History, Duty, and the Overlap of Classes

I'm finally beginning to answer the question: How is it that dutiful action emerges from historical thinking? Or, how does historical thinking produce a certain moral perspective?

Same question, guys.

I think the answer may belong in Collingwood's concept of 'the overlap of classes'.

Or something like that. He lays that all out in the Essay on Philosophical Method, which I haven't read. But I've read enough people talking about it to have a vague idea.

Basically, the idea is that classification in the human/philosophical world can't work in the same way it does in the natural world. Classes of things overlap with one another. So in distinguishing levels of consciousness, for example, we would never be making completely clean distinctions. Yet, all of us know from experience that there is a base level of consciousness in which we are simply aware of something, a higher level in which we are manipulating those rawer experiences, and an even higher level in which we are thinking conceptually. Those are legitimate ways of classifying consciousness, but they overlap and blend into one another.

History and duty are also overlapping classes, it seems.

Both of them perceive action as completely individual. That is, in no way reducible to a certain kind or type of action. A certain thing is exactly what it is in that particular time and place, not a type of thing.

I think Collingwood makes this clear when discussing his rejection of the comparative method in history and its relation to present observation. We cannot be content, he says, to view the French Revolution as just an example of revolutions, defined as generic type of event:

"The dandelion-head whose seeds I now watch a sparrow eating," he observes, "is as individual and unique a thing as the French Revolution. The sparrow is this sparrow, not any sparrow. Its appetite for the seed I now see it eating is, no doubt, an example of a kind of appetite common in sparrows; but if I cannot be content to say that the French Revolution happened because oppressed population rebel against rulers too weak to control them, I cannot be content to say that this sparrow eats this seed because sparrows like dandelion-seeds. In both cases, the ground of my discontent is the same: it is, that the general rule, just because it explains every case of the kind indifferently, does not explain this case in it concrete actuality, but only those features of it in which it resembles the rest. In short, if I am content with a scientific explanation of a natural fact  the reason is that I am content to think of it not as the unique fact which it is, but merely as an example of a certain kind of fact." ('Reality as History," in Principles of History, 181).

There is no real difference between the past and the present. We use the same methods of thought to understand both.

To really think historically is to perceive in terms of uniqueness and not in terms of kinds.

Seems like duty and history, then, belong to this overlap of classes. Because in reality, as he admits in 'Goodness, Rightness, Utility', they are identical forms of consciousness.

Very satisfying to think clearly about this question of history and duty.

I intend to write more about it soon. For my future. And for fun.