Welcome to all new subscribers who found their way here via , who kindly recommended this Substack after my short piece about the whole Churchill blowout.
In this essay, I go into more detail on some of the philosophical points made there about our relationship with history — something that should be of interest to new and long-time readers alike.
Basically, what the Churchill debate and the screeching reactions show is that the political right needs to come to terms with where the historical consciousness is at in our age: we can’t go back to the ancient or medieval ways of dealing with history, because the experience of the scientific age makes this impossible. We want our myths to be provably true. But since history is not science, this can’t really be done, as the postmodernists understood. In the end, as I’ll argue, the only serious criterion for the quality of a historical story, a particular take, is the quality and level of the mind looking at history. Hence what kind of myth, what kind of story about our past we should tell, is not just relative to the power of this or that group enforcing it; there are better and worse stories. Good takes on history can only be brought forward by a mind coming at it with all it’s got: its experience and understanding of the deepest aspects of the human condition, paired with knowledge of every possible field and realm, looking at history from the inside, the world of thought and inner experience driving historical events. And since our minds exist in history themselves, it also needs to understand itself as part of history, conscious of how its own thinking came about historically. A good take produced by such a mind can only be recognized as such by another mind that has achieved a similar level of development. But there’s more to say about all that, as you’ll see, which may shine a new light on some of our political-historical controversies.
I took much inspiration from R.G. Collingwood’s work here. A few parts even follow his arguments quite closely. Check out his “The Idea of History” if you are interested in this sort of thing.
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“History does not presuppose mind; it is the life of mind itself, which is not mind except so far as it both lives in historical process and knows itself as so living.”
— R.G. Collingwood1
I.
The history of ideas can teach us a great deal about the world we inhabit and ourselves. By studying it, bare threads of thought running over long time stretches come to our attention, illuminating pathways that jump-start areas of our minds having laid dormant before. We make ourselves available to the great becoming of history itself: a version of which having always been there in potential; a version whose trajectory playing itself out is a necessary feature of the cosmos.
To trace the history of thought is to strengthen what makes us truly human: our capacity to step out of our minds, taking the position of an observer looking at our own thought processes. Such a jump-start can kick us out of the parthogenetic sauce our brains are habitually cooking up, enabling us to watch it, study it: notably its disastrous entanglement with an unconscious logic playing itself out mercilessly. For to a large degree, we are the product of our thoughts — so what could be more useful than discovering them, understanding them in their wider historical context, so that we may work with them instead of being worked by them?
One of those threads running through recent history is the decline, if not outright destruction, of our long tradition of valuing what we might call the art of truthful reasoning. It is the art of developing and cultivating a beautiful and sharp mind, one that cuts through the jungle in front of our mental eyes, able to conquer new lands in the vast expanse of wider reality; a mind that takes in the deeper fabric of the thoughtscape in stride, a fabric built of logical connections across time and space, therefore transcending what we moderns like to think of as material reality. This thought-structure underwriting reality can be discerned via a wholesome form of reason, a perception rooted not in empiricism, but in Experience unfolding over time, in time, as Being.
True thought, beautiful reasoning, is not aimed at stating true facts that you discover once and hammer in stone. What you gain isn’t a thing, a material price. Results of thought are just fossilized artifacts; you might hang them on the wall if you like, but try to take them as timeless truths from which to build a worldview, and you end up with a monster made of dead parts: twitch it will, perhaps, but not live. And like ideologies, which are just such monsters, it will eventually haunt you and everyone it touches.
True thought is a movement, a process. It’s a bold charge, fueled by the dialogue between soul, mind and the hidden nonverbal mindspace from whence our experience ultimately flows. While it expresses truth, its truth is only valuable in the very act of thinking or rethinking it. Hence the fruits of true thought are never the last word, but an achievement in a certain direction. Such thought, when told or written down, and when read or listened to, may open a connection to the ground of all truth for all who are equipped to do so. With each connection so established, the next connection may become easier. True thought breeds more true thought.
To understand the decline of this form of beautiful and truthful reasoning and how it relates to history, we must look at how the ideas have formed that got us there: ideas that are part of a thought complex playing out its inner logic in a sort of background program running in the collective mind. Such background programs can arrest our development in history towards self-awareness, towards mind understanding itself in an ongoing act of illuminating the wider thoughtscape.
II.
There is a long-standing battle in philosophy between the schools of realism and idealism. Realists, who (re)gained ground in the late 19th century particularly in Oxford and Cambridge and later went on to dominate Anglo philosophy entirely, emphasized the outside world, the reality that we see. In this picture, our mind’s purpose is to faithfully reproduce what’s out there, and it mostly does a decent job of it, to the point that we can safely ignore philosophical mind games for the most part. If this view seems to be entirely self-evident to you, this is because it is close to how science looks at the world, and as we know, we are in the near-total grip of a science-worshiping age: in fact, a big part of the realists’ motivation was to get rid of traditional philosophy as a competing sense-making framework and strengthen the scientific world view. This had been an ongoing process ever since Descartes and the dawn of the scientific age, fully actualizing itself in the positivist spirit of the 19th century. Figures like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and later the logical positivists sought to inoculate the high priests of the scientific age against those pesky philosophers threatening to undermine their grand ambitions to know the secrets of the universe using empirical facts and the scientific method alone. (A corollary to this program was their rejection of the traditional idea that ethics should be about helping people build character; instead, they proclaimed morality to be just another object of scientific study: let’s figure out how morality works, why humans behave morally or not, but let’s not be fooled by outdated notions such as that studying ethics can actually make us better men.)
But this downplaying of mind hadn’t been the standard view before. Difficult as it is to imagine these days, people at different times took the primacy of mind for granted. Their deepest background assumptions, their absolute presuppositions, formed a different constellation, as R.G. Collingwood put it. How exactly they went about it varies from recognizing a divine plan behind it all to assuming an inner logic not just to movements of objects, but to thoughts as well, this inner logic coming from a place more fundamental than the material world. Others assumed the world to be alive right down to the smallest part, not drawing the hard line between mind and nature that we take for granted these days.
The idealists came at it from many angles, ascribing to mind various roles in the process of knowing, understanding and perceiving the world that are very different from simply reproducing external reality. While we are somewhat used to thinking of our minds at least as a sort of “filter,” like colored glasses that may warp what’s really out there, the idealist tradition goes far beyond that. For Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, while reality most certainly exists (we don’t just make it up in our minds willy-nilly), what we actually experience is to a large degree conditioned by the make-up of our minds. Not just in the sense of those colored glasses, but much more deeply: even such fundamental categories as time, space and causality for those thinkers are not “out there” in the physical world, but are imposed on our perception by mind, thereby creating the world of appearances we experience. While this still implies a certain mind-matter duality, other approaches went beyond that and sought to give up such dualistic thinking entirely by looking at our experience more holistically, refusing the sharp distinction between life on the one side and dead matter on the other. But even such an approach tends to be misunderstood these days because of our scientific presuppositions: a philosophy centered on life that assumes the cosmos to be alive right down to the smallest material stuff invites us to think biologically about the world, and therefore ultimately scientifically, again losing sight of the role of thought and its place. You don’t have to diminish the intellectual achievements born of the scientific mindset that focuses on “nature out there” to ask the question: isn’t it weird to exclude thought itself as an object of study — not via experiment but, well, via thought?
You might say the battle between philosophical idealism and realism is pretty far-out stuff; and it’s easy to get lost in all those different positions and arguments. But the important thing to understand here is whether consciously or not, we all adhere to this or that philosophical school, the habitual way of thinking of our age. This creates sort of a hidden program running in the back of our minds, through which much of our perception of the world is directed. And since realism, and the connected thought complex of the materialist-reductionist program, has won the day not only in academia, but in the wider collective consciousness as the founding myth of the scientific age, it forms our standard assumption — the story we all “know” somehow, without us even noticing it. One of the implications of the realist mindset is that our attention is magnetically drawn to bottom-up materialist explanations and a view that treats everything, including history, as a sort of spectacle best viewed from the outside. In this light, it’s no wonder that we tend to forget about thought proper, as experienced from the inside, in our inquiries: our background assumptions, unnoticed by us, push us away from such an endeavor. This is especially relevant when it comes to our relationship with history.
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