The Tao of Duty

I am only interested here in juxtaposing two quotations. They point towards thoughts that I hope to think at a later date.

John Gray on Taoism:

"Outside the Western tradition, the Taoists of ancient China saw no gap between is and ought. Right action was whatever comes from a clear view of the situation. They did not follower moralists – in their day, Confucians – in wanting to fetter human beings with rules or principles. For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skilfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realize any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal with whatever needs to be done. The good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with 'morality' " (Straw Dogs, 112-113).

Collingwood on history and freedom:

"The rational activity which historians have to study is never free from compulsion: the compulsion to face the facts of its own situation. The more rational it is, the more completely it undergoes this compulsion. To be rational is to think; and for a man who proposes to act, the thing that it is important to think about is the situation in which he stands. With regard to this situation, he is not free at all. It is what it is, and neither he nor anyone else can ever change that. For though the situation consists altogether of thoughts, his own and other people's, it cannot be changed by a change of mind on the part of himself or anyone else. If minds change, as they do, this merely means that with the lapse of time a new situation has arisen. For a man about to act, the situation is his master, his oracle, his god. Whether his action is to prove successful or not depends on whether he grasps the situation rightly or not. If he is a wise man, it is not until he has consulted his oracle, done everything in his power to find out what the situation is, that he will make even the most trivial plan. And if he neglects the situation, the situation will not neglect him. It is not one of those gods that leave an insult unpunished."

Collingwood speaks here not of duty, but of freedom. Later he will call this form of activity 'duty'.

I'm sure any reader can perceive the affinity between these two quotations. I leave this here simply as a reminder for myself. I will return.

What I've Done

My life is full and I don't intend to pursue my writing with much gusto right now. I will thus share what I have done. The comparative study of Collingwood and Bergson is as complete as I'm going to make it. The questions that I had intended to pursue, which you can see in notes at the end of the project, will continue to occupy me. But  I won't be writing about them presently.

Time and Duty

The Project. The Reading.

I have chosen to truncate my current writing project on Collingwood and Bergson. Initially I had hoped to pursue a series of questions that I now intend to confine to a separate project. The questions concerning friendship, duty, and concrete relations to not-selfs cannot be contained within the framework of the Collingwood-Bergson project.

I generally have a problem with limited statements. I have found myself several times trying to pursue such a variety of questions within one piece of writing that I jeopardize the coherence of the project. In this instance I have decided to let the comparative study of Collingwood and Bergson stand on its own. The work I did has been invaluable in helping me move towards a fuller understanding of their work, but it can't be everything. There is time yet for more projects.

I also made this decision because it has become clear to me that my grasp on the extant literature on friendship is inadequate. I began reading A.C. Grayling's Friendship and enjoyed my jaunt through his cursory history of the philosophical writing on friendship. His writing on Plato's Lysis was just downright weak, however. His takeaway basically being: 'this is an early dialogue of Plato's that is inconclusive and advocates a simple utilitarian view of friendship'. I've spent a bit of time with the Lysis in the last year, and I'm astounded that he could read it in such a way. In any case, I will continue to learn to read the ancients seriously. I'm less confident about my ability to speak intelligently of Aristotle's account of friendship in his ethics. I did the ethics last year with some friends and feel like I have a solid starting point with that work.

In any case, I'll be editing and revising the Collingwood-Bergson project over the coming weeks and will make the entire thing available at some point.

I also want to start working on something new. I have some new reading, for example, that needs examination. The most serious things I've encountered have been Wittgenstein's On Certainty and Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I'm quite please with what it felt like to touch these authors. I don't yet know how to breath with them, and I am hoping that some writing will help clarify what I've learned from them.

In particular, I wanted to do a bit of reflection on Wittgenstein and Hume's approaches to the problem of experience, or the bedrock of practices that underlies all thought and activity. This would line up well with an inquiry into Leo Strauss' analysis of Collingwood, and the problem of establishing with clarity Collingwood's approach to relativism.

In any case, the project is 'done'. The reading is happening. The thinking is happening. It's unclear to me what I'll be working on next. But, to be frank, I just made myself the first pair of cutoffs of the season and I'm itching to wear them around. I know there are quieter parts of myself, parts that like dancing and throwing frisbees in the park, and I need to cultivate those as well.

Thought as an Ontological Condition

The distinctions I've made in my current project emerged from Collingwood's criticism of Bergson in The Idea of Nature. There he accuses him of setting up three interrelated dualism: Life and Matter, intellect and intuition, and knowledge and action. I labeled these cosmology, epistemology, and pragmatics, respectively. After a bunch of textual analysis I started digging into these. I made it through the problem of cosmology relatively easily, as Collingwood departs from Bergson's position quite clearly. But when I started thinking about addressing epistemology and pragmatics in isolation from one another I started getting hung up. My mind was swirling and I had all these different moments in Collingwood's work popping up. None of them cleanly divided along those lines, however, and I was forced to rethink the approach.

There is no separating epistemology and pragmatics for Collingwood because thought in his work is given an ontological status. Human beings, that is to say, live in a world made of thoughts. I just did some writing on it this morning that I'm now sharing. These few pages are the analysis that is necessary to get me talking about Collingwood's conception of freedom as the freedom of thought. Speech is thus integral to his conception of freedom in a way that it isn't for Bergson.

Here it is:

In addition to Collingwood’s rejection of Bergson’s cosmological scheme, he also took issue with Bergson’s problematic relationship to abstraction, and also his inability to conceptualize philosophy as having practical implications. We now turn our attention to these two breaking points. For Collingwood’s rejection of philosophy’s dependence upon cosmology is simply the first step. The more significant moves are the assertion that human beings must treat abstraction as a genuine path to knowledge, and that this healthy engagement with abstraction is a vital element in any practical life.

According to Collingwood, Bergson is incapable of engaging with abstraction in a healthy or meaningful way. He claims that on Bergson’s scheme abstraction, and logical thinking in general, is nothing but a practical fiction of a mind that is intent on cutting up reality for its own purposes. This criticism is especially pronounced in The New Leviathan, where he claims that Bergson hopes that someday the mind will shed its cumbersome relationship to abstraction and appear unveiled to itself in its ineffability. As we noted, Bergson does at times seem to speak as if though true knowledge is ultimately ineffable, especially in the “Introduction to Metaphysics.” The definition offered in that essay, however, is worded delicately as “the science which claims to dispense with symbols.” Whether this is ever achieved with any purity, however, is doubtful. For in other places Bergson seems to admit that one never fully achieves this full-blown ineffable grasping, but is rather engaging in a dialectic between intuition and analysis, ineffability and abstraction. In Time and Free Will, for example, he claims that articulate thought can have an existence within concrete reality, “for immediate intuition and discursive thought are one in concrete reality....”Thought, in other words, doesn’t have to be a mere arresting of the flow of reality for the purposes of manipulation, and intuition doesn’t have to be a inarticulate ineffable mess, but can dwell within the flow of duration. He hints at this idea again in the “Introduction to Metaphysics.” There he argues that “intuition once grasped must find a mode of expression and applications which conformed to our habits of thought and which furnishes us, in well-defined concepts, the solid basis... we so greatly need. That is the condition of what we call strictness, precision, and indefinite extension of a general method to particular cases.” Statements like this point us to the idea that Bergson’s relationship with language is not as black and white as Collingwood would have us believe. Intuition and analysis, I believe, are not opposed to one another, as Collingwood may have us believe, but are rather in a dialectal relationship with one another. This is not what were are here to explore, however. 

Collingwood also accuses Bergson of setting up an opposition between knowledge and action, with analysis naming and cutting things up to manipulate them, and intuition standing back in an ineffable sphere of impractical knowledge. This, too, I find a problematic depiction of Bergson’s thought. The whole time I’ve read Bergson I’ve been troubled by the ambiguity surrounding the relationship between intuition and action. For, as we saw above, intuition absolutely has implications for how we speak of and experience the world, so can’t but have implications for how we behave. This point, however, is never made clear, and I’m forced to search for the implications. In the introduction to The Creative Mind, for example, I find certain sentences that imply that there is indeed a relationship between intuition and action. While speaking of the experience of real time, duration, Bergson asks “How would it appear to a consciousness which desired only to see it without measuring it, which would then grasp it without stopping it, which, in short, would take itself as object, and which, spectator and actor alike, at once spontaneous and reflective, would bring ever closer together–to the point where they would coincide,–the attention which is fixed, and time which passes?” Here we find the idea that the intuitive mind, dilated to perceived the flow of real duration, does not cease to be an acting mind, but doubles itself, placing a portion of itself outside of its activity, while keeping one foot firmly planted in the world of activity. I have found similar passages in Matter and Memory that imply a similar kind of doubling. Again, I am not interested here in dwelling on whether Collingwood was correct to read Bergson this way, for I don’t believe he was. What we want to do is explore Collingwood’s thoughts on Bergson as they gave rise to his own. Let us turn to Collingwood’s relationship with language and action.

Collingwood’s work in general displays a self-consciously positive relationship to abstraction and even dogma, and always wore its practicality on its sleeve. Here I have chosen to explore the questions of Collingwood’s epistemology and pragmatics in tandem because it would be inappropriate to separate them. Language and action are deeply intertwined in his work to the point of being distinguishable only analytically. Ontologically thought, language, and action are one.  

In The New Leviathan Collingwood presents us an account of the mind that only begins to exist in any meaningful sense once it begins to speak. The mind, properly speaking, emerges in Chapter 6 on ‘Language’. The Collingwood argues that al self-knowledge is acquired through an act of speech, through the practical act of naming a feeling that is being experienced. This ranges from the simplest, ejaculatory kinds of speech, like a shiver that makes one aware of being cold, to the most sophisticated forms of speech, in which one makes oneself aware of an obligation by saying ‘this is my duty’. That language is wielded in this way is just a basic fact about how human beings function in the world. It is something that we do without being conscious of the fact that we are using language, which requires an even more developed sense of self-consciousness. Language, in a sense, is the beginning of human being.

Indeed, there is a serious conflation in Collingwood’s work between language, thought, and activity. In the chapter on language he claims that a proper language is secondary to the notion of discourse, which is “the activity by which a man means anything; a language is the system adopted, the means employed, the rules followed, in this activity” (6.11, my emphasis). It is difficult to find an instance, however, in which a human being doesn’t mean something by their use of language. A shiver, as we saw, can be considered a form of language. The fact that human beings always find themselves embedded within communities that already possess a language, means that humans always find themselves already meaning something with everything they do. This fact reveals itself in the unfinished Principles of History, where we learn that action is the proper subject matter of historical study. Or, to put it differently, that mind always and only reveals itself through its activity. Human beings, he argues, are reasonable beings, in that everything they do is always done with a specific reason in mind, however irrational that particular reason may be. “The actions traditionally studied by history,” he writes, “are actions in this narrower sense of the word: actions in which reason, in a high or a low degree, reason triumphant or reason frustrated, wise thought or foolish thought, is not only at work but recognizably at work. The old belief that man is the only ‘rational animal’ may well be mistaken; not so much because it implied too much rationality in man; it never did that, for it never implied that man was more than feebly intermittently, and precariously rational; as because it implied to little in non-human animals.” The human mind then always reveals itself to be governed by reasons, however muddled and meager these reasons may be. These reasons always present themselves as thoughts, and these thoughts are always expressed by language in one form another, whether it because the ejaculatory shiver or the full fledged treatise. 

Thought or language thus occupies an ontological place in Collingwood’s work, if I can be forgiven for speaking of it this way. Previously I had described language as a way of being in the world, by which I meant that the use of language is a basic constitutive fact of the human experience: we are born into a named world and we continue trying to name things as accurately as possible. Indeed, in The Principles of History Collingwood makes this idea explicit, claiming that for a human being there is no way of acting that is not at the same time a form of language and an expression of thought: "For a rational animal, in so far as he is rational (and in the case of man, I repeat, that is never very far), every action has the character of language: every action is an expression of thought. Every trace of his action left upon the world he inhabits has the character of writing: every such trace is evidence, to a person who can read it, of what his thought was. A man climbing a snow-covered mountain is putting into practice his plan for getting to the top; and if he sticks to his plan, his movements during the ascent make up a continuous piece of language, from which an understanding watcher can make out, with as much precision as if he were listening to a running commentary given by the climber in words, what the plan is. And because he leaves tracks in the snow, which as long as they remain legible preserve a tolerably complete notation of his movements, it remains possible to read his movement-language after he has ceased to utter it, and to reconstruct the history of his ascent from the evidence of his footprints." This passage possess the intertwining of thought, language, and action that I am arguing is central to the entirety of Collingwood’s philosophy. There can be no clean dualism between thought and language or between knowledge and action on this scheme, for all of these things are so deeply intertwined in our very being. We are beings that speak through every action. Consequently this means that we can only come to know ourselves through speaking, through acting. When we begin to regard every action as a piece of language and as an expression of our thoughts, we will recognize that thought is not a mere activity (though it is that) but rather is an ontological condition. Our world is a world of thoughts.

The ontological character of thought is also addressed in The Principles of Art, where Collingwood argues precisely that the world is made of thoughts, and that to change our thoughts is to change our world. Within the world of art, he argues, there is no distinction that can be made between theory and practice, between changes in one’s environment and oneself. The role of language in art is both practical and theoretical. When an artist uses language to explore his world he finds that is engaging both with himself and the world, and that they are united through language. The aesthetic experience “is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world. It is also a making of oneself and of one’s world, the self which was psyche being remade in the shape of consciousness, and the world, which was crude sensa, being remade in the shape of language, or sensa converted into imagery and charged with emotional significance.” When we find that both the human world around us and our inner worlds are both constituted by the use of language, we have no choice but to regard different uses of language as constituting differences both within and without us. Speech is a path both to how we perceive our own activity and how we perceive the meaning of the world outside of us, and thus necessarily has repercussions for how we act in the world. Indeed, a few pages prior Collingwood had argued that moral activity is identical to the aesthetic experience in this way, knowing no distinction between theoretical and practical. Morality, that is to say, involves both changes within and without. If I change myself, I change my thoughts, I change my actions, and I change my world.

The Current Project: Comparing Collingwood and Bergson's Accounts of Freedom

I have made a good deal of progress in a project comparing Collingwood and Bergson's accounts of freedom. The working title is 'Time and Duty: Collingwood’s Collaboration with Bergson’s Account of the Free Act'. In this project I concern myself with most of Collingwood's work, but pay special attention to Part I of The New Leviathan. With Bergson I restrict myself primarily to Time and Free Will, but will draw on Matter and Memory and The Creative Mind as I find appropriate.

The sections that I have completed so far are:

I. Introduction: The Problem of Collingwood’s ‘Influences’
II. Evidence of Collingwood's Collaboration with Bergson
III. The Free Act in Bergson's Time and Free Will
IV. History and Freedom in Collingwood: Part I of The New Leviathan
           IV.1. Chapters 1-6: Mind, Body, and The Here-And-Now of Feeling
           IV.2. Chapters 7-12: Appetite and the Pursuit of the There-and-Then
           IV.3. Chapters 13-18: There-and-Thens, Choice, and the Forms of Reason 

It's all getting away from me and I'm feeling confused. I feel as though I'm losing touch with the arguments as they've been developed. It's still been a nice exercise and I'll continue to work on it.

In any case, here is a link to section II of the project where I analyze Collingwood's references to Bergson is his various works:

II. Evidence of Collingwood's Collaboration with Bergson

What? This? Again? Yes. This. Again. Or, Duty and History, Reflection and Friendship.

I used to blog a good deal, initially as as Savage Riley, then as Civilized Riley. In both instances I explained what I meant by those words. Savagery, if I recall, had something to do with my relationship to my own emotional life. Looking back at the first posts on that blog, I was operating under an odd conception of 'noble savagery'. I remember having conversations with a friend about Rousseau, but I hadn't actually (and still haven't) read him. This use of the term was thus only tangentially related to his work. I was using the terms 'savage' to mean the raw, ineffable emotional power of life, and 'noble/civilized' to signify the idea that language/reason is some kind of generic force that has no purpose other than the reining in these supposedly wild emotions. I was in the business of championing these unreflective forms of consciousness. This was the beginning of 2010 and I had only recently learned of the science/nihilism connection, that nice Heideggarian move about the secret nature of technology and language's capacity to place us in opposition to the world. I couldn't embrace such a stark dichotomy, and have since deepened my understanding of the role of language in human life. Frankly, it's hard for me to identify very fully with those initial pieces of writing.

It would be more precise to say that I identify with many of the questions that are being raised, but I no longer find the terms of engagement appropriate. My concerns have always been the same: How am I to deal with the intensity of my emotional life? How am I to integrate my intellectual life into all of this churning inside me? Why is it that language such a double edged sword, bringing me both intimacy and alienation? How does one learn to think and speak carefully so as to live more fully? What does it mean to live fully, anyways?

In those years my points of reference had been supplied to me by my undergraduate years and some of my own reading: Clausewitz and the training of Genius; Foucault and establishing an ethics outside of apparatuses of power; Collingwood and the radical project of the philosophy of history; Goldman and the insights of simulation theory of mind; Claxton and the intelligent unconscious. These are still important reference points for me, but I no longer have such an inflated view of their importance.

More reading in the larger philosophical tradition has revealed all of these issues to be far more complex, and, in some sense, business as usual. What I initially regarded as radical disruptive insights turned out to be the bread and butter problem of the biggest names. How could I be so naive to think that Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, and the rest weren't aware of these problems?

More reading has brought me a larger reference pool for the same philosophical projects. Now I can think about Aristotle's middle portion of the soul and its relationship to epieikeia; Bergson's dialectic of analysis and intuition as being analogous to Plato's journey in and out of the cave; Thomas Nagel and the problem of cosmology as it relates to the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. I have, in other words, continued to read and think.

That I have continued to think is somewhat of a surprise to me. "How am I to go on thinking and writing?" I asked my sister when I didn't get into graduate school that one time. "You've been thinking and writing for the last four years," easily delivering an obvious truth in the way she does. "You aren't just going to stop." Certainly, I haven't stopped. It did become painful for a while. But thinking finds a way.

I eventually began blogging as Civilized Riley. This was due exclusively to my reading of Collingwood's The New Leviathan, the work I am most deeply engaged with at the present moment. There was something attractive in Collingwood's conception of being civil, in attempting to reduce as much as possible the amount of force in my relations with others. I still think this is my proper task, potentially the proper task, although the language of civility and civilization feels encumbered. I think that the juxtaposition of savagery and civility was humorous to me, as I probably recognized the inadequacy of the terminology I was using.

In any case, I intend to start blogging again. Looking through the old blogs it is all a mish mash of reflections, emotional outbursts, sustained writing on texts, and the general play of ideas. I don't know that I'll be able to show such disregard for my image. I am, frankly, embarrassed by some of the writing I see on those old blogs. It is hard for me to see myself revealed to myself in that way.

Right now I am working on a writing project built around Collingwood's The New Leviathan and Bergson's Time and Free Will. The final book of the former and the first book of the latter. The initial goal of the project was to compare the different conceptions of freedom advanced by those authors. 'Time and Duty: Collingwood’s Collaboration with Bergson’s Account of the Free Act' is the working title. I am nearly done with the textual explication and will proceed to compare their work more fully after that.

The major thrust of the writing, however, will be an attempt to answer what I take to be the most perplexing question of Collingwood's body of writing. What does duty have to do with reenactment? In The New Leviathan Collingwood argues that duty is the most comprehensive form of moral action that the modern European mind has access to. If Europe is to confront the threat of fascism, with it's hot-blooded rejection of reason, European thinkers must learn to embrace rational thought once more, and with it embrace dutiful action.

The essence of duty is that it is a corrective to the inherently abstract character of other major forms of practical reason: utility and right. Utility, being based off a means-end analysis and aiming for expediency or usefulness, leaves much to caprice and cannot account for itself. A utilitarian, while being able to show that a certain means is conducive to a certain end, most draw on another type of reason to justify the pursuit of those means. Right, or a morality based on adherence to law or rule, similarly contains elements of caprice. For one thing, rules, being generic, always admit of alternative realizations. If many actions will be in accord with this rule, how am I to decide which I should perform? For another thing, it is nearly impossible for rules to adequately capture the complexity of a given situation. The interrelations between rules would become so complex that I wouldn't be able to rely on them as an accurate guide to action. Again, I must look outside of right to another form of reason.

Duty is the form of reason that is able to remove these elements of caprice from right and utility. It is a consciousness that seeks to reckon with a situation exactly as it is. In reckoning comprehensively, it preserves the place of rules and of expediency, it just adds what is missing: a full accounting of the situation just as it is.

Every form of practical reason, we are then told, gives rise to forms of theoretical reason. The way I account for my own actions, in other words, leads me to analyze the world around me in a similar fashion. The theoretical counterpart to duty is history. To act dutifully is to perform a unique action that is appropriate for a unique situation. To observe and explain historically is to analyze individuals as individuals, to reckon with everyone as performing a unique action in a unique situation.

Great! That's all well and good, Collingwood!

The big problem is that prior to The New Leviathan and The Essay on Metaphysics, reenactment had been championed as the essence of history. To think historically is to say 'Ah, I understand what so and so was thinking when they did/made/wrote that'. By understand we mean 'think those same thoughts again for ourselves'. By 'think those same thoughts again' we mean 'reenact'. This is all laid out with much fervor in An Autobiography and The Idea of History.

So why is reenactment never mentioned in The New Leviathan?

I intend to explore a solution to this question based on the ancient conception of friendship. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle implies that the relationship with the friend may be the best way for us to relate to ourselves. This is implied by the fact that Books 6 and 7, which examine the question of self-restraint, transition without explanation into Books 8 and 9, which address friendship. The friend, we learn there, is 'another self', or something like that.

The central form of freedom for Collingwood is freedom from the passions, by which we mean the emotions that arise in us from our interactions with the not-selfs that inhabit the world. To be free is to not be at the whims of your own mind or the passions created by your contact with things outside of you. To be free from the passions is to have the ability to contemplate genuine alternatives. This means that a thought as it exists in your mind can be examined or entertained without being full embraced. That thought would be 'encapsulated' or 'quarantined' in a sense, allowing for it to be held at a distance. This kind of distance from one's own thoughts is a precursor to any genuine choice. So the question of how to be free in some ways becomes the question of how do I not be totally wrapped up in my own thoughts?

History, for Collingwood, is a process whereby we reenact other people's thoughts. When we successfully reenact another person's thoughts we 'encapsulate' them in the context of our own mind. We think their thought, but it doesn't belong to us entirely, we have a distance from it. What I am proposing is that the process of reenacting and encapsulating thoughts may be a kind of practice space in which we can learn to treat thought in general at a distance. Experiencing other people's thoughts in this encapsulated form may lead to a general ability to distance ourselves from our own thoughts.

I think the friend relation may serve a similar function in Aristotle. When a friend speaks to us we have thoughts that come to us from a place genuinely outside of us. When we think their thoughts we think them not as our own, but as thoughts that come from outside of us. If we treat our own thoughts in the same way, if we treat our selves as a friend, we may have the ability to contemplate alternative courses of action more fully. Friendship of a certain kind, then, is conducive to a certain capacity for reflection.

By befriending the self, by reenacting the self, we keep passions from dominating us, and we gain the space we need to contemplate alternatives. I think that duty may stand in relation to history in the same way that reflection stands in relation to friendship.

This is where the essay is building. I'll share portions of it soon.