R.G. COLLINGWOOD: Interview with Dr. Maarten Steenhagen
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- čas přidán 5. 08. 2024
- I interview Maarten Steenhagen, a researcher at Uppsala University, all about R. G. Collingwood. We discuss his argument that realist and analytic philosophy will eventually result in fascism along with many other area of his philosophy, such as his metaphysics, logic, and critique of method. This is a long-form uncut interview.
NOTE: Apologies for the distortion on my mic (at times). I'll reduce the recorded input volume for the next video.
The autobiography of R. G. Collingwood that Dr. Steenhagen recommends can be found here:
www.amazon.co.uk/Autobiograph...
#RGCollingwood #Interview #MaartenSteenhagen
--------- Video Contents ---------
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:00:28 - Why the interest in RG Collingwood?
00:08:08 - Idealist vs Realist epistemologies (and science)
00:15:05 - Collingwood's biography
00:20:50 - Collingwood's idealist and realist influences
00:27:54 - Was Collingwood an idealist?
00:32:01 - Collingwood's metaphysics and epistemology.
00:34:59 - Collingwood on truth
00:40:54 - Critiquing Analytic Philosophy's methodology
00:46:33 - Logic's role in philosophy
00:55:13 - Philosophical realism's effect on society and religion
01:05:23 - Philosophical realism's effect on our conception of truth
01:12:56 - The path to fascism
01:18:30 - Where we have come to
01:22:31 - What Collingwood might say to us
01:26:18 - Criticising Collingwood's argument
01:30:26 - Collingwood's understanding of fascism and communism
01:37:17 - Kinds of philosophy and where they might lead
01:50:17 - The point of philosophy (and religion)
01:54:53 - The logic of question and answer (and its metaphysics)
02:10:15 - What is formal logic good for?
02:16:36 - Does logic capture thought?
02:19:57 - Wrapping up
--------- Channel Details ---------
This channel features videos about big ideas in philosophy, explained as simply as I can. The focus is on late 19th and early 20th century thought, with a particular emphasis on the British Idealists (e.g. F. H. Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart) and early analytic philosophers (Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Ramsey). Welcome to the channel!
--------- My Details---------
I am a PhD student and Gates Scholar at Cambridge having submitted a thesis on Frege's views on Truth. I have lectured at Cambridge on Frank Ramsey and Bertrand Russell, regularly taught undergraduate logic classes, and have also supervised students in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, epistemology, and early analytic philosophy. But I have a keen interest in the British Idealists that I hope to pursue by making videos about what I'm reading, so much of the content of this channel will be an outlet for that interest.
Thank you both for that discussion. I have returned to this discussion again today and found plenty I had not worked through properly the first time around. I guess I will be back for a third at some point, too !!!
That's one of the best comments I've ever had. Perfect!
This popped up in my recommended videos list. Some nice easy listening for a Tuesday morning haha. Nice conversation though, and I've just subscribed to your channel.
Very interesting, looking forward to more videos from you!
I read the title and it felt like CZcams recommendations saw me listening to my usual (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Arendt, etc) and went, "ey wouldn't it be fun if we slammed on the brakes and went into a completely different direction?" 😆
No complaints, I'm fairly new to philosophy (or at least new to engaging it in depth) and have been getting really into areas where philosophy, politics, & sociology meet/influence each other. Excited to learn more about Collingwood!
Glad you found us! Hopefully you stick around. More to come from the Collingwood direction.
You make mention that Frege distinguishes between grasping a thought and asserting it (The force content distinction), and infer that this means Frege would be open or acknowledges the difference between question and answer at play in Collingwood. Maarten Steenhagen doesn't circle back to your point, but I can address it. Collingwood thought that questions arose from assertions. So for there to be a question there to be assertions already in play. He wasn't unique in this idea, and it wasn't even uniquely idealist. Cook Wilson and Stout also thought this. Cook Wilson is very clear that he thinks hypothetical judgements are a kind of categorical judgement, where you are committing yourself to there being a relation of implication between terms of the antecedent an consequence. They thus hold to a kind of logical expressivism in which relevance is key element to understanding inference.
Thanks for that, very interesting. So not like Frege then really. Given he insists on the material conditional.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy You've read Bradley's logic. From there you can see that these people at oxford, and even some at cambridge, don't think about logic as set of connectives with truth functional semantics determined by the input of the atoms they connect, and introduction and elimination rules. Instead logic is about the specialized functional roles that different kinds of judgement and inference play in that making the expression, understanding and progress of thought possible.
Yes, good point - I missed that aspect of the question in the heat of the moment. I think it may well have been Cook Wilson who got Collingwood thinking about the role of questions in the first place, although I also think that Collingwood took it as an opportunity to give an account of dialectic that Cook Wilson would not have endorsed. In Collingwood's Speculum Mentis from 1923, which contains an early elaboration of the logic of Q&A, there's an interesting connection between questioning and supposition, and the latter Collingwood connects to the aesthetic (the imagination). (You probably know this, but other people reading the comments may want to follow this up.) Although a question indeed arises because of what has been asserted or judged to be the case, I think Collingwood would say that there is a dialectical sense in which the question is prior to the assertion, because he thinks that aesthetic consciousness is prior to theoretical (scientific/logical) consciousness. You get an earlier statement of this view (without the emphasis on questioning) in Croce.
Something worth mentioning, Giovanni Gentile was the one of the founders of Fascism, the other being Mussolini, Gentile was a Neo-Hegelian ,and he was a Actual Idealist.
Indeed. And Russell was a staunch liberal. But Collingwood's argument is not about an intellectual connection but one based on the retreat of older forms of philosophy giving way to an emerging realism which then provides the social climate in which fascism can arise.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find any two things more diametrically opposed.
Intellectually perhaps. But Collingwood's claim is based on the societal impact analytic philosophy has, which he thinks will then provides the conditions for fascism to emerge.
I think we're already seeing a bit of it in certain longtermists and there's something creepy about Bostrom
Fascism is more a political phenomenon, no? It's seed is neoliberalism (in modern times) or general _needless_ economic austerity in others. Fascism has no motive force otherwise. It is a form of desperation, not philosophy. Once people grasp proper macroeconomics (like MMT) all fascism will go away. Even that toff J.M. Keynes understood it: _anything a nation can resource it can afford._ In other words, the state currency is nothing but a scorekeeping system, a tax credit, not gold, not silver, not of any intrinsic value. The issuer tells you what it exchanges for. Know this and you see how full employment is achieved with price stability and the entire motive and driving force behind fascism goes away like a fart at a Taylor Swift concert (so my daughter tells me).
Perhaps, with recent more place-oriented and more historicist projects like Geography of Philosophy and Peter Adamson's claim that the only philosophy worth doing is history of philosophy, there is a countervailing force against the social conditions that analytic philosophy of the 20th century has fostered. Kant was a racist despite providing liberal principles that would undermine racism. In a way, it would seem analytic philosophy is moving in such a direction, as we're already seeing negative social effects of viewing social life in terms of a calculus. If Collingwood is right, Leibniz is also equally culpable given his view of reality.
By moving in such a direction, I meant providing the tools to undermine the social conditions it helped foster, like Kant did.
I thought it was neitchezes fault
There are links between Nietzsche's writings and Nazism. This link is definitely historical (I think it was a sister of Hitler who was a big fan of Nietzsche and gave him his writings), but whether it is ideological as well is debated.
Collingwood's claim, which is what we discussing here, is that Analytic philosophy (or, more precisely, its Realist metaphysical underpinnings) would leave a philosophical vacuum in society that would become exploited by those peddling fascism. So this is a claim about the practical implications of philosophy retreating into a highly theoretical space, detached from the practical concerns of life, more than an association between realist thought and whether it intellectually implies a particular political system.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy
Neitzsche's sister was a rather devout Nazi, and seized a lot of his works and altered them to suit her own purposes, posthumously of course.
I see no traces of fascism in his works, but I guess I can understand how some of his prose can be interpreted that way. There is also most definitely a sector of the left that loves and interprets his works, and I place myself in that category.
To address the content of the video, I have to say I'm agreeing with what I'm hearing so far. I just finished reading some excerpts from Richard Rorty' Consequences of Pragmatism for an essay -- even those who spawned out of the "analytic" camp have had similar worries.
I think you're right to say that religion doesn't have the same criteria for truth as science, but the idea that you can make religious belief totally independent of science ("non-overlapping magisteria") has led to a very toothless and unconvincing kind of religion that doesn't command respect. What has happened is that religion tries to borrow respect from liberal pieties rather than the other way round. Christianity will justify itself by saying it makes people more generous or tolerant, i.e. in terms of social outcomes evaluated against liberal values, rather than the word of god. And there's a reason for that. I don't think we can put back the clock and believe christianity with the same sincerity that the medievals did. This is Nietzsche's "death of god" and what Nietzsche tried to do was create new values out of which something meaningful could grow without being smothered. Christian values without christianity leaves us with all these sentiments about how "blessed are the meek" but without anything supernatural to redeem the "ugliness" in the material world. The mediocrity of modern "liberal" culture flows from this: anything that would redeem the material world from the outside is ruled out as unscientific and superstitious, anything that would redeem it from the inside is elitist and illiberal.
@14:00 except that's all wrong about the physics, totally backwards (granted many of the physicists themselves got it backwards too, and still do). Einstein's theory was really about removing the observer, that's what general covariance is all about. Reference frames are irrelevant. If you depend upon a reference frame your physics is suss. Quantum theory is a different kettle of fish, but if you buy Copenhagen all I can say is you got sold a lemon. All quantum physics is these days best understood as gauge theory + non-trivial spacetime topology, so the same as general relativity (GR has not the topology but the holonomy/curvature), the whole point is the connexion fields are there precisely to get covariant derivatives. Invariance of the Laws free from any mind or daemon in other words, it's what makes science possible (I. Kant).
If you ask me, the great contribution of modern physics to Idealism is that we now at least comprehend physical science cannot explain all things, you could even say the mathematicians got that first (Gödel, Turing, not that Truing realized, but Gödel did). It is _because_ physics has nothing to say about mind, and cannot have subjectivity, that we know mind is not physical. All the crock of nonsense from quantum mechanics mysticism is new age bullshyte, there's no compulsion to trust a word of it, not even from J.A. Wheeler. (Not that it's all bonkers in sincere intent, just that its all bonkers. (imho.))
The mind can determine initial value/boundary conditions (one might suppose) and that's enormous. But any physicist worth their salt knows this (if they're being honest). The IV/BCs are almost everything. So what determines IV/BCs is "everything" (or a big chunk of it, so "almost practically idealism" I would say). You can quote me on that if you like, no one directly told me this.
I can't spare two hours to listen to this, so I am replying only to the title of this video. Nietzsche's histrionic pronouncements and Heidegger's word salads are much more closely related to naziism than anything these wide people are going to be discussing over the next 1 1/2 hours.
Thanks for the comment. You may be right in terms of ideology. But Collingwood's argument is about the civil impact of a form of philosophical method that attempts to follow a scientific one too closely. He believes the retreat of philosophy from its more unfettered roots, to one governed by a defined methodology (often a technical one), will leave behind it space for bad actors (in his view, fascists) to fill the void with rhetoric that captures the populace with irrational but forceful views.
That's not to say Continental philosophy, with its (to quote you) 'word salads', would necessarily be better. I think Collingwood had in mind a philosophy that meets the needs of the thinking public by talking about practical issues in a thorough and rational way that can be understood.
yes. Also, fascism breathes and feeds on the carbon monoxide of failed political elites burps and flatulence. Fascists cannot get a purchase when people are good to each other without discrimination. Unfortunately neoliberal style politics discriminates (both left-wing and right-wing). The poor are the ones who elites choose to unemploy to "fight inflation", the very inflation that was invariably caused by decline in output. "Ze Best vay to punish those lazy Greeks is to put them out of work." (A. Merkel (I paraphrase)).
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Ironically, recent history (20th/21st century) shows that less rigid philosophy leans heavily into word salad and flowery language that manipulates and captures the populace with irrational but forceful views. Bad actors all over the place who figured out that, as long as you sound "deep," you (and your scam) will appeal to anyone whose beliefs and ideologies lost to the prevailing evidence-backed consensus. They sound enticing especially to the less educated and less informed. These bad actors are really good at framing reasonable people, or anyone who rejects word salad for that matter, as "close-minded," further insulating and exciting their base camp of ideological followers. I wonder what Collingwood would have thought of today's various fascisms coming from the opposite end. Heck, I didn't even learn about Collingwood myself until I started debating with people who used Collingwood's work to form the backbone of their own fascist-oriented theological arguments.
It is wrong to equate fascism and the cult of the great leaders. Fascism is primarily a technocratic conentration of power, not simply political but all the powers: mediatic, corporate. So the great leader is not necessary for fascism and the favian society version of it , founder of the labor party privileged to keep the democratic facade to fascism and today the West is more fascism than Russia and no far behind China. The financial control is throw the new surveillance infrastructure near total fascism far far beyound Hitler version of it or Stalin version of it but still keeping the facade of democracies with near retarded politicians so the official political power structure is ridiculised and render ridiculous cultuviating a sense of hopelessness.