More specifically concerning: r.g. collingwood
Adversaria (21)
31 December 2024, around 4.18.
‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art’ —Zadie Smith (Intimations, 26%) ‘A man who will decide, on philosophical grounds, to give up speaking and confine himself to pointing must be a man in whom the ordinary interests of intelligent human beings have been completely strangled by the parasitic growth of a philosophy […]
Adversaria (22)
31 January 2025, around 4.15.
‘When ideas are dead their ghosts usually walk; but no ghost walks for ever, and the main thing is for the people they haunt to remember that they are only ghosts’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 149f.; cf. another ghost) ‘For when a master is instructing his scholar, if the scholar understand all […]
ebb and flow
16 July 2025, around 13.28.
But in history as it actually happens there are no mere phenomena of decay: every decline is also a rise, and it is only the historian’s personal failures of knowledge or sympathy—partly due to mere ignorance, partly to the preoccupations of his own practical life—that prevent him from seeing this double character, at once creative […]
imposition
21 July 2025, around 14.58.
But there are acts of a different kind to this when the outer crust gets broken by the inner self breaking through at a moment of tension and you get what may be called a free act. Such acts are of rare occurrence. It is only at moments of tension and crisis that we choose […]