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THE LATER OF R. G. COLLINGWOOD. By Alan Donagan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Pp. 332.

Until very recently, British historians regarded disputes between philosophers of history with a mixture of toleration, , and outright contempt. Un- like their Continental counterparts, British historians have long operated under the terms of a gentlemen's agreement concerning the and scope of historical inquiry, and this has allowed them to go about their work with- out having to raise the kinds of ethical and epistemological questions that might have led to their division into conflicting schools or of history. 1 According to orthodox British historical , the writing of history required no theoretical justification. One studied history because one was curious, because it gave one pleasure to do so, or simply because, like Mt. Everest, is was there. The innocence of the historian was justified, pre- sumably, by the modesty of the tasks which he for himself. As G. N. Clark put it in a famous inaugural lecture: "We work with limited aims. We try to find the about this or that, not about things in general. Our work is not to see life steadily and see it whole, but to see one particular portion of life, right side up and in true perspective." 2 In the comfortable, eminently work- able social world in which British found its daily confirmation, there seemed little reason to pause over the so-called "meta-historical" ques- tions, and so they were quietly left aside to be dealt with by "idealists", "mys- tics", and whatever other cranks might see fit to concern themselves with such exotic matters.

1 As late as 1952, A. J. P. Taylor could still write: "In England there are no schools of history; there are only individual historians." Rumours of Wars (London, 1952), 1. He did not see, apparently, that the absence of "schools of history" reflected the fact that British historians might very well make up one grand school. (See, for example, H. Butterfield's well-known The Englishman and His History and The Whig Inter- pretation of History.) In this respect, it is interesting to note that even Toynbee refuses to admit, or at least until very lately refused to admit, that he was departing from solid British empirical technique; see his Civilization on Trial (New York, 1948), 16. 2 Quoted in G. J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Method (Boston, 1950), 49.

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The reasons for this resistance to philosophy of history in British thought are, I believe, relatively easy to state. For a long , the task of the British historian was primarily to inform a satisfied governing class how the current state of affairs, whatever it might be, a state of affairs in which Britain in- evitably enjoyed a favored position, had come about. For most British histo- rians of the last generation, the British social order constituted a kind of real- ized utopia which might require minor revisions in detail but whose main prin- ciples were essentially and eternally and whose main problem was merely to extend these to other, less fortunate peoples elsewhere. In short, British historians have had little reason to ask the kinds of questions which are inspired by reflection upon radical social failure. For them, social and social ideality were the same thing, and thus there was nothing to set over against the current social dispensation that would generate the kind of idealizing self-criticism that has informed historical thought on the Con- tinent since the French Revolution. In the quiet contemplation of consistent achievement, the historical world as lived took on the character of an autono- mous and self-sufficient whole wherein ideal and reality were fused and iden- tified. It was enough to contemplate "what really happened" in order to achieve the kind of metaphysical calm which on the Continent could only be achieved by the construction of countless visions of "what might have been". Lately, of course, all this has changed. In the last two decades in England there has been enough debate over the nature and function of historical knowl- edge to warrant comparing this particular phase of British intellectual history with the Sturm und Drang in Germany. The new debate has accompanied the shocking discovery that British society, like its Continental counterparts, is as much a problem as a datum. As the Empire fades and the monarchy loses esteem, as the "Establishment" falters and the very ideal of the gentle- man, that mainstay of the British social system, disintegrates before the acid remonstrances of the Angry Young Men, British thinkers have been forced to realize that society is not so simple a thing as they had once supposed and that history itself, like life in general, may be more of a construction than the ground upon which everything else is erected in an exercise of British common and good . 3 Interest in the philosophical status (by which I mean the epistemological and ethical import) of historical thought today constitutes the one theme, apart from the problem of language itself, which the analytical movement in British philosophy shares with on the Continent. Like the Existentialists, British thinkers have discovered, some- what to their surprise, that the of the world can be as presently unnerving as it was once comforting, that words and actions can have a variety of meanings, that men can still be rational and have "different 'na-

3 Representative of the sustained cultural inquiry that is now going on in England is Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York, 1960).

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tures' and see the world with a radical difference",4 that life and history can be viewed as a chaos to be "muddled through" only when "muddling" is generally successful, and that, finally, when "muddling" ceases to be good enough, must undertake to construct a general social context for thought where before it had only been necessary to find one. And many have dis- covered that the best place to begin construction of such a social context is with a reconsideration of history.

The first British thinker in this century to take up the problem of the nature and function of historical and to make of it the kernel of his entire philosophy was R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943). Influenced by Dilthey, Croce, and Bradley on the one hand and reacting against the realism of Cook Wilson, Moore, and Russell on the other, Collingwood envisioned a theory of culture based upon a naturalistic theory of mind which avoided the re- ductionist tendencies of conventional while salvaging the Kantian functions of , willing, and knowing as attributes of an autonomous humanity. Acutely sensitive about the threats of irrationalism and mechanism (or as he called them both, "barbarism") to the civilization of which he con- sidered himself both representative and guardian, Collingwood took as his special task the construction of a of affairs based on a syn- thesis of philosophy and history, one that would be eminently rational and self-critical insofar as it was philosophical and prescriptive or norm-producing insofar as it was historical. In his own lifetime, Collingwood received little from his colleagues in philosophy, who dismissed him as an "ideal- ist", and little sympathy from historians, who saw him as prescribing new and excessively complicated requirements of self- for which they felt little need. Since his death, however, British thought has turned, under the impact of Wittgenstein's Investigations, to a serious examination of the cultural function of language, therewith to an encounter with the more gener- al problem of , and inevitably therefore to the specific problem of the nature and worth of historical knowledge. As a result of this turn in British thought, Collingwood's work has assumed a new importance; for, as Donagan's excellent book quite clearly shows, Collingwood was one of the first to see that a theory of culture adequate to the needs of British society in particular and to European civilization in general could only be constructed on the basis of a critical reappraisal of the whole British philosophical tradi- tion and, what was even more important, its informing social . At first, Collingwood thought that this reappraisal entailed a return to Hegel, and his early works were conceived in terms compatible with the neo-

4 Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (New Haven, 1959), 33. See especially Chapter 3, "The Sickness of the Language", and Chapter 4, " and Imper- fect Sympathy". Those who know Miss Murdoch's fine will see immediately how much the line of thought here developed is indebted to her remarks on the similarities between the ordinary-language movement in England and the Continental Existentialists.

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Hegelianism of Dilthey and Croce. But he soon found an alternative, peculiar- ly British predecessor who would serve his needs even better, one whose thought would allow him to maintain his in an organic, essentially Bur- kean of society without requiring any fundamental break with natural- ism and science: Hobbes. Donagan's thesis, in fact, is that Collingwood, in his later philosophy at least, "denounced introspection as a method in the study of mind, and revived Hobbes' doctrine that, since all consciousness involves the use of language, the and the are two sides of a single study" (19). Thus envisaged, Collingwood's work, inso- far as it examined the implications of the identification of language and mind for the various functions of culture, represented an early essay in general cultural inquiry of the sort demanded by Wittgenstein's revolutionary work in philosophy of language and executed in a limited sphere by Ryle's demolition of the " in the machine" in The of Mind. Wittgenstein showed that language, far from a mirror of a given so- cial and physical reality, which the Logical Atomists believed it to be, is rather a primal human activity by which a reality is constituted and assigned a as expression of a particular of life or cultural game. But although Wittgenstein provided a technique for a descriptive analysis of lin- guistic usage, he did not inquire into the dynamics of the relationship between language and its social matrix. It is true that he accounted for innovations in language by a kind of "genius" theory, which supposed that new language games were "invented" and then taken up or rejected by particular groups as they saw fit. But he did not ask how it was that a particular society might come to designate one game as suitable to its needs and another as unsuitable or how it was that societies were able to live with and use simultaneously dif- ferent language games which, to all appearances, were contradictory and mutually annihilating in a formal logical sense. Collingwood's investigations of the relation between mind, culture, and society constituted such an inquiry. And in the degree to which he showed how a theory of history could provide into the interactions of mind and society, he seems to have provided a point of departure for the next stage in the evolution of the ordinary language movement. Indeed, I suspect that the reason for the current interest in Collingwood's philosophy of history among Wittgenstein's disciples is to be found in the fact that Collingwood seems to provide a link between language and the "forms of life" which are mentioned in the Investigations as the meta-linguistic base of all human activity. 5 Collingwood's general position can be characterized succinctly as one in

5 , Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Ox- ford, 1958), I, 23; I, 241. H. R. Smart has listed other instances of Wittgenstein's use of the term "forms of life" (Lebensformen) in his article, "Language Games", Philoso- phical Quarterly. VII (1957), 224-35.

This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 19:07:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 248 REVIEW ESSAYS which historical knowledge appears as a kind of initiation of men into the mystery of their own humanity. For him, history served as the starting point for sociology, with its search for general social laws, but the discovery of these laws was not the concern of the historian. The function of the historian was to provide materials for the inculcation of a peculiarly human ethical sense in man, one which told men, not what they generally did in this or that hypothetical situation, but what they had done in specific situations in the past, and what, therefore, they ought to do in the situation in which they found themselves in the . This did not mean that history provided a specific moral code or a ready-made solution to contemporary problems. Rather, it educated men to what acting morally was in the society of which they were members. For Collingwood, history set the limits of civilized activity, which meant moral activity, in the only terms in which they could be set short of a divine revelation, that is, as social norms given by the human past to the human present. Thus envisaged, history was a kind of auto-analysis on a general cultural scale; it explicated, not laws, but values that were operationally ab- solute insofar as a man had to begin his confrontation of the world with the ethic provided him by his own society. These values, viewed as a purely human product of past human actions, provided a basis for a general social confrontation of present problems, one that could, in , be revised in detail as technical exigency required. Historical knowledge showed how men in the past had solved their prob- lems by accommodating technical exigencies to received moral conventions, thereby instructing them in the present use of their own rational and volunta- tive capacities. History, then, for Collingwood, was pre-eminently a moral discipline, providing into the functioning of the practical reason. Such was the lesson that he learned from Hobbes, and in general we can say of him what Strauss has said of Hobbes: "Taught by tradition what man should be, he seeks to discover by the study of the historians and by induction from history, what man is, what really determine him, in order to gain from this knowledge rules for the application of traditional norms." 6 For Collingwood, as for Hobbes, the forces that determine man are both physical and cultural. Man is subject to the same physical laws that govern the rest of nature, but he enjoys an area of responsible decision and freedom peculiarly his own which allows at least partial transcendence of the simple animal state. This area of freedom is defined by his cultural endowment as incarnated in language. The language of a culture consists of all the words and gestures by which that culture identifies itself with and distinguishes itself from the rest of humanity. Through his linguistic capacities, man, unlike the animals, raises private and subjective emotional states to consciousness, there-

O Leo Strauss, The of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Oxford, 1936), 130.

This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 19:07:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms REVIEW ESSAYS 249 by making of them objects of reflection, rationalization, and modification, and allowing at least partial control of them in such a way as to provide for con- struction of a communal life which transcends the iron necessity of unmedi- ated . In his theory of mind, Collingwood distinguishes between feeling, attention or first order consciousness, and conceptual thought or second order con- sciousness. A feeling is a sense together with the "emotional charge" or subjective reaction which it and makes of it, not only a sen- sation, but a sensation of a particular kind, such as a , a joy, a , or the like. Attention is an act in which some aspect of a general here and now feeling is raised to consciousness by language, either as utterance or gesture. Concep- tual thought is reflection on those aspects of the world raised to consciousness by attention, occasioned by some practical need to move against the world and order it. Thus envisaged human consciousness begins in private but becomes publicly accessible when it is expressed in language which is commu- nicable to other men on the basis of generally recognized rules of linguistic usage. This conception of consciousness allowed Collingwood to treat human actions in an idealist manner, that is to say, allowed him to distinguish between the "inside" and the "outside" of human events, without committing him to the idealist belief that the "inside" was in any sense spiritual or ghostly in its essential nature. Here his thought begins to resemble that of Wittgenstein. Human life appears to Collingwood in his later work, as it did to the author of the Investigations, as a process in which private responses to the "booming, buzzing " of sheer sense data are translated by linguistic acts into the materials out of which a public or common world is constructed. This public world thus appears as a "game", the rules of which are constantly being revised in accordance with the demands of the reality which is sensed to lie beyond language but which is always known only mediately, that is, through the various language games that constitute the cultural endowment. This conception of the relation between mind and language endows history with a special epistemic value, for culture thus takes on the character of a field of interaction between present consciousness, reality (envisaged as a Kantian thing in itself), and inherited linguistic rules or ritualized gestures. Higher orders of consciousness, as represented in the various forms of , , and science, thus become expressions of the process by which mind reflects upon received usages and traditions in order to discover what is relevant in them for the solution of present problems. As the process of re- flection continues, particular cultures take form through self-conscious iden- tification with certain past traditions and rejection of others. Thus, the proc- ess of cultural self-definition is at once a making and a discovery. It is a making insofar as we are driven to build a world out of our immediately felt individual needs and aspirations; it is a discovery insofar as we are able to build our world only through cooperation with other mein and are therefore

This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 19:07:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 250 REVIEW ESSAYS driven to formulate our plans in terms congenial to the society of which we are members. We objectify our personal needs and aspirations by an act of historical reflection in which we discover the communality of our personal needs and aspirations with those past actions that have existentially deter- mined our present cultural endowment. Through reflection on a shared past, we are made aware of the rules which inform the cultural game we are now playing and are provided with tools by which our personal aims can be trans- lated into or identified with general social goals. Through our study of past human actions, then, we take possession of our cultural endowment and contribute to its reification by our conscious affirmation of it as the base of our own projected goals. It followed for Collingwood that the historian was properly concerned only with those aspects of past human actions which were in principle capable of reconstruction in the present. Past emotional states or feelings could not be objects of historical knowledge because, since they were irrational and sub- jective, the historian had no way of knowing whether the he felt while reconstructing past human events was the same as that which had been felt by the agents who had participated in that event in the past. Nor were the physical movements resulting from decisions to act the peculiar of historical knowledge; these could be known and understood by the techniques used by physical in determining, say, the location and movement of heavenly bodies. Similarly, the ways in which feelings were raised to first order consciousness and the ways in which first order consciousness became an object of reflection for second order consciousness were properly studied by and philosophers. The historian, while utilizing techniques borrowed from these other disciplines, had his own special province in the study of the specific, rational thought processes by which an historical agent arrived at a decision to execute his plans in a particular way. He is interested in the processes of thought by which individuals assess the problems confront- ing them, correlate them with their subjective needs, and undertake to realize them under the aspect of specific goals that have a general human import. Historical knowledge begins with contemplation of an artifact or document considered as a means for the realization of some goal or as a solution to some problem. If historical artifacts are seen as rational solutions to practical problems, and if it is assumed that the principles of reason by which human solve their problems are and eternal (and no other assump- tion is imaginable), then the thought processes by which a historical agent in the past had come to fashion the historical artifact in precisely the way he did are in principle as knowable and confirmable as the thought processes by which mathematicians provide solutions for mathematical problems. Present consciousness thus provides the criteria by which the thought processes behind past actions are to be reconstructed. These thought processes are the "mean- ings" of historical events.

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When Collingwood spoke of the "inside" of an event, then, he did not intend some spiritual or emotional kernel of the sort indicated by Dilthey in his use of the term Erlebnis. And when he said that all history is the history of thought and that the task of the historian is to "re-think" or "re-live" the thought processes of past agents, he did not intend a theory of Einfiihlung of the sort advanced by romantic historians. The job of the historian, according to Collingwood, was not to find out if the documents were true or false or to identify historical events as instances of general causal laws. His job was to find out what the documents "mean", and he did this by reconstituting the thought processes which lie "behind" every historical artifact in the same way as problems lie "behind" their solutions or questions "behind" their answers. He identified historical knowledge with moral insight - erroneously, ac- cording to Donagan (242) - because he saw the attempt to reconstruct past human as an essay in the definition of the historian's own ethical and epistemological limitations and thus of the limitations of the culture of which he was a member. This is why Collingwood argued that you study history in order to find out what kind of man you are. You find out what kind of man you are by finding out what parts of the historical record are assimilable to your own cultural endowment. You also find out what kind of man you are not, but in distinguishing yourself from other men by historical exercises, you are at the same time discovering the shared historicity of every man and every culture. Thus, the study of history breeds the tolerance of the civilized man, a tolerance which is a product of strength rather than weakness, a tolerance which allows a person to be himself without threatening the freedom of others. Such "civility", Collingwood held, is the foundation of "civilization" in a moral as well as an etymological sense. Without a sense of history, man lives in an eternal present of subjective affirmation; with a sense of history, he can attain to a critical self-consciousness of both a personal and a general cultural sort.

Donagan has chosen to concentrate on Collingwood's theoretical philosophy and to avoid discussion of his social, political, and ethical thought. In my opinion, this was an unfortunate decision, for Collingwood's thought is im- portant to the contemporary cultural dialogue and to the ordinary-language movement at precisely the point where he tries to build a bridge between culture (conceived as a creation of language) and . I said earlier that Collingwood's of history provides a possible point of departure for an investigation of those "forms of life" mentioned by Witt- genstein as the meta-linguistic base of all social activity. As H. R. Smart pointed out in his article on language games in Wittgenstein's thought: " 'Forms of life' evidently play the role, in Wittgenstein's own language game, of a metaphysical ultimate in terms of which the functioning of language is to be understood. They must be accepted, and they are given - that is to say, they are regarded as the indubitable basis, a rock of certainty, like the Carte-

This content downloaded from 129.133.6.95 on Mon, 16 Apr 2018 19:07:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 252 REVIEW ESSAYS sian cogito." And it is true, as Smart argues, that "the conception of philoso- phy as sheer description logically requires completion in the idea of something of this sort. Without some anchorage description would be utterly devoid of philosophical import. Only on the ground of some ultimate factuality does the conception of philosophy as description make any sense at all. Sheer description, were it actually feasible, would spell sheer vapidity." 7 Wittgenstein had held that "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it a foundation either. It leaves everything as it is ... ." 8 To Collingwood, it was self-evident that philosophy cannot refuse to examine that "common behaviour" which it takes to be the bed-rock of reality with reference to which linguistic games find their meanings. It may be true that the ordinary- language movement is non-metaphysical in that it seeks merely to explicate the relation between language and the social context in which language oper- ates, but it cannot ignore the fact that this social context is a flux which can only be understood historically. The best younger exponents of the ordinary- language movement, of which Donagan is a representative, have grasped this fact in a methodologically significant way. They have seen that Collingwood's thought provides a bridge to that meta-linguistic base where the "forms of life" have their origin. British philosophy thereby shifts from a passive to an active mood, and British social thought in general finds justification for undertaking construction of a new social context for language itself.

University of Rochester HAYDEN V. WHITE

ON REVOLUTION. By Hanna Arendt. New York: Viking Press; London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Pp. 343.

The phenomenon of social revolution is one with which all of us have to come to terms in a century which has seen more and greater revolutions than any other in recorded history. By the very nature of their impact, however, revo- lutions are very difficult to analyze satisfactorily, surrounded as they are and must be by a cloud of hope and disillusion, of love, hatred and fear, of their own myths and the myths of counter-propaganda. After all, few historians of the French Revolution who wrote before the 100th anniversary of its out- break are now read, and historiography of the Russian Revolution, in spite of some accumulation of preliminary material, is only just beginning. The scientific study of revolutions does not mean dispassionate study. It is fairly certain that the major achievements in this field will be 'committed' - generally to sympathy with revolutions, if the historiography of the French is any guide. Committed study is not necessarily mere pamphleteering, as

7 Smart, 231-32. 8 Wittgenstein, Investigations, I, 121-130.

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