People
Robin Collingwood
February 2004 - R. G. Collingwood
Charles Booth
Robin George Collingwood wrote on the philosophy of art, metaphysics, political philosophy, the philosophy of nature and, perhaps most famously, on the philosophy of history. Despite this seeming eclecticism, certain unifying themes can be discerned, ones which represent issues of enduring philosophical importance, fully justifying the recent renewal of critical attention that belies Collingwood's reputation as a neglected and marginal thinker.
Collingwood, the son of John Ruskin's secretary and biographer, was raised and educated within a milieu in which the aesthetic imagination was perceived as a paramount human experience. He was elected to a fellowship at Oxford in 1912, and apart from military service in Admiralty Intelligence from 1914 to 1918, he spent the remainder of his professional life at Oxford, being appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1935. He was a professional archaeologist as well as a philosopher.
One important theme in Collingwood's work was the role of philosophy in uncovering how we structure our experience of reality. Specifically, Collingwood was concerned with the presuppositions through and with which we experience the world; and with the ways in which different concepts and categories govern or inform different kinds of experience - theoretical, moral, aesthetic - so that we are able to make potentially contradictory judgements concerning truth, goodness and beauty.
Collingwood argued that behind every perception, proposition or action lies a presupposition, behind every presupposition another presupposition, until one reaches bedrock in the form of an 'absolute presupposition'. He explicitly distinguished between an absolute presupposition and the relative presuppositions that both flow from it and are underpinned by it; and between presuppositions and linguistic entities such as theories and statements.
Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable by experience, nor can they be undermined by experience - rather they are the means through which experience is judged. Although absolute presuppositions may change, such changes are not a matter of fashion, choice or of conscious thought; rather, they entail 'the abandonment of all [our] most firmly established habits and standards for thought and action.' Stephen Toulmin argues that Collingwood here anticipated much of what was significant about the work of Kuhn on scientific paradigms. Others, similarly, have argued that Collingwood's emphasis on complex contextual structures prefigured the use and meanings of words and sentences in language games proposed by Wittgenstein in his later work.
This framework informed both Collingwood's philosophy of history and his philosophy of art, as well as his metaphysics. Collingwood argued that the past does not exist entirely independent of the present, but that it lives on in the present, and that historical events, actions and processes may therefore be re-enacted (or reconstructed), through a disciplined logic of 'question and answer'. Investigation seeks to recreate the presuppositions of agents in re-enacting, not only the thoughts and actions of those agents, but the questions to which those actions were intended as a solution. If we merely interpret action according to our presuppositions, we are not carrying out accurate, effective or useful history.
Collingwood argued for precisely the same methodology in his account of art criticism and appreciation. The production of a work of art is an act of imaginative creation: appreciation of that work of art is an imaginative reconstruction of the act, and of the problems, questions, thoughts and emotions that inspired it. In these respects, Collingwood was concerned with elucidating history philosophically, and philosophy historically: a project which he called effecting a rapprochement between philosophy and history.
Underpinning this position was his credo that historical knowledge was self-knowledge, and that although philosophy generates principles through which a life might be lived, these are not rules to be slavishly followed. Collingwood made clear that a reliance on rules and theories derived from natural science, divorced from the context in which they were to be applied, is what bankrupted modernism. He suggested that in guiding moral and political actions, individual actors should instead rely on the ability to apply insight, derived from an understanding and application of artistic, religious, scientific, historical and philosophical principles.
His emphasis on
context and on the unverifiability of absolute presuppositions left Collingwood
with a difficulty in his late political philosophy. Writing against the
background of totalitarianism rampant in Europe, Collingwood was concerned to
depict a liberal civilization at threat from both without and within. Within his
metaphysical project, however, the presuppositions of liberalism could no more
be said to be 'true' than those of opposing political systems. Thus, his defence
of liberalism was distinguished, in some senses, by a retreat from the
even-handedness implied by his metaphysics, in that his defence of civility in
liberal politics was explicitly informed both by his Christian religious beliefs
and by his sense of imminent crisis confronting the liberal polity. Liberal
humanism does not preclude a radical stance. In the closing words of his
autobiography, he remarked, 'I know that all my life I have been engaged
unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark.
Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.'
Suggested reading
Collingwood, R. G. 1994 [1936]. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Collingwood, R. G. 1978 [1939]. An Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Johnson, P. 1998. R.G. Collingwood: An Introduction. Notre Dame, Indiana: St
Augustine's Press.