Collingwood's Manuscripts

Chapter 4 Collingwood’s Manuscripts

4.1 Introduction

Since March 1978 there have been available for consultation in the Bodleian Library at Oxford about 4,000 pages of Collingwood’s unpublished manuscripts.1 Of the manuscripts that could be consulted at the time of writing, around 2,700 pages deal with a great variety of philosophical subjects, the others mainly with historical and archaeological topics. The former include not only manuscripts on the philosophy of history, but also on epistemology, metaphysics, economics, politics, and art.2 The manuscripts on philosophy of history are important for two reasons. In the first place, they throw new light on the development of Collingwood’s ideas. It is especially fortunate that we now have ample evidence with regard to the development of his philosophy of history in his lectures of 1926 and 1928 (the latter being the ‘Die manuscript’

1 Quotations may be made with the permission of Mrs. Teresa Smith, daughter of R.G. Collingwood, who retains ownership of them. 2 Besides these, the Bodleian Library has in its possession another group of manuscripts that has been available for consultation only from May 1980. These contain, among other things, Collingwood’s lectures on the ontological proof, and his notes and lectures on ethics of the years 1921, 1923, 1928, 1932, 1933 and 1940. At the time of writing these manuscripts could not yet be consulted. They are included, however, in the List of Manuscripts. There are two comprehensive bibliographies of Collingwood, being structured differ- ently: Donald S. Taylor, R.G. Collingwood. A Bibliography. The Complete Manuscripts and Publications, Selected Secondary Writings, with Selective Annotation (New York and London, 1988), and Christopher Dreisbach, R.G. Collingwood. A Bibliographic Checklist (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1993). The bibliography by Taylor contains, besides an introduction to Collingwood’s work (1–49), the data on the writings by Collingwood (manuscripts, letters, books, philosophical essays and essays on archaeology and Roman Britain, reviews, and translations), and writings about Collingwood (books and collection of essays, selected essays, essay-length writings, reviews, and passages from books). The writings by and about Collingwood are carefully and sometimes extensively annotated by Taylor. The bibliography by Dreisbach gives a list of Collingwood’s publications (books, mono- graphs, articles, essays, reviews, and translations) as well as his correspondence and unpublished manuscripts, but also articles and essays about or mentioning Collingwood, dissertations about or mentioning him, reviews of works by Collingwood, and reviews of works about or mentioning Collingwood. In The Correspondence of R.G. Collingwood. An Illustrated Guide (Llandybïe, 1998), Peter Johnson has edited a complete list of Collingwood’s correspondence.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004424937_005 160 Chapter 4 referred to by Collingwood in An Autobiography (Aut, 107)), and in subsequent notes. Also of great interest are his manuscripts on metaphysics of 1934, 1935 and 1938. In the latter manuscript, which unfortunately is incomplete, he deals with his now much discussed theory of metaphysics as the study of ‘absolute presuppositions’. The manuscripts also provide evidence of certain aspects of Collingwood’s thought which were in fact unknown before. He took a lively interest in folk- lore, and after 1935 he made an extensive study of the subject, documented by his manuscripts. He further wrote in 1933–1934 a complete treatise of 130,000 words on cosmology; and his manuscript ‘Man Goes Mad’ of 1936 clearly shows that his concern about the social and political developments of his time was sincere and of an early date; not at all springing from caprice, as the last chapter of An Autobiography has led many to believe. Collingwood always emphasized that we can only sensibly talk about the past if we are in the possession of relevant evidence for it. The same is true, of course, when the ideas of a past philosopher are at issue. With all the new ma- terial now at our disposal, it is clear that Collingwood will never be the same for us again. I do not hesitate to declare that the new Collingwood is more important than the old one was generally thought to be. This is especially true for his philosophy of history. If his manuscripts on this subject had been known at an early date, the philosophical discussion of historical thinking, as it took shape after World War II, with The Idea of History playing such an essential part, would probably have been different. The manuscripts amply show, however, that Collingwood’s philosophical interest was not only focused on history, but covered a wide variety of subjects. The energy with which Collingwood threw himself into his work is sometimes amazing. To give one example: in his ‘Log of a Journey in the East Indies’ we read for 24 Oct. 1938: ‘Crossing Bay of Biscay. Began writing Metaphysics in afternoon’. The succeeding days are mostly filled with ‘writing all day’, although he also learned Malay (on which the present-day Indonesian language is based). On 13 November he records: ‘Revising all day; wrote new chapter XXVII (last)’. So the first draft of An Essay on Metaphysics, a work called by Toulmin a ‘powerful and important book’ (Aut, xii), was written in 3 weeks on board a ship, revising parts of it in February and March 1939, mostly on the ship back home. According to Collingwood, mind is by essence always in development. His own mind well exemplifies this claim, making the interpretation of his ideas not always easy. The manuscripts which are now available for consultation must therefore not be read as a solid block, or as the elaboration of a system. They are more the vivid expression of a mind constantly at work on certain