Tag Archives: 2018

NL XXXV: What Civilization Means Specifically

September 17, 2018 – 6:51 am

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Civilization is a process, from barbarity towards the ideal of civility (35. 1). The ideal itself, and any particular stage along the way, are also called civilization (35. 11). This is our understanding from the previous chapter.

Civilization happens to a community. Any member can refer to the community in the first person plural: it is a “we” (35. 24). There is the corresponding possibility of a “not-we” (35. 25), in the sense discussed in Chapter VIII, “Hunger and Love” (8. 16). The “not-we” can be relative (35. 28) or absolute (35. 27), according as, to its own members, it is a “we” or not. To us, a relative “not-we” can be a “you” (35. 28). I shall suggest that the “not-we” is always at least a “they,” although Collingwood uses this only for the relative “not-we” (35. 28).

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, New Leviathan, Philosophy | Also tagged , , | Comments (6)

NL XXXIV: What Civilization Means Generically

September 14, 2018 – 6:56 pm

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Turning now to Part III of Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942), we take up civilization, a topic of utmost importance, featuring as it does, for example, in the controversial hypothesis of the “Clash of Civilizations,” and generally being something that reactionaries say they want to defend.

Civilization is something that happens to a community (34. 4). We studied communities as such in Part II, and their members individually in Part I.

Civilization is a “process of approximation to an ideal state” (34. 5). That is the gist of Chapter XXXIV, “What ‘Civilization’ Means: Generically.” There will be a lot to spell out.


We have returned to Istanbul. Below are
sunset photos from our last night on the Aegean coast

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Language, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , | Comments (5)

NL XXXIII: Decline of the Classical Politics

September 10, 2018 – 8:16 am

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Lacking the experience of social and political life mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, Germans could not understand the classical politics. German communities were non-social (33. 32). What experience those communities did have of freedom was despised (33. 5). When Marx converted Hegel’s dialectical idealism into the equally nonsensical dialectical materialism (33. 91), he sought only to teach what materialism entailed: that there was no such thing as freedom of will (33. 97).

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By David Pierce | Posted in dialectic, New Leviathan | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

NL XXXII: Society and Nature in the Classical Politics

September 9, 2018 – 7:54 am

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In the last chapter, we described classical politics by analogy with classical physics. Now we turn entirely to politics. The nature of “Society and Nature in the Classical Politics,” Chapter XXXII of the New Leviathan, is not the nature studied by physics; it is the nature of the “state of nature” (32. 32), which is our theoretical political origin.

The “problem of the classical politics” (32. 1) is “to give an account of the social element” of political life (32. 19). The non-social element of political life is nature (32. 19).

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By David Pierce | Posted in Criteriological Science, dialectic, New Leviathan | Comments (3)

NL XXXI: Classical Physics and Classical Politics

September 8, 2018 – 10:52 am

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As my beach holiday winds down, so perhaps does the current spate of blog posts. Here is one more. Setting aside Homer, I continue immediately with Collingwood, in part because, in the 2000 paperback impression of the 1992 Revised Edition of the New Leviathan that I take to the shore, I have now also read the Editor’s Introduction by David Boucher. (Back at the cottage, I have to type out the quotes from this that I make below; for quotes of Collingwood himself, I cut and paste from a scan of the 1947 corrected reprint of the 1942 First Edition.)

As I could infer from my pencil-marks, I had read Boucher’s introduction some time before; but I could remember little of it. I think it is aimed at professional philosophers, rather than at anybody who would admire Collingwood for saying, as he does in An Autobiography (page 6), when he describes getting prepared to go to Rugby School,

The ghost of a silly seventeenth-century squabble still haunts our classrooms, infecting teachers and pupils with the lunatic idea that studies must be either ‘classical’ or ‘modern’. I was equally well fitted to specialize in Greek and Latin, or in modern history and languages (I spoke and read French and German almost as easily as English), or in the natural sciences; and nothing would have afforded my mind its proper nourishment except to study equally all three.

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Criteriological Science, dialectic, Galileo, New Leviathan, Pacifism, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

NL XXX: War As the Breakdown of Policy

September 6, 2018 – 6:05 pm

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By the account of Chapter XXX, called “War as the Breakdown of Policy,” of Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942), humans have not always made war (30. 1). Why then do we make it now? People say war is a continuation of policy (30. 14); but as Collingwood cleverly points out (30. 15), the original saying, which is due to Clausewitz (30. 69), is ambiguous: a continuation could be an extension or a breakdown (30. 16–17).


Photos taken September 6, 2018
around our cottage
and of the wood that I cut there
in Profesörler Sitesi
Altınova, Balıkesir, Türkiye

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By David Pierce | Posted in dialectic, New Leviathan, Pacifism, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (13)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book XIV

September 5, 2018 – 10:14 pm

Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

When Neptune was helping the Greeks stave off certain defeat, I tried to suggest that divine intervention in the course of events might be understood as human resolve to change that course. This was in Book XIII of the Iliad, where Neptune took the form of one of the Greeks – Calchas – in order to exhort the others. They would have listened to Calchas anyway; he was a prophet. Ajax Oileus said he could tell Calchas was “really” a god; we can read this to mean Calchas was inspiring. We can say this of somebody today, without meaning to suggest any supernatural influence.

Mostly a calm sea, with heads of two swimmers; behind, a strip of pink sky with setting sun

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, Homer | Also tagged , , , | Comments (6)

NL XXIX: External Politics

September 4, 2018 – 9:36 am

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Executive summary (added September 13, 2018, edited July 19, 2019): Dealing with other bodies politic is the third stage of political life, after societies’

  • formation (as if by marriage),

  • dominion over non-social communities (as if by having children).

Having been used in the first two stages, dialectic can be used in the third. Being the eristic of external politics, war has no psychological cause. War is a state of mind, which does not think non-agreement can become agreement. Pacifism has this state of mind.

External politics are international relations. These represent the third of the “stages” in political life (29. 1), which we enumerate:

  1. The joining of wills into a society, which rules itself (29. 11).

  2. Such a society’s ruling over a non-social community in a body politic (29. 12).

  3. Dealing with other bodies politic (29. 13).

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, New Leviathan, Pacifism, Philosophy, Plato, Psychology | Also tagged , , , | Comments (12)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book XIII

September 3, 2018 – 2:43 pm

Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

Usually when your defenses are breached, you are lost. Thus when the Ottoman Turks under Mehmet I found a way through the Theodosian Walls on Tuesday morning, May 29, 1453, the city of Constantinople was theirs.

Path to a gate in a crenellated stone wall; people gathered around the plaque next to the gate
The gate where the invasion of Constantinople is supposed to have been made

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer | Also tagged , | Comments (10)

NL XXVIII: The Forms of Political Action

September 2, 2018 – 8:53 am

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Executive summary (added September 12, 2018), To condemn political discussion is to wish for tyranny: this continues a thought from the previous chapter. The ruling class need not share their deliberations with the ruled class, but it is better if they do. As our understanding of the reason for an action evolves—at first the action is merely useful, but later it conforms to a rule—, so ruling, originally by decree, has evolved to include legislation. However, to be enforced, law does not require a formal structure; international law is an example. The best reason for an action is duty. Though the German Treitschke says our highest duty is to the state, he gives the state no duty, and so his politics are entirely utilitarian.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates seeks understanding of the just human being through examination of the just state. In Collingwood’s New Leviathan, the order is reversed. What we first considered in somebody, we now look at in the “body politic.”

Narthex of the former Taksiyarhis Church (now museum), Ayvalık, Balıkesir, Turkey, August 30, 2018

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Homer, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato | Also tagged , | Comments (5)