox and Alan Donegan, that there was a sharp break in Collingwood's thought late in his life, sometimes blamed on Collingwood's declining health. Connelly carefully dismantles these arguments by a thorough review of Collingwood's life-long philosophical project. Of course, there were changes in Collingwood's thought and different shadings over time, but nothing approaching a break, just development. Also, Connelly rightly claims Louis Mink arrived at the same conclusion, and I concur. After establishing the "unity of Collingwood's philosophy," Connelly goes on to discuss Collingwood's ideas about philosophical method and metaphysics that Connelly argues are essential to understanding Collingwood's "political philosophy of civilization." He also visits Collingwood's concept of "absolute presuppositions" as the underpinnings of any metaphysics. It is only after addressing these issues, which comprise the whole of Part One of this book before he turns to Collingwood's political and legal thought. 

In Part Two, Connelly turns to topics such as "the theory, practice, and forms of action," "political action," "civilization and barbarism," and "the dimensions of civilization." Of course, in addressing these topics Connelly's work inevitably overlaps with Boucher's early work, but one still notes the differences. Boucher's work is like a guided tour of the museum, the museum, in this case, is limited mostly to Collingwood's New Leviathan, his most explicitly political book and the last one published during his life, along with some references to other published books. Connelly's work, on the other hand, is more like a talk at the museum that expounds upon the most important displays. Also, Connelly, publishing in 2003, has an advantage over Boucher, who published in 1989, because many of Collingwood's papers were made available to scholars by Collingwood's daughter, Teresa Smith after Boucher's publication. For instance, Collingwood's "Man Goes Mad," an exceptional analysis of the political and cultural predicament of the time was available to Connelly, and he used it and other unpublished drafts to good effect. 

Collingwood described himself as a "European liberal," which, so far as I can tell, provides an accurate description of his political outlook throughout his life. But with Collingwood, little is simple or obvious (although he writes delightfully refreshing prose for a philosopher). His "three laws of politics" considers the reality that in any liberal society there will be rulers and the ruled. Today, I might prefer the terms "elites" or "leaders," but under any terms, he sees that politics will have those at the head and those who follow. But he makes a couple of additional points: First, that there should be a continuous, open influx of membership in the leadership (ruling) group. Second, what the leaders (rulers) do will be mimicked in large measure by the followers (ruled). In other words, example counts; one leads by example. In the contemporary U.S., this observation seems especially important and a lesson hard-learned. 

Connelly's book provides a deep but comprehensive view of Collingwood's thought about politics, law, and civilization, and along with Boucher's book, one could not ask for two more capable books on this topic. And yet despite their impressive and admirable efforts, it seems to me that Collingwood's thought about politics, his political theory, remains underappreciated and under-explored. I came to Collingwood's work as a student of history. But I am also someone deeply interested in political thought, and here is where I received my happy surprise. Once I began reading Collingwood, I was hard-pressed to find a topic about which he wrote that I didn't worthwhile (with the archeology of Roman Britain providing the exception, although I'm sure there are nuggets in those writings as well.) Now it seems to me that a new generation of Collingwood scholars can and should explore and expand Collingwood's political thought. Our age is not so different from his, which experienced the rise of authoritarian regimes in the wake of the Great War and the Great Depression. We have now experienced a growing proto-fascism and authoritarianism in liberal democracies. Also, we face an ecological crisis (climate change and much more) that will greatly tax our political, economic, and social institutions in ways that I'd venture to believe Collingwood would not find surprising. For myself, because I've been updating my acquaintance with the work of Hannah Arendt, I've come to see significant similarities between these two philosophers turned political theorists. Although Arent was about a generation younger than Collingwood, she too was deeply affected by the Great War and rise of fascism and communism. (She was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany beginning in 1933.) Their  similarities and differences are quite intriguing and have sparked my enthusiasm for more deeply exploring their stances and deploying them in our time of troubles. I hope others (including Boucher and Connelly) will use Collingwood's insights and those of his contemporaries to help us make sense of our current predicament toward the end of more effective political action. 

*Connelly's website (https://jamesconnellly.academia.edu/cv) indicates that Oxford University Press will issue this new edition of Speculum Mentis this year (2021) edited by Connelly and David Boucher. In addition to making the original text widely available, the new addition will include additional shorter works by Collingwood that haven't been previously published, at least if they follow precedents of previous works of Collingwood that they've edited along with other colleagues. Collingwood left behind a treasure trove of unpublished works that have been gradually published over the course of the last thirty years or so that have proven a boon for students of Collingwood's work and that have helped bring his published works into sharper focus. Good news indeed! (And as a further teaser, the same website indicates that Connelly's biography of Collingwood is scheduled for publication in 2022.) 

Friday, January 29, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 29 January 2021

 



To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the right’s support. It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules. Yet conservatism began life as an enemy of liberalism and never fully abandoned its reservations about democracy.


The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.”
I disagree with Keynes, at least in part and regarding the U.S. military. I believe that most of the top brass have spoken out in commitment to democracy & the rule of law ("liberalism") and have remained committed to the American tradition of civilian control of the military and to non-interference in politics.

The concept of Love (philia), in fact, figures large in Epicurean axiology. The noble nature devotes itself to wisdom and love, of which the first is a mortal god, the second immortal.

The peculiar political unreality and traditionalism among anti-Stalinists seems to be closely connected with the general political situation in this country. All totalitarian movements, but Bolshevism even more today than Nazism a decade ago, are completely absent from the American domestic scene. All that Bolshevism actually means today is a possible menace from abroad, helped by domestic espionage, with the result that anti-Stalinists think more and more exclusively in terms of foreign policy. Since they have no contact with and little lively interest in politics as the realm of the statesman, they have degenerated into armchair strategists who marshal the forces of the world for and against Stalin. The new emphasis on foreign policy is what chiefly distinguishes present-day anti-Stalinism from earlier forms of anti-totalitarianism like Trotskyism or anti-fascism. Although fascist groups in this country were never very strong, they existed nevertheless. The fact, moreover, that totalitarian and partially totalitarian dictatorships of the fascist brand had sometimes been helped to power by the native bourgeoisie (the significance of which was greatly overrated by all Marxists) led American anti-fascists, rightly or wrongly, to believe “it can happen here,” which naturally gave them a personal stake in the struggle and revealed to them certain possibilities for action at home.
How does Arendt's assessment of anti-Communists ("anti-Stalinists") and her assessment of U.S. politics written around 1949 compare with the current U.S. situation? It seems to me that we currently have a strong proto-fascist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal political movement at work in our country. It's a minority, but because of a variety of factors, it has an out-sized influence on policy and events.

Focus lets us intentionally form and file symbols. With it, we temporarily hire the librarian to pull specific symbols from the paralimbic library and then escort them into the higher brain areas. Focus is a kind of wedge at the root of everything we do. It’s as easy as breathing. It allows us to take control of how we want to experience the world. However, we can’t focus all the time. Instead, we use focus to help give the limbic librarian new instructions for how to continue when we’re not paying attention.

Against this image of continuous human progress, which inspired the whole Enlightenment, not least the philosophy of Kant, [Walter] Benjamin places the logic of disruptive intervention, later called “Chok” (shock). The quintessential Chok events, which both bring down extant entire images of the world and create new ones, are “origins” (Ur-Sprünge, literally “primal leaps”)...
Any chok about today?

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 28 January 2021

 


Madison pleaded that it was “indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community [against] the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate. The limitation of the period of his service, was not a sufficient safeguard.” (There’s a lot there: incapacity, negligence, or perfidy.) He feared that the president “might lose his capacity after his appointment.” Madison was especially concerned that the president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.” And if the president were either corrupt or incapacitated, the situation might be “fatal to the republic” unless impeachment were available.

For Keynes, the soft underbelly of the classical theory was Say’s Law, which he summarized as the maxim that “supply creates its own demand.” Postulated by Jean-Baptiste Say, a French contemporary of Adam Smith, it linked together three problems Keynes saw in the classical story: the outdated focus on scarcity, the notion that markets self-correct, and the idea that involuntary unemployment is impossible.
Cf. The quoted reference to von Mises in yesterday's post.

“Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them. Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it.”

[Colin] Wilson argues that Pamela and the other novels that emerged in its wake were like a new kind of drug, but one without the horrific side effects of gin. The story kept readers interested—like all good novelists, Richardson instilled that itch to “see what happens.” But aside from the mild titillation of sex, what really attracted Richardson's readers was the sense of having stepped out of the confines of their lives.

Conservatives took society to be harmonious. They respected power and accepted customary authority. They did not believe in progress or in equality. Respect in their eyes was due not to everyone regardless but to merit and excellence.

Collingwood argues that most theories of knowledge – knowledge as acquisition, description or correspondence – make history impossible because they neglect the work of the imagination in the way the world comes to be known.






Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Thoughts of the Day: Wednesday 27 January 2021

 




History is not just about lists of dates – the Kings and Queens of England, say, or the Reform Acts; nor is it just about events and the causes of events – the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, say, or the assassination of an American President. Nor is history about the treatment of past experience as fact, since facts do not come to historians with their explanations already made.
I have a slight disagreement here: history isn't at all "about a list of dates." History is about "dates" in the same way that receiving a vaccine is "about" the needle and syringe. There's a danger of confusing the ends (purpose) with the means. Dates are tools, not ends--and this illusion about history is something that Collingwood (and any serious student of history) detests.

“For a world that is always in equilibrium there is no difference between the future and the past,” [Joan] Robinson once said. “There is no history and there is no need for Keynes.”

“Unemployment is a problem of wages, not of work,” Keynes’ Austrian contemporary Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1927.
I include this to demonstrate how daft--or downright callous--one of the patron saints of neoliberalism can be.

Here's what I think. I think angels make their home in the Self, while Resistance has its seat in the Ego. The fight is between the two. The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are. What is the Ego, anyway? Since this is my book, I'll define it my way. The Ego is that part of the psyche that believes in material existence. The Ego's job is to take care of business in the real world. It's an important job. We couldn't last a day without it. But there are worlds other than the real world, and this is where the Ego runs into trouble.

Gebser speaks of such a consciousness as being “ego-free,” which he insists does not mean “ego-less.” Gebser is not speaking of a return to the whole, a blending of our consciousness with that of the All, as some mystical paths suggest. In “ego-freedom,” as I understand it, we are aware of the whole and our relation to it, while retaining our clear awareness of our independent self. We are “ego-free” insofar as we transcend the limited perspective of the ego, the small self, aware of little more than its appetites and complaints, and gain a “bird’s-eye view” of the larger world beyond ourselves.

In Kant judgment emerges as “a peculiar talent which can be practised only and cannot be taught.” Judgment deals with particulars, and when the thinking ego moving among generalities emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new “gift” to deal with them.


Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 26 January 2021

 

The freedom rampant in the West, which it wants to export, [contemporary Russian writer Alexander] Dugin sees, is only a freedom from some constraint or other. It has no positive value; it is not freedom for some purpose or goal. As Nietzsche said, “many lost what was best in them when they lost their chains,” meaning that without an aim or purpose, freedom is merely license—or, as existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre saw, a burden.

“Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic … and feels that he is participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day … he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or Bonaparte.”---Thomas Jefferson

Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially. On the basis of this dual independence they could afford that attitude of superior disdain which gave rise to La Rochefoucauld’s contemptuous insights into human behavior, the worldly wisdom of Montaigne, the aphoristic trenchancy of Pascal’s thought, the boldness and open-mindedness of Montesquieu’s political reflections. It cannot be my task here to discuss the circumstances which eventually turned the hommes de lettres into revolutionaries in the eighteenth century nor the way in which their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries split into the class of the “cultured” on the one hand and of the professional revolutionaries on the other.

“Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary….The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.”--John Maynard Keynes

Then he asks me if I’ve ever heard of George Catlin. Indeed I had; lately, Catlin has had a bit of a resurgence among a certain breed of biohackers who look to evolution for answers to human health. Born in 1796, Catlin was a renowned explorer, painter and ethnographer who spent much of his life traveling among indigenous tribes of North and South America. He traveled with William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) on explorations of the Missouri River and had the opportunity to meet tribes and communities who had never encountered white men before. Toward the end of his career, Catlin began to wonder why it was that nearly all of the tribes he encountered had incredibly low instances of chronic diseases.

Monday, January 25, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: 25 January 2021

 



All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.

I do not want to believe that we are essentially a people obsessed with security (safety, insurance, prisons, protection, labeling laws); nor that we are a people enslaved to consumerism; enchanted by the media, entertainment and celebrity; dependent on relationships; or that we are a narcissistic society in love with its own childhood to the utter denial of our national tragedies, unable to imagine a meaningful future. These diagnoses observe symptoms only, without getting to the fundamental syndrome of which the symptoms are but fluctuating and fashionable manifestations. The deeper syndrome is inertia of the spirit, a passivity that feels no vocation and shies from imaginative vision, adventurous thinking and intellectual clarification. That we imagine ourselves today as a nation of victims attests to a vacuum in the spirit of the nation. These are symptoms of the soul in search of clarity. Clarity is the essential. The soul is desperately seeking the power of mind to be applied to the powerlessness it experiences.
That’s why our courtships are a dance, not a death match. Apes and elks battle for the right to reproduce and take multiple mates by force, but humans have a more runway-model approach: rather than fight, we flaunt.

When his [Abraham Maslow's] students began to talk to one another about their peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time. It is as if reminding yourself of their existence is enough to make them happen.