I. Introduction: Theory, Inquiry, Genius
II. Critical Analysis, Narrative, Mental Reconstruction
III. Narrative and Reenactment
I. Introduction: Theory, Inquiry, Genius
In order to grasp what Clausewitz means by critical analysis we first must understand how he approached the question of theory, and how he believed theory was to serve as an educational device.
In Chapter Two, Book II of On War, 'On The Theory of War', Clausewitz unequivocally states that a theory of war should never strive to be a positive system or a doctrine, but must rather be a form of study, a special type of inquiry. Given the unpredictability of war, he argues, "it is simply not possible to construct a model for the art of war that can serve as a scaffolding on which the commander can rely for support at any time" (On War, Howard/Paret translation, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 161). If military theory cannot be a "sort of manual for action" it must instead become a form of study. "Whenever an activity deals primarily with the same things again and again – with the same ends and the same means, even though there may be minor variations and an infinite diversity of combinations – these things are susceptible to rational study. It is precisely that inquiry which is the most essential part of any theory, and which may quite appropriately claim the title" (Ibid., 163, all emphasis is Clausewitz's unless otherwise noted). Since this kind of inquiry into the nature of war is conducted not with the aim of constructing a doctrine or a predictive set of rules, it must aim instead for ""a close acquaintance with the subject; applied to experience – in our case, to military history – to thorough familiarity with it" (Ibid.). Clausewitzian theory is therefore meant to be a type of instructive inquiry that does not aim at prediction, but is "a guide to anyone who wants to learn about war from books; it will light his way, ease his progress, train his judgement, and help him avoid pitfalls" (Ibid.). A combination of historical study and theoretical reflection will thus help educate a commander's intellect: "Analysis and observation, theory and experience," Clausewitz writes, "must never disdain or exclude each other; on the contrary, they support each other" (Ibid., 69). When Clausewitz argues that his theory of war is meant to train the judgement of a commander, he has a very specific picture of what strategic decision making is like and how the human mind handles these issues.
Indeed, in Chapter Three of Book I Clausewitz argues that strategic decision making in war must be handled by the 'genius' of a commander, by which he means "a harmonious combination" of intellectual and emotional qualities that allow a commander to exercise sound judgement. Sound judgement, moreover, depends largely on subrational faculties, which Clausewitz calls metaphorically coup d'oeil, a term derived from tactics that means "the idea of a rapid and accurate decision." He then goes on to explain that the term also has a strategic meaning that refers "to the inward eye." "Stripped of metaphor and of the restrictions imposed on it by the phrase," he continues, "the concept merely refers to the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection" (Ibid, 118). Jon Sumida, in his Decoding Clausewitz, rightly argues that Clausewitz is claiming that intuition, "a form of unconscious thought that integrates rational intelligence and emotion," is at the heart of Clausewitz’s concept of genius (Jon Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, University of Kansas Press, 2008, 3).
Intuition, moreover, is something that can only be improved through experience in war. Clausewitz makes the importance of experience clear during his concluding observations to Book I. There he argues that experience is the only thing that can help genius function properly in war’s danger and uncertainty. “In War,” Clausewitz writes, “the experienced soldier reacts rather in the same way as the human eye does in the dark: the pupil expands to admit what little light there is, discerning objects by degrees, and finally seeing them distinctly. By contrast, the novice is plunged into the deepest night” (On War, 141). Clausewitz regards experience to be of paramount importance, and we can safely assume that his theory must have something to do with the effects of experience on a commander’s judgement. Sumida puts this idea very clearly in his preface to Decoding Clausewitz when he argues that at the end of Book I Clausewitz “implicitly poses the question of what might constitute an effective palliative for lack of experience” (xvi). Indeed, Sumida argues that this is at the core of Clausewitz’s theory: “Clausewitz believes that it is possible to formulate a theory of war that will promote the operation of genius through the replication of the effects of experience” (Decoding Clausewitz, 135). Clausewitz’s theory is therefore a form of inquiry meant to strengthen the intuitive judgement (i.e. genius) of a commander by providing access to something like experience. History, it turns out, is where Clausewitz believes we may gain access to something like experience.
II. Critical Analysis, Narrative, Mental Reconstruction
Having told us that theory must be a form of historical study that is aimed at improving a commander's intuitive decision making abilities, Clausewitz further specifies in Book II the lines along which such an inquiry must proceed. ‘Critical Analysis’ is the name he gives to said inquiry. In Chapter Five of Book II, titled 'Critical Analysis', Clausewitz explains that theory must ultimately be a historical inquiry: an intensive study of past military campaigns. Permit me to quote him at some length. The chapter on critical analysis begins as such: "The influence of theoretical truths on practical life is always exerted more through critical analysis than through doctrine. Critical analysis being the application of theoretical truths to actual events, it not only reduces the gap between the two but also accustoms the mind to these truths through their repeated applications. We have established a criterion for theory, and must now establish one for critical analysis" (Ibid., 181, my emphasis). The chapter on critical analysis is thus delivering on the promise that he made in Chapter Two of Book II: he is explaining how theory as a form of study is to manifest itself. It is to be a historical study that incorporates theoretical reflection. It is absolutely essential that we read Chapter Five of Book II in light of what he has told us in Chapter Two of Book II. That Clausewitz claims that this process 'accustoms the mind to these truths', moreover, shows that he is concerned with a educating particular kind of intelligence that we can call intuition.
The first thing to note is that critical analysis is essentially a narrative exercise: the writing of a fuller account of a past campaign that goes beyond ordinary historical narrative. He immediately distinguishes "between the critical approach and the plain narrative of a historical event, which merely arranges facts one after another, and at most touches on their immediate causal links" (Ibid.). Critical analysis as a narrative exercise, Clausewitz explains, contains three different elements: historical research proper, critical analysis proper, and criticism proper: "First, the discovery and interpretation of equivocal facts. This is historical research proper, and has nothing in common with theory. Second, the tracing of effects back to their causes. This is critical analysis proper. It is essential for theory; for whatever in theory is to be defined, supported or simply described by reference to experience can only be dealt with in this manner. Third, the investigation and evaluation of means employed. This last is criticism proper, involving praise and censure. Here theory serves history, or rather the lessons to be drawn from history" (Ibid.). The first element of this process, historical research, is clear enough, but what does Clausewitz mean by the 'tracing of effects back to their causes' and 'the investigation and evaluation of means'?
By the 'tracing of effects back to causes' Clausewitz must be referring to the mental processes of the commander in chief that led to certain decisions being made in war. For 'effects' and 'causes' can only mean the outcomes of certain military campaigns, and the thinking that led to those decisions being made. We can be confident that Clausewitz is not referring to material causes and effects here since in Chapter Two of Book II he criticizes his contemporaries for limiting their theories to material factors (155-156) and for not adequately dealing with mental factors (157-160). His inquiry into causes and effects in war therefore must be related to his goal of formulating a theory that adequately deals with psychological factors in war.
The mental processes that effect the outcome of a war, however, are not directly accessible to us by the historical record: "Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so. They may be intentionally concealed by those in command, or, if they happen to be transitory and accidental, history may not have recorded them at all. This is why critical narrative must usually go hand in hand with historical research" (Ibid., 181-182, my emphasis). The real business of theory as critical analysis, then, is to dig beyond the surface of the historical record to reveal the mental processes that gave rise to actions. Surmising about the mental processes that led to certain decision in war, however, cannot proceed willy-nilly. It must be supported by a working theory that can bound the limits of the inquiry and help us ask intelligent questions. "In short," he argues, "a working theory is an essential basis for criticism. Without such a theory it is generally impossible for criticism to reach that point at which it becomes truly instructive...." (Ibid., 183). Clausewitz is adamant that theoretical truths are not to stand on their own, but may only to be used as aids to the construction of these critical narratives:
But it would be wishful thinking to imagine that any theory could cover every abstract truth.... The same spirit of analytical investigation which creates a theory should also guide the work of the critic who both may and should often cross into the realm of theory in order to elucidate any point of special importance. The function of theory would be missed entirely if criticism were to degenerate into a mechanical application of theory. All the positive results of theoretical investigation – all the principles, rules, and methods – will increasingly lack universality and absolute truth the closer they come to being positive doctrine (Ibid.).
When one finds a past commander's decisions to be in conflict with a theoretical truth, moreover, one is not to dismiss such a decision. Rather, one must inquire into the reasoning behind such a choice. "If, in tactics, it is generally agreed that in the standard line of battle cavalry should be posted not in line with but behind the infantry, it would nevertheless be foolish to condemn every different deployment simply because it is different. The critic should analyze the reasons for the exception" (Ibid.). Again, this means using theoretical truths to reconstruct the mental processes that led a commander to make such a decision. Clausewitz says this with great clarity when he argues that "Critical analysis, after all, is nothing but thinking that should precede the action" (Ibid., 196, my emphasis). The thinking that should precede the action, you say? Such a statement shows that by critical analysis Clausewitz must mean the critical reconstruction of past decision making processes.
This kind of reconstruction, moreover, extends to all the various layers of a military campaign, from the highest strategic objectives to the lowest tactical decision:
One can go on tracing the same effects that a cause produces so long as it seems worthwhile. In the same way, a means may be evaluated not merely with respect to its immediate end: that end itself should be appraised as a means for the next and highest one; and thus we can follow a chain of sequential objectives until we reach one that requires no justification, because its necessity is self-evident. In many cases, particularly those involving great and decisive actions, the analysis must extend to the ultimate objective, which is to bring about peace. Every stage in this progression obviously implies a new basis for judgment. That which seems correct when looked at from one level may, when viewed from a higher one, appear objectionable (Ibid., 184).
This kind of narrative reconstruction thus necessarily covers not only strategic decision making, but tactical decision making as well, 'the means employed'. As he says, the notion of 'means' here is broad and covers a variety of phenomena. But no matter how diverse the means possibly employed, their consideration always implies an inquiry into an individual's mental process that led to decision making, it is always subject to reconstruction and evaluation. That Clausewitz believed ends and means to be of such a diverse nature is confirmed in his writing in Chapter Two of Book II, when he argues that "The influence of the great diversity of intellectual qualities is felt chiefly in the higher ranks, and increases as one goes up the ladder. It is the primary cause for the diversity of roads to the goal..." (Ibid., 160-161). It is not a shortcoming, then, that Clausewitz cannot tell us more precisely what is meant by the tracing of effects back to their causes and the investigation of the means employed: the meaning of 'effects and causes' and 'the means employed' will vary based on what campaign we are investigating from what perspective. In one case it may mean understanding why a commander chose to abandon a siege of one city in favor of attacking another, and in another may mean asking why a commander chose to use his cavalry against unbroken infantry. Critical analysis and criticism, however, find their unity in the basic fact that it always involves the narrative reconstruction and evaluation of the thought processes that led an individual to make such a decision, that it is 'thinking that precedes the action'. Critical analysis, in short, is always a narrative and perspective taking exercise.
Clausewitz then provides us with an example of how such an inquiry is to be carried out. On page 185 he begins a historical narrative of Napoleon's decision making process in a 1797 campaign. He does precisely what he describes: he looks at the objectives that Napoleon pursued, he looks at the means by which that goal was achieved, and he tries to imagine what Napoleon must have thought to make him choose such a goal and to pursue it in such a way. He effectively shows us that through a critical narrative a critic may take a variety of perspectives, reconstructing the mental processes of many different actors. In discussing Napoleon's successful routing of Archduke Charles in 1797 he asks "How could Bonaparte make use of this success? Should he press on into the heart of the Austrian Empire, ease the advance of the two armies of the Rhine under Moreau and Hoche, and work in conjunction with them? That was how Bonaparte saw it, and from his point of view he was right. But the critic may take a wider view – that of the French Directory; whose members could see, and must have realized, that the campaign on the Rhine would not begin for another six weeks. From that standpoint, then, Bonaparte's advance through the Norican Alps could only be considered an unjustifiable risk" (Ibid., 185, my emphasis). I have italicized portions of this quotation to show that Clausewitz's language consistently betrays the fact that critical analysis is fundamentally about assuming the perspective of decision makers in war, getting in their heads and reconstructing their thought processes.
That Clausewitz believed strategic criticism the be primarily a matter of perspective taking is shown with even greater clarity in his study of the battle of Waterloo. In that study he writes, "the main point of all criticisms of strategy, difficult though this may be, is to put oneself in the position of the decision-maker. If writers were to consider all eventualities, the great majority of criticisms of strategy would be totally without substance or diminish into minute distinctions of reasoning" (On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo, Carl von Clausewitz, translated by Peter Hofschoroer 2010, University of Oklahoma Press, 38, my emphasis). Critical analysis is thus a narrative exercise that is meant to place us into the perspective of past decision makers, allowing us to work out their thinking for ourselves.
At the end of his discussion of the events of 1797 Clausewitz says, "It will suffice to show that comprehensive, intricate and difficult character which a critical analysis may assume if it extends to ultimate objectives – in other words, if it deals with the great and decisive measures which must necessarily lead up to them" ( On War, 187). Again, it is obvious that the 'great and decisive measures' that lead up to military phenomena must be the mental processes of the commander-in-chief, and that to critically analyze them is to reconstruct and evaluate them.
The purpose of this narrative reconstruction of a commander's mental process, as we've noted, is to 'accustom the mind' to the realities of military things, by which Clausewitz means that it should help us cultivate an intuitive grasp of them. He further clarifies this point in the last section of Chapter Two of Book II. He closes the chapter by considering "a factor more vital to military knowledge than any other," an emphatic statement we would do well to take seriously:
Knowledge must be so absorbed into the mind that it almost ceases to exist in a separate, objective way. In almost any other art or profession a man can work with truths he has learned from musty books, but which have no life or meaning for him. Even truths that are in constant use and are always to hand may still be externals. When an architect sits down with a pen and paper to determine the strength of an abutment by a complicated calculation, the truth of the answer at which he arrives is not an expression of his own personality.... It is never like that in war. Continual change and the need to respond to it compels the commander to carry the whole intellectual apparatus of his knowledge within him. He must always be ready to bring forth the appropriate decision. By total assimilation with his mind and life, the commander's knowledge must be transformed into a genuine capacity. That is why it all seems to come so easily to men who have distinguished themselves in war, and why it is all ascribed to natural talent. We say natural talent in order to distinguish it from the talent that has been trained and educated by reflection and study (Ibid., 170, my emphasis).
The most vital fact in military education, then, is that a commander become so acquainted with military truths that they become fully integrated into his personality. A commander must cultivate a kind of instinct, a feel for things that cannot be captured in rational truths. A commander's knowledge is "an intellectual instinct which extracts the essence from the phenomena of life, as a bee sucks honey from a flower. In addition to study and reflection, life itself serves as a source. Experience, with its wealth of lessons, will never produce a Newton or an Euler, but it may well bring forth the higher calculations of a Conde or a Frederick" (Ibid., 169-170, my emphasis). We have several things to note here. First, Clausewitz is discussing a form of intelligence that he explicitly contrasts with rational, mathematical study. Second, it is a form of intellect that is trained primarily through experience and the study of experience rather than through mere rational study. The centrality of experience, as we already noted, has already been raised in the concluding chapter of Book I (See Ibid., 141-142).
Critical analysis, as the culmination of Clausewitz's theory of war, must therefore be about educating an intuitive sensibility in war by providing a substitute for experience. Indeed, Clausewitz argues in the chapter on critical analysis that the critic is supposed to be 'absorbing' theoretical truths into his mind in a way that mirrors the intuitive capacities of the commander under study. The critic is not to "check a great commander's solution to a problem as if it were a sum in arithmetic. Rather, he must recognize with admiration the commander's success, the smooth unfolding of events, the higher workings of his genius" (Ibid., 193, my emphasis). Through the faithful and humble attempt to use theory as an instrument to reconstruct a great commander's decision making process in war, a critic can expose his mind to the experience of that genius. For "in the same way as in war these truths are better served by a commander who has absorbed their meaning in his mind rather than one who treats them as rigid external rules, so the critic should not apply them like an external law or an algebraic formula whose relevance need not be established each time it is used. These truth should always be allowed to become self-evident...." (Ibid., 196, my emphasis). Here we see a sort of identity between the critic and the general: the critic desires to have a mind that intuitively grasps the difficult realities of military problems like the great commanders of the past. The critic therefore limits himself to the terms that the great generals used, never engaging in academic technicalities or jargon, but letting everything "be done through the natural workings of the mind" (Ibid., 197). Through the reconstruction of past commander's mental processes the critic is able to gain a second-hand experience of the simple concepts that are employed to solve the enormous difficulties of war. We will be returning to this question of 'second-hand experience'.
Clausewitz closes the chapter on critical analysis with a severe indictment of abstract theories that do not embrace the actual language used in politics. Such a jargon-rich, unrealistic language never would have flourished, he writes, "if by means of simple terms and straightforward observation of the conduct of war theory had sought to determine all that was determinable; if, without spurious claims, with no unseemly display of scientific formulae and historical compendia, it had stuck to the point and never parted company with those who have to manage things in battle by the light of their native wit" (Ibid., 198, my emphasis). Critical analysis, then, is essentially a process in which a critic uses a combination of historical fact and theoretically supported surmise to reconstruct a past commander's mental process with the goal of replicating his experience. In the process the critic is supposed to be cultivating an intuitive grasp of military phenomena and a sense of the ways in which the greatest minds of the past have dealt with these kinds of problems. The critic attempts to reconstruct the workings of past genius so that they may work to develop their own genius.
III. Narrative and Reenactment
As we can see, Clausewitz's writing on critical analysis can be rendered in the language of narrative, mental reconstruction, second-hand experience, and the training of intuitive judgement. All of this is clear from the first two Books of On War. Jon Sumida, in his Decoding Clausewitz, however, proposes that Clausewitz's concept of critical analysis should be thought of as a form of 'historical reenactment'. According to Sumida, the primary argument of On War "is that an imagined replication of past decision-making of a commander-in-chief – that is, historical reenactment – can promote the development of a sensibility similar to that produced by the experience of real war" (Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, xvi). Through historical reenactments one is supposed to gain a second-hand experience of the genius of past commanders. Great commanders of the past, he writes, "demonstrated a practical understanding of armed conflict through their possession of whatever it took to overcome the manifold and in many cases unpredictable obstacles to taking sound action in war." Such a practical skill, moreover, "was the product of experience. And [Clausewitz] was furthermore convinced that the most important thing improved by experience was intuition...." Clausewitz's theory, as a form of reenactment, then, was meant to offer "instruction as to how a sense of intuition, and thus of genius, might be acquired by someone without experience of supreme command" (Ibid., 3). Later in the book Sumida puts this point with more clarity. Given that Clausewitz believed experience to be the most vital factor in a commander's education, he attempted "to construct something that resembles experience–to the point of being nearly equivalent to–through historical reenactment based on historical fact and theoretically informed surmise" (Ibid., 184). Later on Sumida calls the product of reenactment 'synthetic experience'. Clausewitzian theory, he claims, can be rendered as "Verifiable Historical Fact (VHF) + Theory-Based Historical Surmise = Synthetic Experience.... Synthetic Experience (SE) + Reflection on Synthetic Experience (RSE) = Improved Capacity for Judgement (ICJ)." (Ibid., 196). These terms are not so different from the language I used above, but they put the case a bit more strongly, and draw on a variety of different sources. My reading of On War, I confess, is entirely indebted to Sumida's work.
The reception of Sumida's use of the term reenactment has not been uniform. Some reviewers, like J. Alex Vohr, have lauded Sumida's use of the phrase reenactment as a profound insight into Clausewitz's thinking, while Eugenia Kiesling has expressed less enthusiastic appraisals of the terminology, and Janeen Klinger has outright questioned the applicability of the phrase. "On this point," she writes, "one might do well to apply a version of Occam’s razor that the simplest explanation is the best and that perhaps Clausewitz used the term 'critical analysis' because that is what he meant to say." (http://www.clausewitz.com/bibl/Klinger-ReviewSumidaDecodingClausewitz.html, accessed 9/25/2014). I find this last statement a little bit befuddling. In what sense is a term like critical analysis self-evident? Clausewitz's discussion of it reveals it to be a complex process that combines historical study and theoretical reflection in a way that he believed overcame the shortcomings of previous forms of military theory. My goal in the latter half of this essay is to look more closely at this question of what critical analysis means, and whether Sumida is correct in claiming that critical analysis is essentially a form of historical reenactment.
Now, given that Sumida self-consciously borrows the term reenactment from R.G. Collingwood, I think it prudent to begin with Collingwood and see what kind of affinity exists between he and Clausewitz's writing. Based on the discussion above, two thing are undeniable about Clausewitz's concept of critical analysis: first, it is a kind of historical study that tries to understand the thoughts behind past actions, and second it uses narrative to do so. In order for Sumida to be justified in using the term reenactment, therefore, we must find that Collingwood believes reenactment to serve similar purposes.
The first thing that we must grasp about Collingwood's concept of historical reenactment is that it is an answer to the question: How can we have knowledge of another mind? For Collingwood there is only one object of historical study: thought. The historian, of course, cares deeply about actions and studies the actions of past actors. Action, however, can only be understood as an expression of thought. "The deeds which historians study are therefore... deeds embodying or expressing thought." (The Principles of History, 48). Thought, and not action, is the ultimate object of history. Collingwood reiterates this point in his Autobiography: "You are thinking historically... when you say about anything, 'I see what the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed this &c.) was thinking' " (An Autobiography., 110). In order to say that we have seen what someone was thinking, moreover, we must think those same thoughts for ourselves. For Collingwood there is no other way to understand a thought, we must think "that very same thought, not another like it" (Ibid., 111). Thus claiming that all history is the history of thought, and that thought can only be understood by rethinking those thoughts, Collingwood argues that "historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying" (Ibid., 112). So far Collingwood's concept of reenactment seems to square with Clausewitz's concept of critical analysis in that they both strive to understand past actions in terms of the motivating thought. But does Collingwood's reenactment explicitly rely on narrative?
Yes. Yes it does. If we look closely at The Idea of History we discover that Collingwood argues that this process of reenactment is always bound up with narrative. This becomes clear in his essay 'Historical Evidence'. In section vii, 'Who Killed John Doe?', Collingwood argues that the historians business is in many ways similar to a detective. Both the historian and the detective reject the idea that difficult questions will be handled by means of testimony and or second-hand observation. No one will hand them the truth about an event. On the contrary, both the detective and the historian must ask their own questions in order to reconstruct an accurate picture of why people behaved the way they did. Collingwood demonstrates this fact by telling a story in which John Doe has been murdered:
When John Doe was found, early one sunday morning, lying across his desk with a dagger through his back, no one expected that the question who did it would be settled by means of testimony. It was not likely that anyone saw the murder being done. It was even less likely that someone in the murderer's confidence would give him away. It was least likely of all that the murderer would walk into the village police-stations and denounce himself. In spite of this, the public demanded that he should be brought to justice, and the police had hopes of doing it; though the only clue was a little fresh green paint on the handle of the dagger, like the fresh green paint on the iron gate between John Doe's garden and the rector's (The Idea of History, 266).
That Collingwood would provide us with such an interesting narrative shows that he took the relation between narrative and history seriously. In comparing the work of the historian to that of the detective Collingwood intends to drive home several points about the nature of historical inquiry. First, that the historian, like the detective, is driven by questioning. Second, that historians exclusively ask questions about the thoughts behind certain actions. Third, that historians regard objects and actions as evidence of thought. Fourth, that historians use this evidence to reconstruct, or 'reenact', in their own minds the thought of the individual under study. This ultimately results in the construction of a narrative in which past actors' thoughts are reconstructed and thus rendered intelligible.
When Collingwood claims that all history is a matter of reenactment, therefore, he implies that reenactment always comes in a narrative form. It is, moreover, a particularly robust form of narrative, one driven by the critical questioning of the historian. He reaffirms the uniqueness of his concept of history in the Autobiography: "History and pseudo-history are alike consisted of narratives: but in history there were narratives of purposive activity, and the evidence for them consisted of relics they had left behind (books or potsherds, the principle was the same) which became evidence precisely to the extent to which the historian conceived them in terms of purpose...." (An Autobiography, my emphasis, 109). Collingwood distinguishes his version of history as critical narrative from what he calls 'scissors-and-paste’ history. Before the nineteenth century, Collingwood argues, historians essentially worked by a "scissors-and-paste" method. A practicer of scissors-and-past history seeks "to know what 'the authorities' had said about the subject he was interested in, and to his authorities' statements he was tied by the leg..." (Ibid., 79). In Collingwood's account of history as a form critical narrative (reenactment) we have a perfect echoing of Clausewitz's distinction between critical analysis and plain narrative: "We distinguish between the critical approach and the plain narrative of a historical event, which merely arranges facts one after another, and at most touches on their immediate causal links" (On War, 181).
Collingwood and Clausewitz's approaches to historical study undeniably share one component that intimately binds them to the concept of reenactment: narrative. They are both explicit about the central role of narrative in their concepts of history. In Collingwood's account of historical narrative the presence of reenactment is made explicit, whereas the idea is implicit in Clausewitz. Read carefully, however, On War makes it clear that critical analysis as a narrative exercise is essentially about perspective taking. Let alone the fact that in other places Clausewitz explicitly says that strategic criticism is about putting "oneself in the position of the decision-maker" (On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo, 38).
At the heart of Collingwood's concept of reenactment we therefore have two fundamental claims. First, human action is only intelligible as a narrative. And second, that these narratives of human actions must take us inside a situation, allowing us to rethink the thoughts of the actor under study. Reenactment is therefore not merely a claim about historical methodology. It is more fundamentally a claim about human epistemology: about what it means to understand another human being. Collingwood is not shy about elevating the concept of reenactment to the level of epistemology. Indeed, he claims that all knowledge of mind is essentially historical in character. "If it is by historical thinking that we re-think the thought of Hammurabi or Solon," he writes in The Idea of History, "it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who rites us a letter, or a stranger who crosses the street.... In this sense, all knowledge of mind is historical" (The Idea of History, 219, my emphasis). Thus, for Collingwood, human activity can only be understood if it is rendered into a narrative that allows us to reenact the thoughts of those we wish to understand.
The idea that human activity becomes intelligible only when rendered in a narrative is not unique to Collingwood. If we can grasp the central place of narrative in human self-knowledge, moreover, we will understand that Clausewitz's notion of critical analysis, bound to narrative as it is, must imply something like reenactment.
The inextricability of narrative and human understanding has been put with great clarity by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his After Virtue. In the course of explicating Aristotle's account of the virtues, MacIntyre thinks it essential to grasp the way in which human action is intelligible only when rendered as a narrative. That narrative plays such a central role in human knowledge, however, is an elusive fact, "an unacknowledged presence in many of our ways of thinking and acting" (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2007, 206). In arguing for the importance of narrative understanding MacIntyre is explicitly arguing against social sciences, like behaviorism, that attempt to classify action in generalized ways. Such generalized accounts of human action, he claims, ignore the fact that every human being is driven not by general rules, but by particular intentions. "There is no such thing as 'behavior', to be identified prior to and independently of intentions, beliefs and settings...." Instead, we must "place the agent's intentions... in causal and temporal order with reference to their role in his or her history; and we also place them with reference to their role in the history of the setting or settings to which they belong" (Ibid., 208). "Narrative history..." he concludes, "turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions" (Ibid.).
MacIntyre provides several examples to demonstrate this fact that all human activity must be rendered in a narrative that takes account of intentions and settings. Take the example of a man who has made the decision to work in his yard:
To the question 'What is he doing?' the answers may with equal truth and appropriateness be 'Digging', 'Gardening', 'Taking Exercise', 'Preparing for winter' or 'Pleasing his wife'. Some of these answers will characterize the agent's intentions, other unintended consequences of his actions, and of these unintended consequences some may be such that the agent is aware of them and others not. What is important to notice immediately is that any answer to the questions of how we are to understand or to explain a given segment of behavior will presuppose some prior answer to the question of how these different correct answers to the question 'What is he doing?' are related to each other. For if someone's primary intention is to put the garden in order before the winter and it is only incidentally the case that in so doing he is taking exercise and pleasing his wife, we have one type of behavior to be explained; but if the agent's primary intention is to please his wife by taking exercise, we have quite another type of behavior to be explained and we will have to look in a different direction for understanding and explanation (Ibid., 206).
A comprehensive and accurate account of action, therefore, must be rendered in the form of a story that orders an agent's intentions and places them in their the proper context.
These narratives of human action, moreover, have the character of being embedded. That is, they are intertwined with one another so that our stories, in which we are all the lead character, affect and bleed into one another. "Someone may discover...," MacIntyre writes, "that he or she is a character in a number of narratives at the same time, some of them embedded in others" (Ibid., 213). Thus MacIntyre corroborates the notion that we find in Clausewitz in Collingwood that all human action becomes intelligible only when place in narrative form. He summarizes his argument well when he says "man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth" (Ibid., 216). This notion of man as a 'story-telling animal', we shall shortly see, is essential to grasping the depth of Clausewitz's concept of critical analysis as a theoretical narrative exercise.
Clausewitz, I would like to quickly note, displays a tacit understanding of the ways in which human narratives are embedded in one another. Recall that in his account of critical analysis he repeatedly adopts multiple perspectives, effectively showing us the way in which a narrative of Napoleon's action only becomes intelligible if it is embedded in a complementary narrative of the intentions of the French directory and of the Austrian commander's. This fact is evident in his consistent use of the phrases like 'a wider view', 'From that standpoint', or 'a still wider view' (On War, 185-186). Clearly, Clausewitz understood that human action must be rendered in an 'embedded narrative' in which different people's intentions are gauged and explicated in relation to one another.
That human action only becomes intelligible in the form of a narrative has been addressed more recently by Jonathan Gotschall in The Storytelling Animal. Gotschall, moreover, deepens our understanding of this phenomena by arguing that narratives can only be understood from the inside. Narratives of human behavior, that is to say, always take us into the mind's of the individuals under study, allowing us to reenact or simulate their thoughts and experiences. In seeking to answer his central question, 'Why did humans evolve to be so intimately intertwined with story?', Gotschall develops the argument that story "is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life." A good narrative always takes us so deeply into a situation so that we can "identify so closely with the protagonists that we don't just sympathize with them; we strongly empathize with them. We feel their happiness and desire and fear; our brains rev up as though what is happening to them is actually happening to us" (Gotschall, The Storytelling Animal, 2012, 67, my emphasis). The concept of narrative or story, therefore, necessarily implies that we are going inside another person's mind, reenacting or simulating their thoughts for ourselves. It seems prudent to note, further, that the term 'simulation' has been used as a synonym for Collingwood's concept of reenactment (See Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds, 2006, 18; and Karsten R. Stueber, "The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the Fusion of Horizons," History and Theory 41 (February 2002), 25-42) ).
The central takeaway of this discussion of Collingwood, MacIntyre, and Gotschall is that the concept of narrative already implies the existence of something like reenactment. That Clausewitz explicitly identifies critical analysis as a narrative exercise means that it must amount to something like a reenactment, or simulation. Read with this more robust concept of narrative in mind Clausewitz's theory of war pushes us to take seriously the concept of narrative education. Clearly, he believed that a certain kind of narrative education was the best form and function a theory of war could take. His theory, at it’s heart, must be about cultivating an ability to accurately narrate, that is, reenact, the thoughts of the individuals we seek to understand. Narrative, reenactment, is the only way to understand the human mind, whether it be in war or in love.
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