Clausewitz and a General Theory of Human Things

 Reading Carl von Clausewitz's On War was without doubt the decisive experience of my undergraduate education.

 

Over the course of a semester, Sumida led us through large portions of On War, Guy Claxton's wonderful book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When you Think Less, as well as historical studies of Napoleon's invasion of Prussia in 1806, and some of Sumida's writing from his Decoding Clausewitz, which was in press at the time. I remember when I acquired my copy of his book sometime later that year, I believe.

 

I recently pulled Claxton off the shelf for his work on time and 'the speed of thought,' and have similarly been inclined to think about Clausewitz again.

 

It was from Clausewitz that I first began to understand the core of my philosophical desires: To develop a general theory of human things. At the time I was very confused and pained by the prospect of my history degree being economically worthless, while my peers in computer science stood to (and did) make a lot of money in the tech world. The divorce between the sciences and humanities, in other words, was a practical dilemma for me during undergrad.

 

My reading and writing from 2009-2012 shows a lot of concern with this divide. It still concerns me. But I now have greater resources for thinking of it beyond those terms. The divide between the sciences and humanities, after all, is the divide between nature and history. Such a divide, I think, is fundamentally based on an inadequate definition of nature: i.e. mechanical, physical, predictable nature. This is only part of nature. The 'humanities' or 'language' or 'history' is also a part of nature.

I now favor a basically Platonic-Aristotelian alternative. Nature, for them, was not mechanical, but alive and full of beings with natural ends. 

I suspect Clausewitz still has a ton to offer. It seems clearer to me, actually, that the structure of Clausewitzian theory is similar to Plato: a staunch refusal to separate abstraction from concrete situation. Plato, of course, is credited with the view of an 'pure world of abstract forms', but I believe this to be a highly cartoonish Plato. The dialogues themselves, I think, are concrete instantiations of this fusion. 

Plato did not give us a theory of the forms. Plato gave us a dialogue in which Socrates articulates the forms in different ways, in different times and places, in situations that have different social and political pressures.

The forms are still a very real problem, and they are at the heart of Plato's views on intelligibility. But they are not such a cartoonish problem. 

Perhaps I will pick up on some of the threads in the recent writing, pursue Clausewitz and Plato. Some have made the connection. I will have to return to the text of On War in a significant way. I don't know that the time is right for this.