Collingwood and the Reenactment of Past Thought
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday 22 February 2024 is the 135th anniversary of the birth of Robin George Collingwood (22 February 1889–09 January 1943), better known to posterity as R. G. Collingwood, who was born in Cartmel, just south of the Lake District, on this date in 1889.
Collingwood is sometimes remembered as the man who made philosophy of history respectable in the Anglophone world; Hegel was not to the taste of Anglophone philosophers, but Collingwood was another matter. His most important book on Philosophy of History — The Idea of History (1946) — was assembled posthumously from his papers by T. M. Knox, who also translated some of Hegel into English. It has been said that Collingwood wrote a long book about history then put everything he wanted to say in an appendix. The appendices probably are the most interesting parts of the book, but it was actually Knox who did this, not Collingwood.
The Idea of History, as we know the text today, was not the book for which Collingwood wanted to be remembered. The Principles of History, left unfinished at his death, was supposed to be his magnum opus. Parts of the manuscript were used by Knox for The Idea of History, then the manuscript was lost, rediscovered in 1995, and subsequently published in 1999. What we have of Collingwood’s mature philosophy of history, then, is incomplete and fragmentary, but the ideas of philosophers rarely are transmitted to posterity in the form they intended.
Collingwood was not only a philosopher, he was an archaeologist and a specialist on Roman Britain, so we could say that Collingwood got his hands dirty with history in a literal sense. Yet despite this engagement with the nitty-gritty of history, Collingwood’s philosophy of history is usually called idealist. Philosophy in England at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century is known for several prominent philosophers like F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart, known as British idealists, and with significant intellectual debts to Hegel; Collingwood is also known as an idealist, but he was a different kind of idealist.
Despite being part of this idealist tradition, and despite being a philosopher of history, there is almost nothing of Hegel in Collingwood’s philosophy of history. Part of this is due to Collingwood’s unique approach to idealism, which followed from his unique philosophical method, or, perhaps more accurately, his unique interpretation of philosophical method. He wasn’t interested in an ontological formulation of idealism, like that put forward by Bishop Berkeley and disputed by Dr. Johnson, but rather what we could call a conceptual account of idealism. Collingwood had an explicit methodological justification for this in the theory of concepts he formulated in his early Essay on Philosophical Method, which informs all his later work, as expressed much later in New Leviathan:
“Man’s body and man’s mind are not two different things, but the same thing… as known in two different ways. Not a part of man, but the whole of man is body in so far as he approaches the problem of self-knowledge by the methods of natural science. Not a part of man, but the whole of man is mind, in so far as he approaches the problem of self-knowledge by expanding and clarifying the data of reflection.” (New Leviathan)
For Collingwood’s conception of history, the whole of man is mind, and one of the best known quotes from Collingwood is that, “All history is the history of thought.” In The Principles of History, this is immediately followed by,
“This includes the history of emotions so far as these emotions are essentially related to the thoughts in question: not of any emotions that may happen to accompany them; nor, for that matter, of other thoughts that may happen to accompany them.”
Given his idiosyncratic formulation of idealism, Collingwood stands outside and apart from familiar categories in philosophy of history, but he has been placed in recognizable schools of thought. Georg Iggers in The German Conception of History says:
“Droysen, Dilthey, and Collingwood had seen the reexperiencing of the historical actors’ mental processes as the core of historical understanding.”
Ted Carr in What is History? says:
“The reconstitution of the past in the historian’s mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in itself an empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital of facts. On the contrary, the process of reconstitution governs the selection and interpretation of the facts : this, indeed, is what makes them historical facts. ‘History’, says Professor Oakeshott, who on this point stands near to Collingwood, ‘is the historian’s experience. It is “made” by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it’.”
We could locate Collingwood in a little recognized tradition that passes from Droyson and Dilthey through Collingwood to Oakeshott. Standing apart, as he did, he could afford to be critical of more familiar schools of thought. Collingwood was especially critical of what he called “Scissors and paste history”:
“There is a kind of history which depends altogether upon the testimony of authorities. As I have already said, it is not really history at all, but we have no other name for it. The method by which it proceeds is first to decide what we want to know about, and then to go in search of statements about it, oral or written, purporting to be made by actors in the events concerned, or by eyewitnesses of them, or by persons repeating what actors or eyewitnesses have told them, or have told their informants, or those who informed their informants, and so on. Having found in such a statement something relevant to his purpose, the historian excerpts it and incorporates it, translated if necessary and recast into what he considers a suitable style, in his own history. As a rule, where he has many statements to draw upon, he will find that one of them tells him what another does not; so both or all of them will be incorporated. Sometimes he will find that one of them contradicts another; then, unless he can find a way of reconciling them, he must decide to leave one out; and this, if he is conscientious, will involve him in a critical consideration of the contradictory authorities’ relative degree of trustworthiness. And sometimes one of them, or possibly even all of them, will tell him a story which he simply cannot believe, a story characteristic, perhaps, of the superstitions or prejudices of the author’s time or the circle in which he lived, but not credible to a more enlightened age, and therefore to be omitted. History constructed by excerpting and combining the testimonies of different authorities I call scissors-and-paste history. I repeat that it is not really history at all, because it does not satisfy the necessary conditions of science; but until lately it was the only kind of history in existence, and a great deal of the history people are still reading to-day, and even a good deal of what people are still writing, belongs to this type.”
We can think of this as an unsympathetic and slightly malicious account of the kind of history that Ranke established as the accepted method of scholarly history in the nineteenth century. Collingwood doesn’t name Ranke when he is criticizing scissors and paste history, but the implication is clear.
Because of this distinctively idealist philosophy of history, Collingwood needs a new method for history. It can’t be Ranke’s scissors and paste method, and it can’t be the method of the natural sciences, because while Collingwood was among those philosophers of history who assert that history is a science, not an art, he argued that history has its own, distinct methodology, not the methodology of the natural sciences. And while Collingwood said that history is a science, but a science that does not use the methods of the natural sciences, he also did not employ the distinction between idiographic and the nomothetic sciences developed by Windelband and Rickert. Thus Collingwood’s method of history can’t be the method of the ideographical sciences. Collingwood has to blaze his own trail:
“History… is a science, but a science of a special kind. It is a science whose business is to study events not accessible to our observation, and to study these events inferentially, arguing to them from something else which is accessible to our observation, and which the historian calls ‘evidence’ for the events in which he is interested.” (The Principles of History)
For Collingwood, history is constructed in the mind of the historian.
“When a man thinks historically, he has before him certain documents or relics of the past. His business is to discover what the past was which has left these relics behind it. For example, the relics are certain written words; and in that case he has to discover what the person who wrote those words meant by them. This means discovering the thought (in the widest sense of that word: we shall look into its preciser meaning in § 5) which he expressed by them. To discover what this thought was, the historian must think it again for himself.”
One of the distinctive features of Collingwood’s cognitive methodology is what he called the a priori historical imagination:
“I described constructive history as interpolating, between the statements borrowed from our authorities, other statements implied by them. Thus our authorities tell us that on one day Caesar was in Rome and on a later day in Gaul; they tell us nothing about his journey from one place to the other, but we interpolate this with a perfectly good conscience. This act of interpolation has two significant characteristics. First, it is in no way arbitrary or merely fanciful: it is necessary or, in Kantian language, a priori. If we filled up the narrative of Caesar’s doings with fanciful details such as the names of the persons he met on the way, and what he said to them, the construction would be arbitrary: it would be in fact the kind of construction which is done by an historical novelist. But if our construction involves nothing that is not necessitated by the evidence, it is a legitimate historical construction of a kind without which there can be no history at all. Secondly, what is in this way inferred is essentially something imagined. If we look out over the sea and perceive a ship, and five minutes later look again and perceive it in a different place, we find ourselves obliged to imagine it as having occupied intermediate positions when we were not looking. That is already an example of historical thinking; and it is not otherwise that we find ourselves obliged to imagine Caesar as having travelled from Rome to Gaul when we are told that he was in these different places at these successive times. This activity, with this double character, I shall call a priori imagination.” (Section 2 of the Epilegomena to The Idea of History)
As a cognitive method, which can be construed very differently by different thinkers, Collingwood’s cognitive methodology is subject to significant interpretation and dispute. William Dray has written an entire book on historical reenactment (History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History, 1995), and he’s not the only one.
Collingwood is mentioned on both sides of the Carr-Elton debate, with a certain ambivalence on both sides. Carr gives us the advantages and disadvantages of Collingwood’s methods, while Elton says that philosophies like Collingwood’s are a response to the “extreme relativism” of those like Carr, and if those who hold this philosophy are also historians (as Collingwood himself was), their history can’t be judged by their philosophical views.
Collingwood’s distinctive idealism, and a philosophy of history based on this distinctive idealism, such that, “The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind,” means that natural history cannot be history in Collingwood’s sense. This, in turn, means that human history cannot be integrated into a larger context of natural history, which is what we would expect from a species of idealism. Collingwood does this by making a distinction between the inside and the outside of historical events:
“The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins.”
And in the next paragraph he adds:
“In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace. It is true that the scientist, like the historian, has to go beyond the mere discovery of events; but the direction in which he moves is very different. Instead of conceiving the event as an action and attempting to rediscover the thought of its agent, penetrating from the outside of the event to its inside, the scientist goes beyond the event, observes its relation to others, and thus brings it under a general formula or law of nature. To the scientist, nature is always and merely a ‘phenomenon,’ not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.”
Here Collingwood gives us the relationship between his historical methodology and the methodology of natural science, which latter Windelband called nomoethetic, in contradistinction to Windelband’s idiographic method, which he argued characterized the historical sciences. The natural scientist fills the void of the interior of his events, known only through observation from the outside, with the operation of natural law; the Collingwoodian historian, by contrast, fills the interiority of historical agents, which he knows not to be void (because they are agents with an interior life), with the thoughts that he reenacts.
Collingwood, in addition to his works on history and art, wrote several treatises on methodology and metaphysics that place his historical thought in a larger metaphysical context, which then substitutes for the naturalistic context lost through his idealism. In his An Essay on Metaphysics history comes up frequently, and Collingwood makes the assertion that metaphysics is an historical science. Collingwood argues that metaphysics is the science of absolute presuppositions, but this science of absolute presuppositions must be historical:
“Because the metaphysician is a special kind of historian, his training should consist first in a general historical education; secondly in special attention to the history of science; and finally in concentrating on problems of the following type: Here is a document providing evidence about the history of science; what light does it throw on the question what absolute presuppositions have been made?” (An Essay on Metaphysics)
Not only does metaphysics illuminate and expand history, according to Collingwood, but history is part of the metaphysical enterprise.
