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THE LATER PHILOSOPHY of R. G. COLLINGWOOD. by Alan Donagan

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THE LATER PHILOSOPHY of R. G. COLLINGWOOD. by Alan Donagan REVIEW ESSAYS THE LATER PHILOSOPHY 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, irritation, and outright contempt. Un- like their Continental counterparts, British historians have long operated under the terms of a gentlemen's agreement concerning the nature 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 philosophies of history. 1 According to orthodox British historical thought, 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 set for himself. As G. N. Clark put it in a famous inaugural lecture: "We work with limited aims. We try to find the truth 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 empiricism 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. 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 245 The reasons for this resistance to philosophy of history in British thought are, I believe, relatively easy to state. For a long time, 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 sound and whose main problem was merely to extend these principles 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 reality 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 sense and good intentions. 3 Interest in the philosophical status (by which I mean the epistemological value 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 Existentialism on the Continent. Like the Existentialists, British thinkers have discovered, some- what to their surprise, that the complexity 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). 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 246 REVIEW ESSAYS 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, mind 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 knowledge 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 psychology while salvaging the Kantian functions of feeling, 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 science of human 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 attention 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-consciousness 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 cultural history, 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 presuppositions. 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, "Introspection and Imper- fect Sympathy". Those who know Miss Murdoch's fine essay 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. 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 247 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 belief in an organic, essentially Bur- kean notion of society without requiring any fundamental break with natural- ism and science: Hobbes.
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