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.
