R.G Collingwood & the bankruptcy of History

R.G Collingwood wrote in his auto-biography-

The reason why the civilization of 1600–1900, based upon natural sci-
ence, found bankruptcy staring it in the face was because, in its passion for ready-made rules, it had neglected to develop that kind of insight which alone could tell it what rules to apply, not in a situation of a specific type, but in the situation in which it actually found itself. It was precisely because history offered us something altogether different from rules, namely insight, that it could afford us the help we needed in diagnosing our moral and political problems.

Bankruptcy arises when expenditure is inelastic to a negative income shock and this is common knowledge. If it isn't common knowledge, an insolvent enterprise can continue to trade. The point about the natural sciences, or their commercial applications, is that elasticity is guaranteed by exit and entry. Unnatural sciences- like Metaphysics and Ethics and 'Political Economy'- do not have this characteristic. More time and effort may be expended on them, the less utility they generate. This is entirely proper because their stock in trade is non-rival, ontologically dysphoric, and thus not subject to scarcity. However, their propagation, because it uses up scarce resources, can fold up like a Ponzi scheme the base of whose pyramid can no longer, by common knowledge, burgeon and expand.

Income shocks arise because 'depreciation' was not properly covered. In other words, the stock of assets was not replenished and diversified in a manner such that, under some adverse contingency, it could generate the same income. Sadly, history offers no insight whatsoever into how rapidly current assets will depreciate and what assets will be most productive going forward. One good rule is 'let bygones be bygones'. Don't allow current decisions to be affected by money you have already spent. On the other hand, don't underestimate the amount you need to spend to cover depreciation of current assets.

Tzarist Russia was not spending enough on killing dissidents and projecting power across its borders. It relied on the true enough 'historical knowledge' that its people could always be crushed and that it could use 'human wave' tactics to ultimately prevail over its neighbors. What it didn't calculate on was that that though this 'historical knowledge' would be vindicated, it would be under the reign of Bolsheviks, not the descendants of Boyars.

France, more stupidly yet, failed to develop an offensive doctrine- preferring to let the Russians do the heavy work as if the year was 1848 and Nicholas I was still on the throne. It made the same mistake in the 1930's.

With hindsight, the French bourgeoisie would gladly have paid higher taxes and accepted lower disposable income in order to protect their wealth. As the smaller power, they needed an offensive doctrine fearsome enough to act as a deterrent. Otherwise the war would be fought on their soil.

Both Britain and France needed to turn their diverse colonial populations into military assets effective against European powers. However, sentimental racism got the better of them. In any case, they had not endeared themselves to their subjects and feared that once dusky folk got used to bayoneting Whitey in faraway lands, they might make a habit of it on returning home. But, this was a childish fear.

Collingwood lived to see Britain become all but bankrupt because Winston Churchill took a shilling of Income Tax rather than refurbish the Navy and abandon the 'ten year rule'- i.e. the notion that peace would prevail for the foreseeable future. This, not Gandhi's shenanigans, ended the Empire. One would have thought Churchill would have remembered the excellent seamanship displayed by the Japanese Navy in the Meditteranean in 1917 and 1918. This should have shaken up his complacency. It should have caused him to change his attitude towards India. But, no- and though his 'historical knowledge' was vindicated, and he did return as Prime Minister, Power had slipped from the grasp of his class. Indeed, Europe had been provincialized and rendered a Protectorate. Paramount Power resided elsewhere.

What was the 'philosophical' cause of this remarkable shift? Collingwood, had he lived to Russell's great age, might have said that Europe's mistake was to think knowledge was transparent. Intuition could directly grasp its object. Some 'ideal part' supposedly subsisted in every judgment.  Frege type Truth Values, not coordination and discoordination games, were Semantics' central concept. God, to put the matter briefly, suffers not children to come to Him via a baptism of lies.

Collingwood whose method, unlike Foucault's, was genuinely archaeological, might have remained in the same rut as his colleagues had not the outbreak of War, and his own engagement in it, given him the peace and quiet he needed to formulate a less puerile notion of Knowledge. As he says in his autobiography- ' A man whose mind is always being stirred up by philosophical teaching can hardly be expected to achieve the calm, the inner silence, which is one condition of philosophical thinking'.

Descartes, holed up in a oven, resting from the rigors of battle, established the cogito. Collingwood, an Intelligence officer in a frozen war of attrition, could share no such illusion. But whereas Descartes was wrong because the true Scientific Method represented the triumph of the devil of algebra over the angel of geometry, Collingwood's equal and opposite error was that interrogation's hysteresis uncovering angel could avail aught against the good soldier Schweick of ergodic Economics.                                                             

The Oxford ‘realists’ talked as if knowing were a simple ‘intuiting’ or a simple ‘apprehending’ of some ‘reality’. At Cambridge, Moore expressed, as I thought, the same conception when he spoke of the ‘transparency’ of the act of knowing; so did Alexander, at Manchester, when he described knowing as the simple ‘compresence’ of two things, one of which was a mind. What all these ‘realists’ were saying, I thought, was that the condition of a knowing mind is not indeed a passive condition, for it is actively engaged in knowing; but a ‘simple’ condition, one in which there are no complexities or diversities, nothing except just the knowing. They granted that a man who wanted to know something might have to work, in ways that might be very complicated, in order to ‘put himself in a position’ from which it could be ‘apprehended’; but once the position had been attained there was nothing for him to do but ‘apprehend’ it, or perhaps fail to ‘apprehend’ it.

The Good Soldier Schweik is always beforehand in occupying the Schelling focal ground which is the solution to a coordination problem. He has put himself in the position to apprehend everything and yet to do as he pleases with impunity because it is clear that he has apprehended nothing. He is just a simple soldier and, anyway, don't you know there's a war on? We must make do and mend. Don't court martial the fellow, send him to the front or promote him to the rear or attach him to the General's entourage.

This doctrine, which was rendered plausible by choosing as examples of knowledge statements like ‘this is a red rose’, ‘my hand is resting on the table’, where familiarity with the mental operations involved has bred not so much contempt as oblivion, was quite incompatible with what I had learned in my ‘laboratory’ of historical thought. The questioning activity, as I called it, was not an activity of achieving compresence with, or apprehension of, something; it was not preliminary to the act of knowing; it was one half (the other half being answering the question) of an act which in its totality was knowing.

That questioning activity was always and everywhere the concern of the school master or the second lieutenant. It was subaltern. The good student was a Schweik and Schweikism was the too knowing method of knowing absolutely nothing and thus avoiding being cashiered for so obviously incarnating the ideal of the tabula rasa.

I have tried to state the point as it appeared to me at the time. I was well enough trained in ‘realist’ methods to know exactly what a ‘realist’ would have said in answer to my statement of it. But Cook Wilson himself had said to me once: ‘I will say one thing about you: you can see the obvious.’ And it was obvious to me that such an answer would have been no more than an attempt to argue the hind leg off a donkey.

So Collingwood too was, if not himself the good soldier Schweik, then a cog in the machine that produced that eternal survivor of Europe's wars over shite whose secret of immortality was that even total war of an ideal type must conserve universal shiteness as the condition of its own voir dire.

Britain's long peace- from 1815 to 1914- was punctuated, for Collingwood, by a monstrosity- the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park which had been designed by a relative of his. Collingwood, a Classicist whose father had been close to Ruskin, does not tell us what he found objectionable in Scott's ciborium's orientalised Gothicism weighted down by imagery of a frankly boosterish and industrial kind, but he says it struck him as ominous in the manner of Wordsworth's old leech-gatherer. What had begun in Athenian or Elizabethan rapture can only culminate in a Utilitarian firmness of mind which, itself made obsolete by an unearned opulence, gives way to a sense of having senilely survived all that was worthwhile in the World's eternal war. Poetry is more philosophic than History but-
'We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
'But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.'

Collingwood from being the hero of 'Swallows & Amazons', had become a clerk in the Admiralty grimly surveying Europe's Gotterdammerung.

A YEAR or two after the outbreak of war, I was living in London and working with a section of the Admiralty Intelligence Division in the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society. Every day I walked across Kensington Gardens and past the Albert Memorial. The Albert Memorial began by degrees to obsess me. Like Wordsworth’s Leech-gatherer, it took on a strange air of significance; it seemed
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment. 

Everything about it was visibly misshapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous; for a time I could not bear to look at it, and passed with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness, I forced myself to look, and to face day by day the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it? To say that Scott was a bad architect was to burke the problem with a tautology; to say that there was no accounting for tastes was to evade it
by suggestio falsi. What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what he had done and what he had tried to do? Had he tried to produce a beautiful thing; a thing, I meant, which we should have thought beautiful? If so, he had of course failed. But had he perhaps been trying to produce something different? If so, he might possibly have succeeded. If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault? Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did?

The answer to Collingwood's question supplies itself readily enough. Scott was not really an auteur. What we have is a turkey because the coordinative effort required by this Victorian enterprise lacked a synoptic vision. Squatting where it does, it is the reverse of Gothic. By assimilating Humility to Temperance, it is brazenly un-Christian. In its stab at heteroclite Oriental magnificence, it achieves merely a gorbellied Municipal complacency. Albert is not an Adonis or Endymion but rather a pinchbeck memento for Windsor's thrifty Widow.

During the War, in the course of my meditations on the Albert Memorial, I set myself to reconsider this ‘realist’ attitude towards the history of philosophy.
Was it really true, I asked myself, that the problems of philosophy were, even in the loosest sense of that word, eternal? Was it really true that different philosophies were different attempts to answer the same questions?

Prince Albert had foreseen that any statue of himself would be an artistic monstrosity inviting derision and ridicule. His friends thought a fitting memorial for him would be the establishment of a University.  In 1907, this vision was realized by the granting of a Royal charter to Imperial College- still one of the top Scientific Research establishments in the world. Albert has been redeemed because passersby can see on their smartphones that the Prince's true memorial lies elsewhere. For people from the sub-continent, this may be in the products of the subtle mind of Abdus Salam not some bulky sari clad marble lady, with boulders for breasts, astride a crushed elephant of extraordinary and dispiriting ugliness.
There will always be 'open' questions in Mathematics and the Sciences. In this sense, they are eternal and give scope, according to Collingwood himself, to Philosophy's 'distinctions without a difference'. What is lacking is any 'ideal' element in these questions. Voir dires exist so Schweick can be a good soldier for all eternity.

I soon discovered that it was not true; it was merely a vulgar error, consequent on a kind of historical myopia which, deceived by superficial resemblances, failed to detect profound differences.

Collingwood is speaking of the shite talked by people like himself. However, everybody knew it was shite. They did not avoid it because it 'failed to detect profound differences' but because it is unpleasant to step on a turd.

The first point at which I saw a perfectly clear gleam of daylight was in political theory.

Which nobody does not know is a steaming pile of shite. It is not possible to glimpse daylight in a turd.

Take Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan, so far as they are concerned with politics. Obviously the political theories they set forth are not the same. But do they represent two different theories of the same thing?

Yes. Both are totalitarian shite. If you find this noisome stuff is coming out of any orifice of yours, you need more fiber in your diet. Eat grass instead of dog turds.

Can you say that the Republic gives one account of ‘the nature of the State’ and the Leviathan another? No; because Plato’s ‘State’ is the Greek πóλις, and Hobbes’s is the absolutist State of the seventeenth century.

So what? Hobbes' State had to grow out of the hegemony of some Polis or the other. The 'absolutist' State is fractally Platonic even if ruled by a Prince. Anyway, both are 'ideals' of an incompossible, utterly shite, type. Their being logically incoherent means, by ex falso quodlibet, anything can be said, with equal truth, about them. Shit can be produced by eating shit. But it is wiser not to eat shit in the first place. Avoid the ‘questioning activity’ in knowledge. Do something useful or else simply play with yourself till somebody else does so.