With “Peace and Plenty,” we reach the end of the account of civilization in Collingwood’s New Leviathan. What remains is the account of barbarism. Strictly speaking, we little need it. Civilization quâ ideal of civility is the positive end of civilization quâ process, and as was pointed out on Chapter XXXII, “Society and Nature in the Classical Politics,” the positive end is the primary thing to know in conducting a process (32. 35–6).
“May Day, 1929,” V. V. Kuptsov
Knowing, from the previous chapter, what civilization is, we ask: How do we bring it about? Collingwood’s answer is to homeschool our children.
This is the New Leviathan’s first detailed piece of positive advice, and it may sound crazy. Rather than list reasons why, I want to see what sense can be made of the ideas.
Civility is respect (37. 15). To respect another person is to recognize their freedom (37. 14). To do this, one needs self-respect (37. 13).
Instead of respect, we may approach another person with servility, namely “the demeanour of a man lacking self-respect towards one whom he fears” (37. 17). The will to barbarism is just the will to servility (37. 19).
Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926)
The Boating Party, 1893/1894, oil on canvas
Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art Continue reading
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.
Executive summary. Some sciences are called descriptive, empirical, or natural; others, prescriptive or normative. We should recognize a third kind of science, which studies the criteria as such that a thinking being imposes on itself as it tries to achieve success. I propose linguistics as an example. Collingwood introduced the term criteriological for the third kind of science. This was in The Principles of Art (1938), though I find the germ of the concept in earlier work, even in Collingwood’s first book, Religion and Philosophy (1916), in the passage on psychology that the author would recall in An Autobiography (1939).
Collingwood’s examples of criteriological sciences are logic, ethics, aesthetics, and economics. Pirsig effectively (and independently) works out rhetoric as an example in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). We may benefit from clarity here, given how people can have a strong reaction to being lectured by experts. For Collingwood, such a reaction is found in Nazi Germany; see the last chapter of The New Leviathan (1942). Reactions to grammar are the subject of my own two ensuing articles, “Writing and Inversion” and “Writing Rules.”
Some sciences are not recognized for what they are. The sciences themselves are not new, but a proper understanding of them may be new to some of us, including myself.
Follower of Pietro Perugino, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1490/1500, tempera on panel (National Gallery of Art, Washington; Samuel H. Kress Collection)
We continue to investigate how two purposes x and y can have a relation symbolized by y → x. In the previous chapter, the relation was that x was useful for y; now the relation will be that x is right for y, meaning x “conforms with the rule y” (16. 3). Continue reading
Summary added January 29, 2019, revised May 8, 2019. Practical reason is the support of one intention by another; theoretical, one proposition by another. Reasoning is thus always “motivated reasoning”: we engage in it to relieve the distress of uncertainty. Reason is primarily practical, only secondarily theoretical; and the reason for saying this is the persistence of anthropomorphism in theoretical reasoning: by the Law of Primitive Survivals in Chapter IX, we tend to think even of inanimate objects as forming intentions the way we do.
Reasons for adding this summary of Chapter XIV of Collingwood’s New Leviathan include
Says Burkeman, whose “problem” is apparently motivated reasoning itself,
One of the sneakier forms of the problem, highlighted in a recent essay by the American ethicist Jennifer Zamzow, is “solution aversion”: people judge the seriousness of a social problem, it’s been found, partly based on how appetising or displeasing they find the proposed solution. Obviously, that’s illogical …
On the contrary, how we reason cannot be “illogical,” any more than how we speak can be “ungrammatical.” Logic is an account, or an analysis, of how we do actually reason; grammar, of how we speak. Of course we may make errors, by our own standards.
Rogier van der Weyden (Netherlandish, 1399/1400–1464),
Portrait of a Lady, c. 1460, oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington; Andrew W. Mellon Collection
There was a rumor that Collingwood had become a communist. According to David Boucher, editor of the revised (1992) edition of The New Leviathan, the rumor was one of the “many reasons why [that book] failed to attract the acclaim which had been afforded Collingwood’s other major works.” Continue reading
Polytropy 