A World of Questions & Answers—Part VI

Universal and Individual

Jun 02, 2023

Introduction

In today’s post, we continue our series that began with “Questioning Truth,” offering an exposition of Collingwood’s logic of question-and-answer and its critical importance to creating change. This week we focus on his critique of reliance on general rules, principles and abstract categories in place of paying close attention to the unique and idiosyncratic features of our situation.

—The Editors

A World of Questions & Answers—Part VI: Universal and Individual

Back to the Tiger, the Traveller and the Woodsman

Last time we left Collingwood’s trained woodsman bringing to bear his specialist knowledge of woodcraft, pointing out the tiger lurking in the grass to the “ignorant traveller” who could only see trees and grass, while the traveller objected that such knowledge was not of much use if the woodsman cannot supply a rifle with which to shoot the tiger.

Here was Collingwood’s analogy for the role of the historian in practical affairs, where the “historian’s business is to reveal the less obvious features hidden from a careless eye in the present situation,” bringing “a trained eye for the situation in which one has to act.”1

The objection was that this was not after all of much use in practical affairs if the historian “only makes us see the features of the situation and does not also provide us with rules for acting in situations of that kind.”2

Collingwood argued that there were two kinds of fatal replies to that objection, both of which were important.

When Insight and Improvisation Are Needed

His first reply was that if it’s a rifle you want then go to the gunsmith’s, but if you want to see tigers as well as shoot them then “you must learn woodcraft.”3

In other words: if ready-made rules for dealing with situations of specific types are what you want, natural science is the kind of thing which can provide them. The reason why the civilization of 1600-1900, based upon natural science, found bankruptcy staring it in the face was because, in its passion for readymade 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.4

Some situations, he argued, “can be handled without appeal to any ready-made rules at all, so long as you have insight into them. All you need in such cases is to see what the situation is, and you can then extemporize a way of dealing with it which will prove satisfactory.”5 And he went on to prove6 that rules for acting could never have been arrived at in the first place without a great deal of insight-based knowledge of how to act that was not based on rules.

But his second reply to the objection was that “if you are sure that the thing you are going to see in the grass is going to be a tiger, and if your only idea about tigers is that they are things to shoot, take a rifle with you. But are you sure? What if it turns out to be your own child playing Indians?”7

If you are taking aim at the wrong target, or at the wrong level of description, your intervention may do harm, prove disastrous, create the very opposite result to the one intended, or at the very least fail to achieve what it was intended to achieve at all.

This second answer he thought highly important in practical affairs, not least in moral and political life, and Collingwood felt the need to expound it at greater length. It strikes at the heart of what is wrong with so much of contemporary thought and action, and it is indeed highly relevant to the business of creating change.

Collingwood was at pains to indicate that when speaking of action in this context, he meant what an agent does, “not because he is in a certain situation, but because he knows or believes himself to be in a certain situation,” and that when speaking of “action according to rule,” he meant “that kind of action in which the agent, knowing or believing that there is a certain rule, applicable to the situation in which he knows or believes himself to be, [consciously and deliberately] decides to act in accordance with it.”8

He admitted that what we do in a great part of our actions, and what is responsible for their ease and success, is acting according to rules, but only because, a lot of the time,

we are moving among situations of certain standard types, and trying to manipulate them so as to obtain certain standard results. Action according to rule is a very important kind of action, and the first question which any intelligent man asks, when he finds himself in a situation of any kind, is ‘What are the rules for acting in this kind of situation?’9

Where Our Actions Cannot Rely on Abstractions and General Principles

But a large part of our human life, he said, cannot rely on action according to rules, and these fall into two broad classes of cases.

First, there are all those occasions “when you find yourself in a situation that you do not recognize as belonging to any of your known types. No rule can tell you how to act.”

Whether this is due to “inexperience and ignorance” or some “disturbance of our regular routine” or “find[ing] ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings,”10 when no readymade rule is to hand and yet you still “must do something,” then “you must improvise as best you can a method of handling it.”11

The second and more significant kind of occasion arises “only for people of experience and intelligence, and even then occurs only when they take a situation very seriously”—“so seriously as to reject” the “three temptations,” however thinly disguised, that lead all our most important actions astray: desire, self-interest, and acting according to recognized rules.12

Of these three temptations cited by Collingwood as tripping-up our most important and serious endeavours, the most destructive and insidious, he felt, was the third temptation, that of acting according to recognized rules, in which the individual, clinging to the security of the customary, habitual, and rote, is

trying to see only those elements in the situation which he already knew how to deal with, … shutting his eyes to anything which might convince him that his readymade rules were not an adequate guide to the conduct of life.
Rules of conduct kept action at a low potential, because they involved a certain blindness to the realities of the situation. If action was to be raised to a higher potential, the agent must open his eyes wider and see more clearly the situation in which he was acting.13

Although I am not a professional historian applying the lessons of history to contemporary affairs as Collingwood was, I can understand what Collingwood was driving at here. For these are, it so happens, just the kinds of situations which have made up my own professional practice with clients over the past four decades: the client’s desired outcome was mission-critical and had enormous consequences.

And here it was always clear that the client and their professional advisers (typically the large, well-known consulting firms), had previously been “seeing only those elements in the situation [they ] already knew how to deal with.” Their actions were consequently stuck “at a low potential, because they involved a certain blindness to the realities of the situation,” and the results they were getting were accordingly limited.

Either the desired change was not achieved, or only partially achieved, or it took months or years to achieve, or once achieved the change failed to stick for any length of time, and was soon undone by the system. I found that their actions could only be “raised to a higher potential” by means of a question-and-answer methodology enabling the individual to “open his eyes wider and see more clearly the situation in which he was acting.”

Collingwood pointed out that “[t]his second kind of occasion on which you must act without rules is when you can refer the situation to a known type, but are, wisely, not content to do so.

You know a rule for dealing with situations of this kind, but you are not content with applying it, because you know that action according to rules always involves a certain misfit between yourself and your situation. If you act according to rules, you are not dealing with the situation in which you stand, you are only dealing with a certain type of situation under which you class it.14

We all tend to do this all the time, and in daily life and in run-of-the-mill, business-as-usual situations there’s no harm done. A certain amount of efficiency may even result in getting through most of our mundane daily tasks this way, at least when finding ourselves in the kind of situations where optimizing the outcome does not matter terribly much one way or the other.

It may also be expedient to follow general rules or principles in the kinds of situations where we are more inclined to follow routine procedures than to try and gain real insight into the situation and creatively improvise a unique, truly optimized response to what is always a unique situation with the potential for positive spin-offs depending on precisely how we go about it.

Although in reality every situation is unique in this way, at the same time, the situation can always be more-or-less arbitrarily classified as a case of, or instance of, some generic type of situation where we know rules or principles or procedures for dealing with it. But there’s a catch.

The type is, admittedly, a useful handle with which to grasp the situation; but all the same, it comes between you and the situation it enables you to grasp. Often enough, that does not matter; but sometimes it matters very much.15

Where the rewards of success or the cost of failure are high, where it matters a great deal how well we handle the situation, we must jettison all pre-conceived categories, rules and procedures, and deal with the unique situation in front of us. This is not just a situation of type S. This is not just a person of type P.

Rather, this is a real situation, the description of which is literally inexhaustible, with an infinite number of dimensions which may turn out to be relevant, and we are dealing with a person who is more than the type or role or category to which we happen to choose to assign them.

How Not to Deal with Your Tailor

As an example, Collingwood cites how someone acts “in dealing with his tailor.” Everyone who has a tailor has “certain rules according to which he acts” in dealing with him, rules “soundly based on genuine experience; and by acting on them a man will deal fairly with his tailor and helps his tailor to deal fairly by him.”16

But these rules one adopts have severe limitations built in. For, “so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank.”17

The rules for dealing with tailors no doubt enable you to cope with the tailor in John Robinson, but they prevent you from getting to grips with whatever else there may be in him. Of course, if you know that he has a weak heart, you will manage your dealings with him by modifying the rules for tailor-situations in the light of the rules for situations involving people with weak hearts. But at this rate the modifications soon become so complicated that the rules are no longer of any practical use to you. You have got beyond the stage at which rules can guide action, and you go back to improvising, as best you can, a method of handling the situation in which you find yourself.18

That simple passage about Collingwood’s tailor John Robinson has implications which are vast.

The Procrustean Bed of Abstract Categories

To take an example from the business world, to which many of our readers may be able to relate:

The biggest, best, and most prestigious consulting firms understandably expend a lot of words in trying to emphasize that they are not just trotting out the same old solutions, whatever the client’s problem might happen to be.

They are at pains to tell us that they are not after all simply slicing and dicing the client’s problem to fit the Procrustean bed of some prefabricated off-the-shelf set of solutions. Rather, they emphasize, in many different ways, that they are strategically, creatively, and in a fact-based objective fashion, grounded in their considerable subject-matter expertise, “devising unique solutions to unique problems.”

Doubtless they are sincere in what they say about attempting to devise unique solutions to unique problems.

Their illusion of treating “unique problems” and helping the client arrive at “unique solutions” can, however, only be maintained with the aid of the biggest and most notorious Procrustean bed of all: the mythology of rationalism, according to which all you need to do to solve any problem is to appropriately classify it along the relevant dimensions and apply the tool or tools for dealing with problems of that type.

This is the very sort of thing that Collingwood was demonstrating the flaws in, and trying to get us away from.

If you were to ask one of the most senior, knowledgeable and experienced of these management consultants what dimensions of your company’s unique problem they will be considering, they will be able to rattle off a very long and impressive-sounding, and apparently comprehensive set of dimensions of the problem, individually necessary and jointly sufficient, for getting the measure of it, all of which dimensions they and their people will thoroughly investigate in detail, benchmark rigorously against the industry or what have you, and so on.

Once they have thoroughly analyzed your unique problem along all of the critical dimensions they deem relevant—perhaps five or seven or twelve critical variables, or even at times as many as 100 or more independent variables—they will tailor a customized solution, or offer you a range of options, based on their thoroughgoing findings.

The difficulty is, however, that they are not really dealing with the problems they analyze as if they were unique at all.

Instead they are classifying them according to an N-dimensional classificatory scheme, analyzing the problem in terms of preconceived categories—the N different descriptive dimensions they are considering.

However, the abstract, skeletal, surrogate problem analyzed by the consultants with their principles and categories and analytical techniques, cannot possibly do full justice to your real problem, which truly is unique, for it has not just twelve or 100 or even 100,000 different dimensions which might turn out to be most relevant to finding the optimal solution.

Rather every unique situation has literally an infinite number of dimensions (description of reality being inexhaustible)—an infinity of dimensions which, in my experience, needs somehow to be filtered in order to arrive at the optimum solution, and none of these dimensions can be named in advance.

There is no way in advance even to suspect the existence of many of these variables, or to guess that the variable in question might be relevant to a solution.

For it turns out that the overwhelming majority of these descriptive dimensions of the problem, if not all of them, will be entirely unique to the situation, a situation which has occurred nowhere else in just this idiosyncratic form and context.

A problem which is analyzed in the way consultants or managers themselves, or business schools, or Collingwood’s scissors-and-paste historians analyze problems, making use of a finite number of preordained abstractions, rules, categories, and techniques which apply to more than one situation, indeed to more than one company or even more than one industry, will only be addressed with a suboptimal, relatively standardized kind of solution, at most a variation on a theme which has worked elsewhere or could work elsewhere.

What’s more, it may take months or years for the implementation of their recommendations to be completed. For it’s a kind of result for a kind of problem. It will indeed work if properly “rolled out” and fully implemented, and it may even stick for a while, though it may require in the meantime a kind of intense pressure-cooker in which the executive can only hope that most of the potatoes will cook in time.

By contrast, jettisoning all the known dimensions, categories, classifications, rules, abstractions and so on, and instead directly addressing the infinite richness of the completely idiosyncratic and initially unrecognizable problem situation, in my experience, means this:

A problem may have been assumed by the leading experts in the field—even after their in-depth analytical work has been completed—to take two or three or five years or more, an enormous input of organizational time, and hundreds of external consultants to achieve the desired outcome which will, with good execution, eventually be reached.

Yet a truly optimum outcome, designed by the executive themselves on their own when faced with the selfsame situation, can instead be achieved with absolute precision in a matter of weeks—without any internal disruption or any outside consulting advice being required—just by having the right thinking tools at their disposal and going about the matter very differently.

And because a truly unique and unrepeatable approach was taken by the executive to address an utterly unique situation, the change sticks, and it sticks because it was purposefully designed to stick in a genuinely unique and idiosyncratic situation—that is, one that has never occurred before and will never occur again.

This is the difference between rationalistic, rules-based action, and action based on insight. If you can say in advance which aspects of the situation you will need to consider, you may arrive at some insight into the situation once all the hard work is done, and you may eventually get to a good outcome, but it will still be rules-based action about kinds of situations. It will not be insight-based action.

The situation will not be considered in its uniqueness the way it would be in insight-based action, and because the solution will be at best a kind of solution to a kind of problem, the result will only kind of fit, will take a lot of work to make it fit, and it will take a long time to get there.

Dogged by a False Dichotomy

Which brings us to a major upshot of all this.

There is a misbegotten, age-old philosophical distinction between the Universal and the Particular, which has not only dogged philosophy, but has dogged the world of affairs for centuries and has got more and more insidious as time has gone by, and more deleterious in its effects on human wellbeing, and its disastrous influence has probably never been more widespread than in our contemporary world.

In Collingwood’s philosophy, the correct contrast, which should have been made by his fellow philosophers, was not that between the Universal and the “misnamed” Particular—the contrast as widely bandied about by the philosophical schools of thought he set his face against—but rather the contrast between the Universal and the Individual.

The former, more traditional distinction in philosophy, the distinction Universal/Particular, is for Collingwood a false dichotomy.

Both sides of that conventional, alleged distinction still classify what they are referring to in an equally abstract fashion, considering the individual only as a particular instance of some universal: thus a particular dog, Fido, in being referred to as a dog, is therefore being considered only as an instance of the universal “dog,” that which all dogs have in common. Fido is here only being considered as a member of the class of all dogs.

But in the real world, Fido isn’t just a particular of some universal. Fido, rather, is a unique and entirely idiosyncratic individual, unlike any other dog in the world, just as he is to his owner, the aforementioned tailor John Robinson who is in the habit of feeding Fido treats of Bourbon chocolate biscuits.

Fido is getting on, at nearly 17 years old, is a cross between a poodle and a black labrador, is a lovely deep copper colour, with a spot around one eye making him look a little like a pirate, has a favourite habit of sniffing visitors’ ankles, is frightened by car horns, and is living in the late 1930s in an East London suburb. And he is in an infinite number of ways, more than just an instance of the universal “dog,” that is, more than just a member of the class of all dogs.

Hence Collingwood’s insistence that the key distinction is not the highly misleading, traditional contrast between the Universal and the Particular, but rather the contrast between the Universal, on the one hand, and the Individual—someone or something idiosyncratic in countless ways, unique in this world and uniquely situated.

Universal, generic rules, classifications and abstractions are only of limited relevance in understanding and dealing with individuals, and we live, after all, in a world of individuals, not a world of types of individuals.

The implications of this last-mentioned point are considerable and wide-ranging, and we shall be exploring them further next week.

An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 100

ibid.

op. cit. p. 101

ibid., italics added

ibid., pp. 101-102

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ibid.

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