|
 Philosopher
of the Month
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.
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured mid March 2004
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