One quick parallel, one liberation long in coming
[jotted by Lynn C. Rees]
Listening to this presentation by Vanya Eftimova Bellinger on her biography of Marie von Clausewitz (helpfully titled Marie von Clausewitz), one quick parallel and one liberation (long in coming) came to mind:
Quick parallel:
As editor of On War, Marie deliberately left On War unfinished.
Carl’s unforeseen death on November 16, 1831 from the cholera left a jumble of papers instead of a book. Marie was left to assemble them into publishable form. Received wisdom long held that Marie’s editorial activity was passive, with the heavy lifting and hard thinking left to her brother Friedrich or some other dude among Carl’s comrades.
Bellinger’s research, based on newly recovered letters Marie and Carl exchanged over their 21 year marriage, reveals the received wisdom as received nonsense: Marie was intimately involved in both the development and detail of Carl’s ideas. Some of Carl’s ideas may in fact be Marie and Carl’s ideas or even Marie’s ideas (though, as a devoted couple, of one mind and one heart, where did one end and the other begin?). She was only qualified editor for Carl’s work other than Carl.
Despite this, she chose to leave it largely as Carl left it, uneven, unfinished, unpolished, and frequently deeply divided against itself. Marie saw Carl’s book, even unfinished, as the greatest work on the study of war ever written. Yet she felt that, providentially perhaps, its incomplete and unsettled state made On War more of an invitation to advance the study of war beyond even her beloved Carl than The One Book On War To Rule Them All. The large blanks left in On War are not, as long claimed, artifacts of a loving but inexpert widow, hopelessly lost among the Great Thoughts of a Great Man. They are roads so wide that the future can move through them with ease, a lasting tribute by a woman of vision to a man of vision she understood better than the small-minded historians (usually dudes) left in her shadow.
This reminds me of the late Col. John Boyd’s slides and the complaints some make that the Colonel didn’t leave behind a comprehensive treatise on war like, um, On War. The Colonel lived as he preached: he was against the formation of orthodoxies, even, and especially, Boydian orthodoxies. He believed they contributed to the closed thinking that Boydian-flavored tactics sought to create in the enemies they targeted. A closed enemy mind is prey to its own illusions. Left without lifelines to reality, a mind’s mental entropy accumulates until it consumes itself and collapses into fatal disorder. Orthodoxy belongs to the same family of tactics, only now the victim is yourself. Orthodoxy is mental suicide.
The Colonel was not going to be a military Aristotle. He was not going to leave behind a body of work so all-encompassing that it euthanized contrary thinking for the next two millennia. So he left behind a bunch of slides, as suggestive in what they don’t say as in what they do say. Filling in the blanks is left as an exercise to viewer.
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