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.
