Rethinking R. G. Collingwood: Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice

Rethinking R. G. Collingwood Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice

Gary K. Browning

Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

Also by Gary Browning PLATO AND HEGEL: TWO MODES OF PHILOSOPHISING ABOUT POLITICS HEGEL AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY LYOTARD AND THE END OF GRAND NARRATIVES POLITICS: AN INTRODUCTION (co-author) UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY – THEORIES OF THE PRESENT (co-editor) HEGEL’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT: A REAPPRAISAL (editor)

Rethinking R. G. Collingwood Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice Gary K. Browning Professor of Politics, Oxford Brookes University, UK

© Gary K. Browning 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–99872–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Browning, Gary K. Rethinking R. G. Collingwood: philosophy, politics, and the unity of theory and practice / Gary K. Browning. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–99872–3 1. Collingwood, R. G. (Robin George), 1889–1943. I. Title. B1618.C74B76 2004 192–dc22

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Contents Preface

vi

1. Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice

1

2. Philosophy; Rethinking Thought

27

3. Nature and Mind

51

4. History: Past and Present; Principles and Practice

73

5. Aesthetics; Art, Mind and Community

97

6. The Dialectic of Political Theory and Practice

120

7. Conclusion: Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice

144

Notes

174

Select Bibliography

196

Index

207

v

Preface Rethinking R. G. Collingwood Collingwood’s ideas have been with me for a long time. I read him as an undergraduate and recall writing a speculative essay on his philosophy of history during a graduate course on the history of political thought at the London School of Economics (LSE). I also recall Michael Oakeshott testifying to what he referred to as the formidable impact that Collingwood exerted upon an intellectual discussion. I have found Collingwood’s impact on the page to be equally formidable. The main concern of this book is to rethink Collingwood’s ideas in an interpretive context, which relates them to the Hegelian tradition and to subsequent theorists. By rethinking Collingwood comparatively and historically, this study allows his originality and historicity to emerge. Collingwood shows that ideas are important. Every page he wrote is testimony to his seriousness, which is enlivening as well as profound. He thinks seriously about a range of theoretical and practical problems, offering considered reflection on the nature of art, history, philosophy and politics as well as providing a subtle and attractive form of Hegelianism. This interpretation of Collingwood’s thought is original in its identification of the unity underlying his many diverse projects, and in its research into Collingwood’s reworking of Hegel. It has developed out of research into the copious unpublished writings of Collingwood that are housed in the Bodleian Library, as well as the re-reading of Collingwood’s published works. I am happy to acknowledge the help that I have received from the staff in the John Johnson reading room in the Bodleian Library. I am also grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge the practical help, which I have received from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, which granted me Research Leave for a term in 2001–2. My own institution, Oxford Brookes University, was also helpful in granting me an additional term’s leave. During this period of research leave I read Collingwood’s unpublished work extensively, and sought to reconcile the main differing lines of inquiry and forms of expression that Collingwood undertook. If my thoughts have now settled into ascribing a discernible pattern to Collingwood’s thinking, this interpretation has been achieved in a slow and critical process. vi

Preface vii

This process has been aided by the criticism which I have received on papers that I have presented to a variety of fora over the last few years. These include the Collingwood Conference at St. Catherine’s College, the University of Oxford, the Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain (2002) and seminars at the Institute of Historical Studies, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Warwick. There are many particular worlds in academic life. One of the most stimulating and friendly of these worlds is that of Collingwoodian scholarship. Collingwood scholars are generous, tending to help one another with judicious criticism, as well as convivial companionship. In the course of the book, I criticize preceding studies of Collingwood. I recognize, however, that my criticism reflects but a small token of what I have learnt from other books. In particular I would like to thank David Boucher for his continued support of my work, Josie D’Oro for her perceptive readings of Collingwood, which I find all the more valuable on account of their distinctness from my own and James Connelly for his willingness to share his invaluable knowledge of Collingwood’s thought. At a time of strain within the world of higher education, I would also like to thank my students. I find teaching an indispensable and enjoyable accompaniment to the isolating process of research. Continued student interest in ideas and values makes a welcome contrast to the increasingly instrumental tone of politics and educational policymaking, to which Collingwood objected. Collingwood’s recognition of the distinctiveness of the human sciences provides students and teachers with a convincing riposte to the desiccated positivism that is currently fashionable in some educational quarters. The interpretive act of rethinking demands imagination and interpretation as well as the assembling and scrutiny of evidence. Last but not least I would like to thank my family. Over the last few years I have become acutely conscious of the value of family life. All of the members of my immediate family have helped enormously by showing me that even the people most familiar to you can show hitherto undisclosed sides of themselves and help one to foster unforeseen strengths in oneself. Thank you Raia, Eleanor and not least Conal, who has shown enormous strength of character. I would also like to thank my brother Alan, Nick Hewlett and Andy Kilmister, who have been most supportive at tricky times.

1 Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice

Introduction Collingwood writes clearly, persuasively and interestingly. He ignores technical terms and abstruse arguments in favour of expressing himself in ordinary if, on occasion, compelling language. His persuasiveness arises out of his evident determination to provide a self-contained and convincing series of arguments, which does not presume prior familiarity with his work on the part of readers. The interest of his writings reflects the range of his reflective concerns. Collingwood’s qualities as a writer are enhanced by an emotional honesty, which he presents as a feature of genuine artistic experience and which precludes him from relying on unreflected formulas. All of these features of Collingwood’s work mark him out as a singular philosopher. This singularity is emphasized by his rejection of the clubbability of academic life, his abhorrence at what would nowadays be canvassed as ‘networking’ and his insistence that the abstractions of theory are to be made to bear upon the practicalities of civilization.1 Collingwood’s resolute singularity, coupled with the breadth of his interests, renders his thought attractive, but at the same time challenges an interpreter of his work. Collingwood writes on a variety of topics in ways, which suggest their inter-connection, though he refrains from encompassing them within a set of stock formulas. Each work develops its own vocabulary and furnishes evidence of fresh thinking in revisiting topics. Collingwood’s engagement with the several areas of knowledge and interest to which he turned was continuously creative, attentive to detail and self-critical. In his Outlines of a Philosophy of Art he observes, ‘For philosophy lives in its own details; and it ought to treat each detail as a fresh problem, with a place of its 1

2 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

own in the general body of philosophical thought, and not as another lock to be opened with the same skeleton key, or as one which for that very reason is not worth opening.’2 The challenges that are posed to interpreters of Collingwood’s thought by this lack of a skeleton key are compounded by the numerous manuscripts and papers of Collingwood’s that were unpublished at the time of his death. Some of these writings, for example, The Principles of History and alternative conclusions to The Idea of Nature, have been published in recent years.3 The unpublished writings complicate readings of Collingwood, in that they either pursue themes that are intimated but underplayed in the principal published works or reinforce aspects of his work that have been examined insufficiently by critics. The manuscripts on cosmology show an interest in developing a first order cosmology that is not developed in The Idea of Nature. Collingwood’s unpublished writings on logic, metaphysics, nature and ethics disclose a close and sympathetic reading of Hegel and an appreciation of its relevance to the theoretical and practical questions facing civilization that have been neglected by commentators. While this study acknowledges discontinuities in Collingwood’s work, arising out of his commitment to creativity and his disavowal of reliance on preformulated answers, it identifies an underlying unity within Collingwood’s thought. This unity is a token of Collingwood’s continuous commitment to trace connections between concepts and areas of experience. The terms in which Collingwood identifies unities within experience varies, but there is a discernible tendency throughout his writings to show how concepts are to be understood as overlapping via their progressively rational articulation of a form of inquiry or mode of practice. Collingwood is a dialectical thinker, who understands thinking to be free and reflexive, and who standardly takes philosophy to consist in the systematic rethinking of forms of thought. Philosophical rethinking is an index of the reflexivity of thought, and its review of the concepts involved in a form of inquiry or practice appraises the logic of the activity by examining its concepts so as to register its presuppositions and the complete set of conditions that contribute to its rationality. The meaning of an activity, for Collingwood, is not exhausted by the internal connections between its constitutive concepts, because forms of inquiry and practice are things of the mind and so bear upon one another in so far as they reveal functions and features that are consonant with the mind’s freedom and rationality. Moreover, the natural world and naturalistic modes of explanation contrast with the conscious and

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 3

self-conscious activities of human beings and, in so doing, reveal the distinctiveness of human thought and conduct. Collingwood’s consistently dialectical approach to theorizing is correlated to the consistency of his respect for, and critical development of, Hegel’s paradigmatically dialectical philosophy. The underlying continuity of Collingwood’s philosophizing supervenes upon discontinuities, the most notable of which is the reformulation of the way in which the unity of experience is theorized subsequent to Speculum Mentis. Collingwood’s construal of the forms of consciousness as constituting a hierarchical order in which philosophy assumes precedence on account of its reflexive awareness of the conceptual conditionality of experience is superseded by a standpoint that acknowledges the interplay between forms of thought and practice. Collingwood’s later formulation of the unity of experience is presented as involving the rapprochements of history and philosophy and theory and practice. This perspective, though presented somewhat ambiguously, does not entail the supersession of philosophy by history and the requirements of practice, because Collingwood persists in taking the unity of experience to be dialectical. His subsequent disavowal of the supremacy of philosophy is a token of his determination to present experience as constituting a differentiated unity in which the autonomy of history and practice are not to be compromised by the experiential supremacy afforded to philosophy. Rather, the unity of experience turns upon the political achievement of a civilization that allows for practical and theoretical expression of the inter-relating aspects of the mind’s freedom and rationality. Collingwood’s notion of the dialectical unity of experience is registered in his conception of the fusion of philosophy and the history of philosophy. In his later thought, he distinguishes between historical and philosophical modes of rethinking experience, which are combined in the history of philosophy. Truth, for Collingwood is not to be conceived as being separated dichotomously from error and the history of philosophy is understood to be the critical historical rethinking of past theories from the vantage point of a present to which their standpoints have contributed. This study of Collingwood, likewise, perceives its interpretive standpoint to derive from, and to constitute a critical reading of preceding interpretations of Collingwood’s thought. The succeeding section of this Introduction acknowledges its debts to predecessors by reviewing its standpoint in the light of preceding interpretations. Thereafter the distinctiveness of its interpretation of the underlying unity of Collingwood thought as residing in its dialectical

4 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

and critical Hegelian rethinking of experience is elaborated and the course that is to be followed in succeeding chapters is signposted and justified.

Interpretations of Collingwood T. M. Knox, Collingwood’s literary executor, played a decisive role in shaping Collingwood’s posthumous reputation. He decided which unpublished manuscripts of Collingwood were to be published, and in what form publication would take place.4 The rationale for the manner in which Knox prosecuted his duties as executor is explained by way of his highly influential overview of Collingwood’s career in the Preface to the first edition of The Idea of History. Knox observes how Collingwood draws upon Hegel in formulating an idealist philosophy, and then he divides Collingwood’s philosophical output neatly into three phases; an early promising phase, a mature period in which he produced first-rate philosophical work that is epitomized by the philosophically sophisticated, An Essay on Philosophical Method, and a late phase, in which Collingwood’s philosophy disintegrated under the impact of his failing health.5 Knox concludes that Collingwood’s later writings, notably the unfinished The Principles of History, An Essay on Metaphysics and The New Leviathan exhibit unfortunate tendencies, namely an historicism into which philosophy is dissolved, an uncongenial relativism and a hectoring style, betokening the abandonment of constructive argument in favour of a belligerent dogmatism.6 Knox, a conscientious and instructive translator of Hegel, may be said to have responded to the interpretative challenges posed by the volume of and discontinuities within Collingwood’s writings by offering a bold if unfortunate reading of them. His view of the decline in the standard of Collingwood’s writings lacks convincing argumentative support, just as his decision to limit the posthumous publication of Collingwood’s writings to two lecture series on the development of ideas about nature and history, The Idea of Nature and The Idea of History respectively, foreclosed on the possibility of other scholars forming countervailing ideas over the value of late works that were withheld from publication.7 Knox, in identifying a significant break in Collingwood’s work between a middle phase of philosophical achievement and a late phase in which the autonomy previously afforded philosophy is compromised by an increasing focus upon history, subscribes to what Rubinoff has termed ‘the radical conversion hypothesis’.8 The radical conversion

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 5

hypothesis divides Collingwood’s thought into discrete stages, according to which Collingwood’s later thought is distinguished from his earlier writings. Collingwood’s later thought is held to exhibit an historicism that erodes the autonomy of philosophy. A sign of this alleged circumscription of philosophy is that Collingwood’s later conception of metaphysics is assumed to render it susceptible merely to an historical inquiry that forbears from critical philosophical engagement with its historically changing assumptions. Rotenstreich in his article ‘Metaphysics and Historicism’ is trenchant in criticizing the later Collingwood’s historicization of metaphysics, which he diagnoses to be at odds with his former notion of philosophy and to be internally contradictory in assuming an extra-historical standpoint to designate metaphysical systems as possessing merely historical roles. He observes, ‘What actually merges from Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics is a kind of cultural anthropology of metaphysics, a study of different world views entertained in the course of history by individuals and groups of individuals…His own attempt to unmask systems is to show that systems are historically determined by changing outlooks on nature.’9 Toulmin, in his article ‘Conceptual Change and the Problem of Relativity’ reinforces aspects of the radical conversion hypothesis, without focusing specifically on question of continuity in Collingwood’s thinking. He analyzes Collingwood’s late work, An Essay on Metaphysics, and, like Knox, observes a stridency in Collingwood’s writing that he relates to the strain under which he was working. Toulmin interprets Collingwood’s later views on metaphysics sympathetically but critically. They are read as raising questions of significance that are pursued subsequently by philosophers of science such as Feyerabend and Hanson. Toulmin, though, is critical of what he takes to be Collingwood’s subscription to historical relativism. He notes, ‘Historical relativity (in a phrase) is taken as entailing historical relativism: the need to bear differences of context in mind, when making comparisons between contexts, is made a ground for limiting rational judgement to relations holding within a single context.’10 Not all commentators who identify a radical change or conversion in Collingwood’s thought subscribe to Knox’s view of a corresponding dramatic decline in his philosophical prowess. Donagan, for instance, is critical both of what he takes to be Collingwood’s early philosophical idealism, and of what he interprets to be his turn towards radical historicist relativism in An Essay on Metaphysics. Nonetheless, he welcomes the analytical acuity that he detects in the later philosophy of mind that is developed in The Principles of Art and The New Leviathan.11

6 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

Notwithstanding the particularity of their individual readings of Collingwood, adherents to the radical conversion hypothesis are at one in highlighting the transformation Collingwood’s thought consisting in his later subordination of philosophy to history. The radical conversion hypothesis draws support from a discernible change in tone of the later writings in which there is an occasional belligerence and quirkiness, which is admitted by Collingwood himself in correspondence.12 Again, Collingwood himself identifies the trajectory of the course of his thinking as constituting a rapprochement between history and philosophy. Collingwood’s increasing attention to the historical dimension of human action and thought occasionally appears to imply the supersession of the autonomy previously afforded to philosophy. In the recently published, ‘Notes on Historiography’ Collingwood delivers a verdict on the relations between history and philosophy that in its polemical content and form harmonizes with Knox’s assessment of the later Collingwood. Collingwood notes, ‘…philosophy as a separate discipline is liquidated by being converted into history.’13 The radical conversion hypothesis has not gone unchallenged. Indeed, its summary formulation as a label to identify a school of commentary by Rubinoff in Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics is but an occasion for its radical repudiation.14 The continuing force of the radical conversion hypothesis, though, is evidenced in the persistence with which argumentative strategies are devised by Collingwood scholars to address and rebut its reading of Collingwood’s work. The chapters by Madood, Martin and Oldfield in the volume edited by Boucher, Connelly and Madood, Philosophy, History and Civilization are designed to combat the notion of a radical change in Collingwood’s conception of the relation between philosophy and history.15 D’Oro’s recent study, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience is dedicated to rebutting the radical conversion hypothesis and maintaining Collingwood’s persisting allegiance to the autonomy of philosophy. She argues convincingly that Collingwood consistently takes philosophy to be an a priori form of inquiry that discriminates between categories so as to establish the distinctiveness of particular forms of reflective activity and to show how their way of understanding reality is possible. Her neo-Kantian reading of Collingwood focuses upon An Essay on Philosophical Method, The Idea of History and An Essay on Metaphysics. According to D’Oro, Collingwood’s later conception of metaphysics remains a categorial form of inquiry, in that fundamental presuppositions may be conceived to be historical, and susceptible to

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 7

change, but the business of appraising the role they play in organizing experience in a coherent fashion is assigned to philosophical analysis. The practice of this a priori philosophical analysis is taken to be exemplified in Collingwood’s conceptual investigation into the principles of history and its procedure is held to be consistent with the method ascribed to philosophy in An Essay on Philosophical Method.16 D’Oro, in dissenting from the radical conversion hypothesis, adverts to, without exploring, the preceding commentaries of Mink and Rubinoff that maintain the continuing autonomy of philosophy in Collingwood’s thought. Notwithstanding their common aversion to the radical conversion hypothesis, D’Oro’s neo-Kantian reading of Collingwood is at odds with the more Hegelian and expressly dialectical reading of Collingwood’s thought maintained by Mink and Rubinoff. Mink and Rubinoff take Collingwood to be engaged continuously in a dialectical enterprise in which internal connections between forms and aspects of experience and thinking are articulated, and in which forms of consciousness and practices are held to progress by reflective criticism of preceding and less rational forms. They hold that there is an overall consistency in Collingwood’s thought that derives from his dialectical manner of perceiving and rendering explicit the overlapping character of forms of thought, whereby the express standpoint of philosophy is seen to be implicit in non-reflexive forms of theory and practice. While Mink and Rubinoff are at one in ascribing continuity to Collingwood’s thinking, they are divided by how they conceive of this continuity and by the extent of the continuity that they impute to Collingwood’s writings. Rubinoff, in Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, argues that Collingwood maintains a complex and consistent philosophical system from the publication of Speculum Mentis to his final book, The New Leviathan. Collingwood is seen to accord a consistent pre-eminence to philosophy that reveals the articulation of the inter-connections of the forms of experience and consciousness. Rubinoff assumes that Speculum Mentis provides the template for the system, and apparent divergences from this template are explained as either deriving from the rhetorical requirements of addressing contemporary audiences or as a consequence of making explicit the express correction of wayward forms of consciousness, which is signalled but not undertaken in Speculum Mentis. Rubinoff highlights the crucial role that he assigns to Speculum Mentis in remarking, ‘I shall therefore attempt first of all to take seriously Collingwood’s own claim to have produced a system, and secondly to explore the consequences

8 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

of entertaining the hypothesis of viewing the whole of Collingwood’s philosophy as a projection of the programme outlined in Speculum Mentis.’17 Rubinoff’s ascription to Collingwood of an unchanging system depends upon a retrospective, illicit reading of an early work in the light of doctrines, which are only developed in later ones. Recognizing continuities in Collingwood’s thought should not signify a determination to deny change and development. Collingwood, in The Idea of History and in his unfinished The Principles of History, develops an understanding of history that highlights the reciprocity of past and present, and that takes the re-enactment of past thought to constitute the basis of scientific historical understanding. This philosophical legitimation of the credentials of historical understanding is entirely absent from the account of history in Speculum Mentis. In Speculum Mentis the problems posed to historical understanding by its project of incorporating the whole world of related individual facts, which are assumed to be external to its own activity, are taken to elicit and justify its supersession by philosophy. Rubinoff glosses this supersession of history by philosophy as implying the need to invoke a philosophically informed historical practice. The express engagement with such a practice is what Rubinoff takes to be the purpose of Collingwood’s later writings on history. This resolution of the apparent discordance in Collingwood’s conceptions of historical practice is only maintained at the price of burdening the reader with the task of reading an early work in the light of doctrines only formulated in a later one. Given the absence of an express authorial warrant for this radical interpretive strategy, it is a price not worth paying. Surely, it is more economical to allow for a change in Collingwood’s thinking. Collingwood himself remarks in his Autobiography that on recently reading Speculum Mentis he was surprised that he did not wish to retract the bulk of its substantive doctrines. The admission of surprise, however, together with his open avowal of subsequent changes in his thinking, implies that he did not follow a programme in his intellectual career that is scheduled in Speculum Mentis.18 While Rubinoff ascribes a systemic unity to Collingwood’s writings, which he discerns in the supposedly programmatic formula of Speculum Mentis, Mink in Mind, History and Dialectic allows for change and discontinuity, though he discerns a consistent pattern within Collingwood’s writings. For Mink, Collingwood is a dialectical thinker whose thought characteristically traces connections between concepts in which implicit experiential connections are made explicit by the

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 9

reflective procedures of philosophy. Indeed, the changing formulations of Collingwood’s thought are seen as evidence of his pattern of dialectical thinking, which is characteristic of his thought. Mink notes, ‘…his (Collingwood’s) thinking went through a process of development and change in which earlier stages were modified but not entirely superseded by later ones, a process which is itself an illustrative example of his own leading views.’19 Mink argues that Collingwood’s thought develops most significantly in regard to how he conceives of philosophy and history and their relations. Whereas Speculum Mentis assigns a pre-eminence to philosophy due to its freedom from the necessary errors that afflict the partial perspectives of science, art, history and religion, Mink questions the sufficiency of its explanation of the character of philosophical experience. Mink identifies a tension between a presumption of the autonomy of philosophical reflection and a sense of philosophy operating instrumentally to achieve reflexive self-awareness of other forms of experience.20 Mink takes An Essay on Philosophical Method to provide what is absent from Speculum Mentis, namely, ‘…a theory of philosophy of which the argument of Speculum Mentis can itself be regarded as an example.’21 According to Mink, An Essay on Philosophical Method is reflexive over the operation of philosophical reason, and thereby recognizes the dialectical character of the history of philosophy. Collingwood’s systematic reflexive examination of the methodology of philosophy acknowledges its engagement with preceding systems. Mink takes this fusion of history and philosophy to be the hallmark of Collingwood’s later dialectical treatment of philosophy, as is exemplified in An Essay on Metaphysics and The New Leviathan. Mink and Rubinoff are united by their common recognition of an underlying unity within Collingwood’s philosophy and they are also at one in their identification of this unity in terms of the dialectical, systematic character of Collingwood’s thought. They differ over the extent of the continuity that they identify. Mink’s recognition of discontinuity within Collingwood’s thinking renders his account of Collingwood’s more plausible. Mink and Rubinoff are also united by their common disinclination to investigate the relationship between Collingwood and his dialectical predecessors. Rubinoff and Mink suggest parallels between Collingwood and Hegel, but neglect to press their suggestions argumentatively. Rubinoff’s reading of Speculum Mentis as a phenomenology of experience is designed to evoke Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. He remarks, ‘It should now be obvious that the “iconoclastic dialectical” approach of Speculum Mentis resembles

10 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

strongly that of Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind…’22. Likewise Mink observes, ‘Whether Collingwood knew when he wrote Speculum Mentis that he was trying to do the same thing as Hegel there is no way of knowing.’23 Mink’s declaration of a necessary ignorance regarding Collingwood’s own understanding of the relationship between Speculum Mentis and The Phenomenology of Spirit is mistaken. Collingwood’s correspondence reveals his recognition of its value as turning upon its affinity with Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind.24 Collingwood’s manuscripts that were unpublished in his lifetime, and which are now housed in the Bodleian Library, highlight the extent of Collingwood’s multifaceted engagement with Hegel. Mink relates Collingwood to philosophies with which he is not directly engaged, namely pragmatism and existentialism.25 The links that Mink establishes between Collingwood and these philosophies are general rather than specific. They reflect Collingwood’s systematic ambitions, whereby he aims, like Hegel, to incorporate a variety of reflective styles and substantive themes. Mink does not establish that Collingwood’s thought contains a defining and overriding concern with pragmatic and existentialist concerns. For instance, while Collingwood’s conception of freedom identifies an existential dimension in choosing particular courses of action, his elaborated discussion of choice within The New Leviathan includes a systematic analysis of the conditions of civilization, in which individual choice is related to the conditions of a rational political community and to the wider context of a liberal civilization.26 This study reinforces the repudiation of the radical conversion hypothesis that informs the work of a number of Collingwood scholars. Its argument follows Mink and Rubinoff in identifying the continuity within Collingwood’s thought as arising out of his practice of a dialectical style of thought that develops its arguments by way of connecting the concepts comprising and relating forms of activity. In resuming while criticizing aspects of the interpretive framework established by Mink and Rubinoff, this study departs from the course followed by a number of recent interpreters of Collingwood, who reject the radical conversion hypothesis without reading Collingwood as a systematic and dialectical theorist. D’Oro and Martin, for instance, highlight the continuing autonomy of philosophy in Collingwood’s later thought, without ascribing to Collingwood a persisting concern to unify experience. Both D’Oro and Martin register Collingwood’s continuing relevance to philosophical debate and his commitment to philosophical argument by relating his thought to analytical or linguistic philo-

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 11

sophy.27 D’Oro remarks in the conclusion to Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, ‘Collingwood’s conception of philosophical knowledge occupies the middle ground between the project of traditional metaphysics and that of linguistic philosophy.’28 Johnson in his R. G. Collingwood: An Introduction, and from a standpoint sympathetic to the explanatory limits recognized by linguistic philosophy, casts doubt on the claims that Collingwood advances for the unifying, synoptic perspective of philosophy. He observes, ‘One of Collingwood’s strengths in philosophy is his range; little in life that is worthy of philosophical attention escapes him, but in relation to philosophical method this strength can seem a fault. The weakness comes about because Collingwood sees philosophical method not as a way of clarifying or elucidating experience but as imposing an order upon it.’29 Johnson’s scepticism raises important questions, but for Collingwood the clarification of experience involves connecting and differentiating the concepts that constitute forms of experience. In aiming to reaffirm the systematic, dialectical character of Collingwood’s thought, this study takes issue with preceding commentators, who either conceive of him as renouncing the autonomy of philosophy or analyze his philosophy in the light of non-systematic forms of philosophizing. Disagreement does not imply disrespect and this study recognizes that there are significant discontinuities in Collingwood’s thought. Speculum Mentis develops an understanding of the unity of experience in and through a phenomenological review of the mind and its activities that examines all experience in terms of its relationship to the absolute knowledge of mind that is achieved by philosophy. Collingwood’s later thought is more even-handed in its assessment of activities and theorizes the unity of experience as residing in the political maintenance of the conditions of rational civilization. This development in Collingwood’s thinking does not override his persisting commitment to recognize the differentiated unity of experience. Collingwood’s later thought continues to recognize the autonomy of philosophy and D’Oro’s recent study is perceptive in showing how experience, for Collingwood, is mediated by the categories employed in distinct activities and how the status and character of these respective categories are discriminated by philosophy. This study’s reaffirmation of the dialectical reading of Collingwood that is maintained by Mink and Rubinoff is not an uncritical reaffirmation. The dialectical character of Collingwood’s thought is construed differently, the consistency imputed to Collingwood by Rubinoff is repudiated and the persisting connections between Collingwood’s philosophy and Hegel’s are explored.

12 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

In reconstruing Collingwood throughout his career as a systematic, dialectical theorist, my study of Collingwood shares an interpretive commitment with Connelly’s Metaphysics, Method and Politics, a recently published revised version of a notable doctoral thesis. Connelly’s work is predicated upon a careful study of Collingwood’s published and unpublished texts, and, though it pursues a different pathway through the unpublished manuscripts from that which is followed in this book, its emphasis upon the underlying continuity of Collingwood’s thought as residing in its systematic character, and its identification of The New Leviathan as a key text in demonstrating this character, reinforce themes of this study. This study departs from Connelly’s, however, in observing the differences that separate Speculum Mentis from later writings, and in pressing the comparison between Hegel and Collingwood, which complements a reading of Collingwood as a dialectical and systematic writer. The crux of Connelly’s thesis, and a central aspect of any interpretation that accents the unity of Collingwood’s philosophy, is his argument that there is significant continuity between An Essay on Philosophical Method and An Essay of Metaphysics. Connelly urges that this unity reflects the continuity of Collingwood’s distinctively Hegelian mode of philosophizing. He observes that the method, which is extolled and practised in An Essay on Philosophical Method, is Hegel’s method. He notes, ‘…the whole argument of An Essay on Philosophical Method might be taken as a restatement of that method [Hegel’s] in non-Hegelian Language, in answer to certain critics of Hegel (for example Croce). The method propounded is therefore a dialectical method, and it is precisely the dialectical method of Hegel that Collingwood later in An Essay on Metaphysics declared to be the method the metaphysician employs in discovering absolute presuppositions’.30 This identification of Collingwood’s Hegelianism, is central to a dialectical reading of his philosophy and yet the relationship between Collingwood and Hegel has not been the subject of a sustained examination. In developing a qualified interpretation of the continuity in Collingwood’s thought, this study offers a detailed analysis of how Collingwood and Hegel can be seen as undertaking related and yet distinct projects.

Rethinking and Collingwood Collingwood is a theorist, whose principal concern is to theorize the conditionality and inter-dependence of a range of reflective activities

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 13

with which he is engaged. Standardly, he takes the philosophical enterprise of establishing the conceptual character of a form of activity to involve its rethinking. Philosophical rethinking is the procedure that is examined and justified in An Essay on Philosophical Method. This philosophical method reviews the concepts underlying a form of activity by establishing regressively the most basic conceptual conditions requisite for its practice and develops progressively the system of implied concepts that provide a rational explanation of the activity. It explores the overlapping character of concepts in explaining an area of experience. The New Leviathan displays Collingwood’s continuing commitment to this conception of philosophy by developing a systemic explanation of the conditions of rational civilization that culminates in the realization that the theory of civilization itself contributes to its survival as much as it depends on the prior practices of civilization to generate the aspects of mind and society that are rethought in theory. Nature is understood by Collingwood to be susceptible to a kind of philosophical rethinking in that the natural sciences reveal the rational patterns of thought underlying natural processes, which can be rethought in cosmological speculation as a serial rational progression to the conscious and self-conscious reflective activities of human beings. Collingwood’s notion of philosophy as a form of rethinking is invoked in Speculum Mentis as the means of unifying experience. Philosophical rethinking realizes that mind and world are not opposed but are interconnected aspects of consciousness. While art, religion, science and history are forms of activity in which the world is mediated by consciousness; this necessary process of mediation is only realized through the philosophical process of rethinking of the phenomena of consciousness. Collingwood subsequently retreats before this spectre of the radically revisionary character of philosophical rethinking by reconsidering the relationship of philosophical rethinking to other modes of experience. His later thought recognizes the internal coherence of the activities of art and history, and the interplay between these activities and philosophy in a rational civilization. In framing his later conception of the unity of experience, Collingwood conceives of the interplay between philosophy and history to consist in the combination of two styles of rethinking. In his philosophical analysis of history in The Idea of History Collingwood famously conceives of the study of past actions to consist in their rethinking by means of the historian’s scrutiny of evidence that he or she assembles in the present. Throughout his career, Collingwood takes philosophy and history to be connected, and following his

14 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

identification of the character of historical rethinking in the 1920s, Collingwood explores the inter-connections between philosophy and history in systematic fashion. Notably, Collingwood conceives of his own practice of analyzing philosophically the fundamental concepts of history as, in turn, presupposing the prior development of a tradition of historical thinking and analytical reflection upon the methods of history. He himself draws upon this practice of historical writing in his self-conscious historical rethinking of this tradition, which is exemplified in the main body of The Idea of History. The practice of history thereby leads to the history of historical practice and the philosophical rethinking of the unity obtaining between the defining concepts of history. Philosophical rethinking also engages with history because its normative or criteriological character involves systematic appraisal of previous ways in which concepts have been construed.31 In An Essay on Philosophical Method the systematic character of philosophical appraisal of concepts in combination with the unique historical vantage point of any particular philosopher invites a critical engagement with preceding philosophies. He maintains, ‘So far as any man is a competent philosopher, his philosophy arises by objective necessity out of his situation in the history of thought and the problem with which he is confronted; but situation and problem are unique, and hence no one philosopher’s system can be acceptable to another without some modification.’32 If Collingwood regards the criteriological dimension of philosophical rethinking to require a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, he also takes the normative character of historical rethinking to require that a history of philosophy is critical of past philosophies. This possibility of critique is exhibited in Collingwood’s formulaic notion of historical explanation as consisting in the re-enactment of past thought. Collingwood does not assume that the act of rethinking is to be regarded as the same act as the original piece of thinking that is to be understood. Thought is universal so that the same thought can be the object of different particular acts of thought.33 The differences between acts of thought remain, however, so that rethinking a previous thought is to rethink it in a significantly new context in which the thinker is aware of the pastness of the thought rethought. This contextual awareness, for Collingwood, underlies the critical interrogation of past thinkers and thought and provides for the possibility of intellectual progress. Collingwood in his essay ‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’ published in the Epilegomena to The Idea of History focuses upon the critical rethinking of past philosophers. He

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 15

acknowledges that a contextually sensitive rethinking of past thinkers allows for the possibility of progress because the historical act of rethinking rethinks thoughts from a new perspective so that preceding insights can be retained while exploring new questions that arise out of preceding solutions. He notes, ‘Philosophy progresses in so far as one stage of its development solves the problems which defeated it in the last, without losing its hold on the solutions already achieved.’34 Collingwood’s standard approach to the variety of disciplines and practices with which he is interested is to rethink them. To rethink them in historical terms is to interpret the evidence assembled in the present so as to reformulate the thought of past historical actors. In philosophical terms, to rethink them it is to reconsider the overlapping conceptual character of the concepts involved in their articulation. The history of philosophy exhibits the combination of these styles of rethinking. Past conceptual systems are rethought by means of a critical appraisal of the historical evidence. The history of philosophy, for Collingwood, is also necessarily a history of philosophical critique in that the reconstruction of historic philosophies is informed by a new philosophical context of inquiry, in which the concepts that are entertained in a past philosophy are subject to reappraisal in the light of subsequent development. An appreciation of the significance of the interplay between philosophical and historical styles of rethinking in Collingwood’s work invites examination of the relationship between Collingwood and Hegel. Hegel, like Collingwood, recognizes the differentiated unity of philosophy and the history of philosophy, and rethinking Hegel is a continuous feature of Collingwood’s practice of philosophy. Moreover, it is a singular omission on the part of preceding commentators that even when their own interpretations of Collingwood suggest a close affinity with Hegel, they do not undertake an analysis of the relationship.35 This book confirms Harris’ suspicion that the Collingwoodian manuscripts might reveal the significance of Collingwood’s engagement with Hegel.36 A token of this significance is provided by Collingwood’s unpublished report for Oxford University Press on Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel. In this report, Collingwood displays a sympathetic reading of Hegel, which acknowledges the Hegelian pedigree of his own conception of philosophy as a mode of rethinking. Collingwood is critical of Foster’s critique of Hegel, in particular of his failure to recognize Hegel’s commitment to freedom and creativity that is implied in his assimilation of Hegel to Plato. Collingwood reads Hegel’s recognition of history as the site of

16 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

and for consciousness to be the crucial development in modern philosophy.37 He encapsulates Hegel’s paradigmatic method of philosophizing as a procedure in which, ‘…the “philosopher” then re-thinks in systematic form thoughts that already exist in men’s minds…’38 Collingwood, throughout his career is a sensitive if critical adherent of an Hegelian conception of philosophy, according to which the freedom and reflexivity of thought are exhibited and evaluated by the philosophical rethinking of experience. All of Collingwood’s major published texts reflect this Hegelian standpoint, and his unpublished writings testify to the detailed, developing and specific ways in which his thinking on ethics, logic, politics, nature, history and mind are shaped by his engagement with Hegel. If Collingwood’s thought is to be understood historically by tracing its provenance in his engagement with Hegel, its philosophical character can also be assessed by comparing it with Hegel’s system. Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis is closely modelled on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind in that the dynamic of its investigation of mind is generated by discrepancies between the subject and object of consciousness so that philosophy realizes an absolute perspective due to its harmonization of subjective consciousness and its objective content. The supremacy of philosophy in Speculum Mentis overrides doubts about Hegel’s absolutist standpoint that are expressed in Collingwood’s early writings on logic. It gives way, however, in his later writings to a recognition of a nonhierarchical interplay between functions of mind and forms of experience that is distinct from Hegel in allowing for a possible misalignment between practice and theory and between the contingency of history and the necessity of philosophical reason. Rubinoff, in Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics suggests that Collingwood differs from Hegel in that Hegel presumes a final realization of philosophical truth, by which a summative and definitive verdict on experience and forms of reflective activity can be delivered, whereas Collingwood allows for the continuing historical exploration of philosophical ways of conceiving experience. Rubinoff remarks, ‘For Hegel, once the Truth has arrived on the scene it remains unmediated; Hegel seems therefore to have regarded his own philosophy as final, never to be superseded by another. In this respect, for Hegel the final transcendence of mind is complete. For Collingwood, however, this transcendence is never complete, never final, but always making itself in the making.’39 Collingwood’s readiness to admit the susceptibility of philosophy to continual modification, which is exemplified by his readiness to pursue alternative ways of concluding his study, The Idea

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 17

of Nature, may be cited in support of Rubinoff’s assessment of Collingwood.40 Rubinoff’s appraisal of Hegel, though, is problematic in that many Hegelian scholars read Hegel as allowing for freedom and openness so as to preclude a Hegelian finalization of philosophy and history.41 Collingwood himself recognizes the complexity of Hegel’s philosophy, which is evidenced in his critical but generally respectful commentary on Hegel, whom he reads as aiming to accommodate freedom and an absolutist comprehension of historical change.42 Notwithstanding Hegel’s commitment to the centrality of human freedom and his possible accommodation of change, Rubinoff does direct attention to the differing views of Collingwood and Hegel on the character of historical development. Collingwood is critical of what he takes to be Hegel’s commitment to the philosophical necessity of the emergence of a free society. Collingwood judges that even this Hegelian notion of the necessity of developments that have actually occurred derogates from the contingency and radical openness that Collingwood attributes to historical processes. Collingwood’s disavowal of Hegel’s philosophical circumscription of the processes of history signals a divergence between Hegel and Collingwood. While both philosophers trace elaborate inter-connections between philosophy and other forms of experience, after Speculum Mentis Collingwood highlights the autonomy of history and philosophy rather than the subordination of the former to the latter. Likewise, he sees art as more than a staging post on the way to philosophy and takes theory and practice to be reciprocally related in contrast to Hegel’s understanding of the philosophically conceptualized limits that constrain their operations.

Dialectic in theory and practice The remainder of this book is dedicated to providing a systematic review of Collingwood’s thought, incorporating his published and unpublished work, so as to demonstrate and vindicate its interpretation of Collingwood as a theorist, whose critical but close reading of Hegel underlies a persisting philosophical concern to theorize the dialectical unity of experience and its constitutive reflective activities. Central to Collingwood’s enterprise are his related conceptions of historical and philosophical styles of rethinking. Collingwood maintains throughout his writings a view of philosophy as a form of rethinking, which rethinks the concepts exhibited in historical experience so as to register their overlapping, inter-connected character. Collingwood’s

18 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

thinking, though, develops and his later thought conceives of experience as a unity, in which philosophy does not supersede other activities. Collingwood’s readiness to rethink his own formulations of the character of the unity of experience is evidenced in An Autobiography, where Collingwood disparages the rationale behind Cook Wilson’s reluctance to publish, which is taken to be the latter’s wariness of exposing his tendency to change his mind to public inspection.43 In Outlines of a Philosophy of Art Collingwood invokes, without express acknowledgement, Hegel’s epigram from The Phenomenology of Mind in remarking that to maintain a preformulated system that is operated mechanically to explain everything, would be,‘…to convert the philosophy of art into a night in which all cows are black.’44 Collingwood’s later thought conceives of art, history, science and philosophy as each contributing to the understanding of experience and he imagines the unity of these activities as being maintained by the unificatory spirit of a rational civilization. The succeeding chapters of this book examine the differentiated unity of Collingwood’s thought by reviewing how he understood the areas of experience and reflective activities with which he was principally concerned. Central to Collingwood’s notion of the dialectical rethinking of experience is his notion of philosophy itself. The following chapter is devoted to exploring Collingwood’s conception and practice of philosophy. It examines his early unpublished Hegelian explorations of logic that follow Hegel’s paradigm of logic as a train of reasoning about processes rather than isolating and fixing upon standard propositions, even if Collingwood is at the same time critical of absolutizing aspects of Hegel’s thought.45 Speculum Mentis, Collingwood’s first major philosophical work is taken to be a concentrated expression of his Hegelian concern to rethink experience as a connected whole, whereby it is the express role of philosophy to undertake the rethinking of the several key activities of mind in relation to one another and in regard to their capacity to conceive of experience coherently. If the later Collingwood has been stigmatized for an alleged collapse of philosophy into history, then a critical reading of Speculum Mentis may conclude that its philosophical critique of the incoherence of non-philosophical activities of the mind reflects deficiencies in the supervening philosophical perspective from which they are read. Certainly, in his writings subsequent to Speculum Mentis Collingwood maintains a more balanced reading of the inter-connections between activities of the mind and their integrity, so that philosophy does not supersede alternative perspectives. The peculiarity of the philosophical

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 19

method undertaken by philosophy that enables it to rethink experience in a connected and systematic manner is set out by Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method. This work, which Collingwood invariably refers to as his most complete work, distinguishes a philosophical treatment of concepts from that which is prevalent in the natural sciences. Species of the same genus are seen by their philosophical rethinking as being internally related to one another by dint of their adequacy in expressing the generic concept by which they are related. This conception of philosophy that Collingwood advertises as Hegelian informs his applications of philosophy to nature, mind and civilization.46 Collingwood’s An Essay on Metaphysics, however, has been taken to constitute a sharp break from Collingwood’s former sense of the autonomy and dialectical character of philosophy.47 It emphasizes the historicity of metaphysical beliefs that are taken to be the absolute presuppositions, which form the starting points for investigations of nature. Absolute presuppositions are not seen as propositions, which are susceptible to logical or empirical justification. This apparent deprecation of philosophical reasoning contrasts pointedly with Collingwood’s notable willingness to undertake speculative first order investigations of being and nature in his unpublished writings of the 1930s.48 Collingwood’s seemingly deflationary review of the critical prowess of philosophy, though, should not be overplayed. In the detailed discussions of examples of the operation of metaphysical presuppositions in An Essay on Metaphysics, Collingwood shows metaphysics to be a special form of historical investigation. Metaphysics remains a normative enterprise, or as he characteristically specifies, a criteriological inquiry. His analyses of metaphysical presuppositions do not assimilate them uncritically to their correlative practices, but involve critical appraisal of the inter-connections between concepts. In An Essay on Metaphysics philosophy operates as a critical inquiry that appraises the coherence and integration between concepts in a way that is characteristic of the method that is canvassed in An Essay on Philosophical Method. In the essay of 1938, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, which reviews the notion of metaphysics as the science of absolute presuppositions, Collingwood expressly highlights how their analysis can be likened to Hegelian logical analysis.49 Chapter 3 reviews Collingwood understanding of nature and mind, which he standardly takes to be intertwined and yet distinct. The meaning of each is revealed by the internal unity of the concepts

20 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

integral to their respective spheres and by the distinction between their respective concepts. Standardly, Collingwood takes mind to be rational and free, and the freedom of mind to consist in an agent’s expressly rational capacity to understand his or her situation and to pursue critically self-chosen purposes within a context that is constituted by perceptions of past undertakings and the social activities and institutions maintained in society. Collingwood takes the processes of nature to be distinct from mind in that they are neither self-consciously rational nor free. Nature displays rationality, but its rationality is not selfconsciously comprehended. The distinctions between mind and nature entail that they are to be explained by deploying appropriately distinctive methods. The activities of mind are susceptible of explanation by criteriological sciences whereby the critical, evaluative character of self-conscious rational thought is acknowledged to be integral to the character of the activity under examination. In the rational activities of mind, the freedom of mind to determine its own actions is respected. Natural phenomena, in contrast, are to be explained in terms of their external determination by forces that can be identified as occurring with regularity, and in a manner that does not involve appraisal of their determination. The relations between nature and mind, though, do not merely exhibit oppositions. In The Idea of Nature Collingwood traces how nature has been conceived, and he observes that the changing formulations reflect the changing ways in which mind, via human intellectual activity, understands its world. He notes that the achievement of modern science is to understand nature as being essentially different from human beings, invoking the need for the application of distinct methods to the two spheres. He maintains, though, that the study of nature presumes the practice of a distinctively human activity, science, which in turn exhibits the rationality and freedom intrinsic to an activity of mind in the application of historical understanding.50 Moreover, notwithstanding the externality of nature, Collingwood recognizes it to exhibit relational rational patterns whereby objects and events are shown to be linked to others. In The Idea of Nature he perceives the value of recent cosmological speculation, which has been undertaken by Whitehead and Alexander, and which incorporates the standpoint of twentieth century science, to reside in the development of a conception of these patterns as inter-connected processes, in which cause and effect cannot be isolated. Collingwood’s sense of natural processes exhibiting patterns in which the externality of phenomena are progressively mediated as

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 21

they approach the internality and self-conscious freedom of thought is highlighted in his unpublished first order cosmological speculation that he conducted concurrently with his lectures on the historical development of the idea of nature. In what remains his largely unpublished, ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic,’ Collingwood develops a first order gradational ontology, whereby the rational but external modes of relation underlying objects situated in time and space, trace patterns that prefigure and await their express realisation in self-conscious acts of mind.51 The self-consciousness of mankind is thereby understood to be able to think or rethink expressly the implicit thought relations of natural processes. Collingwood’s first order cosmological speculation renders explicit the sense of what is demanded in contemporary cosmology that is implicit in his historical treatment of the notion of nature. In doing so Collingwood also emphasizes his appreciation of the continuing relevance of Hegel’s cosmological ideas. The essence of mind is captured, for Collingwood in the related notions of its rationality and freedom. These concepts are fundamental presuppositions of historical study, which is the concern of Chapter 4. Collingwood devoted much of his life to actual historical and archaeological work and philosophical reflection upon its character. Knox presumes that Collingwood’s intensive involvement in historical studies culminates in the dissolution of philosophy into history. Collingwood’s career as understood by Collingwood himself suggests his intellectual career turns upon his working out of a rapprochement between history and philosophy. The rapprochement that Collingwood effected, however, is not so one-sided as to involve the liquidation of philosophy into history. Throughout his career, Collingwood’s characteristic conception of philosophy as a form of rethinking lends itself to linking philosophy to the prior historical development of activities, which it is the activity of philosophy to rethink so as to conceptualize conceptual inter-connections. Consequent upon his rethinking of the autonomy of the practice of history as the rethinking of past thoughts, Collingwood takes historical understanding to be a species of rethinking that is explicated philosophically by attending to the conceptual character of its principles and philosophical understanding to consist in the historically developing form of rethinking the connected character of experience. The relatively recent discovery and publication of The Principles of History is a serendipity that allows readers to form their own judgements on the character and value of a book that Knox had taken to be abandoned in the wake of Collingwood’s declining powers and the

22 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

bankruptcy of his absorption of philosophy into history. Collingwood, in this work, displays the continuing vitality of philosophy by rethinking philosophically the inter-connections between the principles of historical knowledge. The dual senses of history, as an account of the past, and as the activity of understanding the past, are seen as implying a number of mutually inter-locking conceptual conceptions. Collingwood, himself highlights the philosophical character of this enterprise in his Autobiography where he refers to the dual aspects of history as constituting epistemological and metaphysical aspects of a philosophical inquiry into history.52 In rethinking philosophically the principles of history Collingwood identifies the reciprocity obtaining between the freedom manifested in the past record of historical action and the freedom exhibited in historical inquiry, whereby the historian rethinks past historical action by identifying and criticising the sources with which he or she works. The reciprocity between the practice and object of historical knowledge is central to Hegel’s philosophy of history, and notwithstanding the critique of Hegel that is conducted in The Principles of History, Collingwood’s dialectical rethinking of historical knowledge highlights the significance of Hegel as a philosophical point of reference in Collingwood’s mapping of what is involved in understanding the past. Chapter 5 focuses upon Collingwood’s The Principles of Art, which represents Collingwood’s considered reflection on a lifelong engagement with art and its place in experience. It modifies the picture of art that is maintained in his youthful Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. It is united to them, however, by its concern to relate art to a wider sphere of activities and by identifying the conceptual links between aspects of artistic activity. Art, in The Principles of Art, plays a vital role in the operational capacity of mind to develop its freedom and rationality. Collingwood takes mind’s characteristic activities to constitute a ladder whereby the basic apprehension of sense material serves as a presupposition for more discriminating perceptions. Collingwood’s interpretation of art as contributing to the experiential development of mind owes much to the experiential pathway, which is traversed by consciousness under the guidance of Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind. Art, for Collingwood, through its imaginative expression of emotional experience advances awareness and consciousness, and thereby prepares the way for self-conscious reflection that can exercise critical discrimination in its activities. Art’s occupation of a rung upon the ladder whereby mind is enabled to advance is not to be dismissed as the infantile, playful activity of

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Collingwood’s earlier writings. Art is involved in all levels of experience, serving as the means of expressing emotions consonant with advanced reflective experience. All experience, for Collingwood, is emotionally charged and great art expresses the emotions that are constitutive of and significant for the health of a civilization. Collingwood’s sense of the practical significance of art is a major theme of The Principles of Art. Art itself is an activity to which the distinction between theory and practice does not apply, because artistic expression effects a unity between the subject and his or her expressions. The mind’s capacity to express deep emotions that are prone to lie repressed beneath the surface of consciousness, is vital to the continued vitality of a civilization in all its connected activities. Collingwood sees the therapeutic role of art as being particularly acute in what he diagnoses to be the contemporary crisis of civilization. Art, like all activities, is an historical engagement so that it is the charge of artist to respond to what is of essential moment in the contemporary context. Collingwood takes the tendency of his contemporaries to withdraw from the effort of emotional self-expression to betoken the withering of contemporary civilization. For Collingwood art is an activity that is to be understood in terms of its contribution to mind’s comprehension of its world. But the unifying activities of mind, and philosophy in rethinking the principles of these activities are not to be divorced from practice. The linkage of philosophy to history turns in part upon the dependence of theory upon the prior activities of practice, in that philosophy is essentially the second order activity of reflection upon experience. On the other hand, Collingwood maintains that reflection upon experience transforms the meaning of and attitude to experience, so that theory informs and is intrinsically connected to practice. In rethinking the principles of history, Collingwood maintains the reciprocity between the subject and object of historical consciousness, and he makes its reciprocity a feature of his understanding of the principles underpinning liberal civilization that is set out in The New Leviathan. The rationality of civilization is seen by Collingwood as threatened by the contemporary turn against metaphysics, which is epitomized by the standpoint of logical positivism. Hence, Collingwood recognizes how a philosophically articulated conception of the notions of art, history and metaphysics, by evincing an appreciation of determining aspects of civilization, can contribute to its support and survival.53 The unity of Collingwood’s philosophizing culminates appropriately in his final book, The New Leviathan. Its object is to rethink the character

24 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

of civilization, and the political practice of a liberal society, which embraces and nurtures a commitment to civilized values that inform and unify the reflective activities of mankind. The theoretical strategy, which is adopted in The New Leviathan, is of a piece with the idea of philosophical method that is set out in An Essay on Philosophical Method. Collingwood rethinks systematically the conditions of civilization. In so doing he identifies and relates together the conditions of civilization as a series of overlapping concepts on a scale of forms. Collingwood recognizes that his systematic enterprise presupposes the historical development of the conditions of civilization and a tradition of theorizing about those conditions, which he rethinks transformatively. Hence philosophy is combined with history, just as theory is seen to support the practice of civilization as well as deriving from reflection on its conditions. Collingwood’s theoretical practice follows Hegel in conceiving of the individual mind as admitting of a series of ascending functions that realize progressively its inherent freedom and rationality. He also is at one with Hegel in taking the capacities of individual mind both to underpin and to be developed in the historical development of political communities. Collingwood sees a variety of social practices and institutions, such as the family and civil society as being constitutive of the conditions of social and political freedom. In the context of the contemporary war against Nazi barbarity Collingwood takes issue, however, with an Hegelian teleological development of history that would imagine a rational free civilization as being a logical development of man’s inherent freedom, and would deny a fragility to its achievement that rendered feasible a return to barbarism. Collingwood’s preoccupation in The New Leviathan with the character of a free society and the possibility of its demise, highlights the practical turn of Collingwood’s thought and at the same time shows the distinctness of his dialectical philosophy from Hegel’s. For Collingwood, history and philosophy are inter-related yet independent studies that can contribute to an understanding of the principles that are maintained in social and political practices and this knowledge can play a vital role in helping to secure practice against the historical possibility of their demise. Hegel’s philosophy conceives of freedom as a philosophical necessity underpinning historical development, and the development of freedom is not to be conceived as endangered fundamentally by what Collingwood takes to be the radical openness of historical development. Collingwood’s early reservations about Hegel’s absolutism, which derogate from his admiration for what he regards as Hegel’s otherwise exemplary treatment of logic, prefigure his late cri-

Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 25

tique of Hegelian philosophical closure. Collingwood’s sensitivity to the contingency and openness of history, as well as to the course of actual historical development in fact encourages him to advertise the practical implications of his thinking. His philosophical rethinking of the practices of a free society is part of the struggle to maintain and improve them, whereas Hegel’s philosophy, secure in its sense of the overriding development of history, minimizes the practical implications of theory.54 The final chapter of the book concludes by reflecting upon Collingwood’s dialectical turn towards conceiving of the unity of experience as the fusion of the rapprochements of history and philosophy and theory practice. Summative analysis and appraisal of Collingwood’s philosophy is undertaken via a review of his engagement with Hegel. Collingwood’s ultimate perception of the unity of theory and practice and philosophy and history as being realized contingently in the achievement of a liberal rational civilization that is susceptible to collapse, is contrasted with Hegel’ s philosophical conceptualization of the necessity of rational progress. The distinctiveness and success of Collingwood’s theorizing is apppraised via analysis of three recent theorists, Rawls, Lyotard and MacIntyre. These theorists, in distinct and sometimes hostile ways, have developed contrasting conceptions of the fate of modern liberal civilization by engaging with Hegel. Their differing criticisms and developments of Hegelian theory are employed to assess the power and acuity of Collingwood’s Hegelianism. The focus upon Collingwood’s rethinking of Hegel in assessing his work is justified by his close but critical engagement with Hegel, the multiplicity of ways in which Hegel’s thought informs his philosophy and the paucity of interpretive studies on the relationship between Collingwood and Hegel. Collingwood draws upon differing aspects of Hegel as he explores differing styles and forms of activity in rethinking thought and experience. Collingwood can be read in many ways and his thought can be interpreted in a variety of contexts. His thought is subtle. The focus in this study upon Hegel should not be taken as precluding the impact of other theorists upon Collingwood. Indeed, this study remarks upon his critical engagement with a number of theorists including the Italian Idealists, Whitehead and Alexander, Plato, Kant, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, while the significance of his opposition to realism and logical positivism is recognized. The concentration upon Hegel is justified by the light it throws upon Collingwood’s ideas, both in terms of their formulation and by way of the comparative perspective that is afforded by relating Collingwood’s ideas to those of

26 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

Hegel. Moreover, even where Collingwood is undoubtedly occupied with ideas of other theorists, often his interest in the ideas is mediated by his engagement with Hegel. In their co-authored Preface to de Ruggeiro’s Modern Philosophy, which they co-translated, Collingwood and Hannay summarize modern Italian Idealism by remarking, ‘Idealism for these Italians, as it was for Hegel, is a philosophy deeply rooted in history…’55 Likewise, Collingwood’s interest in the cosmologies of Whitehead and Alexander is mediated by his recognition of affinities between their work and Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Again, his enthusiasm for classic social contract theory is conducted via an Hegelian re-reading of the theory.56 Collingwood’s reading of Kant also reflects his interest in Hegel and the Kantian problems with which Hegel was occupied. Collingwood acknowledges a debt to Kant, which is evident in his critical review of categories of thought. This debt inspires D’Oro’s neo-Kantian reading of his works.57 Collingwood, however, characteristically affirms a commitment to the standpoint of Kant’s successors when acknowledging Kant. His analyses of the conditions of knowledge of history, art and philosophy aim at showing the unity between spheres of experience and aspire to a dialectical systematicity that betoken his primary allegiance to post-Kantian and Hegelian thought.58

2 Philosophy; Rethinking Thought

Introduction Philosophy, for Collingwood, is the reflexive project of rethinking the conceptual character of thought so as to highlight the unity of reflective forms of activity. Its reflexive, systematic character is evidenced in its explanation of the rational and free character of thought, which makes possible its project of reflexive comprehension. Throughout his writings, Collingwood highlights the significance of the capacity of thought to be rethought. In history, Collingwood takes the susceptibility of thought to being rethought to constitute the hallmark of historical knowledge.1 Standardly, philosophy, for Collingwood, responds to the universality of thought, by rethinking the relations obtaining between concepts or the principles that govern patterns of thinking. The generality of thought allows for its rethinkability. Thought’s susceptibility to a critical review of its internal relations is rehearsed in Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. In this work, thought is distinguished from sensation precisely due to its capacity to be rethought. Acts of sensation are held to be particular, fleeting and inaccessible to retrieval or even comparison with one another. Thought, by contrast, is held to be amenable to analysis, and to allow for a considered review of the place of sensation within experience. Experience is taken to be an achievement that is analyzable by the process of rethinking philosophically its structural scaffolding, so that it assumes the shape of a series of platforms, whereby thought can ascend so as to understand its own rationality and freedom.2 Collingwood, like Hegel, takes experience to be amenable to philosophical understanding because philosophy operates as the reflexive means of reappraising the activity of mind in framing the terms of meaningful experience.3 27

28 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

This model of philosophical understanding as a form of rethinking is rehearsed at many stages of Collingwood’s career. Its classic statement is developed in An Essay on Philosophical Method, which Collingwood recognized to be the finest achievement of his career. It is specifically devoted to exploring the method of philosophy as a style of rethinking that takes experience to constitute a scale of forms. Collingwood understands a philosophical treatment of concepts to be sui generis in that it identifies concepts to be overlapping in their progressively complete way of specifying their generic character. Philosophy proceeds regressively to arrive at a minimal specification of a genus or form of experience and thereafter ascends or develops by eliciting concepts that overlap with those lower in the scale in their formulation of increasingly satisfactory specifications of the form. Collingwood’s continuing subscription to the conception of philosophy set out in An Essay on Philosophical Method is confirmed by analysis of his final work, The New Leviathan. In the latter, Collingwood practises philosophy as a form of rethinking in that he reviews various functions of mind and conditions of society, civilization and barbarism that he identifies to be contingent, historic creations. This practice of philosophical rethinking mirrors its abstract specification in An Essay on Philosophical Method. The series of mental functions of the mind and conceptions of moral practice, which are identified in The New Leviathan, are not envisaged to be discrete components of a rational civilization, but to be overlapping in their specification of a progressively complete and successful account of a rational and free civilization. The ascription of continuity to Collingwood’s conception of and engagement in philosophy runs counter to the radical conversion hypothesis that assumes there to be a sharp break in Collingwood’s style of philosophizing. Donagan’s summary of what he sees as Collingwood’s conversion to a purely historical conception of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics is typical of interpretations that take the later Collingwood to undermine the independence of philosophy by assimilating metaphysical analysis to historical investigation. Donagan proclaims, ‘Metaphysics … is not an attempt to establish categorical universal propositions about Being itself, but categorical particular propositions about what this or that people at this or that time have believed.’4 The notion of a radical transformation in Collingwood’s philosophizing, whereby the autonomy of philosophy is compromised by an ascendancy that is ascribed to history is supported

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought 29

by passages in An Essay on Metaphysics, An Autobiography and miscellaneous late writings.5 The significance of isolated passages in Collingwood’s writings, however, should not be inflated without regard to a close reading of the texts in which they are inserted and to an understanding of the background contexts within which the texts are written. Collingwood himself acknowledges that the thought of past philosophers should not be assimilated to the preoccupations and standard ways of current thinking. He recognizes that the intentions and prevailing conventions governing past philosophical thinking should be retrieved, before its meaning can be understood.6 Collingwood’s overtly historical reading of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics is motivated by his sensitivity to the contemporary attack on metaphysics, which was currently being undertaken most aggressively by the logical positivists. His allocation of an historical role to metaphysics is designed to forestall the wholesale onslaught against metaphysical thinking. Metaphysics, for Collingwood, is to be saved by accepting the language and assumptions of its opponents, who deny propositional status to metaphysical beliefs, while arguing that metaphysical terms perform a role in serving as absolute presuppositions of, rather than as propositions within, scientific theory and practice. The study of metaphysics is thereby presented as the historical analysis of presuppositions within a conceptual vocabulary that is acceptable to positivists. Hence, metaphysical discourse is rendered immune from positivist critique because it is not presumed to depend upon empirical verification of propositions.7 If the historical guise of Collingwood’s defence of metaphysics is motivated in part at least by the exigencies of the intellectual climate of opinion, the specific examples of metaphysics that he considers in the course of An Essay on Metaphysics show that his notion of metaphysical beliefs implies that they are to be discriminated by the conceptual analysis of philosophy, albeit an historically informed sense of philosophy. He assumes that metaphysical beliefs are related to one another; they must be consupponible in that each belief must be compatible with the logic of the cluster of beliefs as a whole. Hence the philosophical enterprise of rethinking them by analyzing their logical connections is a critical one that may detect errors committed by historic theorists who fail to appreciate the implications for a conceptual scheme of one assumption upon concomitant assumptions.8 The continuity of Collingwood’s theory and practice of philosophy is highlighted by his maligned final works, The New Leviathan and the

30 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

unfinished The Principles of History. In these texts Collingwood sets out the inter-related metaphysical presuppositions underpinning liberal civilization and historical understanding. In both cases his philosophical practice is to identify the a priori conditions that make possible the practices of civilization on the one hand and historical knowledge on the other hand. The analysis of the presuppositions that are entertained in liberal practice and historical knowledge demands appraisal and discrimination regarding the implications of concepts. They are not merely read off from experience, because they determine how experience is to be taken. Although civilization and historical knowledge are historical achievements, Collingwood’s analysis of the principles that underpin them serves at the same time as their justification. He shows how the principles fit with one another and contribute to the development of the native attributes of the mind, namely freedom and reason.9 While there is an underlying continuity to Collingwood’s practice and conception of philosophy throughout his career, there is, of course, development and discontinuity. The published texts in which Collingwood concentrates upon the character of philosophy itself, are Speculum Mentis, An Essay on Philosophical Method and An Essay on Metaphysics. These three texts exemplify early, middle and late ways in which Collingwood conceives of philosophy. In Speculum Mentis philosophy is an enterprise that reveals reflexively the privileged place that it occupies in the overall scheme of things. Rival activities, such as art, science, history and religion are diagnosed as defective in relation to philosophy, on account of the dichotomous relationship, which they assume to obtain between the subject and object of their activities. Philosophy, conversely, is taken to bridge this gap and to recognize the mind-affected character of all experience. Collingwood, in An Essay on Philosophical Method, rather than speculating on the position occupied by philosophy on the map of knowledge, attends to the procedural form of philosophy itself. This reflexive pursuit of philosophy as critical rethinking is connected to Speculum Mentis, in that the latter’s map of knowledge may be said to constitute a scale of forms that is the express object of inquiry in An Essay on Philosophical Method. The novel and explicit focus on method of the latter assumes that philosophy is both systematic in its tracing of the patterns that are exhibited by a scale of forms and historical because philosophy proceeds by way of criticism and assimilation of previous philosophies. This recognition of the historicity of philosophy assumes a pronounced form in An Essay on Metaphysics and other late writings.

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought 31

Collingwood’s recognition of the autonomy of historical knowledge combines with his acceptance of an historical dimension to philosophizing to mark a contrast between the way he conceives of the relations between philosophy and history in his late writings and his sense of the subordination of history to philosophy in Speculum Mentis. Collingwood in his later writings effects a rapprochement between philosophy and history, but it is not a takeover of philosophy by history. Rather it is part of a balanced appreciation of experience and ways of knowing in which philosophy rethinks the general relationships between activities and theorizes the presuppositions of distinct activities such as history and art. In this process of rethinking, history is not merely instrumental to the achievement of philosophy. Philosophy and history are theorized as independent activities that perform significant roles in the acquisition of knowledge, selfknowledge and emotional self-awareness. Throughout Collingwood’s philosophical career, he draws upon Hegel’s conception and practice of philosophy in formulating his own style of philosophizing. Collingwood himself perceived the merit of Speculum Mentis to derive from what it had stolen from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind.10 While this may be a somewhat throwaway piece of ironic modesty, the affinity between Speculum Mentis and Hegel’s philosophy in terms of method and content is not to be denied. Speculum Mentis is an experiential ascent to progressively more coherent forms of self-consciousness and it culminates, like Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, in the realization that successive errors exhibited by preceding forms of consciousness constitute a pathway to truth. The construal of conscious experience as constituting a scale of forms by which concepts are integrally related in their common and cumulative specification of truth is consonant with Hegel’s methodological procedure, which in turn is the paradigm for An Essay on Philosophical Method. The latter’s formulation of philosophical thinking as a style of rethinking that draws upon past philosophizing is a rehearsal of a standard Hegelian notion of philosophy. In An Essay on Metaphysics, Collingwood’s apparent renunciation of metaphysical engagement with being is signalled to be consonant with Hegel’s logical analysis of being. Collingwood does not repudiate Hegel’s account of metaphysics as is suggested by Rotenstreich. In fact he takes care to highlight the compatibility of his conception of metaphysics with Hegel’s.11 His notion of the consupponibility of metaphysical assumptions is affiliated to Hegel’s conception of the inter-related character of metaphysical concepts.12 Moreover, Collingwood’s unpublished writings

32 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

on logic and metaphysics in the 1920s and 1930s acknowledge expressly the inspiration he derived from Hegel in formulating developmental forms of logic and ontology.13 Collingwood’s Hegelian recognition of the necessarily critical character of the history of philosophy entails, though, that his engagement with Hegel is not an uncritical assimilation of his doctrines. In his early unpublished analyses of logic, Collingwood observes that there is a tendency for Hegel’s absolutism to privilege philosophical reason over the contingencies of the sensible world. Collingwood, in his later work, is critical of Hegel’s subordination of history and historical change to philosophical reason and this critique of Hegel informs Collingwood’s mature notion of an interplay between the several human activities that does not admit of a hierarchy. In Collingwood’s conception of the autonomy of historical knowledge and the indispensability of art in achieving emotional self-knowledge, he disavows their Hegelian philosophical circumscription. Collingwood’s sensitivity to the radical contingency of practical affairs accentuates his sensitivity to the practical possibilities of philosophy that are denied in Hegel’s thought. The differences between Hegel and Collingwood on the character and role of philosophy are important in highlighting the distinctiveness of their enterprises. In the rest of this chapter the continuities and discontinuities within Collingwood’s conception of philosophy are examined. Collingwood’s persisting sense of the practice of philosophy as the recognition of the overlap between concepts and its tracing of internal, dialectical linkages between aspects of experience is emphasized. Speculum Mentis, An Essay on Philosophical Method and An Essay on Metaphysics, the three principal texts in which Collingwood concentrated upon examining the character and role of philosophy, are reviewed. To explicate the development of their doctrines, though, requires exploration of Collingwood’s philosophical review of areas of experience and analysis of additional unpublished material as well as the early Religion and Philosophy.

Early writings on philosophy – dialectical logic and the inclusiveness of philosophy In Collingwood’s early writings philosophy highlights the connectedness of experience. In his early explorations of logic Collingwood develops a view of logic as connecting thoughts rather than appraising the legitimacy of discrete operations of thought. In his first

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major statement on the nature of philosophy, Religion and Philosophy, Collingwood imagines philosophy to achieve an understanding of experience as a whole. Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy unites religion with philosophy in their common aspiration to provide comprehensive explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that religion cannot restrict what is to be considered a legitimate area of philosophical inquiry. He urges that theology cannot operate as a protected sphere. Religion is to be open to philosophical scrutiny. Collingwood contends that a philosophical perspective must scrutinize and explain standard religious claims, notably the claims of Christianity. Collingwood in Religion and Philosophy assumes philosophy to be holistic in its examination of experience and in its sense of the unity between God and man, which is proclaimed in the Christian religion. Philosophy, for Collingwood, in its comprehensive understanding of experience, takes the infinite to be revealed in the finite, rather than assuming the spheres of the finite and the infinite to operate in mutually exclusive and thereby self-liquidating ways. Collingwood, in Religion and Philosophy, takes all philosophies to assume God in their deployment of general schemes of thought to conceive of reality. He maintains that materialism and subjective idealism are equally unrealistic. What makes best sense of reality, for Collingwood, is a perspective that takes thought to inform an objective material world and the subjective activities of human beings. Such a perspective allows for difference and unity within the universe. For Collingwood, philosophy and religion must see the world as a selfdifferentiated unity, and this conception of reality underlies all his subsequent philosophizing. In discussing the nature of personality and how individuals are connected and yet distinct, Collingwood remarks, ‘The identity of two minds which think the same thing does, as we have already seen, in one sense abolish the difference between them; but this very abolition is only possible through the free and independent activity of each mind.’14 This nuanced discussion of personal identity, like Religion and Philosophy in general, is not to be dismissed as mere juvenilia. The universality of thought that it assumes is taken by Collingwood throughout his writings to provide the basis for a rethinking of experience, as thought is not sequestered within borders like mere bodies.15 The recognition of the reciprocity between categories of individuality and sociality, which reflects a wider commitment to linking unity and difference, is evident throughout Collingwood’s career.16

34 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

The defining project of Religion and Philosophy is its determination to read the scope of religious language and worship as being assimilable to the explanatory reach of an inclusive, dialectical and holistic philosophy. Ironically, while this ambition suggests that Collingwood undervalues the differences that separate forms of experience, the concentrated philosophical message of the book, and of Collingwood’s general philosophizing, is that difference is not to be sacrificed by a reductive pursuit of unity. Collingwood makes this very point in counselling against the reduction of the notion of God to a purely immanent philosophical principle. He remarks, ‘The formless and empty Absolute of this abstract metaphysic perished long ago in the fire of Hegel’s sarcasm; and it is curious to find the very same pseudoAbsolute, the “night in which all cows are black,” still regarded as being for good or evil the essence of philosophical thought.’17 Collingwood’s reference to Hegel alludes to the Phenomenology of Mind without directly citing it. It is symptomatic of his general reliance upon Hegel’s texts and formulas to support his essential doctrines. In this case, Collingwood’s sense that philosophy must avoid reducing the complexity of reality in its quest for unity runs throughout his writing. It inspires his revision of Speculum Mentis so as to acknowledge the relative independence of forms of reflective activity in the differentiated unity of a liberal civilization. Collingwood develops his sense of philosophy as recognizing and rethinking the internally self-differentiated character of reality in a series of unpublished essays on logic, on which he worked from towards the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1920s. In his Autobiography Collingwood refers to the manuscript of ‘Truth and Contradiction’, maintaining that the only copies of the manuscript were destroyed, though, in fact, a part of the manuscript has survived and is held in the Bodleian Library.18 Collingwood observes that’ Truth and Contradiction’ is critical of standard contemporary notions of logic and epistemology, and contains an account of his alternative logic of question and answer in which propositions are replaced as the standard terms for logical analysis by chains of question and answer processes. While the partial manuscript of ‘Truth and Contradiction’ does not reveal specific reference to the notion of a logic of question and answer, it develops a philosophical understanding of truth that is compatible with this later account. Truth is not seen to be predicable of isolated judgements that can be neatly opposed to errors, but rather reflects the inter-relations between concepts that are constitutive of

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reality, so that truth is taken to be a developing system of thought. Collingwood maintains that William the Conqueror’s victory in the Battle of Hastings is a fact only in the context of a set of developments in which it has a place. Collingwood argues against a conceptual notion of identity that excludes it from other concepts, maintaining that an identity is only constituted and sustained by its differential relations with other identities. Correlative to the notion of reality as constituting an internally differentiated set of concepts in ‘Truth and Contradiction’ is the notion of truth as a development of a set of concepts in which reality is differentiated.19 Collingwood expressly relates his elaboration of the notion of identity and truth to a sympathetic endorsement of Hegel’s critique of the law of identity and Hegel’s developmental notion of truth as a concrete universal.20 In his unpublished ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, Collingwood likewise urges that the logic of concepts is essentially developmental. The copula is taken to express the internal dynamics of conceptual development, whereby concepts are determined by means of their inter-relations.21 Categorical judgements, from this perspective, are testimony to the self-determining activity of thought. This logic of becoming is clearly Hegelian and Collingwood expressly recognizes its Hegelian pedigree. He observes, ‘Here is Hegel’s doctrine of categories (concrete concepts) as in themselves capable of truth; for such concepts are themselves systems of judgements.’22 In his unpublished ‘Notes on Formal Logic’ of 1920, Collingwood reinforces the argument that a rational logic must be developmental, by highlighting the shortcomings of the prevalent practice of a logic of being. A logic of being is diagnosed to be defective in that it sets up an artificial distinction between being and thought in demarcating the being of reality from the thinking by which it is known, and hence does not allow for a developing conceptual discrimination of reality. It is a form of realism that denies the inter-relations between concepts.23 In his ‘Prolegomena to Logic’, which he composed between 1920 and 1921, Collingwood emphasizes that thought and logic should not be conceived as the counterposing of subjective judgements to a world of undeveloping facts. He takes the essence of thought to be dynamic and inferential and imagines that the subjectivity of thought is involved in the objectivity of thought. He rehearses a characterization of philosophical thinking that persists throughout his career in observing, ‘The movement of thought is not a subjective movement away from the ramifications of an objective reality. It is the rethinking of what we have already thought.’24 Collingwood recognizes that Hegel is

36 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

pre-eminent amongst previous philosophers in addressing the notion he is advocating, which is of ‘…an intelligible whole whose very being is that of a system of relations.’25 Collingwood notes, though, that on occasions Hegel lapsed into misconceiving the whole as the very undifferentiated unity against which his concrete, developmental idealism was directed. Collingwood goes on to observe that the followers of Hegel, by whom he most probably meant the British Idealists, certainly misconstrue the whole to be an undifferentiated unity.26 In 1920, according to his Autobiography Collingwood also developed his ideas on the logic of history in the manuscript of a book, ‘Libellus de Generatione’, which he maintains was destroyed.27 However, a manuscript of the original is in the Bodleian Library, and, like the contemporaneous material that has been discussed previously, it emphasizes the significance of taking reality to be a world of becoming.28 He argues against an abstract notion of identity that excludes difference.29 In developing a sense of the interplay between identity and difference, Collingwood aligns himself with the objective idealism of Kant and Hegel rather than with subjective idealism. The world for Collingwood is an objectively developing one in which difference is implied in its becoming, it is not the product of subjective fancy, which, like realism, opposes subjectivity to objectivity. He relates his notion of becoming to the development of personal identity. He observes, ‘My personal identity is the identity of a process – my life.’30 In working out a conception of the processual character of logic, Collingwood lays the foundations for an understanding of the character of change that is implied in historical development. He remarks, ‘The past – It died in order to live, and it lives in the present, which will travel by the same road in its time.’31 In characterizing historical change, Collingwood invokes a notion of the developmental character of reality, in which identity implies distinction and in which the subjective processes of knowing are linked to the processes of objective development so that philosophy and history are to be linked by their inter-related conceptions of knowledge and development. Collingwood castigates the false and abstract opposition of history and philosophy, that he takes to be a product of a nondialectical understanding of reality. He urges, ‘For the world of becoming, on the other hand, history is philosophy and philosophy is history, not as an undifferentiated identity.’32 For Collingwood, the world develops historically just as thinking about its concepts develops, and so philosophy, the rethinking of categories of reality, has an historical dimension.

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Collingwood’s early philosophical writings, then, show a strong commitment to the rethinking of logic so as to allow for the dynamic systematically differentiated character of thought. In this perspective, error is not to be divorced from the activity of discovering the truth. In Religion and Philosophy, Collingwood shows a positive commitment to think holistically by means of philosophy, and in so doing he makes philosophy the supreme mode of knowing. In relation to his key doctrines of the developmental aspects of reality and thinking and the self-differentiated character of the unity that is the object of philosophical inquiry, Collingwood recognizes the provenance of his ideas in Hegel’s philosophy. At the same time, however, he offers occasional criticisms of Hegel’s tendency to lapse into absorbing change and dissonance into an absolutist philosophical perspective. In the ‘Libellus de Generatione’, which is predicated on Hegel’s objective idealism, he objects to Hegel’s schematism.33 In his highly elliptical ‘Notes on Hegel’s Logic’ (1920) he acknowledges the dialectical paradigm of Hegel’s philosophy, but, as Iiritano observes, signals a tendency for Hegel to lapse into a Spinozist absolutism, which privileges identity over change.34 Collingwood criticizes the tendency for Hegel to separate philosophical thinking too rigidly from pre-philosophical thinking and so to succumb, in part, to a Platonic dualism, in which philosophy is privileged over other reflective activities.35

Speculum Mentis and the ascendancy of philosophy In Speculum Mentis Collingwood aims to review the whole of experience by philosophically rethinking the core reflective activities of mind. His avowed aim is to rethink the unity of mind and its activities. He maintains the unity of mind that was experienced in medieval times has been sundered by modernity. Modernity is taken to have incubated the development of individuality and the separateness of the various activities of mind.36 Collingwood’s sense of the practical and theoretical importance of rethinking, and thereby re-establishing a sense of the unity of experience is conducted by means of a philosophical review of experiential patterns of the mind’s activities, and it is in turn predicated upon an historical conception of the development of modernity. In his review of experiential forms of the mind, Collingwood follows a dialectical pathway of questioning the self-consistency of these activities and aims to establish an underlying truth thorough

38 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

the detection of error, thereby enacting the course that he had elaborated in his writings on logic. In construing his course of thinking in Speculum Mentis as a dialectical one, in which there is a development of successive modes of experience, as inconsistencies in one mode invoke succeeding modes that are thereby shown to be internally connected with one another, Collingwood rejects a notion of philosophy that assumes the exclusivity of spheres of activity. Collingwood denies that the forms of experience that he reviews are related to one another merely externally so that their identities are mutually exclusive species. He observes, ‘We have seen that our forms of experience are not mere species of a genus, because each denies the others; and because they are not species they have not that indifference with regard to one another which characterizes abstract logical classification.’37 In undertaking his review of the map of knowledge, Collingwoood deals with five key activities of mind. These are designated forms of consciousness that make claims to be the truth of reality. None save philosophy are shown to have the resources to redeem their claims. Art, science, history, religion and philosophy are the five forms of consciousness, which are investigated. Art is the least sophisticated of the mind-sets that are examined. It is ensnared by its positing a world of pure imagination and its simultaneous adherence to the value and truthfulness of this experience. Its presumption of truth lacks supportive argument. Its contradictory character leads to a religious perspective in which imagination is held to reveal the truth of experience. But religion in turn is held to be susceptible to the criticism from a scientific consciousness that interrogates empirical reality and questions the assertions of religion. The scientific perspective, in turn, is undermined because it is the epitome of an abstract externalizing perspective, whereby the links between mind and reality, the whole and the parts, are ignored. It presumes that explanation can proceed by abstracting a universal law that is construed as an external mechanism, which determines particular occurrences. History is taken to resolve the problems of science in that it conceives of the world of action as a totality in which there is a complete process of becoming. The historical impetus to conceive of a concrete inter-connected encompassing world of facts, however, is in turn taken to be illicitly presumptive. Its aspiration to encompass the totality of facts is a Sisyphean task. The world of facts is ever increasing and supersedes the reach of a single synoptic perspective.

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Philosophy, in Speculum Mentis reveals the errors of other activities of mind because it realizes that world and mind are correlative, and that the errors rehearsed in its phenomenological review of consciousness are not divorced from truth, but are part and parcel of the process of becoming. Philosophical thinking captures the character of mind absolutely, so that it supersedes the errors of other mind activities by rethinking their operations. In so doing, Collingwood criticizes non-philosophical reflective activities and identifies philosophy as providing knowledge of the absolute mind. The absolute mind for Collingwood, though is not distinct from the empirical; world of becoming and particular acts of mind. He remarks, ‘The absolute mind is not “one stupendous whole”. It lives in its entirety in every individual and in every act of every individual, yet not indifferently present in every triangle but expressing itself in every individual uniquely and irreplaceably.’38 The procedure and outcome of Speculum Mentis is redolent of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. The affinity is acknowledged by Collingwood. The course of both books is an examination of consciousness that is conducted by analysis of mindsets in the course of which mind discovers its relationship to a presumed reality is skewed or contradictory. For Hegel, the pathway traversed by consciousness is a ‘highway of despair’ in which consciousness is alienated in that it fails to recognize its own self in the world with which it is engaged. But despair is redeemed in the course of the philosophical journey of The Phenomenology of Mind, in which a bewildering variety of forms of consciousness are reviewed. The rethinking of conscious experience that is conducted by philosophy leads to reflexive awareness of the truth, which is secured by the philosophical understanding of consciousness. Philosophy reveals that reality is not beyond consciousness, but is coeval with the development of consciousness.39 In Speculum Mentis similarly, the rethinking that is undertaken by philosophy transfigures the phenomenological journey of consciousness. Collingwood sees his task to be the rethinking of forms of consciousness that makes claims to truth, namely art, science, history, religion and philosophy. Philosophy and the character of philosophy are held to be revealed by the philosophical exposure of the limitations of the perspectives reviewed. Philosophy is absolute in that it appraises other forms of consciousness and in so doing takes and explains experience to be a systematically related whole. As with Hegel, the connective activity of philosophy in examining forms of conscious experience, is taken to be the practice of dialectic.

40 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

An Essay on Philosophical Method and its application to philosophical problems Speculum Mentis is a tour de force that sets out Collingwood’s holistic dialectical account of experience in which the forms of the mind’s activities are inter-linked in terms of the degree to which they express the truth of the mind’s activities. What is implicit in Collingwood’s account is a notion of the distinctive method of philosophy. It is a rethinking of experience that evaluates the adequacy of thought in apprising reality and it takes the concepts of thought to be rethinkable in terms of their relations to one another in exhibiting and capturing the qualities of mind. Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method provides a considered statement on philosophical method. It is the single book that both he and subsequent commentators have taken to be exemplary in style and content. In this book, Collingwood aims to provide a meta-understanding of the dialectical procedure of philosophy, that he takes to be distinct from the inductive and deductive methods of the natural sciences and mathematics. He traces the lineage of the method he prescribes to philosophical predecessors, arguing that Hegel’s philosophy is paradigmatic of this systematic approach. Collingwood understands a philosophical treatment of concepts to be sui generis in that philosophy recognizes that concepts are internally related to one another. It analyzes concepts as constituting a scale of forms. Whereas empirical concepts are envisaged as being divisible in respect of being exclusive members of species, concepts in philosophy are not held to be divisible into exclusive domains. For instance, Collingwood perceives a philosophical conception of goodness as an investigation that will locate forms of goodness on an overlapping and ascending scale so that the pursuance of duty is seen to exemplify goodness in a distinct but more intensive way than is evident in a utilitarian perspective. But the maximisation of interests is seen to be a component of goodness just as the exercise of duty is seen to involve and supersede the pursuit of interests. Collingwood understands the overlapping forms of philosophical conceptualization to form a system in so far as philosophy itself is a philosophical concept, so that its specific classes overlap in the generic system of philosophical understanding.40 Collingwood identifies Hegel as being the exemplar of this philosophical method, observing that ‘…he used this method throughout his philosophical works.’41 He also expressly depicts this method to be

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought 41

a kind of rethinking of experience. He maintains, ‘If the substance of philosophical knowledge is known to us, however dimly and confusedly before philosophical reasoning begins, the purpose of that reasoning can only be to present it in a new form; and this will be a reasoned form, that is, the form of a system constructed according to certain principles. The philosopher who unfolds such a system is not spinning a web of ideas from the recesses of his own mind; he is expressing the results of his own experience and that of other people in a reasoned and orderly shape; and at every step in his argument instead of asking one question only, as in exact science, namely “What follows from the premises?” he has to ask another as well: Does that conclusion agree with what we find in actual experience?”’42 The resonance of this passage with the Preface to The Philosophy of Right, both in terms of its language and substance is not accidental. Its evocation of Hegelian philosophy is of a piece with the justification of the ontological argument in An Essay on Philosophical Method, which harmonizes with Hegel’s post-Kantian defence of the ontological argument as affirming the reality of thought in his Logic (Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences).43 Throughout An Essay on Philosophical Method Collingwood rehearses Hegel’s sense of the retrospective systematic method of philosophy, according to which philosophy does not invent its repertoire of concepts but reconceives what already informs a reality, which is meaningful precisely because of its expression of thought. What philosophy achieves is a systematic unified understanding of its meaning.44 An Essay on Philosophical Method was regarded by Collingwood as his most finished book, and his subsequent references to the work in correspondence show his continuing allegiance to its account of philosophical method.45 Its conception of philosophical method also informs his preceding work. It is this very procedure of philosophy that is held to justify the elevated position assigned to philosophy in Speculum Mentis. The examination of experience that is conducted in Speculum Mentis constitutes a scale of forms. The concepts informing art, religion, science and history and philosophy are related to one another on a common scale arising out of their degrees of truthfulness in capturing the nature of mind and reality. The essence of Collingwood’s developing conception of logic in his early unpublished writings turns upon a notion of thought as self-determining. Concepts are seen as constituting a process whereby the development of successive forms of judgement are related together and hence may be said to constitute a common scale.

42 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

Collingwood in the immediate aftermath of An Essay on Philosophical Method developed his ideas on metaphysics. In his ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’ of 1934, which has been published as an appendix to the revised edition of An Essay on Metaphysics he explores the character of metaphysics and in doing so he expatiates upon his earlier thoughts on the nature of the logic of becoming. He also signals his continuing preoccupation with Hegel. In a rehearsal of the opening moves of Hegel’s Logic, he maintains that the notions of nothing and becoming are outcomes of a rethinking of the notion of being. He observes, ‘Just as the idea of pure being cannot be grasped in its bare abstraction without allowing it to sprout determinations out of itself like nothing and becoming, so the idea of metaphysics in general cannot be grasped in abstraction by a purely formal definition, unless we allow this abstract idea to sprout determinations of its own in the shape of particular metaphysical problems and doctrines.’46 In his ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, a series of notebooks on metaphysics that Collingwood wrote during 1933 and 1934 he develops a first order cosmology. The character of this cosmology will be discussed in the succeeding chapter that reviews Collingwood’s notion of nature. In relation to their exhibition of Collingwood’s notion of philosophy, however, it is worth remarking that his cosmological ideas depend upon the application of the scale of forms in that he takes the concepts underlying nature to exhibit a gradational development in expressing the mutual connectedness of things and the freedom of thought. Collingwood’s cosmology is a heightened expression of his continuing philosophical aspiration to recognize and explain the differentiated unity of reality. The common scale of thought and its expression links the spatio-temporal possibility of life with the conscious reflexive experience of self-conscious thought.47 In the unpublished ‘Central Problems of Metaphysics’, lectures that were delivered in 1935, Collingwood emphasizes that the key to the success of modern metaphysics is that it must avoid one-sided forms of subjectivism and objectivism, and concomitant forms of subjective idealism and realism. He observes, ‘Over and over again we have found and shall find that the key to difficult problems in modern metaphysics consists in the discovery that these two worlds (objective and subjective worlds) are not mutually exclusive’.48 Collingwood maintains that the world is to be conceived as a developing one, which is to be rethought philosophically as a connected system of concepts in which the more complex and inclusive supervene upon the primitive and simple. In asserting this persisting feature of his philosophical standpoint,

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought 43

Collingwood expressly invokes Hegel as his precursor in developing a systematic account of objective idealism that steers a course between narrow forms of subjective idealism and materialism. He cites with approval Hegel’s systematic understanding of reality and the objective idealism it instantiates. He notes, ‘All I want to do is to call attention to one feature of that system, namely its objective idealism – not so familiar as it ought to be, even to professional philosophers. Yet it is a notion of extreme importance and the importance of Hegel in the history of philosophy is chiefly due to his place as the founder of modern objective idealism.’49 Collingwood goes on to acknowledge that despite the appearance of jerry-building in Hegel’s system that rules out its complete acceptance, Hegel’s notion of objective idealism is the most promising of all current metaphysical ideas.50 Collingwood in the mid 1930 pursues a creative developmental metaphysics that accords with the systematic developmental method of rethinking that he advocates in An Essay on Philosophical Method. His cosmological speculation accords with the objective idealism that he derives from Hegel, and to which he is committed in all his writings. Moreover, in his later philosophizing Collingwood continues to deploy a mode of reasoning that is consonant with the notion of philosophy, that is worked out as a methodology in An Essay on Philosophical Method. The somewhat deflationary account of metaphysics that Collingwood offers in his An Essay on Metaphysics does not expressly involve a systematic notion of philosophy that employs a scale of forms technique. The actual examination of metaphysical presuppositions in An Essay on Metaphysics, however, takes them to be interconnected. Moreover, in the very late works, the unfinished The Principles of History and most notably The New Leviathan, Collingwood practises metaphysics as a form of philosophical rethinking that is systematic in observing the overlapping unity of the concepts constituting history and civilization.

An Essay on Metaphysics and the character of philosophy in the later writings The evidence to which Knox refers to justify his sense of a dramatic decline in Collingwood’s philosophising is drawn primarily from An Essay on Metaphysics. It is diagnosed as subscribing to a relativism in which philosophy is deprived of the autonomy that it was granted in An Essay on Philosophical Method. Knox’s view of An Essay on Metaphysics is supported by Walsh, Donagan, Rotenstreich and Toulmin who read the

44 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

work as subscribing to the relativity of metaphysical standpoints.51 Certainly, there are aspects of the work, and of related passages in his Autobiography, that signal a shift in Collingwood’s position. Collingwood maintains that metaphysics does not propound propositions susceptible of being assessed as being true or false, because metaphysics is not composed of propositions.52 Rather, he takes metaphysics to form the cluster of absolute presuppositions, upon which repose the questions to which propositional answers are given in activities such as natural science. Collingwood maintains that metaphysics is a special form of rethinking, which rehearses what was previously presumed, and not necessarily directly thought or expressed. It is the rethinking of what the evidence that is exhibited in expressed thoughts indicates to be implied in historic activities such as natural science. In his later conception of metaphysics, Collingwood imagines the absolute presuppositions of metaphysics to form a cluster or constellation. He emphasizes that this constellation of presuppositions is not to be thought of as collectively deducible, as in a quasi-mathematical science, but instead, each constituent presupposition is to be ascertained independently by interpretation of the historical evidence.53 Hence, Collingwood’s reformulation of metaphysics appears to deprive metaphysics of autonomy, and yet amidst the evident discontinuities there remain continuities with his former views on philosophical method. Moreover the radicalism of his formulaic characterisations of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics and in his Autobiography are more intelligible if attention is paid to the intellectual and political contexts in which they were written, and the audience to which it is addressed. There is internal evidence from the text, and supporting contextual evidence to suggest that one of the points of the text, its principal illocutionary force, is to maintain the integrity of metaphysics in the context of an assault upon it from logical positivists, whose positivism itself is evidence of a wider threat to the cultivation of reason, the hallmark of Western civilization.54 Collingwood appears to be operating strategically in accepting the language of the logical positivists in the way he defends the practice of metaphysics. Just as the logical positivists deny that metaphysical propositions can be meaningful, so Collingwood admits that the absolute presuppositions lack propositional content. While Collingwood dissents from the positivist equation of meaning with a restricted sense of what can count as the verification of meaning, his strategy, nonetheless, is to appeal to the assumptions actually maintained by those who decry metaphysics. He

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought 45

defends the study of metaphysics by arguing that it consists in the historic retrieval of what is supposed absolutely. He highlights how metaphysical assumptions play a significant role in the natural sciences, which are revered as the paradigmatic forms of intellectual inquiry by the positivists. Collingwood, in pointing to the role played by metaphysics in supporting the activities of the natural sciences and in avoiding the defence of the propositional content of metaphysics, adopts a strategy that is at least compatible with the defining doctrines of the likely audience of his work, contemporary philosophers. Collingwood’s recognition of the strategic factors that are involved in communicating with audiences is evidenced in his correspondence, where he reflects upon the utility of presenting his ideas on history by means of an historic review of ideas about history.55 Collingwood’s historicization of metaphysics appears to distance him from Hegel, and yet he continues to express a high regard for Hegel. His repudiation of metaphysics as having a direct concern with being is supported by a review of Hegel’s account of being in his Science of Logic, where the abstractness of being disqualifies its differentiation from nothing. Indeed, Collingwood’s respect for Hegel is evidenced by his invocation of Hegel to support both a historicist form of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics and a first order notion of metaphysics in his unpublished ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’. Collingwood does not see his formulation of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics as a move away from Hegel. In his notes for this latter book, ‘Concerning Metaphysics’ he cites the historical aspect of Hegel’s metaphysics as a precedent for his own notion of metaphysics. He observes, ‘Thus the Hegelian dialectic is in reality Hegel’s picture of the method which a philosopher has to pursue in discovering what in fact the philosophical presuppositions of our ordinary thinking are.’56 Similarly, in his essay ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, Collingwood argues that his notion of metaphysics as the science of absolute presuppositions is compatible with Hegel’s investigative procedure in examining logical categories.57 Again, Collingwood invokes Hegel to support an historically-oriented conception of cosmology in the published conclusion of The Idea of Nature, and draws extensively upon Hegel to support the first order account of cosmology that is contained in an alternative, cosmological Conclusion of 1934.58 Collingwood’s account of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics is motivated in part by strategic considerations, and its continuity with his previously formulated notion of philosophical method should be recognized. Philosophy is not dissolved into history. Martin in his

46 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

essay, ‘Collingwood’s Doctrine of Absolute Presuppositions and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge’ highlights how such presuppositions are to be arrived at only through reasoned logical argument from the evidence of scientific theories and practice.59 Metaphysics, for Collingwood, employs logical reasoning in identifying absolute presuppositions and it also explores their consupponibility, that is, their mutual compatibility that allows them to operate together. Collingwood in ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’ emphasizes that the metaphysician does not merely catalogue metaphysical presuppositions, but presents them in systematic fashion, exhibiting their logical compatibilities. He observes, ‘Metaphysics is …a presentation of the principles it discovers, not merely in the form of a catalogue, but in the form of a system.’60 In his ‘Notes for an Essay on Logic’ (1940), Collingwood observes the logical relations between suppositions. He notes, ‘Suppositions are logical in so far as, a number of suppositions being made at once, these are mutually consupponible. “At once” here, has not a temporal but a logical, signification.’61 To establish a conclusive appreciation of the actual character of the practice of metaphysics, which Collingwood recommends in An Essay on Metaphysics, attention should be paid to the examples of metaphysical analysis that Collingwood provides. The examples point up the features of the practice of metaphysics, which are not best captured in epigrammatic statements. As an example of the historically informed metaphysics that is entertained in An Essay on Metaphysics Collingwood reviews historic notions of God, considering specifically how these notions bear upon ways of conceiving the natural world, and how, in turn, they underlie the practice and propositions of natural science. Modern science is seen to rest upon the appropriate metaphysical analysis of God that was undertaken by the Patristic fathers, who are held to have corrected Aristotelian errors. This analysis of God involves the four inter-related presuppositions; that there is one God, that God created the world, that the activity of God is selfdifferentiating and that God sets the world in motion. These aspects of God are held to be compatible with one another and with the practices of natural science. Aristotle is deemed mistaken in his metaphysical analysis, in that he neither conceives of God as creating the natural world, nor considers God to have set the natural world in motion. In appraising Aristotle’s metaphysics, Collingwood interprets the notion of God setting the world in motion as being integrally related to the conception of God creating the world. Collingwood hereby shows how metaphysical analysis is not a mere acceptance of what is given in

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experience, metaphysical analysis determines how the world of experience is to be interpreted. Collingwood maintains by a priori analysis that sense experience cannot arrive at the idea of a natural world in which things happen by themselves.62 The philosophical work of metaphysical analysis involves discriminating how concepts are to be conceived and connected. In his discussion of this example Collingwood shows how he understands metaphysics to be a special form of historical investigation, which is normative or as he terms it, criteriological. His analysis does not simply detect or notice presuppositions of practices but analyses and appraises the inter-connections between concepts. In An Essay on Metaphysics Collingwood concentrates on examples of metaphysical thinking that relate to natural science, but along the way he indicates that rethinking the presuppositions of historical thinking is also to be included. He notes that current assumptions about nationalism are incompatible with the presuppositions of the development of the scientific discipline of history. The notion of history rules out a naturalistic standpoint that is associated with nationalism. The implication of this example is that the systematic rethinking of the interconnected exploration of the conditions of historical knowledge, which is conducted in The Principles of History, is to be regarded as a kind of metaphysical thinking that is inspired by the developing practice of history, but which can also work out the meaning of its presuppositions so as to rule out specific conceptions of the historical process. Although Collingwood’s reformulation of metaphysics is ambiguous and he might have more clearly recognised it to involve a priori normative philosophical analysis, his actual specification of metaphysical analysis maintains continuities with his earlier account of philosophical method. Its radicalism is partly a result of the need to mount a defence of metaphysics in an unpropitious environment in which civilization was under threat. The threat to civilization is a theme of Collingwood’s next work, The New Leviathan. This book, as Connelly argues, can be seen as constituting a metaphysical analysis of the conditions of civilization, though it is an analysis that is self-consciously undertaken and presented as a systematic normative inquiry, in which the conditions of civilization are developed so as to show how they are rational and conduce to freedom.63

Conclusion There is an underlying unity to Collingwood’s differing formulations of the nature, procedure and role of philosophy. Philosophical form,

48 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

for Collingwood, is tied to its content. Indeed, a persisting feature of Collingwood’s notion of philosophy is its critique of a dichotomous reading of reality, in which form are divorced from content. The aim of philosophy, for Collingwood, is to perceive connections between concepts and to conceive of reality systematically in terms of its exhibition of overlapping concepts so that the complex and more explanatory concepts are seen to emerge out of the simple and undifferentiated. At the same time Collingwood’s notion of the practice of philosophy as a rethinking of experience that reflects upon and develops the systematic inter-connections between concepts is maintained throughout his writings. Collingwood’s earliest writings on logic aim to rebut a view of logic, whereby it operates as a procedure that is external to the propositions that are to be appraised. Collingwood sees the world and its correlative logic as processual, in which connections between concepts are progressively deepened, and in which the objective world and subjective judgements about the world are differing aspects of an underlying unity. Religion and Philosophy presumes that philosophy is an inclusive discipline that rethinks experience, appreciating that finite aspects of the real are so many ways of revealing its infinite capacities. Speculum Mentis, Collingwood’s first major work, highlights the supremacy of philosophy in experience precisely on account of its synoptic character. The method of philosophy is implicitly seen as a rethinking of the forms of experience in the course of which the errors of art, religion, science and history are superseded but not simply rejected, because errors are seen as instrumental to the achievement of truth. An Essay on Philosophical Method presents an elegant elaboration of persisting features of Collingwood’s notion of philosophical method. In this book, Collingwood imagines philosophical thinking to be a rethinking of experience that connects the concepts with which it deals by tracing systematically their overlapping character. They are seen to operate on a common scale, so that the development of a conceptual scheme operates by registering how a set of concepts express more satisfactorily the generic character of the aspect of reality to which they relate. Collingwood’s largely unpublished explorations of metaphysics in the 1930s assume it to be a discipline that can apprise the conceptual character of reality by theorizing its developmental character via a recognition of the inter-connected character of its concepts. Implicit within the objective idealism to which Collingwood is committed throughout his career is the notion that philosophy is to

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought 49

recognize the objective development of forms of reality that express progressively the nature of thought, notably its freedom, generality and capacity to develop systematically. Collingwood’s An Essay on Metaphysics expresses a more deflationary version of the prowess of philosophy than that which informs his earlier writings. The supremacy of philosophy over other forms of experience is jettisoned, as Collingwood accommodates to a positivistic intellectual climate by accenting the historical dimension of metaphysics. History for the later Collingwood is not to be dismissed as maintaining an incoherent perspective as it is in Speculum Mentis. It is held to yield knowledge of mind. Nonetheless, philosophy, and its powers of a priori analysis, is not dismissed in the wake of an enthusiasm for history. Collingwood in An Essay on Metaphysics recognizes that the absolute presuppositions of metaphysics are to be analyzed so as to reveal their logical form and mutual conceptual connections. The process of analyzing the relational character of presuppositions is a critical form of inquiry that retains much of what Collingwood takes to be the systematic method of philosophical rethinking set out in An Essay on Philosophical Method. In attending to the nature of God that is presupposed in modern science, Collingwood takes the correct analysis to recognize the self-differentiating character of God. Both his analytical method and the content of his analysis of God suggest that Collingwood continues to consider that philosophy is a style of rethinking, which is to develop systematic connections between concepts. Indeed, this work of philosophical analysis, involving the working out of the consupponibility, or mutual compatibility of related presuppositions, is explicitly recognized by Collingwood to be a systematic enterprise, redolent of Hegel’s systematic appraisal of conceptual presuppositions.64 The continuity in Collingwood’s philosophizing is reinforced by an appreciation of the metaphysical inquiries that are conducted in the late works, The Principles of Art, The Principles of History and The New Leviathan. In these works, the nature of artistic experience, historical understanding and civilization are explored via the rethinking of the historical emergence of the relevant practices of art, history and a liberal civilization. In each case, Collingwood analyzes the systematic inter-connections of the constitutive concepts of these activities. He also theorizes the unity that exists between these activities by conceiving of civilization as the practice of rationality and freedom, which is evident in the achievements of reflective activities such as history,

50 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

science and metaphysics. Civilization is sustained by liberal political arrangements, but liberal politics, in turn, depend upon rational understanding of its metaphysical conditions and upon emotional recognition of the profoundest feelings underlying its practices, which are expressed in artistic activity.

3 Nature and Mind

Introduction Collingwood understands nature to be related integrally to mind. An explanation of the relationship between nature and mind is central to Collingwood’s philosophy. Collingwood conceives of mind as emerging within and acting upon the phenomena of nature. Collingwood’s writings that are devoted specifically to nature, notably The Idea of Nature and ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, the latter of which remains as yet unpublished in its entirety, invoke nature’s dependence on mind in distinct but related ways. The focus of this chapter is upon Collingwood’s explorations of nature, as mind is serially examined in all chapters, because the mind informs all the reflective activities undertaken and examined by Collingwood. Mind is nonetheless discussed because the relationship of nature to mind is a salient feature of Collingwood’s understanding of nature. For Collingwood, mind is implicated in the study of nature in two ways that harmonize with two styles of rethinking that are undertaken by Collingwood, and which are distinguished in the Introduction to this work. On the one hand, Collingwood considers that nature is only to be understood by historic acts of mind, so that the idea of nature thereby entails an historical engagement with the development of historical thinking about nature. On the other hand, nature itself is to be understood as exhibiting patterns of rationality that are related to mind by their approximation to the intelligible relations of thought that are maintained and comprehended in human thought and practice. The study of the relational patterns that are exhibited by nature and their relation to mind is the object of Collingwood’s own cosmological philosophical speculation, which is a form of rethinking these patterns and relations. 51

52 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

These two specified ways in which nature and mind relate to one another receive differing emphases in Collingwood’s writings on nature, though they are never entirely divorced from one another. Collingwood’s The Idea of Nature, edited and published posthumously by Knox, presents the idea of nature as emerging historically, and exhibits Collingwood’s historical skills in relating large-scale surveys of the development of ideas.1 General presuppositions about nature are shown to have changed significantly over time in relation to particular developments in the empirical understanding of natural phenomena and to changes in the fundamental mind-sets of cultures. Mind in the form of the scientific activities of human beings presumes general conceptions of nature, which enable particular modes of scientific inquiry to proceed. In the published conclusion to The Idea of Nature, the role and significance of historical activity in the form of actual experiments that are undertaken and recorded on specific occasions are taken to be crucial in the engagement of understanding natural processes. In The Idea of Nature Collingwood interprets past theories of nature in a critical though sympathetic spirit. He comments positively on the cosmological ideas of his contemporaries Alexander and Whitehead. He welcomes their assimilation of the standpoints of modern biology and the physics of relativity. He is particularly impressed by their conceptualization of natural processes as exhibiting inter-connected relations of thought. Collingwood’s evident sympathy with and qualified approval of Whitehead’s standpoint express his recognition of its harmony with contemporary science and its reflection of the way in which philosophical thinking can capture the systematically inter-related character of thought. Collingwood’s appreciation of Whitehead’s cosmological speculation is rehearsed and amplified in Collingwood’s ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, a series of notebooks on cosmology that he wrote concurrently with the lectures for The Idea of Nature.2 In ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’ Collingwood develops a first order cosmology that sets out a conception of nature in which the knowledge of natural phenomena, that informs the natural sciences is rethought so as to envisage nature as a systematically related set of relational patterns of thought. These thought patterns ascend progressively from the merely given nondynamic character of spatial relations to arrive at the conscious formulations of human thought and action. The differing emphases on the relationship between nature and mind that arise from focusing on the one hand, on mankind’s developing historical conceptions of nature, and on the other hand, on developing a contemporary cosmology that perceives mind to be the

Nature and Mind 53

completion of nature, are encapsulated by the distinctiveness of the alternative conclusions to The Idea of Nature. The Conclusion that was published by Knox in the original published conclusion to The Idea of Nature is brief. It highlights the significance of historical activity for the understanding of nature. A short alternative conclusion, that has been published in The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history under the title ‘The Conclusion of 1935’ considers the cosmology of Alexander and extols the notion of process in understanding nature. The third conclusion, referred to as the Cosmological Conclusion by Boucher, likewise has been published in The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, in which it is entitled ‘The Conclusion of 1934’. In this chapter, this latter conclusion will be referred to as the Cosmological Conclusion because this title captures its engagement in detailed cosmological speculation. It reviews the notion of nature as instantiating a systemic pattern of thoughts that evince the free rationality of mind, which can appreciate this developmental character of thought by rethinking its cosmological development systematically.3 These conclusions to The Idea of Nature emphasize differing aspects of Collingwood’s conception of nature. Collingwood takes nature to demand the historical, developing insight of the natural sciences and philosophy to comprehend the rationality of nature. This specification of the dependence of nature on mind indicates the unity between the two. The rational unity of nature and its gradational approximation to the life of the mind is the express focus of Collingwood’s own cosmology he advances in the Cosmological Conclusion and is implicit in the critical sympathy he extends to Alexander and Whitehead’s work in the body of the lectures composing The Idea of Nature. Collingwood also adverts to the unity of mind and nature in The New Leviathan, in which he theorizes how civilization involves the continuing theoretical and practical exploration and exploitation of nature, and is itself nurtured by the spirit of rationality evident in the investigation and exploitation of nature.

Mind Throughout his career Collingwood assigns the analysis of mind a central role in his philosophy. In his ‘Fragment on action and mind’, and ‘Fragment on mind and thought’, Collingwood expresses economically persisting aspects of his conception of mind. Collingwood highlights the active developmental character of mind, and the correlation

54 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

of the knowing mind with the known world. In the ‘Fragment on action and mind’, he observes, ‘Hence all action creates both a new state of the mind and a new state of its world. Know thyself. This is only a true summary of the mind’s duty if knowing oneself includes knowing one’s world.’4 In the ‘Fragment on mind and thought’, Collingwood likewise points to the activity of mind and to the dialectical inter-relationship between the act of knowing and the object of knowledge. He observes, ‘The mind is not an active thing but activity, specifically thinking activity – the act of apprehending.’5 He goes on to link the object of knowledge to the activity of apprehending it. He notes, ‘The two activities are the correlative aspects of one and the same activity.’6 Collingwood maintains that mind is activity and that its activity in the form of thought and action recognizes the intelligibility of the world.7 The world’s intelligibility is correlated to the apprehension of human beings. The active self-constituting character of mind is the core doctrine of Speculum Mentis. Speculum Mentis investigates the map of knowledge, which is constituted by the way the activities of art, history, science, religion and philosophy conceive of experience. The outcome of Collingwood’s investigation, which culminates in philosophical cognition, is that these reflective practices are in error in so far as they assume that their objects constitute a reality separate from their activities. For Collingwood, ‘… the mind’s knowledge of itself is its knowledge of everything else; in knowing itself it knows its world; and in knowing its world it knows itself.’8 The unity of experience is therefore established by the connecting activity of mind that recognizes itself in the mirror of what it perceives and what it undertakes. It evaluates itself and its world. In Speculum Mentis Collingwood represents the achievement of philosophical knowledge as the self-awareness of the Absolute Mind. This does not suggest a flight from the mundane world, and a reduction of particularity to the requirements of a supervening universalism. Collingwood is at pains to point out that mind and the absolute only exist in the particular minds of people situated in particular societies. ‘The absolute mind is not “one stupendous whole”. It lives in its entirety in every individual and every act of every individual, yet not indifferently, as triangularity is indifferently present in every triangle, but expressing itself in every individual uniquely and irreplaceably.’9 The notion of the active self-constituting character of mind underpins Collingwood’s recognition of history as an autonomous discipline that knows mind in a way that is distinct from the methodology of the

Nature and Mind 55

natural sciences. Historians, for Collingwood, are able to understand the past because of their capacity, via the construction and interpretation of evidence, to rethink the past thoughts of purposeful human agents, whose actions exemplify thoughts that are susceptible of being rethought. Natural scientists characteristically imagine natural phenomena to be external to one another, save for the links between them that are established by scientific theory and observation. Historians presume that human agents undertake actions in the light of preceding events, which in turn exhibit the purposiveness, which is the mark of the internality of the relation between mind and act.10 Human agents undertake actions freely in the light of their self-understanding of situations. Historians rethink these actions and thereby confirm the freedom of agency, and of mind. Natural scientists, conversely, conceive of natural phenomena as exhibiting patterns that are determined by external forces. The upshot of Collingwood’s contrast between historical and scientific forms of knowledge is a contrast between mind and nature. Mind is free, while nature is determined. The processes of the mind arrive at this recognition of the contrast between nature and mind. The differing intellectual activities of mind mark out the distinctness of nature from mind. Knowledge of mind, for Collingwood, is to be achieved through the internal criticism, which is undertaken by philosophical reflection and by the critical rethinking of history. In both cases the study of mind recognizes the freedom and rationality of mind and the criteriological or normative character of the reflective understanding of mind. Philosophy in studying logic is concerned to evaluate the validity of conceptual schemes, ethics appraises moral ideas and practices, history re-enacts and reappraises the rational actions of past actors.11 These appropriate ways of studying human thought and conduct assume that reflective operations possess rationality and a rationale by means of which they can be appraised. Natural scientists, in examining natural phenomena, notwithstanding the purposiveness of animal behaviour, characteristically do not assume that the objects of their study selfconsciously evaluate the criteria or norms governing their actions. Rather the operations of natural science supply the external criteria for understanding the phenomena. In his last book, The New Leviathan, Collingwood conducts a critical rethinking of aspects or functions of mind. The rationale for the investigation of mind is provided by the advertised need to review the conditions of civilization. A free civilization, for Collingwood, presupposes the freedom of mind. Mind, in turn, is shown to presuppose the

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body, because mind does not appear as an alien substance but is a development within nature. Mind is investigated philosophically so as to bring out the overlapping character of its various functions. These functions are seen as being inter-connected in so far as all of mind’s functions contribute to the development and recognition of its freedom. In understanding mind, society and civilization as being correlated, Collingwood’s last book, therefore, rehearses a theme of Speculum Mentis. It identifies the freedom and developing rational qualities of mind as underpinning the practices of society and civilization as well as the theoretical modes of construing the world. The freedom of mind underlies the achievement of a free civilization, which includes the practice of civility in all its forms, including the metaphysical study of mind and nature.12

The Idea of Nature Collingwood’s conception of nature is known through a variety of his writings, but his most celebrated account of nature is presented in the posthumously published The Idea of Nature that was edited and prepared for publication after Collingwood’s death by Knox. Relatively little critical commentary has been devoted to the work. Mink interprets it as following Hegel in adopting an historical standpoint. For Mink, The Idea of Nature is Hegelian because it understands nature in terms of successive historical modes of understanding nature, rather than in its framing of an original cosmology. Mink urges that Collingwood’s strategy is to construe the idea of nature as the developing product of the historical activity of mind. On this reading, ideas of nature constitute the changing presuppositions of humanity’s apprehension of nature and natural phenomena. Mink observes, ‘The form which the latter (the dialectical analysis of the products of mind such as is conducted in The Idea of Nature) takes is a history of the development of fundamental concepts guided by the principle that in the history of thought such fundamental concepts develop in the mode of what Hegel called Aufhebung’13 Mink’s recognition of the Hegelian paradigm for The Idea of Nature is rehearsed in Donagan’s interpretation of its standpoint.14 Mink is right to highlight the affinity between Collingwood and Hegel. Collingwood is at one with Hegel in appreciating the historical development of human scientific understanding and the historical character of conceptions of nature. Central to Hegel’s philosophy of nature is a recognition that nature is dialectically dependent upon mind or human

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thinking. The nature of nature, its rationality, would remain unknown without its apprehension by the historic activities of natural scientists and philosophers.15 Hegel in The Philosophy of Nature of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences shows how natural phenomena are linked to the spiritual activity of human beings. Narure is contrasted to mind. Nature exhibits externality and otherness. ‘Nature is estranged from itself; in Nature Spirit lets itself go, a Bacchic God unrestrained and unmindful of itself, in Nature the unity of the Notion is concealed’.16 Hegel explains how the rationality of nature is determined by processes, which are understood by human beings who, unlike natural phenomena, are conscious of their own rationality. Hegel conceives the rationality of nature to be correlative to human understanding. A primary instrument in the process of recognizing and explaining the rationality of nature is natural science. The natural sciences progress historically. Philosophy, in turn, is historical in that it supervenes successively upon the progressive work of natural science to show an underlying unity within the range of phenomena covered by the natural sciences. In a remark, Hegel notes, ‘Not only must philosophy be in agreement with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics’.17 Hegel, then, assumes that a synoptic understanding of nature depends upon the historical development of the empirical sciences and the correlative historical development of natural philosophy. Nature in itself is powerless to convey or establish its own meaning. What is merely rational in itself cannot produce understanding for itself. Nature demands the historic activity of mind, which is rational for itself. The mind’s rational activities reveal the inner rationality of the phenomena of nature. Hegel’s system, like Collingwood’s, is a circle of thought that turns on more than mind, but again like, Collingwood, Hegel takes mind to be the epicentre of the system. Collingwood’s The Idea of Nature, as is recognized by Mink, entertains an Hegelian notion of nature. Nature for Collingwood, as for Hegel, is a world that exhibits thought in an external way. It is the historical development of mankind’s scientific and philosophical thinking that allows for a progressive appreciation of the rationality of natural phenomena. Collingwood, though, takes issue with Hegel at the outset of The Idea of Nature. He interprets Hegel’s famous epigram on the dependence of philosophy upon practical experience in the Philosophy of Right to be as one-sided as Marx’s rejoinder that trumpets the practicality of philosophy.18 Collingwood, in anticipating his account of the

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relationship between the general presuppositions of nature and specific studies of nature, maintains that there is a reciprocity between the philosophical clarification of principles and detailed scientific work. This sense of the unity of theory and practice informs his late conception of civilization. He conceives of civilization as being sustained by the joint activities of theory and practice. Nonetheless, Collingwood’s criticism of Hegel should not obscure the extent to which he follows Hegel. Collingwood in The Idea of Nature adopts an Hegelian perspective in seeing detailed scientifc work and philosophical principles as developing historically. The Idea of Nature possesses a triadic structure that divides fundamental conceptions of nature into three general historic viewpoints. Collingwood’s examination of the idea of nature coincides with the standpoint of An Essay on Metaphysics.19 It detects and analyzes the absolute presuppositions of these historic conceptions of nature. The presuppositions inform and derive from the determining aspects of the cultures of differing epochs. Collingwood distinguishes between three fundamental views of nature: the Greek view, the Renaissance view and the modern view. In Ancient Greece natural phenomena are understood primarily by means of analogy with the vitality and selforganizing qualities of organisms. Introspection provides a model of the rationality, which is exhibited by human beings and nature as a whole is taken to be rational in a similar way. Collingwood regards it as unsurprising that the Greeks interpret nature animistically, because the paradigmatic rationality of a living self-organizing, reflective organism is a powerful one. Ionian and Pythagorean metaphysicians are seen to explore differing versions of this model of conceiving of nature. The Ionians imagine nature as arising out of a primordial material, whereas the Pythagoreans attribute its rationality to the impact of an underlying form. Nonetheless, they are united in making common fundamental assumptions over its unity and animistic rationality.20 The Greek conception of nature is distinctive. It contrasts with what Collingwood terms the Renaissance view of nature. Collingwood confesses to the awkward character of this label ‘Renaissance’ due to its assocation with art history. But the label matters less than the radical change that it identifies as demarcating this early modern view of nature from the preceding Greek view. Where the Greeks imagine nature to operate holistically and purposively, like oganisms, the Renaissance view breaks with the language of teleology and purpose. The Renaissance conception reflects developing aspects of early modern society, notably the prevalence of machinery. Nature is now

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perceived to operate like a machine. The image of the relations between parts of nature no longer resembles that of an organism, where there is inter-dependence and the exhibiton of an overall purpose. Rather, its parts are separate to one another, admitting of no overriding and animating plan. They are, however, susceptible to change brought about by external forces. This image of nature as a machine is coupled with the notion of it being set in motion by a Christian God, who is beyond the natural world.21 The discreteness of natural phenomena that is presumed by the Renaissance view implies a mehanistic understanding of how nature operates. Nature, like a machine, does not develop itself, but performs mechanically in the service of its creator. Collingwood holds the modern view of nature, which succeeds the Renaissance view, to be in the process of development. Its continued development harmonizes with its actual content, in that it attributes a developmental character to nature. The Renaisance view sees nature as endlessly repeating its operations, which presume no internal connections between its discrete aspects. The modern view understands natural phenomena to be structured by the ways in which they function or develop. The modern view is epitomized by modern evolutionary biology, which imagines natural organisms to develop over time and to display purposiveness in this development. Collingwood takes the emerging physics of relativity to presume that natural phenomena are processes occurring over time, and that their identities are not to be determined outside of particular time frames.22 Consonant with his sense of the unity of civilization, Collingwood understands the rnodern evolutionary view of nature to be associated with the rise of historical studies in the modern world. Historians do not presume that change is to be attributed to unchanging entities, but are able to conceive of processes, such as the development of Parliamentary government, in which all their elements are subject to change.23 Collingwood regards the modern view as superseding the preceding conceptions of nature in that it provides a way of understanding nature that avoids disanalogies with individual minds and machines. Collingwood’s historical investigation into the idea of nature culminates in a sympathetic but critical reading of the modern cosmologies of Alexander and Whitehead. They are seen to provide significant if not entirely convincing comprehensive accounts of nature in so far as they see nature as an inter-linked system of progressively more selfsustaining, rational modes of inter-action. Collingwood’s critical

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endorsement of these cosmologies shows how he conceives of the study of nature and metaphyics as a normative, historical exercise. Collingwood’s examination of Hegel’s cosmology is ambiguous. Collingwood concentrates upon expounding Hegel’s cosmology in the historical context of the transition between the Renaissance and modern views of nature. His sensitive evocation of the subtlety of Hegel’s cosmology suggests that its value, though, supersedes a merely historical role. Collingwood’s positive appraisal of Hegel’s cosmology is recognized by Donagan, who observes that Collingwood glorifies Hegel while disparaging Newton.24 Collingwood assumes that Hegel is directly relevant to contemporary thinking about nature, while identifying Hegel’s cosmology in its relevant historical context. Hegel’s cosmology is shown to have developed at a definite stage of history. Collingwood explains Hegel’s natural philosophy to have been developed in the context of a general philosophical openness to ancient Greek notions, and to be informed by knowledge of contemporary achievements in the natural sciences. Against a background of critical neglect or dismissal, Collingwood reconstructs Hegel’s natural philosophy, recognizing its character as a response to the philosophical legacy of Kant and observing its kinship with the objective idealism of Plato and Aristotle.25 Collingwood is sympathetic to the Hegelian standpoint, whereby a synoptic conception of nature depends upon the development of the scientific and philosophical activities of men, because the rationality of nature is only to be known through human theoretical investigation. This dependence of nature on mind turns upon its deficiency in relation to the self-conscious ratonality of human thought and practice. Collingwood also recognizes that Hegel regards nature as real and rational in itself, even if it is incomplete when weighed in a dialectical scale including mind and spiritual activity. In his balanced and sensitive treatment of Hegel, Collingwood notes how Hegel reintroduces the ancient Greek notion of teleology into an understanding of nature. He welcomes how Hegel construes nature as exhibiting a nisus so that it develops into the more authentic reality of mind. Collingwood’s reading of Hegel is sensitive to the distinct yet inter-dependent roles, which Hegel attributes to the parts of his system. Logic, Nature and Mnd are seen as reciprocally related but are not collapsed into one another. Collingwood notes that Hegel, in reviving the objective idealism of Plato, theorizes the principle of rational order to be dynamic, and in so doing, provides a logical form for the developmental character he ascribes to nature.26 Collingwood’s express approval of objective

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idealism is a constant theme in his intellectual career, and in The Idea of Nature he takes Hegel to be the source of its modern revival.27 Collingwood shows a sympathetic appreciation of Hegel’s teleological, dialectial conception of the character of mind and nature. He does not expressly indicate, however that it is to form the basis for contemporary cosmological speculation. The organization of The Idea of Nature implies that Hegelianism is superseded, because the narrative extends beyond Hegel. The context of Hegel’s cosmology is explained to preclude its assimilation of important subsequent scientific developments. Hegel, in The Idea of Nature, is disclosed to be unsympathetic to emerging notions of biological evolution and, of necessity, ignorant of theories of relativity in physics, which highlight important aspects of the processual character of nature. Hegel is criticized for his failure to take account of temporal notions of evolution. Collingwood remarks, ‘But he (Hegel) insists that there cannot be a temporal transition, but only a logical transition, from the lower forms in nature to the higher.’28 Although he recognizes the historical conditionality of Hegel’s cosmology, Collingwood remarks upon significant parallels between the work of Hegel and Whitehead, whom he sees as the leading contemporary cosmologist. He observes how, in following Hegel’s line of thought, ‘… we soon arrive at the conception, which Whitehead has rediscovered and made familiar in our own time.’29 Collingwood also notes that in the light of contemporary developments in physics, ‘… a philosopher-scientist like Whitehead can restate Hegel’s theory (not knowing that it is Hegel’s, for he does not appear to have read Hegel, so far as I can judge).’30 The narrative of Collingwood’s The Idea of Nature culminates in the cosmological speculation of Alexander and Whitehead, whom Collingwood interprets to be attuned to a contemporary turn in science that incorporates developmental processual aspects of nature. He regards their speculation to be the most effective contemporary means for ascertaining the fundamental presuppositions of an idea of nature, which accords with scientific knowledge and which configures the processes of nature in convincing systematic ways. Collingwood values Alexander’s sense of the emergence of ever more complex higher patterns of being. Alexander’s cosmology begins with spacetime, which provides a framework for the future evolution of rational orders of increasing complexity. Matter develops out of point instants, and living organisms, in turn, are patterns constituted out of elements of matter. The higher is implicit in but not reducible to matter. Collingwood recognizes the Hegelian style of argumentation

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underpinning Alexander’s account, but he maintains that Alexander’s representation of the evolutionary process appears to be merely empirical, in that it lacks a logical ground for the development.31 Whitehead’s approach, for Collingwood, resembles Alexander’s, because he takes nature to consist in a series of developing patterns central to which is the notion of the organic unity of elements. All existing things are understood to be configured into so many patterns. These patterns are construed as developmental rational processes. Whitehead, according to Collingwood, is distinguished from Alexander due to his understanding of cosmic processes as resting upon eternal objects or forms. This linking of processes to an intelligible realm provides an explanation for the putative teleology of the cosmos that is diagnosed to be lacking in Alexander. These projected eternal objects are explanatory of the processes to which they relate, because they act as lures for the actual processes. Collingwood interprets Whitehead as resuming key aspects of a philosophical tradition that includes Aristotle and Hegel. Collingwood maintains that there is a close unacknowledged affinity between the cosmology of Whitehead and that of Hegel. He observes, ‘Whitehead himself, though he shows no sign of having read Hegel, says in the preface to Process and Reality that in his ultimate views he is approximating to Bradley and the main doctrines of Absolute Idealism though on a realistic basis (it is this that shows his ignorance of Hegel’s polemic against subjectivism), and claims continuity with the philosophical tradition’.32 While recognizing the acuity of Whitehead’s cosmological thought, Collingwood is nonetheless critical of Whitehead’s conception of the eternal objects and also of his sense of the commonality of mental life with non-mental prehensions at a lower level. These dimensions of Whitehead’s cosmology are criticized for being insufficiently justified. The upshot is that Collingwood recognizes the need to resolve analytical deficiencies in Whitehead’s cosmology, despite the power and acuity of his Hegelianised systematic account of the purposive unity of nature. Collingwood’s resolution of these deficiencies involves his own reworking of Hegel’s cosmology.

The Idea of Nature: Conclusions The brief conclusion to the The Idea of Nature, edited by Knox, testifies to Collingwood’s historical turn of mind. It shows its Hegelian pedigree in its respect for Hegel’s warning against predicting the future.33 Collingwood emphasizes the historicity of the idea of nature. He allows

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himself, however, a brief prognostication of the future development of the idea of nature. He projects an increasing recognition by natural science of its dependence upon history. Scientific observation and theory are held to turn upon mind in the form of historical action, and hence an understanding of nature is considered likely to recognize and assimilate historical understanding. Nature, for Collingwood, is dependent upon mind for its comprehension. Naturalistic explanation turns upon priority of mind and its freedom, because the study of nature is itself an historical practice, which makes historical observations to evaluate historic theories in its focus upon nature as a topic of study. The conclusion to Knox’s edition of The Idea of Nature reinforces a reading of that work as essentially an historical project. It encapsulates one aspect of Collingwood’s reading of the relations between mind and nature that Collingwood acknowledges to be Hegelian. This notion is that the idea of nature is an historical construction rather than a natural object. This conception is linked to an affiliated sense of the dependence of nature upon mind, which, in turn, signals the precedence that mind assumes over nature on account of its selfconscious rationality and its freedom. Collingwood’s Idea of Nature, then, displays an historical character both in its procedure in reviewing the development of historical conceptions of nature, and in its conclusion, in which explanations of nature at whatever level of abstraction are held to presume historical observations and theories. The importance of history for a study of nature however, is presented in a very different way in the additional brief conclusion for The Idea of Nature, entitled ‘The Conclusion of 1935’ by Dray and van der Dussen in the recently published, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history. In this short conclusion, which is organized around a discussion of Alexander’s ‘The Historicity of Things’, Collingwood points to the apposition between an historical conception of processes, where identities are conceived as entirely involved in the process of change and the continuous change exhibited by natural phenomena.34 This standpoint does not merely rehearse the standpoint of the previously published conclusion to The Idea of Nature. Its conception of the commonality between nature and history bears upon the way that nature is to be understood. History is seen not merely as relevant methodologically to the study of nature. The idea of a process, which is deployed to conceive of historical objects, is recognized as applying to nature as well as mind. The lengthy recently discovered cosmological conclusion to The Idea of Nature, which is published in the Principles of History and other

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writings in philosophy of history under the title, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’, provides a more sustained substantive contribution to cosmology than that which is contained in ‘The Conclusion of 1935.’ It contains a substantial contribution to the contemporary formulation of the idea of nature and to the designation of the relationship between nature and mind. In so doing it draws heavily upon Hegel’s substantive understanding of nature, recognizing it to offer the basis for developing a conception of the relationship between nature and mind, which Collingwood sees as crucial to a philosophical understanding of reality. In the cosmological conclusion to The Idea of Nature, Collingwood reads nature as exhibiting an overall process of development, in which there is an underlying impetus to overcome the externality of nature to achieve a unity whereby outwardness and separateness are overcome. In developing this conception, Collingwood invokes explicitly the language of Hegel and Aristotle. ‘The entire evolution of the world may therefore be conceived as a passage from outwardness to inwardness.’35 Collingwood imputes to nature the nisus or teleological purposiveness that is identified to be Hegel’s defining characterization of nature in the section on Hegel in The Idea of Nature.36 Collingwood refers to ‘… a nisus towards the production not exactly of life as we know it but of some form of existence in which the mutual externality of a thing and its environment should be overcome.’37 A particular concern of this newly discovered cosmological conclusion is Collingwood’s commitment to elaborate the logic of what he takes to be the developing view of nature that is implicit in the processes that are assumed in contemporary science. He engages critically and correctively with Whitehead’s cosmology. Its recognition of the significance of Whitehead’s cosmology is at one with the review of the modern idea of nature that is conducted in the main text of The Idea of Nature. Collingwood’s sense of an affinity between Whitehead’s and Hegel’s cosmology, which is a feature of his discussion of Whitehead in the penultimate chapter of The Idea of Nature, is reinforced by the review of the ideas of both philosophers in this alternative cosmological conclusion to the work. Collingwood’s review of Whitehead’s cosmology in this conclusion, however, is more critical than in the preceding chapter of the text. Collingwood judges Whitehead’s explanatory strategy of relating the changing processes of nature to eternal objects of reason to be highly problematic. Collingwood invokes the concept of history that is assumed in the practice of historians to signal his corrective notion of a process as selfcreating. A history of England, for instance, is shown to involve its cre-

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ation and continuous change, though thoughts created in the process can stand outside the process of change and be rethought by historians. Collingwood, however, does not see the processes of nature and mind as being entirely self-composed and self-explanatory. He urges that the entire cosmic process itself presupposes the notion of process as its logical basis. He notes, ‘I am referring to certain fundamental conceptions like being, unity, necessity and so forth, which are logically presupposed by the very idea of process, or, in cosmological terms, to the fact that all process is essentially finite and must depend upon something other than itself’38 Collingwood refers to the logical basis of process both in nature and human development as God, thereby invoking and re-working the language and system of Hegel, who had depicted the relationship between the three parts of his system as the relations between God and his creations, nature and mind. Collingwood equates the logical basis of pure being with God. He underlines the affinity of his standpoint with that of Hegel in exemplifying the fundamental logic of process by rehearsing the starting point of Hegel’s Logic, in which being is developed into becoming via recognition of its indistinguishability from nothing.39 Collingwood perceives the opening sections of Hegel’s Logic to instantiate the rhythm of the development of inter-linking categories. Collingwood declares, ‘God is infinite, creative in his relation to the world … He is pure and absolute being … the ocean or abyss of being which is indistinguishable from an abyss of nothingness’.40 He continues by remarking, ‘Pure Being is not a mere abstraction, an ens rationis, the empty form that is left in our minds when we have thought away everything particular; it is a real object of thought and (as Hegel points out) by no means difficult to think.’41 The dialectic between Being and Nothing, according to Collingwood, and it must be said Hegel, is ‘thus a process from pure indeterminacy to determination.’42 This processual logic constitutes the basis of a cosmology of becoming, which underlies cosmic processes. Collingwood in elaborating the relationship between his logical identification of process and the natural world follows Hegel in observing that natural phenomena resist categorial determination. Their contingency and otherness thwart conceptualization. Collingwood, though, also follows Hegel in assuming that nature is at the same time intrinsically related to the categories of thought determinination. The processes of nature are seen to be configured in rational patterns, which are grounded in the logic of being itself. The evolutionary processes of nature are understood by Collingwood to be processes by

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which the shadows of externality and outwardness cast by the cosmos are overcome by the development of increasingly self-determining thought patterns. Collingwood views the perfect development of mind, which constitutes the highest and limiting case of the achievement of the creative process in developing such patterns and their understanding, as nullifying the impetus for further development. He notes that it ‘… would seem to be a real elimination of the process of nature’.43 This language of Collingwood resonates with Hegel’s conception of mind as both opposing and consummating the natural world, and it is unsurprising that Collingwood defines God, in so far as he can be defined, in terms of a Hegelian self-developing process that is aware of itself, as mind. Whereas the conclusion to the published edition of The Idea of Nature reinforces the significance of historical activity for an appreciation of nature, the alternative cosmological conclusion highlights how the logical processes of nature culminate in mind.

Notes towards a Metaphysic Collingwood’s concern in his cosmological conclusion to The Idea of Nature to think through the metaphysical conditions of nature is not an isolated experiment. It reflects a considered engagement both with the questions posed by contemporary science. It is a token of his ongoing concern to reflect on natural processes so as to see them as interrelated patterns of thought, the relations between which suggest the developmental pattern of rethinking that his philosophical work explores consistently. More specifically, it also reflects a related aspect of Collingwood’s work, namely his continued reconsideration and rethinking of the terms in which Hegel conceives of a systematic consideration of reality. In his unpublished ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, on which he worked between 1933 and 1934, Collingwood examines the nature of nature and its ground in Being in ways which reflect the alternative cosmological conclusion to The Idea of Nature. In these reflections on nature he explicitly invokes and develops his thinking in relation to a sympathetic reading of Hegel’s system and natural philosophy. This drift of Collingwood’s thinking is also signaled in ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, two lectures on metaphysics that he delivered at the beginning of 1934. In these lectures, Collingwood concludes that the contemporary discussion of idealism and realism is confused. He observes that the idealism of Plato and Hegel is not to be equated with a merely subjective idealism. He also engages in a dialectical

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examination of being in a way that is evocative of the cosmological conclusion to The Idea of Nature. Again, he sees the logic of being as implying nothing and thence the process of determination between the two ideas.44 ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’ is consonant with Collingwood’s development of a substantive Hegelian cosmology in ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic.’ In the initial notebook of ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, Collingwood develops a systematic substantive cosmology. He emphazises that Hegel’s natural philosophy contains ‘…certain fundamental ideas without which no cosmological theory can get along.’45 Collingwood self-consciously derives from Hegel, what he attributes to Hegel in The Idea of Nature; namely an understanding of nature as exhibiting a nisus, an immanent teleology, whereby what is virtual becomes actual.46 To conceptualize the logic of the transition between nature and mind, and to highlight how the rational patterns, virtual in nature, can be rethought in systematic fashion by human apprehension, Collingwood draws upon his methodological doctrine of a scale of forms, which is elaborated in his An Essay on Philosophical Method. By the operation of a scale of forms whereby differing forms of thought are seen as related to one another on an overlapping scale so that they are related to one another according to their success in registering the rationality of thought, mind is seen as including within itself lower forms of matter and life. Collingwood’s self-conscious reference to his metaphysical method as a recessive means of capturing progressive development, harmonizes with Hegel’s philosophical procedure, in so far as it thereby operates as a means of showing the development of the more concrete from the more abstract. The core of Collingwood’s speculation involves understanding the emergence of mind from what is not mind. This project involves the Hegelian interpretation of nature as virtual mind. For Hegel, mind is the highest definition of the absolute because human beings, in their thinking recognize the thought determinations that are virtual rather than expressly in natural phenomena. Collingwood observes, ‘…the physical world is virtually mind’.47 He confirms this developmental reading of mind by reflecting upon the trajectory of the human mind in advancing to more self-conscious forms of understanding. The mind in becoming actual activates the real qualities in nature, which are latent in things but not appreciated before the onset of mind. For Collingwood, as for Hegel, the natural world is rational in itself, but not for itself. The human mind, for instance, in realizing its perceptual capacities actually achieves an appreciation of patterns in nature,

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which possess an inherent, virtual rationality before they are actually perceived.48 The human mind, then, for Collingwood, as for Hegel, acts as a focusing agent for the world of nature. This teleological reading of nature as constituting a process whose overall concern is to achieve freedom and the rationality of mind is identified by Collingwood as commencing with space and time. The patterns exhibited by space/time are considered to possess a nisus to realize matter, and thereafter to develop into life and mind. Collingwood’s recognition of an overall pattern of evolutionary development rehearses the logical teleology, which Hegel sees as at work within nature. For Hegel this pattern of development is not a temporal process, and Collingwood in ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’ replicates his criticism of this Hegelian reading of process that is offered in his discussion of Hegel in The Idea of Nature. What Collingwood aims to achieve is a fusion of Hegel’s notion of an ideal, logical pattern of development from space/time to the highest reaches of human awareness, with an actual temporal process of evolution. Collingwood makes this objective explicit in observing, ‘Hegel thought that all genuine concepts fell into a single unilear order. I do not know if he was right but I suppose it is probable. What I want to suggest is that history is the coincidence of logical with temporal order.’49 The assignment of a logical and temporal order of development to nature entails, or so Collingwood infers, that nature must be seen as in some sense historical. Collingwood’s concern to fuse the idea of temporal evolution with that of logical development is exemplified in his criticisms of Alexander’s determination to see the provenance of creativity within space/time itself. Collingwood notes that this ascription of developmental creativity to space/time, runs counter to his own preferred Hegelian notion of the primordiality of logical categories. He observes, ‘My conclusion is that a transcendental logic or theory of categories must precede a spatio-temporal world’.50 At the beginning of the second notebook of ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’ Collingwood revisits his thoughts on the nature of nature and mind. He observes, ‘Mind is not the absolute though the absolute is thought’.51 Collingwood rehearses the Hegelian notion of how mind conceives of absolute thought but, in so doing, is not entirely coincidental with it. Collingwood registers the Hegelian provenance of his standpoint by observing that the remark is unintelligible to all those not conversant with objective idealism.52 Collingwood also follows Hegel in identifying God, the fount of reality, with the fundamental categories of logic, rather than the sum of all categories.

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Collingwood highlights the triad of being, nothing and becoming as the essence of God and the inspiration of the world of space and time.53 The power and creativity of God are identified with process itself, which is expressed logically in the category of becoming. If the category of becoming is taken as a formula for the dialectical power of self-moving thought that is rethought in philosophical cognition, then Collingwood is adopting and applying a Hegelian dialectical logic to the idea of nature. The world of space/time is taken by Collingwood to be a world of finitude, in which externality and outwardness prevail. He runs through the Hegelian dialectic of finitude and infinity by rehearsing how the physical world throws up quasiinfinites of magnitude and quality in which the infinite is presented as another finite term outside an existing one.54 The implicit suggestion is that true infinity, in parallel with Hegel, is taken as the development of being and of thought thinking itself and its being. In ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’ Collingwood traces the development of the natural world in a Hegelian manner, whereby every complication of the physical world collapses into an immediacy, which then triggers further development. He notes that the logic of natural development implies a narrative of temporal development, which Hegel reserves for the human world. In the final notebook of ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’ Collingwood attends to the prime inspiration of his cosmological reflections, namely Hegel’s natural philosophy. His concern to take Hegel seriously is reflected in his consultation of different editions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.55 Collingwood is critical about the details of Hegel’s philosophy of nature. On the one hand, he is suspicious that Hegel’s concern to reject Romantic notions which see Nature as expressive of spiritual identity, leads to an underestimation of the developmental aspect of reason in natural phenomena. On the other hand, he is also suspicious of Hegel’s apparent deduction of natural qualities, as if they exhibited a speciously precise logical order. He cites as an example of the latter, Hegel’s ‘logical’ deduction of the five senses. Collingwood, however, recognizes an emphatic kinship between his own enterprise and Hegel’s. He attends to the rationale of Hegel’s rejection of physical evolution. He notes that Hegel is opposed to the notion that a low form of reality can explain, and by itself produce a higher form. Hegel’s invocation of the Idea or a teleological principle of rational development as the only satisfactory form of explanation is endorsed as being methodologically sound. Collingwood confirms Hegel’s standpoint, but is critical of Hegel’s refusal to see natural development as a form of evolution over time.

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Conclusion The nature of nature and, in particular, the nature of the relationship between nature and mind are topics to which Collingwood turns in published and unpublished writings. He takes mind and nature to be distinct and to require differing methods of inquiry. The reflective activities of mind are to be understood by the criteriological methods of philosophy and history, which appraise the efficacy of the thought and reflective action that they study. While natural sciences possess criteria for evaluating the success of their operations, they do not presume that the processes, which are the objects of their concern, are governed by norms or express criteria. Collingwood’s understanding of nature and mind, though, does not presume that they are merely opposed. The relationship between nature and mind is a differentiated unity that reflects Collingwood’s characteristic reading of experience. Mind and nature are united in that mind does not exist without being embodied, just as nature is understood by the activities of mind. The rationality of nature is to be apprised by means of the theoretical activities of mankind, and the cultivation of these theoretical activities is a token of a rational form of civilization, which unites and promotes the several rational activities of mind. Collingwood in The Idea of Nature provides an account of three historic general conceptions of nature. He articulates the fundamental presuppositions of these Ancient Greek, Renaissance and modern views of nature, which he imagines, are embedded in the cultural practices of their respective forms of civilization. His narrative of the development of differing conceptions of nature is compatible with the historical emphasis he places upon the practice of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics. His account of the development of the idea of nature focuses upon the historical development of successive metaphysical ideas of nature. Collingwood shows how the assumptions of scientific inquiry in distinct periods are shaped by the dominant ways of conceiving of rational objects in specific cultures or civilizations. The Ancient Greek appreciation of the rationality of the psyche as an organized purposive intelligence, for instance, is invoked to explain how they attributed purposive intelligence to the organization of nature as a whole. Likewise, the development of machinery in the early modern world is suggested to be an explanation of the Renaissance view of the ubiquity of mechanistic processes. Just as the historical dimension of Collingwood’s formulation of metaphysics in An Essay on Metaphysics does not override his continued

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commitment to the role of philosophical analysis in appraising metaphysical assumptions, so the historical guise of The Idea of Nature should not obscure Collingwood’s philosophical analysis of conceptions of nature. In the course of his account of the development of the idea of nature, Collingwood endorses the cosmological theories of Whitehead and Alexander, while making criticisms of aspects of their work. The criticisms are inspired by Collingwood’s philosophical analysis of the coherence of the assumptions that they make about the development of processes in nature. Alexander is criticized for lacking a conceptual explanation of the process of development, while Whitehead is taken to inflate the repertoire of explanatory concepts by imagining an array of eternal concept corresponding to the empirical objects involved in processes of change. Collingwood intimates the non-historical dimension of his analysis of the idea of nature by invoking Hegel’s cosmology as a supra-historical paradigm of cosmological speculation in his discussion of Whitehead and Alexander. Given Collingwood’s evident interest in developing further contemporary cosmological speculation so as to make its conceptual specification of assumptions coherent and mutually compatible, it is no surprise that his unpublished papers reveal that he worked on his own cosmology alongside developing the lectures on the history of the idea of nature. The alternative cosmological conclusion to The Idea of Nature and his ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’ show that he engaged closely with Hegel’s philosophy of nature in working out his own cosmological ideas. His criticisms of Whitehead and Alexander and his employment of Hegel’s ideas coincide with remarks he makes in The Idea of Nature and show how his own cosmological speculation is compatible with his historical reading of the development of conceptions about nature. Collingwood’s willingness to entertain a metaphysics of being in his unpublished writings might be thought to conflict markedly with his express renunciation of metaphysics of being in An Essay on Metaphysics. Rotenstreich, amongst other commentators has observed a break in Collingwood’s conception of philosophy to turn precisely upon this renunciation of metaphysics of being.56 Collingwood, though, in An Essay on Metaphysics is careful to justify this renunciation by referring to its compatibility with Hegel’s conceptual analysis of being. Hegel analyzes being to be without content and to mean nothing.57 In Collingwood’s cosmological speculation, his development of the logic of natural processes is conducted via reflection on Hegel’s logical analysis of categories just as his abrogation of a metaphysics of being is later justified via Hegelian categorial analysis. Collingwood’s late express

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discussion of metaphysics is conducted in a cultural context in which a prevailing positivist climate of opinion that favours its strategic presentation in historical terms. Collingwood’s later turn towards an historical reading of metaphysics is not a direct rebuttal of his largely unpublished cosmological speculation. He imagines that cosmological ideas are predicated on historical developments, and his own cosmological speculation is shown to arise out of intellectual and cultural currents that he specifies in The Idea of Nature. The mode of analysis that he employs in his writings on cosmology is consonant with his persisting sense of philosophical method. He rethinks the unity of natural processes as a series of forms on a common scale by analyzing them in terms of their increasing rationality and self-determination. Collingwood’s continued commitment to the autonomy of philosophical analysis, while recognizing the historicity of its objects and of its own practice, is confirmed by the examples of metaphysics he provides in An Essay on Metaphysics and by the methodological standpoint of his final book, The New Leviathan. The New Leviathan conducts a review of the conditions of civilization by rethinking the functions of mind and the social practices that are required to cultivate the virtues of civilization. The analysis of mind replicates the standpoint and method of the cosmological writings, in its conception of the mind as admitting of analysis that shows the overlapping character of its functions within a conceptual scheme that appraises them in terms of their intensification of rational and free capacities. Civilization itself, for Collingwood, is a rational unity, which stands upon and allows for the cultivation of intellectual inquiry. For Collingwood the cultivation of metaphysics and cosmology is a sign of civilization and their continued practice reinforces the rational functions of the mind, which make possible a free and rational civilization.

4 History: Past and Present; Principles and Practice

Introduction In his Autobiography Collingwood encapsulates his life’s work in an evocative formula. He professes, ‘My life’s work hitherto, as seen from my fiftieth year, has been in the main an attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and history.’1 This reminiscence is suggestive rather than definitive. Its status reflects the character of Collingwood’s Autobiography, which confirms the scepticism that Collingwood himself maintains over the historical value of biography. It is not the expression of a careful sifting of evidence relating to his intellectual development, but a passionate declaration of the nature and value of an intellectual life in the light of a contemporary crisis of civilization.2 Collingwood’s principled defence of his own intellectual standpoint highlights its emergence in the context of his own distinct practical and theoretical interests, and against the background of an unpropitious intellectual and political atmosphere. An Autobiography testifies to Collingwood’s perception of the connections underlying his intellectual commitments and to his concern to press his reflections on theory into the practical service of defending civilized values. Collingwood’s espousal of a lifelong commitment to a rapprochement between philosophy and history is suggestive of a characteristic style of philosophizing that connects aspects of experience by rethinking their conditionality. It points to his development of a standpoint by which the unity of experience turns crucially upon the reciprocity of philosophy and history, rather than the subordination of the latter to the former. Throughout his life, Collingwood recognizes the inter-dependencies between philosophy and history. In Ruskin’s Philosophy he demonstrates 73

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an early commitment to a specifically Hegelian style of philosophizing that he attributes to Ruskin.3 It is a style that allows for the recognition of change and historical development. Speculum Mentis reads the interrelations between philosophy and history from the standpoint of philosophy. He understands history to be implicated in the contradiction of aiming to comprehend the concrete world of facts in their entirety but of necessarily being partial in the execution of its aim. The contradictory character of history is traced on a map of knowledge that is drawn and evaluated by philosophical cognition. In contrast to this critical reading of the partial contradictory nature of history, Collingwood’s mature conception of history, which is developed in The Idea of History and The Principles of History, renders it an autonomous, coherent discipline that achieves self-authenticating knowledge. The problems that are diagnosed as subverting the claims of historical knowledge in Speculum Mentis turn upon a presumed externality obtaining between the activity of the historian and a corresponding world of facts. Collingwood’s subsequent conception of the historian’s activity as involving the rethinking of past thoughts removes the gap between the historian and the object of historical knowledge. Past and present are fused in the act of historical rethinking. In the manuscripts on the nature of history in the Epilogmena to The Idea of History and in his Autobiography Collingwood unites past and present, and aligns the activity of the historian with its object by showing that the past is rethinkable in the present world of the historian. Past thought is rethought by means of the critical scrutiny of contemporary evidence. Collingwood’s notion of historical activity of rethinking the thoughts involved in past actions is, as Dray observes, designed to show its explanatory coherence, rather than to entertain the questionable methodological goal of duplicating another’s experience.4 To rethink a past thought is to infer the point of past actions in the light of present evidence, and the process of critical rethinking allows an appreciation of the logic of past actions, which is in itself explanatory, and thereby delivers the historian’s activity from an endless and fruitless pursuit of a totality of external facts. Collingwood’s re-evaluation of the status of historical knowledge engenders a realignment of the way in which he conceives intellectual activities to be related to one another. History is no longer subordinated to philosophy in the scheme of things. This realignment, however, is not a revolution whereby philosophy replaces history at the apex of a hierarchy. The rapprochement between philosophy and history is not an abdication, whereby philosophy cedes supremacy to history. This

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rapprochement recognizes that history is not a delusive activity, but rather combines with philosophy in contributing to the self-knowledge of mind. History combines with philosophy because the two activities require each other to explain and to clarify experience. Collingwood maintains that there is an interplay between philosophy and history in providing the conditions for a rational understanding of civilization and for the principled defence of its practices. Philosophy is not an unhistorical activity; rather it rethinks the principles underlying practices, which have developed historically. History is an activity that is rational and coherent, but the rationality of its principles is only to be known via their philosophical rethinking. Dray and D’Oro identify the philosophical analysis of this rationality of historical principles to be a normative inquiry.5 Civilization, for Collingwood, is the contingent, practical unity of the several rational activities of mankind. It is constructed historically, and it is known by the philosophical reconstruction of the unity underlying its contingent features. Subsequent to Speculum Mentis, Collingwood recognizes that the practice of philosophy implies historical development and self-knowledge. His characteristic reading of philosophy as a form of rethinking implies that its object is historical, namely the developing activities of mind that construe reality in distinctive ways. An Essay on Metaphysics reconstrues metaphysics as an historical discipline that explores the logical relations between clusters of absolute presuppositions that are maintained in these activities. The Idea of Nature and The New Leviathan apply this conception of metaphysics. They explore the historical development of fundamental ideas about the cosmos and civilization respectively. In so doing, they in turn presuppose the contingent, historical character of the ideas that they investigate. Philosophy, however, is not sacrificed to contingency and to an uncritical acceptance of historical development. In The New Leviathan Collingwood undertakes a philosophical rethinking of the rationality of liberal civilization that reviews how its various conditions constitute a progressive realization of freedom and reason. In his various writings on nature Collingwood conceives of the natural world as constituting a series of interacting and developing processes that possess an objective rationality, which is appreciated by a procedure of systematic rethinking. Just as philosophy presupposes historical development, so historical inquiry is shown by Collingwood to be rational and autonomous by the philosophical rethinking of its principles. Philosophical explanation of the principles of history presupposes the historical development of the practice of history. Collingwood himself undertakes a

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rethinking of the principles implicit in historical practice that explains their overlapping character and how historical knowledge is possible. The philosophical explanation of history is prescriptive as well as descriptive in that it shows how the object of historical knowledge must be construed and how historical thinking is to be practised, if historical understanding is to be achieved.6 In his Autobiography Collingwood highlights the principal aspects of a philosophical explanation of the principles of history. He distinguishes between the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of history, which philosophical analysis can explore so as to demonstrate the possibility of historical knowledge.7 The epistemological aspect of history refers to the procedures that are employed by historians to understand the past. The metaphysical aspect of history relates to the identity of the past that is the object of historical knowledge. The rapprochement between history and philosophy is endorsed by the philosophical clarification of the principles of history. In clarifying principles, philosophy reflects on the actual practice of historians and in doing so can guide historians in their reading of the relationship between past and present, and in their interpretation of historical evidence. Philosophy in rethinking the principles of history establishes the coherence of principles with one another and hence can rule out inappropriate historical assumptions and procedures. In his Autobiography Collingwood reviews his work as an historian of Roman Britain. He reflects upon how he tackled the historical question of the revival of Celtic art forms at the end of the Roman occupation of Britain. He rehearses the puzzle that is posed by the apparent disappearance of indigenous Celtic art forms, their supplanting by cosmopolitan forms and the subsequent revival of the former Celtic styles. The disappearance of the Celtic art forms precludes an explanation that attributes its revival to a popular resumption of an art form that was merely recessive rather than eclipsed. He explains how the conundrum is susceptible to resolution via a philosophical appreciation of the nature of thought. He observes that thought in contrast to mere physical things is circumscribed neither physically nor temporally, so that past thought even when its original inspiration is passed, continues in the evidence of past thoughtfulness contained in objects and cultural practices. Past thought and reflective practice is susceptible of being rethought or revived. Hence Collingwood’s philosophical recognition of the capacity of past forms of action and cultural styles to survive across time allows for an appreciation of the disappearance and revival of an art form.

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Collingwood emphasizes the significance of a philosophical appreciation of the object of historical understanding for the practice of history, by underlining the paradigmatic status of his reading of the history of art in Roman Britain. He remarks, ‘This was the idea which I expressed in the chapter on “Art” in the Oxford History of England which I would gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to prosperity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence but by reconsidering questions of principle. It may thus serve to illustrate what I have called the rapprochement between philosophy and history, as seen from the point of view of history.’8 Another example of the way that Collingwood takes the theoretical examination of principles to underpin and to promote historical investigation is provided in Roman Britain. At its outset Collingwood observes that it would be misguided to assume that the object of the historical study, Britain, possesses unchanging qualities to which Roman imperial activities are opposed. He remarks, ‘The student who approaches Roman Britain as merely an episode in English history cannot see this very simple fact. His point of view makes him forget that England herself, at the beginning of English history, did not exist, even by the name of Britain; and that England is the product of a historical process.’9 Collingwood’s principled sensitivity to the changing character of historical subjects is predicated upon his non-naturalistic reading of human activities and processes. He expresses this appreciation of the non-naturalistic character of historical processes by recognizing, paradoxically, the ‘naturalness’ of the absence of nationalism in pre-Roman Britain. He observes, ‘This absence of national feeling and national exclusiveness may seem to us strange, but in reality it is natural and it is rather our nationalism that is artificial and demands explanation.’10 Collingwood’s conceptual recognition of the continuous change to which the objects of historical investigation are subject, is the obverse of his sense of the survival of thoughts in historical relics. The identity of human beings and the character of their activities are shaped by their contingent, changing thoughts and actions that express rational purposes. Contexts and the institutions and practices that reflect human thoughts shape these purposes. Purposes are subject to change that springs from the demands of developing contexts. Hence institutions such as the British Parliament and cultural identities such as Englishness are not unchanging ‘natural’ objects, but developing processes, even though past cultural identifications or institutional

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arrangements can be appreciated at a future date by rethinking historically the thoughts that constitute them via analysis of the available evidence. The practical relevance to historical study of this theoretical recognition of the character of the historical enterprise demonstrates the rapprochement between philosophy and history. It demonstrates what philosophy can contribute to history. Collingwood’s metaphysical recognition that nationality and nationhood are not to be conceived of in naturalistic terms is rehearsed in his reference to the continuously constructed character of nationality and nationhood as being an absolute presupposition of historical study in An Essay on Metaphysics.11 The modern practice of history shows the constructed character of nationality, but historians can only be successful in their investigations if they eschew the methods of natural science and assume the nonnaturalistic character of the objects of their investigation. Central to Collingwood’s understanding of history is his sense of the interplay between history and philosophy that is revealed in the actual practice of history. The object and method of historical inquiry are inter-connected, and their conceptual overlap is brought out by philosophical reflection upon the metaphysics and epistemology of history. The object of historical investigation, the free and rational thought and action of mind, contrasts with the externally conditioned behaviour of physical things. It demands a free rational investigation that respects the rational, developing character of its subject matter. History assumes that the thinking, which is the object of its study is self-determining and self-evaluating or criteriological, and historical inquiry assumes and explains this rationality by showing the rationale of the thoughts that constitute its object. Collingwood’s philosophical understanding of history establishes reciprocities between philosophy and history and between the principles constituting the practice of history. Collingwood’s recognition of the connections between the principles of historical method and the subject matter of history aligns his philosophy of history to Hegel’s speculative conception of history. This affinity between Collingwood and Hegel and the broad scope of Collingwood’s philosophy of history are confirmed by the review of Collingwood’s The Principles of History, which is conducted in the subsequent sections of this chapter.

Collingwood and Hegel To align Collingwood and Hegel’s conceptions of history is to contend with the views of perceptive commentators on Collingwood and the

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philosophy of history, who define Collingwood’s analytical clarification of the principles of historical understanding in terms of its contrast with Hegel’s allegedly overblown speculative rationalism.12 Walsh frames his categorial distinction between critical and speculative philosophies of history by taking Collingwood and Hegel to be exemplary practitioners of the two approaches. In An Introduction to Philosophy of History Walsh draws upon Collingwood in elaborating his own conception of critical philosophy of history, which consists in the analytical examination of the concepts of explanation, truth and objectivity in historical thinking.13 Walsh sees Hegel as framing a speculative philosophy of history that imputes an alleged philosophical necessity to the actual course of historical development. This speculative reflection on historical progress is taken to be irrelevant to the separate philosophical task of analyzing or criticizing the concepts that are involved in the explanations offered by historians.14 Walsh’s sympathetic consideration of Collingwood contrasts with his deprecation of Hegel. It separates Collingwood’s philosophy history from Hegel, just as it divorces speculative philosophy of history from critical or analytical philosophy of history. For Walsh, Hegel is the arch representative of the illicit enterprise of reflecting upon the overall narrative of past events, the object of historical inquiry, while Collingwood is the most distinguished representative of the respectable philosophical exercise of clarifying the meaning of the concepts employed by historians in the course of their work. Walsh’s dual dichotomies in An Introduction to Philosophy of History, between speculative and critical philosophy of history, and between the philosophies of history of Hegel and Collingwood, are highly problematic. Collingwood is a critic of Hegel’s philosophy of history, but his criticism is measured and respectful rather than wild and hostile. In his elliptical treatment of Hegel in the historiographical section of The Idea of History he construes Hegel’s conception of the necessary logical development of freedom in the modern world as plausible in so far as it detects a logic of development in the patterns of thought that shape the historical and social worlds. It is not dismissed as the mere imposition of an external philosophical standpoint, even if Hegel’s focus upon the development of political cultures is held to be an unduly restrictive perspective, given the wealth of constructed cultural patterns with which historians are engaged.15 What is most damaging to Walsh’s treatment of Collingwood and Hegel is their recognition of the ambiguity of the word history. Rather than follow Walsh in taking this ambiguity to signal the need to insulate its meanings from one

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another, they are at one in recognizing the ambiguity of the word history to betoken the intimate relationship between the procedures of historical thinking and the subject-matter of history, the actions of human beings.16 Collingwood and Hegel, then are united by their mutual recognition of the links between the content of history, past events, and the form of historical knowledge, the concepts involved in the methods followed by historians. This affinity between Hegel and Collingwoods informs their common understanding of how freedom is exhibited and realized both in the content of historical study, the past actions of historical actors and through the character of historical study itself. For Collingwood, the freedom native to the human mind that is expressed in historical action is confirmed in the autonomy of historical understanding, just as, for Hegel, the progressive realization of freedom in the course of history is matched by the freedom, which is assumed and demonstrated in the formulation of speculative philosophy of history.

Knox and The Principles of History A comparison of the philosophies of history of Collingwood and Hegel disturbs the false dichotomy between their approaches that is maintained by Walsh. It allows for a balanced appreciation of how history plays a significant role in Collingwood’s philosophy. Collingwood takes history to be both the primary site for the development of freedom and as a crucial means of understanding the freedom of mind. Likewise, it permits an appreciation of Hegel’s subtle reading of the development of historical understanding as well as his synoptic perspective on the course of historical development. It is also timely because the recent publication of Collingwood’s The Principles of History, in which Collingwood engages with Hegel’s philosophy of history, provides an opportunity to reassess the relationship between their philosophies of history. The belated posthumous publication of this text raises new questions about Collingwood’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Dray and van der Dussen show that Knox, Collingwood’s literary executor and a sympathetic student of Hegel, altered the text of the parts of the manuscript that he included in The Idea of History so as to mitigate criticisms of Hegel. At first sight, then, publication of The Principles of History, which Collingwood projected to be his major work on history, reinforces a sense of the radical opposition between Collingwood’s and Hegel’s conceptions of history. A careful reading of

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The Principles of History in the light of Hegel’s own reflections on history, however, recognizes affinities between their approaches to history. Collingwood ‘s critical but perceptive reading of Hegel is central to the development of his investigation of the principles of history, and given the significance he attaches to the latter project, the centrality of Hegel for Collingwood’s philosophy is reinforced. To urge the recognition of the underlying affinities between the philosophies of history of Hegel and Collingwood is to argue against prevailing opinion. Van der Dussen and Dray’s editorial Introduction to The Principles of History divorces Collingwood from Hegel, rather than recognizing affinities between them. Moreover, in his scholarly study of Collingwood’s philosophy of history, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, van der Dussen rehearses the dichotomy between Hegel and Collingwood, which is signalled by Walsh. He urges, ‘…modern interpretations of Collingwood differ sharply from traditional ones, which consider him primarily an idealist and a follower of Hegel or Croce.’17 He disparages Gadamer’s assimilation of Collingwood to the German tradition by observing, ‘Collingwood’s philosophy of history is both too rational and empirical for this contention to be justified.’18 Even commentators such as Goldstein and Peters, who identify affinities between Collingwood and Hegel, neglect to highlight the similarities between their approaches to the philosophy of history.19 Collingwood’s understanding of the principles of history is in fact shaped decisively by his engagement with Hegel. Hegel and Collingwood develop their conceptions of history via an historigraphical critique of the practice of historians. They are at one in recognizing the reciprocity between the form and content of historical understanding. Collingwood’s sensitivity to the actual practice of historians and the acuity of his analysis of historical explanation inform his celebrated posthumous publication, The Idea of History, which combines essays on the nature of historical study with a well-informed historiographical review of conceptions of history. The historical identity of Collingwood’s own conception of the idea of history, though, demands historical scrutiny. The Idea of History is a composite work that was put together by Knox, Collingwood’s literary executor, who incorporated material from Collingwood’s lectures on the development of historical study, sections from the projected, The Principles of History, and essays that Collingwood had published on aspects of historical understanding. Knox decided against authorising the publication of all that Collingwood had completed for his projected The

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Principles of History. While Collingwood signalled that the prospective work would ‘…go down to posterity as my masterpiece’, Knox merely included one of its prospective chapters, ‘Evidence’ and a section of another chapter, ‘Nature and Action’ in The Idea of History.20 Knox’s withholding of The Principles of History and other manuscripts of Collingwood from publication, and his idiosyncratic decisions on the forms in which Collingwood’s manuscripts were to be published reflects posthumously what Boucher observes to be the crucial role that he played as a literary executor.21 Knox considered The Principles of History, notwithstanding Collingwood’s own estimate of its prospective importance, to reflect an unfortunate deterioration of style and content in Collingwood’s late writings and to possess insufficient interest to justify publication.22 It is unsurprising, given the contestable character of his judgements, that Knox’s role, as Collingwood’s literary executor has been the subject of subsequent critical scrutiny by Collingwood scholars.23 Van der Dussen and Dray in their editorial Introduction to The Principles of History, criticize Knox’s decision to leave unpublished what Collingwood had completed of The Principles of History. While appraising the work to be less than the masterpiece to which Collingwood aspired, they make a convincing case for its publication, noting distinctive aspects of its account of historical knowledge. These aspects include its analogy between the historian’s use of evidence and an aesthetic appreciation of language, and its widening of the object of an historian’s knowledge to include the emotions associated with past thought. Dray elaborates elsewhere upon how Collingwood broadens the object of historical knowledge in The Principles of History in comparison with what he had envisaged in other writings.24 The very publication of The Principles of History alongside other hitherto unpublished writings of Collingwood constitutes a critique of Knox’s execution of his duties a Collingwood’s literary executor. Moreover, the editorial Introduction of Dray and van der Dussen also criticizes Knox’s insertion of material from The Principles of History into The Idea of History in a form that was not envisaged by Collingwood. They note that Knox tampered with the manuscript, reformulating passages so as to modify their intended meaning. Aspects of the way in which Knox inserted material from The Principles of History into The Idea of History to which Dray and Van der Dussen draw attention, are the subtle changes that Knox made to sections relating to Hegel. They observe that Collingwood’s critical reading of Hegel is attenuated by minor textual alterations, which are undertaken by Knox. They suggest that Knox’s motivation in softening

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Collingwood’s critique of Hegel derives from his affiliation to an Hegelian philosophical perspective. They identify a number of minor changes that Knox made to the material from The Principles of History that is entitled ‘Heads or Tails’, which he incorporated into the historiographical section of The Idea of History dealing with Hegel and Marx. They note that Knox amends the manuscript of The Principles of History that reads ‘…natural science from which Hegel had in principle proclaimed it free…’ by deleting the phrase ‘in principle’ when it is included in The Idea of History.25 Again where Collingwood’s manuscript reads, ‘…had not been fully achieved…’, the corresponding passage in Knox’s edition of The Idea of History omits “fully”.. Again, the text of The Idea of History reads ‘…in which he (Hegel) mainly contented himself with scissors-and-paste methods…’, and the word “mainly” is not in Collingwood’s manuscript.26 Van der Dussen and Dray also observe that a paragraph of the original manuscript criticizing Hegel’s subordination of history to logic was omitted from Knox’s transposition of the section to The Idea of History.27 Dray and van der Dussen, then, provide an informative Introduction to The Principles of History and an historical reconstruction of the questionable editorial role performed by Knox. Their incisive critique of Knox’s treatment of Collingwood, however, lends itself to a reading of The Principles of History that divorces its approach to the philosophy of history from that of Hegel. While there are passages in The Principles of History that are more critical of Hegel than had been admitted into The Idea of History, the overall effect of the publication of The Principles of History heightens a sense of the affinity between Hegel and Collingwood on philosophy and history. This affinity is not an identity. Collingwood affirms the contingency of history whereas Hegel proclaims that a necessary pattern is discernible in historical development. Nonetheless an overarching theme of The Principles of History is the reciprocity between historical investigation and its object, and Collingwood draws expressly from Hegel in developing this theme. For Collingwood and Hegel, the object of historical knowledge is the freedom of human action, and both see reflection upon historical theory and practice as demonstrating the development of freedom and reason. A careful reading of Collingwood’s The Principles of History undermines Walsh’s influential dichotomous reading of the relationship between Hegel and Collingwood and Walsh’s sharp separation of speculative from critical philosophy of history. Hegel differs from Collingwood in framing a unificatory, speculative philosophical reading of the course of

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historical development. Hegel and Collingwood, however, are united in their philosophies of history by their recognition of a dialectical interplay between history a parte subjecti and a parte objecti. For Collingwood and Hegel, the differing senses of history underlying the contrast Walsh draws between speculative and critical philosophy of history are actually united because the character of historical knowledge reflects the nature of historical actions. Their shared abrogation of historical naturalism follows from their appreciation of the freedom that must be recognized both in the subject matter of history and in its study. Collingwood eschews a unificatory and deterministic reading of historical development, but he takes the historical understanding of past human action to deepen comprehension of human freedom. Historical understanding recognizes the freedom involved in historical action, and the autonomy of the form of historical understanding, which mirrors the general freedom of human beings in shaping their own situations. Moreover, although Collingwood criticizes Hegel’s interpretation of historical development as evincing a necessary logic of human progress, he is prepared, nonetheless, to interpret the contingent development of civilization as exhibiting a concrete record of the rationality and freedom that is native to the human mind. D’Oro signals the affinities between Hegel and Collingwood on history by highlighting Collingwood’s Hegelian stipulation of the subject-matter of history as rational. She urges, ‘His (Collingwood’s) conception of history as a rational process is much closer to the Hegelian notion of “philosophical history” than many care to admit.’28. The similarity of Hegel’s and Collingwood’s conceptions of history is elucidated by reconsidering their relationship in the light of Collingwood’s critical engagement with Hegel in The Principles of History, where Collingwood aspires to produce a definitive statement of the principles of history. Ironically, this affinity between Collingwood and Hegel is emphasized by attending to the actual wording and intended location of Collingwood’s undiluted criticisms of Hegel in The Principles of History rather than by turning to Knox’s dilution of them in his transposition of Collingwood’s critical commentary on Hegel to a historiographical section of The Idea of History.

The reciprocity of historical method and the subject-matter of historical study What Collingwood projected to include in The Principles of History is set out in his ‘Scheme for a Book’ that is contained in his ‘Notes on

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Historiography’.29 The book was to consist of three books or parts, examining the nature of historical study, the relations between history and other kinds of inquiry, and the relations between history and practical life. In the event Collingwood only completed three chapters of Book 1, which are devoted to the examination of the character of the science of history, and fragments of chapters on ‘The Past and History and Philosophy’ that were presumably intended for subsequent sections. The three chapters of Book 1 that Collingwood completed are entitled, ‘Evidence’, ‘Action’ and ‘Nature’ and ‘Action’. They develop a continuous account of how the subject matter of historical study is related to the way in which the activity of historical study is carried out. This theme is encapsulated in Collingwood’s observation at the outset of Chapter 2, ‘Action’, where he remarks, ‘There are two questions to be asked whenever anyone inquires about the nature of any science: “What is it like?” and “What is it about?” If the reader prefers words of more syllables, the first question concerns the subjective characteristics of the science, its peculiarities as a kind of thinking; the second concerns the characteristics of its object, that which in the course of this thinking people come to know.’30 Collingwood begins The Principles of History by reflecting on historical method. He focuses upon the misconceived methodology of ‘scissors and paste’ history, which constructs an account of the past by relying upon the testimony of diverse authorities. The sources that are constituted by these pieces of testimony are conceived as being essentially independent of the historian. Collingwood considers the ‘scissors and paste’ historian to be in thrall to his or her sources, even if a critical attitude to these sources is adopted. For Collingwood, the historian is not to be conceived as in any way dependent upon external sources. Rather the historian puts the past to the test, by framing questions, and accumulating and criticizing evidence in the process of answering these questions. Wilson, in his article, ‘Collingwood’s Forgotten Historiographic Revolution’ highlights the significance of The Principles of History in articulating this independence of historians from the authority of sources in determining their conceptions of the past.31 In so far as the activity of the historian is entirely responsible for determining what will count as evidence of the past and how this evidence is to be construed, history is rendered a properly autonomous scientific activity. In the second chapter, ‘Action’ Collingwood explains how historians deal with evidence. He takes the evidence with which the historian is concerned to possess the character of a language, in which thoughts of

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historical actors are expressed. It is like a language in that it must be interpreted to ascertain its meaning. This interpretive character of an historian’s activity shapes the range of the historian’s subject matter. Historians interpret evidence so as to reveal past thoughts, and hence the object or subject matter of history constitutes not merely the actions of human beings, but more specifically, the rational actions of human beings. Collingwood develops this specification of the character of the actions with which an historian is concerned further in the chapter ‘Action’ and in the subsequent chapter ‘Nature’. In ‘Nature and Action’ he distinguishes natural phenomena and natural science from the world of human rational action and historical study. In a crucial passage, in which he declares that nature is not a proper object of study on the part of historians, Collingwood invokes Hegel’s conception of history. In so doing, he recognizes the affinity between Hegel’s approach to history and his own. He remarks, ‘Hegel said that nature had no history because he got hold of the question by the right end.’32 Collingwood takes Hegel to be approaching the question in the right way because he relates the subject matter of historical understanding to a critical appraisal of the methods of history. Hegel, like Collingwood, excludes natural phenomena from the scope of historical explanation by undertaking a critical appraisal of historical methods.33 Collingwood’s critique of naturalistic methods in the practice of history entails a reciprocal repudiation of the determination of the content of historical action by natural causes. Collingwood observes, ‘With the disappearance of historical naturalism, the conclusion is reached that the activity by which man builds himself his own constantly-changing historical world is a free activity.’34 For Collingwood, the actions of human beings are shaped by their own assessments of their situations rather than being determined by circumstances that can be specified without reference to the beliefs of historical actors. Human interaction with nature is mediated by beliefs pertaining to the situations in which human beings are involved. Human action is free and autonomous in the sense that human beings act in accord with their own understanding of situations to achieve their rational purposes. Collingwood understands the past actions that are to be explained by historians to be rational and free in that they are not determined by factors external to the consciousness of the actors, just as the activity of the historian in explaining these past actions is rational and free in not being determined by factors external to the historian’s critical reading of the evidence.

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In praising Hegel, Collingwood goes against the grain of standard commentary on the philosophy of history. Hegel is taken routinely to be a speculative theorist of history, who identifies grand but questionable patterns in the course of historical development rather than considering the methodology of historical understanding. For instance, Gardiner and Berlin rehearse Walsh’s categorization of Hegel as a misguided practitioner of speculative philosophy of history.35 In contrast to this orthodoxy, Collingwood is right to observe that Hegel develops his philosophy of history by reviewing the methods that are adopted by historians. Hegel arrives at his notion of philosophical history by means of critical reflection on the deficiencies of preceding and current modes of practising history. In the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel sees his own philosophical history as responding to the discrepancies between the ambitions and actual achievements of other historians. He distinguishes between three types of history; original history, reflective history and philosophical history. Like Collingwood, Hegel sees philosophical concepts as overlapping, and he construes these forms of history as being internally related. Wilson urges that Collingwood’s notion of scientific history operate as an overlapping concept of history to that of ‘scissors and paste’.36 Hegel’s representation of how philosophical history completes and supersedes subordinate modes of history vindicates Goldstein’s recognition of the affinity between Hegel and Collingwood in their schemes of conceptualization.37 Philosophical history, for Hegel, achieves a coherent, harmonious understanding of the relationship between past actions and present mode of understanding that is demanded by, but not realized, in these preceding standpoints. Hegel, then, like Collingwood, recognizes the reciprocity of history a parti subjecti and history a parti objecti. In the Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he observes, ‘In German, the term for “history” (Geschichte) is derived from the verb to “happen” (geschehen). Thus the term combines the objective and the subjective sides: it denotes the actual events (in Latin res gestae) as well as the narration of events (in Latin, historiam rerum gestarum) This union of the two meanings must be regarded as something of a higher order than mere chance.’38 Just as Collingwood explains the principles of history by means of a critique of the methods of ‘scissors and paste’ historians, so Hegel’s philosophy of history is elaborated via a critique of the methods employed by previous historians. Original historians, for Hegel, are immersed in the historical actions they describe. Their work provides an imaginative representation of what has happened that is based on

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the evidence of eyewitness reports. Hegel remarks, ‘The culture of the author and of the events in his work, the spirit of the author and of the actions he tells of, are one and the same.’39 Original historians show sensitivity towards the events that they narrate, but the scope of their studies is unduly restricted due to their exclusive focus upon events with which they are involved directly. Reflective history supersedes original history because it aims to achieve a mediated rather immediate identification with the action that is narrated. It extends the explanatory reach of historical study. Hegel takes the various types of reflective history to be deficient, however, in that they are unable to explain satisfactorily the past actions with which they deal. Unlike original historians, whose proximity to events enables them to appreciate their animating spirit, reflective historians tend to import into the past, notions and standpoints that are drawn from the present. Hegel distinguishes universal history, pragmatic history and critical history as representing specific forms of reflective history. In universal history, the historian connects events by taking them to illustrate principles. These principles are brought to bear upon the past events by the historian from the vantage point of the present. The consequence of this method of understanding and connecting events is that the sequences of past events are abridged according to the dictates of the historian’s external assessment of what is of universal significance in these past events. This attribution of significance, however, rather than reflecting what is genuinely universal tends to be shaped by the particular standpoints of another age. In pragmatic histories, the historian views the past expressly from a particular current perspective, so that lessons for the present can be derived from past events. Hegel deems these lessons to be illicit, because the distinctness of past events from present circumstances entails that no direct lessons can be so derived.40 Critical history is a form of reflective history, in which the historian criticizes a range of historical narratives so as to generate a synoptic account that is constructed via this review. Just as Collingwood criticizes a critical form of ‘scissors and paste’ history for continuing to privilege the authority of sources, so Hegel critiques a form of history in which historians merely criticize preceding accounts without establishing an independent form of historical understanding. Hegel also discusses various forms of specialized histories, such as the history of art, which view history and its development from a specialized reflective viewpoint. He perceives them to be limited in their appreciation of the past by the circumscribed, particular interests that inspire and inform these specialised histories.

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For Hegel, philosophical history bridges the gap between the present world of the historian and the past that is the object of historical understanding. The perspective of philosophical history understands reason and freedom to be defining concepts of continuing human identity, which link the present to the past. History is understood by the philosophical historian to be the process, whereby the rational and free character of human beings is necessarily developed. Hegel’s philosophical conception of mind (Geist) recognizes that human beings are free and rational, and that their freedom and rationality are central to a narrative of historical development and for an appreciation of the character of human beings in the present. Hegel observes, ‘Because we are concerned only with the idea of Spirit – and we regard the whole of world history as nothing more than the manifestation of spirit- when we go over the past, however extensive it may be, we are really concerned only with the present.’ 41 Like Collingwood, Hegel ascribes reciprocity between historical method and the object of historical study. Just as Collingwood takes the practice of history to be a free and rational inquiry, which is correlated to the study of free and rational human actors, so Hegel takes philosophical history to be a free and rational inquiry that is concerned with the actions of free and rational actors. Hegel observes, ‘To him who looks at the world rationally, the world is rational in return.’ 42 Again, like Collingwood, Hegel’s critique of current and preceding modes of historical study turns upon their dual misrepresentation of the object of historical study and the methods, which are employed to explain this object. For Hegel, an immersion in the object of historical study, which is evident in original history is deficient, just as a reflective historian’s projection onto the past of particular notions of the present misconceives the development of freedom and rationality in history. Hegel differs from Collingwood, because his conception of the dialectical reciprocity between philosophical history and its object turns upon an overarching narrative of historical development whereby freedom develops necessarily so as to underpin progressively more rational accounts of its progress. Hegel takes the course of historical development to consist in the expansion of freedom from the arbitrary freedom of a single individual under Oriental despotism to the universal achievement of freedom in modern North European states. Hegel remarks,’ …the Orientals knew only that One person is free; the Greeks and Romans that some are free; while we know that all humans are implicitly free.’43 For Collingwood, the contingency of historical

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development is not compromised by an overarching philosophical conception of the necessity of rational progress.

Freedom, necessity and contingency Hegel and Collingwood differ on how they interpret freedom, its historical expression and its comprehension. They are, however, united by their common recognition that freedom is a corollary of the rational capacities of human beings. Hegel understands freedom to be the defining concept of humanity. He also maintains that it is intrinsic to the concept of freedom that it develops. He takes consciousness to be inherently free in that its engagement with the world is shaped by its own activities, but awareness of this freedom is only gained by historical developments that recognize and express this freedom. He conceives history as the process whereby human beings necessarily become conscious of their capacity to act freely and rationally, and they do so by actually producing a political culture in which they are free and rational.44 Hegel, like Collingwood, holds that historical understanding is attuned to interpreting the self-conscious, free, rational self-development of human beings, and he eschews naturalistic methods that are associated with the study of natural phenomena. As well as linking freedom to historical expression, Hegel maintains that freedom and its historical expression are necessarily connected to the development of political cultures. The rationale for Hegel’s identification of historical development with the fortunes of political cultures turns upon his plausible argument that the impetus for historical knowledge emerges simultaneously with the development of a specifically political culture, in which a deliberately constructed public order replaces the naturalistic ties of family order. Within a political culture public actions require express public recognition. The public recognition of action is both an index of properly historical actions superseding unthinking predominantly naturalistic routines, and of a specifically historical concern to record and understand these actions. Hence, Hegel identifies the reciprocity between history a parti subjecti and history a parti objecti as determining the onset of historical action and historical understanding. Collingwood’s identification of the subject-matter of history accords with Hegel’s. He specifies it to be the free rational action of human beings, and he stipulates that the object of historical study must be human actions that clearly supersede naturalistic behaviour and routines. Collingwood, like Hegel, takes the subject matter of history to

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be the actions of human beings that are meaningful in so far as they express thoughts that are intelligible in terms of public conceptions. Collingwood’s strictures in The Principles of History against biography indicate his affinity with Hegel in regarding human actions to form the object of historical study.45 Collingwood maintains that biography is a misbegotten form of history. It is designed to arouse emotion rather than to understand rational action. It deals with merely naturalistic aspects of human behaviour, such as the passing fancies and illnesses of individuals. Biography fails to deliver authentic historical knowledge, due to its lack of focus upon actions that arise from and impact upon those aspects of the world that are shaped by a shared public language, in which evidence for the rational purposes expressed in those actions can be ascertained. Hence, Collingwood follows Hegel in perceiving past historical actions and the activity of understanding those actions to arise out of the development of social practices, which supersede merely naturalistic behaviour. Although Collingwood and Hegel are united on specifying the subject matter of history to be the free, rational actions of human beings, they differ on whether they see historical development as exemplifying a necessary or contingent pattern of development. Where Collingwood affirms the contingency and non-teleological character of history, Hegel maintains that amidst the contingency of historical events there is an underlying pattern that attests to the logical development of freedom. Hegel’s assumption that history exhibits a unitary development that leads inexorably to the recognition of the freedom of all citizens is problematic, and Collingwood’s criticism of it as thereby placing history ‘in a pupillage to logic’ is to the point.46 At the same time Collingwood recognizes that Hegel defends his position skilfully.47 While Hegel predicates his philosophical history on the historical narratives of reflective historians, he considers that the essential freedom of human beings is necessarily expressed and developed in history. In short, he imagines, with some plausibility, that there is an inner drive for the inherent potential freedom of mankind to be expressed and developed. He observes, ‘Humanity on the other hand, has an actual capacity for change, and change for the better, a drive towards perfectability. This is the drive, the internal impulse of spiritual life, the drive to break through its own shell of naturalness, sensuality, and self-estrangement, in order to arrive at the light of consciousness, its own self-hood.’48 For Hegel, philosophical history’s rational comprehension of freedom depends on the prior actual development of a free political

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culture, and traditions of philosophical and historical understanding. Hegel comprehends philosophical history to resemble all activities in being an historical enterprise arising out of a specific political culture. Its sense of the defining significance of freedom and reason in constituting human identity is itself the product of a mature realization of human freedom in the public cultures of modern North European states. For Hegel, the reciprocity between the method of philosophical history and its object of inquiry entails their mutual generation by the necessary, prior historical development of reason and freedom. Collingwood appraises Hegel’s notion of teleological historical development as derogating from the freedom of historical actors and the autonomy of historians. For Collingwood, freedom consists in the contingency with which human beings interpret their own situations and act in terms of their own self-understanding. To conceive of human actions as following an independently specifiable logic is to circumscribe the freedom human beings possess to act in self-chosen ways. Collingwood’s conception of the freedom and autonomy of human beings, which is evident in contingent historical actions and in the correlative activity of historical understanding, is tellingly revealed in the section of The Principles of History that is entitled ‘Freedom’. Collingwood maintains that historical actors are to be conceived as constituting their own situation by way of their beliefs, and that historians in recognizing the freedom of historical individuals to act autonomously and determine their own actions simultaneously appreciate the autonomy of historical understanding. In explaining past events, historians must establish their narratives of events on the basis of their own imaginative and critical reading of the evidence, which they themselves establish and interpret. Collingwood recognizes the reciprocity between the freedom of historical actors and the activity of being an historian in remarking, ‘The discovery that the men whose actions he studies are in this sense free is a discovery which every historian makes as soon as he arrives at a scientific mastery of his subject. When that happens, the historian discovers his own freedom: that is, he discovers the autonomous character of historical thought, its power to solve its own problems for itself by its own methods.’49

Conclusion Collingwood and Hegel are linked as theorists of history by the unity which they recognize between the method and object of historical understanding. Walsh in An Introduction to Philosophy of History

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assumes that historical methodology is separate from its object. He urges, ‘For just as scientific thinking gives rise to two possible studies, one concerned with the activity itself, the other with its objects, so does historical thinking.’50 Hegel and Collingwood, in contrast to Walsh, demonstrate the reciprocity that obtains between the activity of historical thinking and its subject matter. In appraising the principles of historical thinking, both thinkers practise a dialectical method of criticism, by means of which higher forms of historical knowledge are seen as developing out of less rational ones. They both perceive more sophisticated methods of historical understanding to emerge from and to include less developed methods, because the concepts of historical method are overlapping on a scale of forms. Collingwood and Hegel also show the subject matter of historical knowledge to be free rational human action. They both argue that historical understanding employs a non-naturalistic methodology to understand this rational freedom of historical agents. Where Hegel is critical of contemporary reflective forms of history and sees a supervening philosophical history as resolving the deficiencies of nonphilosophical history, Collingwood maintains that philosophical analysis discerns the principles of a scientific mode of history, which is implicit in the autonomy of an historian‘s practice. For Hegel the unification of past and present perspectives is only to be achieved in philosophical reflection on history, due to philosophy’s singular grasp on the unity of reason. In contrast, Collingwood recognizes that historians unify present and past by rethinking past thoughts via examination of contemporary evidence. Collingwood understands the freedom of human beings, which is expressed in their past actions to exemplify the contingency of their actions. He criticizes Hegel’s claim that there is a unity to the development of history that is to be understood in terms of its exhibition of a logical development of freedom. While Collingwood endorses Hegel’s decisive repudiation of a naturalistic reading of the object and methods of history in the second chapter, ‘Action’, of The Principles of History, he is at the same time critical of Hegel’s philosophical importation into history of a notion of logical necessity. Collingwood’s critique of Hegel’s philosophical reading of history is pressed further in the section of the succeeding chapter, ‘Nature and Mind’, which is entitled ‘Heads or Tails.’ This is the section that Knox transposed from its intended context in The Principles of History to The Idea of History. Knox’s transposition of this section, along with his removal of a paragraph highlighting Hegel’s subordination of the autonomy of

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history to the logic of philosophy, should not be invoked to emphasize Collingwood’s critique of aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history at the expense of an appreciation of the profound affinities between the two philosophers. The publication of The Principles of History, notwithstanding its incorporation of a robust critique of Hegel, should obscure neither the affinities between Hegel and Collingwood, nor Collingwood’s express recognition of his debt to Hegel. The very fact that Collingwood considers Hegel to be a philosopher of history, who is worthy of extensive criticism in a book, which is devoted to the analysis of the principles of history, shows the respect in which he holds Hegel. In his initial remarks on Hegel, in the chapter ‘Action’, Collingwood highlights the perspicacity of Hegel’s remarks on the non-naturalistic character of historical study. Collingwood acknowledges the astuteness of Hegel’s strategy of appraising history through a critical review of current methods, though he signals ultimate deficiencies in Hegel’s speculative schematic reading of historical progress. 51 The overall tenor of his commentary on Hegel, however, emphasizes the incisiveness of Hegel and the significance of his philosophical exploration of history. These preceding remarks establish a context for Collingwood’s subsequent, more critical consideration of Hegel and his conception of history in the section of the succeeding chapter, which is entitled ‘Heads or Tails’. The balance of his remarks on Hegel’s conception of history becomes more critical in this chapter, but his comments acknowledge and derive their point from this earlier recognition of the perspicacity of Hegel’s understanding of history. In ‘Heads or Tails’ of The Principles of History Collingwood acknowledges Hegel to be the grand master of the history of philosophy, but he considers that Hegel’s grand narrative of historical development, which is based upon a philosophically inspired conception of freedom, renders history subservient to philosophy. He observes, ‘The point I am making at the moment is that here, in respect of its relation to logic, Hegel did not even claim autonomy for history, far less achieve it.’52 Collingwood, then, is a critic of Hegel, but he is a critic, who acknowledges Hegel’s significance for understanding the method and subject matter of history, and for acknowledging the inter-relations between them. Collingwood’s critique of Hegel’s general narrative of historical development is not his last word on the matter. Boucher proposes that Collingwood’s failure to complete The Principles of History does not entail that he abandoned those aspects of the work, which

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were projected but not undertaken in the manuscript. He urges that Collingwood deals with most of the material, which he had intended to cover in The Principles of History in An Essay on Metaphysics, The New Leviathan and to some extent The Idea of Nature.53 The third part of the projected Principles of History was to have considered the relationship between theory and practice, and the notion of an historical civilization. Collingwood discusses these themes in The New Leviathan, the nature of civilization constituting its principal subject. In this latter work, Collingwood analyzes the conceptual conditions of a liberal civilization, which is taken to have developed historically. In so doing he reworks Hegel’s notion of the historical development of freedom, but in a way that renders its development, and the understanding of its development, consonant with the autonomy of history. In the first part of The New Leviathan Collingwood offers a theory of mind that conceives of mind in terms of its freedom and reason and thereafter he provides an account of a society and civilization that shows how the ideal of freedom has developed and has been instantiated in theory and practice. He recognizes that a society recognizing and promoting the freedom of its members is an historical product and takes the wider ideal of civilization, whereby all people are to be treated as free and rational beings to be an equally historical achievement. He identifies significant historical contributions to the development of the notion of a free society and civilization, such as classical social contract theory. As Nicholson observes, Collingwood’s identification of the complex multi-layered social practices contributing to a free society and his recognition of the historical dimension of a free society and civilization testify to the impact of Hegel upon Collingwood’s work.54 The New Leviathan reveals that Collingwood is committed to the Hegelian project of working out a highly generalised historical account of the development of freedom, though, in contrast to Hegel he is careful to observe its contingent, fragile status, exemplified by its susceptibility to barbarism.55 It serves as a reminder, however, that Collingwood’s understanding of history, is shaped by his engagement with Hegel, even in regard to aspects of Hegel’s approach with which Collingwood disagreed. Collingwood’s understanding of the principles of history is informed in particular by recognition of Hegel’s insight into considering the inter-connections between historical method and the object of history. While Hegel concludes that historical understanding must accommodate its supersession by a philosophical appreciation of the necessity of the

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development of freedom, Collingwood understands historical understanding to combine with philosophical understanding in providing for a theoretical understanding of the rationality of practical and theoretical activities. Ultimately, Collingwood understands the development of a rational and free civilization to provide the unifying conditions, which permit the exercise of the rational activities of human beings. He understands the unity of civilization in philosophical terms, but it is a unity which is a contingent achievement.

5 Aesthetics: Art, Mind and Community

Collingwood’s The Principles of Art shows how art contributes to the development of mind and the enrichment of the community. Within The Principles of Art, Collingwood rethinks the conditions of artistic achievement so as to highlight how art necessarily achieves both these goals simultaneously. Mind, for Collingwood, is not the exclusive property of particular individuals. Rather, an individual develops his or her capacities for rational thought and action, qualities of the mind, by inter-acting with others. Collingwood emphasizes the necessarily social side of experience. ‘Individualism conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and to exhibit his nature in whatever works are appropriate to it. But a man, in his art as in everything else, is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself. As artist, he is a speaker; but a man speaks as he has been taught; he speaks the tongue in which he was born.’1 While art necessarily is a social activity in which artistic expression turns on social connections at every turn, Collingwood also sees it as essential to the development of mind. Mind develops via rational thought and action. The development of rationality, for Collingwood, is a process of making sense of experience and enabling human beings to free themselves from the grip of merely received and delimited experience. Art contributes to this process of development by enabling human beings to express and clarify the emotions that they feel. Art releases human beings from the hold of unacknowledged, unexpressed emotions. Collingwood’s study of art plays an important role in his philosophizing. In Speculum Mentis the activity of art furnishes a partial and contradictory perspective on experience that summons an imaginary, intractable world. It is superseded by a philosophical standpoint that 97

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understands the role of mind itself in shaping reality. In evoking an imaginary world that is at odds with its own experiential standpoint art is taken to be childlike in its playful insularity. In contrast to this critique of art in Speculum Mentis, The Principles of Art affords art a vital role in the development of mind and experience. What remains constant is that art is comprehended by means of a synoptic philosophical perspective and a distinct philosophical method. Just as An Essay on Philosophical Method defines philosophical method in terms of its rethinking of the overlapping character of concepts, so Collingwood’s philosophy of art examines the conceptual character of the concepts constituting art by means of reconsidering the overlapping terms of sense, imagination and thought. Collingwood’s analysis of art is integral to his wider philosophical concerns. It contributes to his general conception of mind, and art’s cultivation is held to be essential for the flourishing of civilization. If art were to be neglected, then the nature of perception, imagination, emotion, thought and language would not be understood. Collingwood’s identification of art within a synoptic analysis of experience and his employment of a distinctive philosophical method in its identification, entails that Ridley’s perceptive study of Collingwood’s aesthetics, which downplays its wider philosophical standpoint, should be treated with caution. Ridley is sensitive to the nuances of artistic practice and to key aspects of Collingwood’s aesthetic. He acknowledges Collingwood’s wealth of informed, thoughtful reflection on the processes of actual artistic creation and art’s critical reception on the part of audiences. In so doing he recognizes the continued relevance of Collingwood’s aesthetic appreciation. Yet he aims to insulate Collingwood’s aesthetics from the wider context of his philosophizing due to what he identifies to be the problematic character of Collingwood’s ‘philosophical baggage’. 2 Ridley is not explicit about the nature of this dubious baggage, though it would appear that he has in mind a form of metaphysical subjective idealism that Collingwood himself disparages consistently.3 It is true that in The Principles of Art Collingwood occasionally and oddly depicts artistic creation as taking place entirely in an artist’s head. This formulation of artistic creation, however, is not inspired by a peculiar philosophical view of reality in which the external world is reduced to an individual’s fancy. Rather, it is an example of Collingwood’s tendency, on occasions, to formulate his thought in arresting and provocative ways. In this case, Collingwood expresses the power of artistic imagination in a formula that deflects from the physical and

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social aspects of the processes of creation, even though he is well aware of the significance of the latter aspects. Collingwood’s aesthetics reflect his subscription to a way of reading the world that harmonizes with a long-standing philosophical commitment to a dialectical reading of the unity of experience that connects reflective activities to a variety of ways of experiencing the natural and social world. Collingwood subscribes to an objective idealism that opens the subjectivity of the individual to the objectivity of shared patterns of thought. Baggage may well encumber a traveller, but travel generally requires that connections are made, and routes are checked out by information in the public domain. Collingwood invariably rethinks an activity by assessing how the component concepts that constitute its conditions, contribute to a unified goal. His evaluation of the activity, in turn, depends upon how it contributes to a wider scheme of concepts. In fact, Collingwood’s conception of art is best approached by appreciating how it arises out of his characteristic style of philosophizing. An index of the affiliation of Collingwood’s aesthetics to his general philosophical style is its critical Hegelianism, because Collingwood is a critical practitioner of an Hegelian style of philosophizing in all his works. The Principles of Art does not pretend to provide detailed scrutiny of artistic works. Instead, it concentrates upon exploring how artistic expression contributes to an overall development of consciousness, whereby human beings are progressively able to become aware of, and to assess their experience. Consequently, the trajectory of The Principles of Art resembles that of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind in so far as the latter, like the former, establishes a ladder of experience, which human beings ascend so as to domesticate experience by becoming increasingly self-aware. The Phenomenology of Mind is not a study of art, but it is a dialectical study of the developmental pathway of consciousness and self-consciousness. Art, for Collingwood, contributes crucially to the development of self-consciousness. Collingwood’s aesthetics also draws upon Hegel’s own aesthetics, in that Hegel, like Collingwood, takes art to be imaginative activity that possesses value through its intrinsic expression of truth rather than for its adventitious promotion of political or moral causes. Hegel does not perceive art to work with or to clarify emotions, which do not admit of a nuanced or specific expression of truth. In his Aesthetics – Lectures on Fine Art Hegel interprets art to be an expressive medium, in which spirituality is expressed in sensuous form. Art for Hegel neither mirrors nature nor contrives to produce effects. It is, ‘…simply one way of bringing to our minds and

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expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of spirit.’4 The significance that Hegel attaches to art is captured by his designation of it as a mode of absolute spirit. Hegel, however, takes art to be subordinate to religion and philosophy to the extent that its expression of the ideal universality of thought is made in a sensuous, particular form that is superseded in the more rational modes of religion and philosophy. Collingwood in his early works, Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art follows Hegel in subordinating art to the rational speculation of philosophy. In Outlines of a Philosophy of Art Collingwood imagines art to be pure imagination distinct from reflective thinking, which is decisively superseded by philosophy’s rational appraisal of experiential meaning. Collingwood remarks, ‘Hence art always has its centre of gravity outside itself … The aesthetic spirit, which from its own point is the pure negation of transcendence, its passage from the life of art to another, fuller life, from the monadic world of imagination to the world of reality whose essence is its transcendence of all monadism.5 Collingwood’s later aesthetics, however, affords art an irreducible role in expressing the emotional charge that accompanies all forms of experience, including the most reflexively self-aware. Collingwood, therefore differs from Hegel in taking art to express and achieve a nuanced discrimination of emotional feelings, and to conceive of the experiential ascent of consciousness to more considered and rational forms of awareness as allowing for the continuing need and value of art in clarifying emotions. Philosophy, for Collingwood, does not supersede the role of art in expressing and discriminating amongst the emotions, which inform the highest reaches of the mind. If Collingwood’s The Principles of Art differs from his earlier Hegelian subordination of art to philosophy, it is also distinct from Hegel in its treatment of modern art. Hegel considers that Romanticism, which expresses the signature modern preoccupations with interiority, reflexiveness and particularity, represents an artistic decline from the elegance and purity with which classical art depicts the ideal, universal character of beauty. The truth of the modern Christian world, for Hegel, renders art redundant to the extent that its profundity and inwardness are not susceptible of sensuous representation. Hegel remarks, ‘…the spirit of our world today, or more particularly the spirit of our religion and the development of our reason, appears as beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute. The peculiar nature of artistic production, and of works of art, no longer fills our highest need.’6 Rather than deprecating the con-

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temporary role of art, Collingwood assumes that art has a major role to play in responding to what he perceives to be an unfolding crisis of civilization. Members of a civilization, for Collingwood, must address their feelings and emotions on vital subjects, and art plays a crucial role in the process by which this occurs. A persistent theme of The Principles of Art is the present need for authentic, socially sensitive art that expresses the emotions, which are repressed in the contemporary psyche. Collingwood’s presentation of the current indispensability of art forms a clear contrast to Hegel’s melancholic vision of the ‘death’ of art in the modern world. Collingwood imagines that art offers a signal service to contemporary civilization in counteracting underlying causes of its crisis. He maintains that a society is more than a collection of individuals in that there are aspects of the life of a community, which are not to be explained simply by aggregating the effects of the actions of its constitutive individuals. He remarks, ‘…moral diseases have this peculiarity, that they may be fatal to a society in which they are endemic without being fatal to any of its members. A society consists in the common way of life, which its members practise; if they become so bored with this way of life that they begin to practise a different one the old society is dead even if no-one noticed its death.7 Collingwood diagnoses the malaise of contemporary civilization as arising out of its members’ emotional indifference to its way of life. Their collective boredom and indifference are symptoms of a social decadence that spread amongst Roman citizens during its decline. Collingwood takes the drudgery of standard forms of modern work as inducing a craving for amusement rather than a disposition to pursue authentic emotional self-knowledge and conviction.8 He perceives art to offer a remedy for this state of affairs in that contemporary artists can recognize and express the emotional hollowness of modernity. Emotional recognition of the disturbing features of modernity is a means of responding to them. Collingwood evidently sees his own work, The Principles of Art, as a contribution to this artistic engagement. He diagnoses the contemporary crisis in apocalyptic terms, foreseeing the imminence of calamity.‘…our civilization has been caught in a vortex, somehow connected with its attitude towards amusement, and that some disaster is impending which, unless we prefer to shut our eyes to it and perish, if we are to perish, in the dark, it concerns us to understand.’9 T. S. Eliot’s poetry due to its evocation and expression of the crisis of civilization is imagined by Collingwood to be an exemplary form of contemporary art.10

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Collingwood’s conception of art, then, is distinct form that of Hegel. Art, for Collingwood, plays a continuing and indispensable role in expressing emotions, whereas Hegel imagines art’s role in depicting the truth and unity within experience to be superseded by the more perspicuous standpoints of religion and philosophy. Nonetheless, there is a profound, underlying affinity between the aesthetics of Collingwood and Hegel. They both conceive of art as a mode of imaginative expression that contributes to a more general experiential development of consciousness whereby mankind develops its understanding and selfawareness. In his understanding of art, Collingwood maintains that the philosophical process of rethinking experience traces a development from a merely sensuous apprehension of the world and our feelings, to a conscious mastery of our emotions via their imaginative expression. A mastery of our emotions is a part of the progressive story that is narrated by Collingwood, whereby mankind is increasingly able to reflect upon itself and its environment so as to render its world a rational and free one. Hegel sees art as providing a sensuous representation of an absolute conception of experience, which depicts the individuality and particularity of sensuous experience as expressing the universality of reason. Art is an immediate expression of the unifying, self-related character of thought, which religion and philosophy show to be central to all experience. The point of Collingwood’s aesthetics, like that of Hegel’s, is to identify the role that art plays in a wider scheme of things. A theory of art, in which its relations to the wider web of human activities is neglected, would miss the point of artistic activity. A perspective that separates the artist from the wider world of social inter-action not only invokes the curse of ‘the ivory tower’ but also abstracts from the profound sense that all human activities by necessity take their bearings from their social connections.11 Art, for Collingwood, is language, and language for him is the social rule-bound activity that it is for Wittgenstein.12 The sociality of language and art, for Collingwood, is of a piece with the sociality of experience that is emphasized throughout his writings, and which he recognizes to be a central aspect of Hegel’s philosophizing.13 Collingwood locates art on a map of inter-connected concepts. He recognizes it to be linked to social intercourse and to the ways in which human beings establish their cognitive grip upon the world. The upshot is that art forms part of the economy of human self-awareness. Art plays a key role in emancipating human beings from the hold of the merely given. If mere feeling is ineffable and evanescent, unable to

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account for itself, the imaginative self-expression of artistic experience domesticates the rawness of emotions, renders them intelligible and enables men and women to understand themselves and one another. Collingwood maintains that all expressions of thought carry an emotional charge that requires expression if human beings are to understand their feelings and hence themselves. Artistic expression is an indispensable element in intellectual and practical life. Given the social character of artistic activity, Collingwood imagines that the special function of art is to express and thereby clarify the most difficult, troublesome emotions that are experienced in a society or civilization. In so doing it performs an invaluable service in so far as society tends to engage in the collective repression or displacement of difficult or unpalatable emotions analogous to the processes of displacement and repression that psychoanalysts, like Freud, have detected as operating in the psychic life of individuals.

Art and not art Throughout his career, Collingwood imagines truth to be a process of achievement rather than an end state that is insulated from the errors to which processes of discovery and argument might be prone. Truth is the process by which mind understands the world; it is not an unchanging formula that is independent of the ways in which it is arrived at.14 In ethics, Collingwood’s standpoint is synoptic, embracing a number of partial perspectives, which would be merely rejected if moral truth were not to be conceived as being constituted by the overlapping concepts that develop its meaning. The utilitarian standpoint, for instance, is misguided if it is taken to be the whole truth about morality, but nonetheless plays a part in the economy of Collingwood’s synoptic conception of moral life. In considering the identity of art, Collingwood examines a number of related perspectives that misperceive the nature of art. But, in reviewing them, Collingwood criticizes them in ways that contribute positively to the delineation of his own conception of art. In doing so, Collingwood follows the example of Hegel in his Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art. Hegel, like Collingwood, works with previous formulations of the character of art, subjecting them to a criticism that reveals progressively his own conception. It is a concrete example of how his dialectical investigation proceeds; standpoints are interrogated to reveal problems and incoherencies that motivate the formulation of new answers, and thereafter new questions. This procedure is neither

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random nor a presentational device. It reflects a considered position; namely that truth is neither a unique nor an unqualified insight, owing nothing to previous speculation or contemporary debates and standpoints. Truth, for Hegel and for Collingwood, is not to be isolated from error, as if a healthy body depends on its total insulation from contaminating germs and disease. Hegel in the Introduction to his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art reviews a variety of prevailing and preceding opinions on art. In the section, ‘Aims of Art’ he considers the opinion that the aim of art is to imitate or represent nature. Hegel is unimpressed by this theory of art, taking it to undervalue the creative imaginative activity of artists, to detract from assessment of the object of art and at the same time to set artists on a course that is impossible, given the range and power of the forces at work in nature. He remarks, ‘…by mere imitation, art cannot stand in competition with nature, and if it tries, it looks like a worm trying to crawl after an elephant.’15 Again, Hegel is critical of a theory of art that defines art either in terms of its evocation of feelings or in terms of its promotion of elevating moral purposes. For Hegel, its mistake is to value art for its effects rather than for what it undertakes. To value art for its external effects is to devalue its intrinsic character, because other activities could be substituted for that of art if the effects could be achieved by alternative means. Hegel is a critic of a utilitarian view of art. He observes, ‘The perversity lies here in this, that in that case the work of art is supposed to have a bearing on something else which is set before our minds as the essential thing or as what ought to be, so that then the work of art would have validity only as a useful tool for realizing this end which is independently valid on its own account outside the sphere of art. Against this we must maintain that art’s vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration…’16 Hegel’s review of misguided theories of art is conducted not merely to dispense with error but also to highlight how art is actually to be understood. Hegel’s review of mistaken theories of art intimates that art actually operates as an independent, expressive and self-justifying activity. Likewise, Collingwood in The Principles of Art develops a philosophical understanding of art through the process of rethinking problematic views of art. In evaluating these mistaken theories of art, Collingwood reviews the conditions of experience within which art operates. This mode of operating has an Hegelian pedigree and reaches back to the dialectical procedure of Plato. The ideal of philosophical discourse, for Collingwood, is one in which there is an openness to dis-

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cussion that admits of alternative standpoints rather than aiming at a sterile set of truthful propositions, which are uncontaminated by their involvement in the processes by which they are accepted. Truth does not inhabit an insulated zone of truthfulness but is to be glimpsed in its Socratic emergence from and engagement with error.17 Collingwood at the outset of The Principles of Art reviews a number of what he takes to be misguided theories of art. His criticism, of these standpoints is fundamental in that the errors that he identifies within them are taken to impede the possibilities of human selfunderstanding and expression. Their critique, however, also serves to intimate features of an authentic conception of art as the imaginative expression of emotion. This preliminary identification of the authentic nature of art is developed subsequently. In the latter part of the book, this exploration assumes the form of an analysis of the nature of sense, feeling, imagination, consciousness, thought and language that are the media in which emotions are felt and expressed. Collingwood’s review of misleading theories of art also leads to a critique of a counterfeit current of opinion that undermines beliefs crucial to the maintenance of civilization. The misconceptions of art are shown to be united by their common tendency to dissect aspects of artistic experience so that artistic techniques are separated from the ends of art; aesthetic emotions are taken to be external to processes of creation and the purpose of art is determined by non-artistic criteria. Collingwood rejects this putative dependence of art upon non-artistic criteria and purposes as decisively as it is by Hegel. Collingwood also follows Hegel in arguing for the autonomy of art, whose significance is revealed, nonetheless, by its role in evoking and expressing capacities that contribute to the overall development of self-consciousness. Collingwood’s begins his review of theories of art by exploring the sense in which art is taken to be a craft. He traces its pedigree to the Ancient Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle. The contemporary currency of this conception of art is recognized by the treatment of works of art as commodities. The continuing commodification of art amidst the ubiquity of market transactions in determining the ways in which objects are produced and distributed has confirmed how art is susceptible to market forces. Transactions in art operate routinely as hedges against currency fluctuations. While Collingwood values craft itself, he is adamant that craft is not art. It is not art because craft, unlike art, presupposes a separation between key aspects of the creative process. A craft implies a technique, whereby means are divorced from the ends to be achieved. There is a clear distinction between planning and

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execution, and between form and matter. The raw material or matter that is worked on by the craftsman persists in the finished product, whereas the form is identified as the plan or pre-formulated scheme adopted by the craftsman that guides him or her in the shaping of the material. The notion of the craftsman or putative artist working on given raw materials to fashion an artistic object likewise assumes raw materials and finished product to be independent of one another. Collingwood’s summary of the ways in which craft implies a series of oppositions between its constitutive elements is completed by his analysis of the hierarchical relationship that obtains between the various crafts. This hierarchy entails that the raw materials and tools of certain crafts are supplied by the finished product of others. Some crafts are seen as being organised so that their component activities operate in separate and hierarchical ways, as is evidenced in the manufacture of motor cars. For Collingwood, the separation of the constitutive aspects of craft distinguishes craft from art. Collingwood’s critique of the identification of art with craft underlies much of his own positive identification of art and its role in sustaining civilization. Ultimately Collingwood offers an independent justification of his view of art, but in his initial specification of the ways in which art does not fit the craft model he adverts to commonly recognized distinguishing features of art. Ridley, in his analysis of Collingwood’s aesthetics, observes justly that Collingwood’s critique of the craft model does not entail that the unity of form and matter in art is universal. The block of stone on which the sculptor works evidently can be separated from its artistic form.18 Rather, Collingwood maintains that a separation between art’s constitutive elements is neither an essential nor a universal presupposition of art. In crucial examples of undeniably artistic activity, authentic art depends on artists not treating the elements of their work as separable. For instance, Collingwood points rightly to the absurdity of supposing that a poet operates with a clearly specifiable set of raw materials consisting of words or language.19 Likewise, Collingwood urges that poets and painters in shaping words and colours are not following a preconceived plan or model when they write or paint. The very notion of artistic creativity is undermined if it is reduced to the formulaic procedure of a craft. While the media might manufacture a pop idol, the consequent commodification of the artistic process highlights idolatry rather than artistic achievement. Collingwood summarizes the view of art as craft by observing how it assumes the artist to resemble the craftsman in practising a technique

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that delivers premeditated products. Given the manifest technical skills possessed, for instance, by Michelangelo and Shakespeare, the craft model is plausible, but it is a plausibility that cannot be sustained when applied as a summative explanation of art. Collingwood’s critique of the assimilation of art to craft underlies his critique of more specific conceptions of art that operate by separating techniques from the actual processes of creating works of art. The affiliated particular versions of art as craft with which Collingwood is concerned, are the notions of art that take it to be representational, magical or an entertainment. The creed of representational art, for Collingwood, maintains the delusion that the business of the artist is to execute a preformulated task. Portraiture, for instance, is itself portrayed as a skill, which consists in the artist’s accurate representation of a subject whom the artist knows beforehand. For Collingwood, this presumption is fatal to the prospective artistic value of portraiture. If art is to fulfil its creative promise, then the process of creation must generate a new perspective. Contracts between sitter and painter militate against artists lending themselves sufficiently to their task to discover and express hitherto unremarked aspects of a subject’s appearance.20 Magic, for Collingwood, is a technical term indicating an activity in which there is a conscious concern to arouse emotions for the pursuit of practical purposes. Collingwood assumes magic to be a rational activity in so far as it employs activities such as dancing, singing and ritual drawing to achieve external ends. He is highly critical of anthropologists like Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl, who designate magic to be an irrational folly of primitive people whose absence of sound scientific sense is evidenced by their invoking of super-natural powers to cope with natural forces. Collingwood’s critique of the categorization of magic as a form of misguided science is plausible, just as his designation of magic as a kind of craft that works on emotions to achieve practical outcomes is an intelligent way of treating magic as a rational and hence intelligible activity.21 Collingwood’s discussion of magic shows his sensitivity to primitive peoples, and his sensitized awareness of the variety of cultural forms in which rationality is displayed. If Collingwood’s reading of magic rebuts imperial misreadings of past cultures that label them to be irrational, his interpretation of magic has a correspondingly deflationary effect on prevalent self-images of contemporary European civilization. On the one hand Collingwood takes magic to be term applicable to activities in his contemporary world just as it is to primitive cultures. In his

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unpublished ‘Folklore’ manuscripts he urges that interpreting the savagery of primitive peoples is a way to appreciate the savagery within contemporary society.22 Indeed, the misconceived contemporary conception of art as a means of promoting emotional affects or of affecting the behaviour of its audience is taken by Collingwood to be evidence of the continuing practice of magic. Collingwood, in fact, is not unsympathetic to those who would resort to manipulating their quasiartistic skills to arouse emotions to serve moral and political purposes. Collingwood’s tolerance and respect for magic recognizes that no society, respectful of its need to inspire and to direct its emotional energies can turn its back on magic. In a number of his unpublished writings, he admits the continuing importance of emotions, and the need for a civilization to attend to the ways in which its emotional resources can be invigorated. In his discussion of fairy tales, in the ‘Folklore’ manuscripts, he observes, ‘We are concerned to understand the mind of the “savage”, with its furniture of magical ideas: and we have already seen that unless we can sympathize with these ideas, by recognizing their kinship with certain elements in our own experience, we cannot hope to understand them.’23 Boucher, in ‘Collingwood and Anthropology as a Historical Science’ interprets Collingwood to mean that a modern sense of ‘savage’ behaviour is only possible if there is an overlap between the thinking of the savage and the modern human being. He observes, ‘In understanding the “savage” historically, we understand the “savage” in ourselves.’24 Collingwood’s interpretation of the contemporary rise of fascism and the concomitant febrility of liberal democracies turns upon an appreciation of the fascists’ exploitation of magical rites and of a corresponding exhaustion of emotional energy on the part of liberal civilization. In his article ‘Fascism and Nazism’, he observes, ‘Fascism and Nazism, then, are successful because they have the power of arousing emotion in their support. They can annihilate even the most widespread liberaldemocratic opposition in their own countries because those who believe in them “think with their blood”, as the Nazis say: care intensely about their beliefs, and can therefore overwhelm the liberalism of democracy, which, because its votaries have for two hundred years progressively purged it of emotional elements, has become as purely as possible what the French call cerebral, an affair of unemotional thinking.’25 In The Principles of Art Collingwood emphasizes that any society must foster and support its core values and emotions. He observes, ‘Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence

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magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society. A society which thinks, as ours thinks, that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.’26 While recognizing the rationality of magic and acknowledging its continuing role in sustaining social practices, Collingwood denies that magic is art. Art, for Collingwood, is not to be understood as operating instrumentally so as to serve ends, which are not part of the artistic process itself. Collingwood conceives of art as maintaining a unity between plan and execution and form and content, which is disrupted by the attempt at serving the Establishment, the nation, the party, the clique or the neighbourhood by ‘magical’ artistic contrivances. Likewise Collingwood denies that art functions as a mere amusement. If enjoyment is the goal of an activity, then the value of the activity is subordinated to this purpose. The peculiarity of amusements is that they are are designed to evoke and discharge emotions, which do not impact directly on practical life. Characterisically amusements construct make-believe worlds in which people play with emotions that do not interfere with life. Amusements, such as erotic fantasy, detective stories, ‘society’ literature and football are hedonistic. They are designed to give pleasure, and this pressure to please renders them instrumental rather than artistic. While Collingwood recognizes that amusement and the pursuit of pleasure are part and parcel of human life, he appraises the intensification of the amusement industry in the modern world to be a potent symbol of the dangers to which it is exposed. Amusement assumes that emotions and their discharge can be severed from the practical world in which human beings are engaged The raison d’etre of amusement is that it is an escape from the demands of the practical world. The alienation of life into distinct compartments, demanded by the amusement industry, is taken by Collingwood to be a sign of a disturbing division within modern society. Modern men and women are seen as escaping from the demands and frustrations of modern life by indulging in a fantasy world of pleasure. The escape is purchased at a price, however, as it detracts from the energy required to reinvigorate the on-going practical life of society. Collingwood observes, ‘Amusement becomes a danger to practical life when the debt it imposes on these stores of energy (requisite for practical life) is too great to be paid off in the ordinary course of living. When this reaches a point of crisis, practical life, or “real” life, becomes emotionally bankrupt; a state of things which we describe by speaking

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of its intolerable dullness or calling it a drudgery. A moral disease has set in, whose symptoms are a constant craving for amusement and an inability to take any interest in the affairs of ordinary life, the necessary work of livelihood and social routine. A person in whom the disease has become chronic is a person with a more or less settled conviction that amusement is the only thing that makes life worth living. A society in which the disease is endemic is one in which most people feel some such conviction most of the time.’27 Collingwood takes the contemporary power of the amusement industry to indicate a crisis for civilization. It is a crisis, which admits of no easy solution. It is most certainly not to be resolved by revolution, in that its causes involve the distorted orientation and repression of emotions rather than the misdemeanours of a government or class.28 The Principles of Art, like all of Collingwood’s later works, tackles a perceived malaise of contemporary civilization. Collingwood recognizes the severity of the contemporary crisis, but sees authentic art as a means of responding to its underlying causes. Boucher has highlighted how Collingwood’s concern to distinguish authentic art from its ersatz forms reflects his recognition of the important role that art can play in the contemporary situation, and the deleterious consequences that follow if magical or amusement art usurp its role. Boucher notes, ‘The purpose of discussing art as magic, and art as amusement is not merely to categorise human endeavours commonly misidentified as art, but also to warn of the dangers of allowing art proper to be displaced by them.’29 Having diagnosed the problems besetting civilization and criticized the misidentification of art as a technique, Collingwood sketches an authentic view of art. In so doing he makes explicit his sense of the linkage between falsity and truth. He urges that his critique of misconceived notions of art points towards a truthful one. He concludes that authentic art must incorporate aspects of the preceding inauthentic standpoints in so far as they engage with features of artistic experience. Collingwood argues that a technical, craft view of art assumes that art deals with emotions, creates something, and creates something that realises a goal or purpose. Authentic art, for Collingwood, shows how art expresses emotions and creates objects that realise purposes. Collingwood, however, while taking art to express emotion does not consider that it arouses emotions for practical or hedonistic purposes. Art is misconceived as a technique, if its creativity is taken to be subordinate to its manipulation of emotions for instrumental purposes. Collingwood perceives the process of artistic creation, true art, to be coeval with the expression of the artist’s emotion. For Collingwood, an

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artist creates in order to express emotion and in so doing he or she knows their emotional world. Collingwood takes this interpretation of artistic experience to be more faithful to the practice of an art such as poetry than the technical theory, which assumes that the poet already knows the emotions that are expressed within a poem, before it is written. Allied to this expressivist dimension to art, Collingwood recognizes that the artist does create something, but what is created is not an end product that is detachable from the process of its production. It is this insistence on the fusion of the process of creation and its product that explains Collingwood’s critique of his former view of art that he delineated in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, where he links artistic experience to the creation and appreciation of beautiful objects.30 The creativity of the artist, for the later Collingwood, is not trammelled by its adherence to a transcendent standard of beauty that exists in nature as well as in artistic creations. Collingwood takes artistic creation to be the work of imagination, in which the artist expresses his or her emotions by constituting a work of art. The artist produces something in the real world, but for the sensuous product of artistic labour to count as a creative expression of emotion, both the artist and the audience must imagine how the object of artistic creation expresses this emotion. ‘Background noise’ has to be eliminated by focused concentration upon what the work is expressing. Collingwood emphasizes, therefore, that what is ‘made’ in artistic creation is a work of sustained imagination, rather than an artifact that can be appreciated without regard to the imaginative creative process whereby it is created. The imaginative world of the artist, though, is not a world of make-believe that is defined in terms of its difference from the ordinary world in which we are situated. Rather, the imagination of the artist is a work of reflection that may or may not be make-believe. The peculiarity of the artist, for Collingwood, is that he or she imagines something that expresses emotions that have been felt in some sense but not previously expressed or understood. The significance of the artist in the light of the contemporary crisis of civilization is that art allows for the healthy expression of emotion and concomitant emotional self-knowledge that serve as an antidote to the contemporary corruption of consciousness.

The ladder of artistic creation In the first part of The Principles of Art Collingwood follows Hegel in criticizing theories of art that assume it to be a technique to achieve an

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independently determined purpose. Collingwood, in so doing, establishes conspicuous features of art and rehearses his standard philosophical practice of rethinking thought so as to recognize unities between categories. Most notably, he links an artistic appreciation of emotion and the practical life of a society. Nonetheless, Collingwood’s preliminary account raises questions as well as suggesting answers. His incipient theory of art as imaginative emotional expression explains neither the meaning of its terms, nor the connections between them. In the succeeding part of the work, Collingwood provides a theoretical defence and development of the notion of art as imaginative emotional expression. In doing so he practises the scheme of philosophizing that he had outlined in An Essay on Philosophical Method. Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method conceives of philosophy as a style of rethinking that reconsiders the concepts pertaining to an area of experience by reflecting upon their conditionality and adequacy in maintaining their implicit or explicit epistemological claims. The upshot is that he perceives concepts to be united in affording conditions for the coherent explanation of an area of experience. Concepts form a series or scale of forms, by which they can be rethought as contributing to an overall process of developed understanding. The second part of The Principles of Art frames such a ladder of development whereby the human experiential world is taken to be one in which there is continuity between successively distinguishable ways in which human beings orient themselves to and construct sense out of their world. The very notion of a ladder of development signals the close affinity between Collingwood’s analysis of the conditions of experience and Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, which, likewise, reviews conditions that progressively make possible human awareness and self-awareness. Collingwood’s analysis of experience, which constitutes the second part of The Principles of Art, begins by contrasting thinking and feeling. He points to features of the two activities that evidently separate them from one another. Feeling relates to the here and now, in that it is to do with sensation. It is a sensuous, immediate psychic involvement with the world. Collingwood observes feeling can refer to two types of experience. Feelings can mean sensations directly linked to the senses such as a feeling of cold, but may also mean emotional feelings such as anger and pleasure. Collingwood takes it that feeling is a term that includes both these elements, and that feelings are analysable into two aspects, whereby a sensation such as that of seeing or hearing can be analysed as also bearing an emotional charge such as pleasure or anger.

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The entire experience of feeling is distinguished analytically from that of thought. Collingwood points to differing features of thought and feeling. Thought, for Collingwood, is capable, crucially, of being rethought. This capacity for being rethought is not adventitious. Collingwood’s distinctive approach to philosophy and history is constructed on the basis of thought’s universality, its supersession of particular delimitation in time or space. The capacity for thought to be rethought allows for the possibility of critique; a thinker can rethink his or her thought so as to appraise whether or not it is appropriate. Hence the rethinkability of thought permits the application of normative criteria, and it is this aspect of thought that induces Collingwood to consider thought and thoughtful activities to be criteriological. Thoughts and the criteria by which they are appraised can be objects of debate, because thoughts can be rethought by a plurality of thinkers and hence are public. Thoughts are regulated by publicly expressible criteria. The universality and normativity of thought separate it from feeling, because feeling is strictly unrepeatable and hence is insusceptible to criticism. To inquire about the temperature, which is susceptible of measurement by agreed public criteria, is entirely different from asking for verification of someone’s sense of being cold.31 The conceptual distinction that Collingwood presses between thought and feeling threatens to disrupt experience, because if thought is entirely separated from feeling there appears to be no possibility that human beings can get an intelligible grip on their experience. In making sense of experience, human beings characteristically classify and discriminate feelings. Sensation cannot be unmixed with thought. The very act of attention to a phenomenon entails a capacity to discriminate between feelings and to connect and to disconnect one from another. Collingwood recognizes that the distinction between feeling and thought cannot be pressed so far as to disconnect the two entirely. Thought and feeling must be combined in making judgements, so as to enable an actual experience to make sense of the world. Feeling, then, does not provide an unreflective, unchallengeable bedrock for knowledge. Collingwood criticizes modern philosophers, such as logical positivists, for committing the fallacy of assuming that feeling can serve as a foundation for knowledge. Feeling is not an autonomous activity and cannot support an empiricism, which deprecates the role of thought in establishing meaningful experience.32 To make sense of the world, feelings that are in themselves discrete need to be somehow linked together so that thought can operate with them and make discriminatory judgements that allow for meaningful experience.

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What links feeling and thought, for Collingwood, is imagination and it is the crucial role that art plays in imaginative experience that renders it an irreducible and valuable activity. Collingwood’s entire discussion of the interchange between feeling, imagination and thought owes much to Hegel. Collingwood, in pointing up the inability of feeling by itself to make sense of experience, highlights how the bare act of attention itself requires thought.33 The incapacity of sense certainty to explain and work with what it attends to without the conceptual discrimination of thought is the phenomenological starting point for Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind. At the outset of that work, Hegel points to the nullity of alleged sense certainty, whereby what is held to be apprised as certain without conceptualization remains a mere ‘this’ or a vacuous ‘here’.34 Collingwood, like Hegel, urges that consciousness supplies the means by which experience is discriminated and comprehended, and that consciousness progresses due to its increasing capacity to realize its own role in making judgements. But in The Principles of Art, Collingwood does not expressly invoke Hegel, with whose philosophical account of experience he is sympathetic, but instead proceeds by examining the ways in which the nature of feeling, imagination and thought are analyzed in the history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Collingwood concentrates on the English empiricist tradition, and in doing so, he disentangles errors that he sees as continuing to beset the English philosophical world, despite the work of Kant and his successors.35 Collingwood conceives of the English empiricists to be operating in the context of a radical scepticism over the capacity of human beings to discriminate between real and delusional imaginary sensations that was introduced into the modern world by Descartes and his immediate successors such as Hobbes and Spinoza. Collingwood reviews a variety of expedients to resolve this problem of scepticism that are canvassed by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. All of these proposed solutions are vitiated by the fact that sensations cannot, in and by themselves, be divided into real and delusionary ones. What must be recognized, as Kant and his successors are acknowledged to observe, is that thought plays a central role in discriminating between what is real and what is delusional. Collingwood’s reference to the positive work of Kant and his successors serves as an implicit indicator of his awareness of the dependence of his account of consciousness on Hegel’s philosophy. He proceeds by way of a critique of English empiricism rather than via an exegesis of German idealism most likely because of his awareness of the importance attributed to the classic exponents of English

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empiricism by his philosophical contemporaries, such as the logical positivists. Collingwood maintains that imagination, far from fabricating illusions, is integral to all discussion of sensation, and to the progressive development of experience whereby mere sensation allows for judgements on the veracity of experience. Sensation or feeling in itself is taken by Collingwood to be incapable of providing the basis for developing an informed, discriminated picture of the world. Collingwood assumes and explains a gradational epistemology, which allots the discrimination of mere sensation or feeling a place below that of discriminated attention to something, because attention demands a conscious commitment to focus upon something. Attention, for Collingwood, implies the conscious work of the imagination. Consciousness implies freedom in so far as the decision to attend to something exhibits a domestication of or control over brute feeling. While conscious attention implies freedom, it does not allow for the exploration and appreciation of freedom that is afforded by an express choice of what to attend to that is based upon a discriminated freedom to choose between alternatives. Choice belongs to thought. The work of thought in classifying and discriminating between sensations depends upon the prior work of imagination in attending to a feeling that allows feelings to be the subject of analysis and classification. The activity of imagination or consciousness, for Collingwood, is the work of thought and as such it is governed by norms. It is subject to the bipolarity of being done well or ill. This appraisal of the activity of imagination operates without the elaborated classification and discrimination of conscious feelings that is conducted by the intellect. The work of the imagination is liable to underevaluation, but Collingwood emphasizes its significance. Collingwood observes that if we repress or misrepresent what we feel, then our lives suffer in so far as we do not express and know what we are. Collingwood understands art to be the imaginative expression of our feelings fused with their emotional charges, and diagnoses its role to be vital in the psychic economy of human well being. If feelings and their attendant emotions are not attended to and expressed, their repression constitutes a corruption of consciousness.36 There are evident affinities between Collingwood’s recognition of psychic repression, psycho-analytical interpretations of the sub-conscious, existential notions of the ‘bad faith’ of consciousness and Hegel’s diagnosis of the alienation experienced by the unhappy consciousness of medieval Christianity that denies its own feeling of self and world in its longing for the divine.37

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Consciousness, for Collingwood, implies language, because consciousness uses language to convey its judgements and perceptions. Language is expressive of emotion in attending to feelings and their emotional charges, and in making judgements. The intellect uses language as an instrument of thought in making discriminatory judgements about experience. Consciousness is able to deliver a controlled expression of emotion, by naming and comparing feelings. Hence, Collingwood conceives of art as expressing emotion in language; it focuses upon psychic feelings and brings feelings to consciousness, which thereby fuses feelings with their emotional charges. Collingwood takes language to be the way in which feeling and meaning are expressed. He takes a broad view of language, in which its gestures and physicality are not to be dismissed, in that they are indispensable means for conveying emotions. Collingwood also understands language to be social, because its terms and rules are learned and practised in inter-personal forms of communication. Like Hegel, he rehearses a sense of the dialectic of experience, in which the development of consciousness presupposes a recognitive world of other centres of consciousness. Speaking and hearing, for Collingwood, are taken to be correlative acts of self-consciousness.38 Emotion is expressed and conveyed through language, because speakers and hearers understand and convey emotions through linguistic acts. Language conveys emotions but it also serves as an instrument for the reflective analysis of feeling and the comparison of feelings. Grammar and logic serve as artificial instruments for recognizing rules that enable language to convey thought. Collingwood, though, warns against taking logic and grammar to be independent of the actual way in which language operates. Speakers using language are able to make reflective judgements the objects of consciousness to which they attend, but no mater how abstract their thinking, they are always conveying their emotions as well as their thoughts. To reflect upon particular objects of consciousness is always a matter of choice, and the choice is one to which the thinker or speaker is committed emotionally. Collingwood denies that language can be neatly divided into scientific and emotional discourses. The project of intellectualizing language is realised by the development of symbolism, but the symbolism of mathematics and logic, for Collingwood remains emotional as well as intellectual. Language conveys human emotions and intellectual judgements and it is for Collingwood no accident that a technical logical term such as, ‘atomic proposition’, carries with it a profound

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emotional force. He remarks, ‘But as we find it [atomic] occurring in the logician’s discourse, it is full of emotional expressiveness. It conveys to the reader, and is meant to convey, a warning and a threat, a hope and a promise.’39 The point of art, for Collingwood, is to convey and express emotions and hence to achieve what is implicit in the very use of language. The upshot of Collingwood’s recognition that language inherently expresses emotion is that there is no hard and fast discrimination of art from practical and intellectual discourse. Whenever a user of language shapes his or her expressions to give a considered truthful and powerful expression of their emotions, then he or she is acting as an artist. Art is not a specialized technique that is divorced from the business of life; psychic welfare and the flourishing of civilization depend upon the general determination to express human emotions authentically.

Conclusion Collingwood’s The Principles of Art is itself a powerful expression of his feeling for art and its significance in the wider life of society. It is an eloquent testimony to the imaginative expressiveness that is Collingwood’s touchstone of art. It also serves as an example of Collingwood’s general practice of philosophy. His philosophical aim is to perceive and explain the unity of artistic experience and to connect art to the development of mind and the wider practices of civilization. Moreover, Collingwood theorizes about art by reconsidering experience. On the one hand, he reviews and criticizes theories of art, whose misconceptions reveal aspects of its authentic identity. On the other hand, he undertakes a systematic review of meaningful experience by rehearsing the development of conscious awareness of experience via analysis of feeling, imagination and language and recognizes the role of art in the economy of conscious and self-conscious awareness, and its discrimination of experience. Graham captures the spirit of Collingwood’s aesthetics by noting that its expressivism is at the same time a form of cognitivism. ‘In short Collingwood’s expressivism leads on to a sort of cognitivism…’40 Collingwood’s understanding of art is characteristically ambitious. Its impetus is his systematizing, unificatory style of philosophizing. Its systematic conception of art, and its recognition of art’s contribution to a more general human engagement with the task of interpreting and clarifying experience, are highlighted by its kinship with Hegel’s aesthetics. Hegel, like Collingwood, criticizes fashionable theories of art,

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which downplay the significance of its creative imaginative activity so as to advertize its imitative or instrumental features. Hegel’s recognition of art’s achievement in framing images of underlying experiential unities, reconciling apparently discordant aspects of reality, harmonizes with Collingwood’s sense of the role of art in the development of human understanding. Collingwood differs from Hegel on art, however, in important ways. Hegel sees artistic inwardness and particularity in the modern world as exerting a strain on the artistic impulse to portray the harmony of the differing sides of experience in a sensuous form. Hegel’s sense of the problems posed by modernity for artistic experience, combines with his view of the supersession of artistic expression by the greater rationality of philosophical discourse, to render the status of art in the modern world somewhat uncertain. It is certainly subordinate to philosophy and its continued viability is put into question. Collingwood, however, takes the significance of art to be reinforced by what he sees as a contemporary crisis of civilization. Collingwood diagnoses the malaise of contemporary society to consist partly in a desiccation of emotional life, by which a craving for amusement substitutes for the expression of actual emotion. The authentic expression of emotions, though, is vital for the health of a society. Collingwood maintains that all human feelings and thoughts possess an emotional charge, whose recognition and expression underpin the successful pursuit of practical and theoretical tasks. The contemporary repression of feelings is held to deprive life of an underlying sense of purpose and to deny civilization the emotional support on which it depends. In his essay, ‘Fascism and Nazism’ Collingwood highlights how a general lack of commitment to the core value of liberty threatens to undermine liberal society.41 Whereas liberal civilization arose out of the strength of Christian convictions regarding the worth of each human being, the subsequent erosion of firm Christian commitments, which is evidenced in the prevalence of illuminism, weakens the convictions of contemporary liberal citizens in the values that define and sustain their civilization.42 The decline in emotional commitment to the core doctrines and values of liberal civilization points to the overwhelming need to recognize this emotional hollowness that threatens to deliver civilization to its enemies, who aim at establishing an illiberal empire by stirring neglected passions. In his ‘Folklore’ manuscripts Collingwood refers to modern European–American civilization as being dominated by its devotion to a form of utilitarian rationalism, which represses emotion.

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He observes, ‘This utilitarianism is more than a principle; it is an obsession. Whatever cannot be justified in this way our civilization tends on the whole to suppress. In general, it discountenances emotion and the expression of emotion; in particular it distrusts art and religion as things not altogether respectable. To live within the scheme of modern European–American civilization involves doing a certain violence to one’s emotional nature, treating emotion as a thing that must be repressed, a hostile force within us whose outbreaks are feared as destructive of civilized life.’43 Collingwood sees artists, in their capacity to express authentic and repressed emotions, as providing an antidote to the contemporary malaise in which rationalism and amusement substitute for a variegated life in which emotions can be expressed and explored. Artists, for Collingwood, should not be secluded in an ivory tower. Rather, artists are social and great art is achieved in so far as artists express emotions that are of great moment to their society.44

6 The Dialectic of Political Theory and Practice

Introduction The focus of this chapter is upon Collingwood’s final work, The New Leviathan. Analysis of this work highlights the interpretive dilemmas, which are occasioned by Collingwood’s texts. Knox reads it as exhibiting the decline of Collingwood’s philosophy, whereas other commentators, such as Donagan and Mink consider it to provide a sophisticated analysis of mind.1 A number of its features combine to render it controversial. It emphasizes the historicity of its subject-matter, civilization. It analyzes mind and civilization via an account of the historical development of mind, society, politics and civilization. Its avowedly historical perspective raises questions over whether its standpoint is relativistic.2 The New Leviathan is seen by some commentators to endorse the relativism and historicism that they ascribe to his later writings.3 It is also a manifestly practical work, since its theoretical explorations of mind and civilization are self-consciously directed to the purpose of sustaining British wartime commitment. At times it verges on propaganda, so that its theoretical perspective may be distorted.4 It is a theoretical text with an urgent practical purpose, namely to contribute to the maintenance of civilization in a crisis. Collingwood identifies the crisis as one in which there are several enemies. Fascist enemies with whom Britain is at war, and the invisible forces hostile to reason within liberal civilization itself. The New Leviathan’s commitment to civilization assumes a patriotic guise in its championing of the English Hobbes and its deprecation of German thinkers. Its tone varies between spare rational presentation and hyperbolic invective. Notwithstanding its eccentricities, The New Leviathan is a sophisticated analysis of the inter-connected themes of the development of 120

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reason and civilization. It represents a genuine culmination of the dialectical, unifying philosophical style, which Collingwood cultivates and practises throughout his career.5 Its conceptual review of the conditions of civilization provides a clear demonstration of the systematic, dialectical character of Collingwood’s philosophizing, which rethinks the overlapping unity of concepts. It conceives of the unity of concepts relating to civilization as consisting in their relative contributions to the achievement of a self-sustaining and rational overall notion of civilization. The New Leviathan is a key text in demonstrating the rapprochements between philosophy and history and between theory and practice, which mark and define Collingwood’s later philosophy. The interplay between history and philosophy is a feature of The New Leviathan. Past political philosophies and past political developments are rethought in a systematic, philosophical rethinking of the nature of mind and the character of a liberal form of politics and European civilization that presupposes their historical development. The New Leviathan also exhibits an interplay between theory and practice, which demonstrates Collingwood’s commitment to their rapprochement. For Collingwood, theory and practice are mutually determining aspects of the concrete unity of civlization. He derives his ideal conception of a free political society and a liberal civilization from a rethinking of practical forms of social and political life. In turn, he imagines that his systematic examination of the conditions of such a civilization serves to bolster the cause of freedom against the contemporary emergence of barbarism.6 The New Leviathan’s treatment of theory and practice and history and philosophy harmonizes with how Collingwood handles these themes in preceding texts. Collingwood’s philosophical rethinking of the conditions of civilization is a continuation and culmination of key themes that are signalled in An Essay on Metaphysics, The Principles of Art and the unfinished The Principles of History. In The Principles of Art Collingwood argues that authentic art, in expressing significant emotions, plays a critical role in advancing civilization by enabling society to focus upon difficult, awkward emotions that might otherwise be repressed. If T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ is a revivifying evocation of the emotional barrenness of contemporary civilization, then The New Leviathan is an intellectual and emotional reminder of liberal civilization, and its contemporary precariousness. Its recitation of underlying truths about liberal society and political practice is intended to contribute to the reinvigoration of liberalism by articulating its character.

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The New Leviathan reflects the concerns of An Essay on Metaphysics because it is a concrete demonstration of the latter’s notion of metaphysics. The New Leviathan combines regressive and developmental analysis so as to arrive at the cluster of absolute presuppositions that are supposed in a notion of civilization. Collingwood shows how these presuppositions support a network of concepts that constitute an elaborated account of civilization. An Essay on Metaphysics and The New Leviathan share common conceptions of how theory is intertwined with practice and how philosophy is linked to history. In both works, Collingwood maintains that intellectual activities such as metaphysical thinking depend upon the continued vitality of a practice of civilization that respects rational inquiry, just as free rational inquiry due to its commitment to rationality supports the rational processes of a free civilization. Again, in both works metaphysics is at once a developing historical mode of inquiry and a philosophical one. The New Leviathan demonstrates the continued autonomy of Collingwood’s conception of philosophy, as it rethinks the inter-connections between fundamental concepts of civilization in a systematic manner that shows their logical unity. The New Leviathan’s model of civilization as representing the unity of theory and practice and philosophy and history also shows affinities with The Principles of History. The latter was projected by Collingwood to include a section dealing with ‘…an historical morality and an historical civilization, contrasting with a scientific one.’7 The manuscript of The Principles of History does not contain this projected material. Its absence is most likely to be explained by the contents of The New Leviathan. The New Leviathan deals with the topic of civilization and develops what can be styled as an historical morality. The argument of The New Leviathan harmonizes with that of The Principles of History. The moral standpoint of The New Leviathan is derived from a reading of the development of European history. The New Leviathan’s conceptions of the freedom of mind, and the freedom of social and political practices are shaped by an appreciation of the character of historical knowledge, which is the focus of The Principles of History. In The Principles of History and The New Leviathan, historical knowledge is held both to reflect and to promote the wider development and recognition of freedom. The New Leviathan represents the historical form of morality and civilization, which is contrasted, favourably, with a scientific form in Collingwood’s plan for The Principles of History.8 The New Leviathan’s rethinking of an historical form of liberal civilization is suggested by the contrast between naturalistic and historical forms of explanation that is central to the

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philosophical review of historical knowledge, which is conducted in The Principles of History.

The ensuing sections of this chapter review the ways in which the argument of The New Leviathan involves inter-related rapprochements between philosophy and history and between theory and practice. Collingwood’s rethinking of past political philosophers in The New Leviathan constitutes a transformative critique of the arguments of past theorists, which yields a philosophical conception of liberal civilization. Collingwood’s critical reading of theoretical predecessors also shows how he takes theory and practice to be interdependent. Preceding theories are taken to arise out of practice, while their criticism provides for a reinvigorated understanding of the practice of civilization, which contributes to its defence. This reading of Collingwood’s critical rethinking of predecessors is followed by a focus upon the substantive argument of The New Leviathan, which explains and justifies civilization via an analysis of its component conditions. Collingwood’s analysis of preceding political philosophies in The New Leviathan is challenging, due to its radical rethinking of past standpoints to assimilate them to the requirements of a contemporary reading. The very title of the book testifies to a provocative re-reading of Hobbes, that takes him to be a precursor to a form of social liberalism. This transformative re-reading of Hobbes requires a highly selective reading of the original Leviathan. Likewise, Collingwood interprets the notion of a social contract which is formulated by the classic social contract theorists Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, to be sufficiently flexible to allow for his own historicized version. Again, Collingwood reworks Plato’s theory of mind and society to align it with subsequent historical development. Collingwood’s exploration of the constitutive conditions of a form of liberal politics and civilisation blends history and philosophy by following the methodological procedure of philosophy, which is elaborated in An Essay on Philosophical Method. He rethinks systematically the constitutive forms of mind and society that underlie a free civilization. These forms are taken to have emerged contingently. They are rethought so as to register their overlapping character, by observing their formation of an ascending series that progressively establishes the conditions of a free society and civilization. The philosophical rethinking of civilization, which is practised, in The New Leviathan is a form of dialectical rethinking because it is a systematic developmental

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examination of the internal connections between the conceptual conditions explaining civilization and a rational form of politics. Collingwood employs regressive and developmental procedures to rethink the self-sufficient conditions of civilization. The reflexive character of this rethinking, whereby the conditions of the practice of civilization are reinforced and defended by their theoretical elaboration to which they give rise, testifies to Collingwood’s conception of the unity between theory and practice. The interplay between theory and practice and between history and philosophy in The New Leviathan, highlights the profundity of the impact of Hegel on Collingwood’s thought. Paradoxically, the New Leviathan’s acerbic comments on Hegel reveal the crucial character of Collingwood’s engagement with Hegel.9 The conceptual architecture of the argument in The New Leviathan harmonizes with Hegel’s characteristic mode of philosophizing, and, in particular, resonates with Hegel’s conception of political philosophy. Hegel’s characteristic identification of philosophy as a retrospective rethinking of previous practice and theory underpins Collingwood’s philosophizing. More specifically, Collingwood’s recognition of the complex interdependence between a political association and processes of socialization within the political community, whereby an individual is prepared for the mature demands of rational political citizenship, rehearses Hegel’s standard approach to political philosophy.10 Collingwood’s interpretation of past political philosophers in The New Leviathan is inspired by his Hegelian notion of the history of philosophy. For Hegel, to practise the history of philosophy is to philosophize, as the past is viewed from the present and present philosophizing if it is to be systematic, must criticize and assimilate past philosophies. Hence for Collingwood, as for Hegel, the reading of past political theorists is a re-reading in the light of a standpoint that has been reached via a critical assimilation of those past political philosophies. Notwithstanding the close affinity between Collingwood and Hegel on the form and content of political philosophy, The New Leviathan is severely critical of Hegel. Collingwood indicts Hegel as a precursor of barbarism. While his critique of Hegel owes much to a patriotic disdain for all things German, there are important components of his critique of Hegel that serve to highlight the distinctiveness of Collingwood’s philosophy from that of Hegel’s. Collingwood’s explicit discussion of Hegel, though, fails to register the extent of his Hegelianism, and exaggerates what is at issue between Hegel and himself.

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Collingwood’s The New Leviathan is neither to be taken as evidence of Collngwood’s declining intellectual powers nor of his conversion to a relativism whereby philosophy is dissolved into history. Rather, The New Leviathan shows the interdependent but distinct ways in which Collingwood practised historical and philosophical forms of rethinking. More specifically it shows a complex engagement with Hegel, whereby Hegel is subject to a polemical dismissal while at the same time providing a paradigm for argument. Collingwood draws upon Hegel to frame a systematic philosophical explanation and justification of civilization that acknowledges the historical development of the terms and character of its argument. Collingwood, in contrast to Hegel, emphasizes the fragility of civilization and the possibility of a reversion to barbarism. Collingwood’s recognition of the problems of contemporary practice sensitizes him to the need to relate theory to practice, which renders his standpoint distinct from Hegel’s severe limitation on the practical implications of theory.

Predecessors The argument of The New Leviathan rests upon a critical historical rethinking of past political theories. It revisits Hegel, whose notion of the inter-relationship between the history of philosophy and philosophy incorporates the idea that intellectual progress is achieved through the progressive and critical development of ideas. Collingwood’s interpretation of intellectual progress in The New Leviathan reflects his earlier formulation of the nature of intellectual progress, which is elaborated in the essay, ‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’.11 Collingwood argues that intellectual progress is possible and that progress is secured and explained by the rethinking of past standpoints in the light of the current situation. A striking example of how progress is to be conceived is provided in The New Leviathan, where Collingwood develops his conception of politics by re-thinking critically classic social contract theory. His rethinking of social contract theory allows for its critical reconstruction so as to accommodate recognition of historical political development and to embrace the on-going induction of individuals into the practice of citizenship. This re-working of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau testifies to the radicalism of Collingwood’s critical, transformative reading of past political theorists. Collingwood transforms social contract theory. His transformative reading of social contract theorists overturns significant features of their arguments such as their abstract specification of

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society, which do not square with the systematic and dialectical character of the argument that is advanced in The New Leviathan. Collingwood criticizes the classic social contract theory of his predecessors implicitly by developing his own dialectical treatment of the social contract. For Collingwood, the metaphor of the social contract, as Hobbes and Locke use it, is insufficiently dialectical in so far as it perceives individuals to be susceptible to complete analysis in abstraction from their involvement in social practices. He styles his own theory dialectical because it observes the connections between the concepts that specify the conditions of political association. He traces the pedigree of his own dialectical formulation of social contract theory to that of classic predecessors, because he conceives of his own argument as developing via a critique of their prior theorizing. Collingwood’s critical rethinking of classic social contract rehearses Hegel’s celebrated conception of the dialectical character of the history of philosophy. Hegel maintains that the historical study of philosophical ideas raises questions over their contemporary currency, which are only to be resolved by current philosophizing that transforms and assimilates past theories. The affinity between Collingwood and Hegel on the transformative assimilation of past philosophy is epitomized by their treatment of Hobbes. Collingwood celebrates Hobbes in The New Leviathan, the very title of the book signalling its homage to Hobbes. Collingwood’s praise of Hobbes focuses upon the latter’s recognition of the continually constructed character of political association. Hobbes’s idea of the social contract is held to represent a metaphorical understanding of the characteristically dialectical task of developing a world of freedom from naturalistic unfree conditions. Collingwood’s celebration of Hobbes jars with aspects of the argument of The New Leviathan, in which Collingwood is implicitly or explicitly critical of Hobbes’s political theory.12 There is a resemblance between the structure and argument of The New Leviathan and Leviathan. They both possess four sections in which regressive and developmental arguments are combined to show how a free political association depends upon functions of the mind and a free recognition of authority amongst citizens, whose freedom is threatened by prevalent forms of barbarism. Collingwood, though, conceives of mind and society as developing in history and in terms of their capacity to develop perspectives and civilized values to supersede the rationality of the Hobbesian desiring self, whose desires are taken to be determined.13 Collingwood’s celebration of Hobbes in spite of his reservations about the Hobbesian self derives in part from the propaganda

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value of Hobbes’s Englishness. Nonetheless his partial reading of Hobbes, which accentuates features of Hobbes’s thought with which it sympathizes, is supported by its close approximation to Hegel’s interpretation of Hobbes. Hegel himself read Hobbes in a critical but selective spirit, in which aspects of Hobbes’s thought that construe political authority as a free construction, are highlighted. Hegel, like Collingwood, appreciates Hobbes’s derivation of political authority from a rational review of human capacities and the logic of social interaction. Hegel also anticipates Collingwood in criticizing Hobbes’s deterministic conception of mind.14 Hegel and Collingwood are united in their reading of Hobbes, because they frame critical historical readings, which subject him to the criticism of a contemporary perspective. Collingwood reworks Hobbes and social contract theory more generally in a dialectical fashion, which conceives of the social contract as a metaphor to signify the development of the social world of freedom. The dialectical political and philosophical procedures, which are invoked by Collingwood in The New Leviathan, however, reflect Collingwood’s sustained critical engagement with Plato and Hegel. Collingwood in The New Leviathan models the character of dialectical discussion, which he takes to be the hallmark of democratic practice on the part of rational citizens, on Plato’s conception of philosophy. Collingwood considers the openness of debate amongst citizens, their readiness to consider all sides of an argument and their generosity in assuming disagreement to be provisional, to reflect the ideal of dialectical investigation that Plato sets out in The Republic.15 Plato’s dialectical account of knowledge also informs The New Leviathan’s analysis of mind, for Collingwood, like Plato, takes the various functions of mind to consist in an ascending series, in which the higher functions amplify the understanding that is achieved at lower levels.16 The New Leviathan adheres to a style of philosophizing that is canvassed in An Essay on Philosophical Method. In An Essay on Philosophical Method Collingwood acknowledges Plato and Hegel to be notable precursors, who practise this method. Collingwood also identifies philosophy as being systematic in its comprehensive and inclusive understanding of experience. Collingwood, in The New Leviathan aims to provide a systematic account of a liberal rational civilization, which incorporates analysis of the progressive functions of mind and the historical development of the conditions of a free society. Collingwood draws upon Hegel more than Plato in showing how an ascending scale of conceptual forms, constituting successive functions of mind and forms of social experience promote freedom and rationality.

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The New Leviathan’s reliance upon Hegel rather than Plato reflects its focus upon freedom. Collingwood recognition that the modern world’s commitment to freedom demands engagement with Hegel rather than Plato is evidenced by his comments on practical and political reasoning in his unpublished ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy of 1921’.17 In these lectures, Collingwood observes how progress in moral philosophy turns upon following the successors of Kant in linking Ancient objectivism with the subjectivism of the modern era.18 He conceives of this project as a modern revision of Ancient rationalism, which takes mind and society to exemplify a rational order that is susceptible of objective conceptual explanation. For Collingwood, Kant’s successors represent a progressive path by combining the rationality of mind and polity with the modern notion of the freedom of the individual agent, whose rationality is subjective in the sense of being self-determining.19 A shorthand expression of Collingwood’s projected pathway for ethical and political theory that is sketched in his ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’ is to say that he aims to follow Hegel, the most celebrated successor of Kant, in invoking and revising Plato’s systematic rationalism in the context of modernity. Throughout his career Collingwood develops the dialectical style of thinking that he associates with both Plato and Hegel. Like Hegel, he recognizes that the objective idealism of Plato must be transformed so as to accommodate modern notions of freedom and subjectivity.20 Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind is Platonic in its affirmation of mind as being social and rational, but it resonates with the distinct spirit of modernity in assuming mind and society to be free. Hegel understands the meaning of freedom to constitute an inter-connected series of expressions in which the most primitive affirmations about the world are unsustainable without acknowledging the force of more complex normative and expressly social conceptions.21 Appreciation of the Hegelianism of the political philosophizing in The New Leviathan is heightened by considering the observations on Hegel’s philosophical method and political philosophy, which Collingwood offers in his unpublished report for Oxford University Press in 1933 on Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel. In this report Collingwood is sensitive and perceptive in commenting on Hegel’s political philosophy. He endorses the Hegelian philosophical method as paradigmatic for the practice of philosophy. He praises Hegel’s methodological standpoint, which serves as the paradigm for the philosophical procedure he himself prescribes in An Essay on Philosophical Method, and which he follows in The New Leviathan. He

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observes that for Hegel, ‘the “philosopher” then re-thinks in systematic form thoughts that already exist in men’s minds before he re-thinks them.’22 Collingwood’s report on Foster’s book endorses Hegelian systematizing philosophical method. It also observes how Hegel’s political philosophy is predicated upon recognition of human freedom. Collingwood argues that Foster’s tendency to assimilate Hegel to Plato misperceives how Hegel’s political philosophy allows for human creativity and freedom.23 Collingwood maintains that Hegel’s identification of the emergence of the object of philosophical consciousness in the process of historical development is the crux of all modern philosophy.24 It is unsurprising therefore that Collingwood’s political philosophy in The New Leviathan follows Hegel rather than Plato in assuming the development of mind to be inseparable from its freedom of self-expression. The affinity between The New Leviathan and Hegel’s political philosophy is evident in Collingwood’s systematic analysis of the conditions for the achievement of a rational form of politics and civilization. Like Hegel, he incorporates within his synoptic perspective a range of inter-connected synchronic and diachronic social practices that incubate the rational and free capacities of citizens. The inclusiveness of Collingwood’s standpoint entails that he follows Hegel in considering reflexively the conditions that make possible his explanatory perspective. Hence Collingwood, like Hegel, recognizes the dependence of his philosophical rethinking upon the prior practical achievement of rational forms of society and politics. Collingwood’s Hegelianized conception of the historicity of theory and practice, however, departs from Hegel in emphasizing the contingency of this process of historical development. This recognition of contingency is dramatized by Collingwood’s warnings over the contemporary revolt against civilization. He perceives this revolt to betoken the fragility of the latter.25 This perceived fragility of civilization imparts a practical urgency to Collingwood’s political philosophy that distinguishes it from the measured tone of Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right. Collingwood’s sensitivity to the possibility of historical regress contrasts with the measured historical optimism of Hegel. Collingwood’s disdain for a Hegelian complacency regarding historical development combines with a patriotic revulsion against Germanic thought to generate a splenetic critique of Hegel in The New Leviathan. Nicholson and Vincent observe the paradoxical character of this critique in that it runs counter to the Hegelian course, which is followed by the overall argument of The New Leviathan.26 The vitriol of

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Collingwood’s critique of Hegel, however, is not entirely paradoxical, because it can be seen as arising out of the differences between the two philosophers. These differences relate to significant questions concerning the relationship between theory and practice and on the nature of historical development. Collingwood’s early writings on logic, while reflecting an Hegelian approach, signal an uneasiness over Hegel’s treatment of difference and contingency, which is inflated in the critique of Hegel in The New Leviathan.27

The New Leviathan: Mind The various sections of The New Leviathan, man, society, civilization and barbarism constitute a systematically inter-related set of answers to the questions about the character of civilization and the contemporary revolt against it. In the context of the Second World War, these questions were practical and urgent, and theoretical answers to them are taken to confirm the connection between theory and practice. Collingwood employs regressive and developmental procedures to rethink the conditions of civilization by tracing their continuity on a scale of forms, which is constituted by a progressively self-sufficient conception of civilization. The presuppositions of mind, society and civilization are linked by their common exhibition of degrees of rationality and freedom. A commitment to civility, which consists in the treatment of others as free and rational beings, recognizes the social context of mind, operates by means of the rational functions of mind, assumes the nurturing agency of a free political association and resists reversion to barbarism. Collingwood’s rethinking of the overlapping concepts pertaining to a free civilization rehearses the systematic paradigm of philosophical method, which is framed in An Essay on Philosophical Method. The concepts of civilization constitute a scale of forms that provides what An Essay on Philosophical Method takes to be the defining unity of philosophical concepts. The conceptual analysis of The New Leviathan also coheres with the notion of metaphysics that is elaborated in An Essay on Metaphysics. Its procedure of identifying and analyzing the historical fundamental presuppositions of civilization operates as an extended demonstration of the procedure of metaphysical analysis, which is elaborated in An Essay on Metaphysics. The New Leviathan takes the conditions of civilization to be contingent historical achievements, and the relationship between its component concepts is not taken to be one of strict entailment. The relationship between the concepts underlying civilization, though, is construed to constitute a unity,

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which reflects Collingwood’s account of metaphysical analysis as being systematic in ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’.28 Connelly is right to identify The New Leviathan as an extended demonstration of Collingwood’s notion of metaphysics, and his persisting sense of philosophical method.29 The concrete examples of metaphysical analysis that are provided in An Essay on Metaphysics exhibit connections between concepts, which mirror the overlapping continuity between philosophical concepts that is entertained in An Essay on Philosophical Method and demonstrated in The New Leviathan.30 Collingwood shows the practical relevance of theory by observing that the mark of a rational civilized style of politics is the express willingness of citizens to engage in a dialectical form of deliberation. Dialectical political debate reflects the dialectical style of investigation that is undertaken in exploring the theoretical conditions of a rational polity. The value of dialectical politics resides neither in its fulfilment of a delusory teleological destiny of mankind, nor in a lack of alternative forms of political practice, but in its systematic, practical expression of the inherent rationality and freedom of the mind. The opening section of The New Leviathan exhibits the regressive aspect of Collingwood’s argumentative strategy. It begins at the point of furthest regression in the analysis of civilization. Collingwood holds that the barest assumption about civilization takes it to be a thing of the mind and that mind is to be understood as embodied. Collingwood’s initial focus upon the capacities of an individual’s mind reflects his understanding of how the practices of social and political life presuppose the pre-reflective and reflective attributes of human beings as their constitutive conditions. Collingwood, in relating the nature of political practice to the conditions of reflective self-organization on the part of an individual, links political rule to an individual’s capacity to achieve rational self-control.

In so far as Collingwood predicates his study of society and civilization on the prior examination of mankind, his procedure replicates that of Hobbes in the course of the original Leviathan. Collingwood expressly invokes Hobbes’s introspective analytical philosophical procedure as a model for his own philosophical enterprise.31 Collingwood, however, departs from Hobbes and approximates more to Plato by conceiving of the individual mind as admitting of a series of ascending functions by means of which the self exercises rational control over its own desires. The Hobbesian self, in contrast to the

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Platonic, Hegelian or Collingwoodian self, neither exhibits a development whereby the mind advances in freedom, nor discriminates between choices according to progressively more rational criteria. Collingwood’s philosophical procedure combines regressive analysis with a normative account of the unfolding of a progressively rational and free mind. It exemplifies the model of philosophical method that is propounded in An Essay on Philosophical Method, whereby philosophy connects concepts by relating them as progressively superseding one another on a common scale. The culmination of Collingwood’s review of the functions of mind is the notion of duty. Dutiful action supersedes the preceding forms of choice, utility and right because its exercise of choice is not subject to restrictions that circumscribe the rational exercise of freedom. The utilitarian and regularian standpoints of the preceding forms of choice merely assume rather than determine by rational means the particular interests and rules with which they operate. Utilitarian action presumes that utility is to be maximised, and allows the specification of utility to be determined by contingent desires. The maintenance of rules establishes neither the appropriateness of particular rules, nor the aptness of a rightful performance in a particular context. Duty, in contrast, is self-sufficient and comprehensive in its rational analysis of a situation and undertakes action consonant with its precise context. It leaves nothing to be determined by extraneous circumstances.32 Collingwood correlates the culminating moral concept of duty to the practice of history. Historical study, for Collingwood, by rethinking past thought, understands mind. Collingwood, notably in The Principles of History, but in all his later writings repudiates a naturalistic way of studying human behaviour, because the natural sciences characteristically regard the processes that they purport to explain as being susceptible of external determination. For Collingwood, historical understanding assumes that human action is rational and free. It respects the self-determining and criteriological character of mind. Collingwood understands human beings to operate by thinking and in thinking they are conceived as appraising or criticizing their own thinking. In this reflective activity, they are seen as determining their own actions freely and according to criteria internal to their own thinking. Historians, for Collingwood, in tracking the rational, self-critical actions of the past, rethink the particular actions of past actors, who respond to the specific circumstances of a situation by undertaking

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actions, which are rational in the light of the particular purposes that they aim to secure. This sensitivity to particularity on the part of historical understanding harmonizes with the orientation and particularity of focus of moral duty. Dutiful action does not operate merely by subjecting a particular situation to the requirements of a rule that is external to the situation. Rather it focuses upon the particularity of a situation and undertakes an action, which is not merely reasonable in the light of a supervening rule of conduct, but is appropriate in that it is an individual action that is rational in terms of the specific way it is performed and in terms of the appropriateness of the rule and the situation. Collingwood’s developmental conception of mind follows Hegel’s analysis in his The Philosophy of Mind and The Philosophy of Right. 33 Hegel, like Collingwood, perceives mind to be embodied and to form an ascending series of functions. These functions are both freely developed and progressively exert rational self-control over actions and they underpin the activities of a free political association. Hegel, like Collingwood, is also sensitive to the problems of relating a moral perspective to the particularity of situations. He does not prefigure Collingwood in invoking the special affinity of the discipline of history with a morality that is sensitized to the rational discharge of duty in particular circumstances. Rather, Hegel sees the problems of morality, namely a susceptibility of moral intentionality to lapse into evil, the abstractness of Kantian regularian morality and the vacuity of an ironic morality, as being resolved in a social ethics that derives duties from concrete and social ethical commitments.34 Collingwood himself follows the Hegelian path of connecting individual morality to its social contexts. Like Hegel, he perceives individual duty as being performed within a political community, in the context of a concrete tradition of civility. But Collingwood’s reference to the affinity between the modern, post-Hegelian study of history and the concrete rationality of individual action highlights his distinctive emphasis upon individuality and contingency. Collingwood’s conceptions of society and civilization allow for the active participation of all citizens in decision-making, and conceives of the achievements of civilization as fragile historical constructions. Collingwood’s philosophical reading of the processes of historical and social life allows for the possibilities of moral failure, demands continuous civic participation to maintain free institutions, and recognizes the irreducible contingency of moral and political progress.

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The New Leviathan: society and civilization The rationale for the elaboration of a theory of mind in the opening section of The New Leviathan is to provide a platform for analysis of society and civilization, because society and civilization are initially assumed, and thereafter shown to be things of the mind. The other side of this dialectical coin, however, is the dependence of mind on society. Collingwood expresses his conception of man’s sociality in his discussion of the role of language in allowing for consciousness of feeling. Hobbes is praised for recognizing the indispensability of language in furnishing the terms of knowledge. Collingwood, though, anticipates subsequent linguistic analysis in identifying meaning with the ways in which words are used. This anticipation of linguistic analysis is also evident in his unpublished ‘Observations on Language’ where the lexicographer’s determination of meaning is taken to be dependent on ‘…correct usage as existing.’35 Collingwood’s understanding of the individual’s dependence on his or her social setting is exhibited in The New Leviathan’s treatment of the will. Collingwood observes, ‘The idea of oneself as having a will is correlative, therefore, to the idea of something other than oneself as having a will.’36 In The Principles of Art Collingwood correlates emotional expression with the linguistic resources available to individuals. In that work, he also highlights the public, criteriological aspect of thought, which allows for the possibility of distinguishing a truthful apprehension of experience from mistaken perceptions.37 To be able to distinguish between truth and error requires a public language in which thoughts about sensations can be expressed. Collingwood’s recognition of the reciprocity of mind and society harmonizes with Hegel’s notion that mutual social recognition underlies the achievement of individual identity and a free will. The Phenomenology of Mind establishes what Pinkard terms, ‘…the sociality of reason…’ via the image of a life and death struggle whose immediate unhappy outcome is the social polarity of mastery and slavery.38 In The Philosophy of Right Hegel observes that recognition of other selves mediates the attribution of property rights and contractual engagements.39 Ultimately, a rational form of social recognition, for Hegel, involves the development of a system of right, that is a network of social institutions, principles and practices affording ethical ties between individuals. In his Lectures on Moral Philosophy (1921) Collingwood declares that men and women were never the solitary creatures, who are imagined in ‘state of nature’ arguments by classic modern political theorists.40

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Accordingly, in The New Leviathan Collingwood disparages an allegedly pre-social condition of mankind, and explores society and politics by developing two paradigms of social organization that are derived from preceding historical social development. He distinguishes between a community and a society. A community is a technical term, which means a set of people, operating within a given territory, maintaining a division of functions, and held together by external rule rather than the free will of its members. A society, in contrast, is a term, which represents a joint enterprise of social association that is formed and maintained by mutually recognizing free wills. The command that is exercized in a community depends upon the force of those who exert power, whereas in a society command and obedience are exercised by the joint free will of members. Collingwood recognizes a society to constitute a liberal form of association that depends upon the free will of its members. He also maintains that participating in the free organisational practices of a society promotes the freedom of its members. This developmental aspect of Collingwood’s social and political theory, like the developmental character he ascribes to mind, is a product of his philosophical rethinking of social and political experience so as to appreciate the internal developmental connections between its concepts. For Collingwood, the body politic, the form of political organization in the state, is characteristically a mixed community that is partly social and partly non-social. Collingwood perceives the underlying truth of the metaphor of the social contract to represent the process of perpetual transformation whereby members of the non-social community are converted into members of a society. Collingwood’s rethinking of the social contract theory abrogates its connotations of conveying the terms of legitimate political organisation for abstractly conceived individuals.41 Collingwood recognizes that membership of a political society is not to be achieved without the nurturing and education of its members over successive generations. Free societies for Collingwood must take care of dependants under their jurisdiction, who are not free. He understands the family and educational provision to perform vital roles in inducting individuals into the possibilities and responsibilities of citizenship. For Collingwood, political life is ‘dynamic and dialectical’, whereby freedom is the process of emerging out of a state of unfreedom.42 Collingwood’s offers three laws of politics to highlight his distinctive conception of a rational and developmental political society.43 They constitute a radical rethinking of fundamental features of Plato’s ideal

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commonwealth. They consist in the division between rulers and ruled, the possibility of transition between being ruled and ruling, and the mutual recognition of and adaptability between rulers and ruled. They highlight the dynamic, developmental character of Collingwood’s notion of politics.44 They rehearse Plato’s conception of ruling as an expertise that requires appropriate education, and they reiterate Plato’s concern that ruling should be conducted on behalf of the whole community including the ruled as well as the rulers. Collingwood’s rules of politics, however, do not reserve the art of ruling for a specific class of mankind but aim to maximise the number of the ruled who will also assume the role of ruling. Collingwood’s political thought differs from Plato’s in being democratic and liberal. For Collingwood, the logic of the process of civilization to which politics contributes, is to extend the freedom of public participation and the recognition of citizenship. Collingwood understands a free political regime to depend upon the reciprocal synchronic functioning of a number of societies or practices such as the family and educational institutions. This sophisticated understanding of the intricate synchronic functioning of social and political institutions is matched by his conception of the diachronic, historical development of social, political and theoretical practices. The historical development of the body politic, for Collingwood, includes the expansion of the number of those, who are to be considered eligible to take part in the free joint rule of society. Women, for instance, were excluded from Ancient Greek and Roman forms of society, but participate in modern societies. Moreover, political activity develops in relation to the historical growth of a wide range of activities. For example, Collingwood imagines the modern intellectual development of an historical consciousness to reflect and reinforce the notion of dutiful political action.45 Collingwood understands his enterprise of rethinking the conditions of a free polity to presuppose the historical development of liberal political cultures and to rest upon the correlative philosophical rethinking of those cultures. His own rethinking of a liberal polity arises out of his own critical rethinking of preceding political theories. Collingwood aligns Hobbes with Locke and Rousseau as theorists who elaborate the classical theoretical explanation of a modern free political association. Their formulation of the social contract is interpreted as highlighting the consensual basis of freely undertaken social obligations and as serving as a metaphor for the constant work of transforming natural conditions to social circumstances that is to be practised by a body politic. Collingwood values Hobbes for his acute appreciation

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of the artificiality of the state and for his recognition of the dependence of sovereign power upon the will of social subjects. He also admires Hobbes’s specification of how a free political association operates in relation to the practice of family life and international relations.46 Collingwood himself reworks the notion of the social contract, so that it stands for a dialectical reading of politics that highlights its continuously transformative character, whereby there is a constant process of accommodation between the rulers and ruled.47 In his unpublished manuscript ‘Folklore’ Collingwood disparages the social contract as being mythological.48 In The New Leviathan disparagement mutates into acceptance, because Collingwood transforms this classic metaphor of political theory by rethinking it. Collingwood thereby practises what he urges in his ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’, namely continuing the work of past philosophers such as Hobbes by criticizing and amending their theories.49 Collingwood’s political theory culminates in his celebration of ideal political action as itself being the practice of dialectic. He holds that the achievement of a joint political will on the part of a political association presupposes a spirit of openness in debate and a commitment to reconcile differences. He imagines what he construes to be the reasonable opposition between liberals and conservatives in nineteenth century England to constitute an historical example of this dialectical spirit. The unity of these political opponents in recognizing a common subscription to constitutional freedom provides the spirit of reasonableness that allows for reasonable argument over the extent and manner of democratic reform.50 This spirit of dialectic is a practical exhibition of the theoretical procedure of rethinking the conditions of an activity so that they are developed and comprehended in a coherent and self-determining fashion. It represents the core of an ideal of civility, whereby relations between individuals are such that the freedom of each is respected. Collingwood’s designation of this ideal of political conduct as dialectical evokes and draws upon his respect for the philosophies of both Plato and Hegel.51 While Collingwood’s political ideal draws upon the inclusiveness of Plato’s and Hegel’s philosophical aspirations, it rejects the undemocratic features of their political theories. Collingwood’s ideal of dialectical political practice harmonizes with subsequent idealisations of deliberative democracy. Contemporary deliberative democrats, however, rarely invoke concrete historical examples of their ideal. Collingwood’s identification of the spirit of dialectic with an

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actual historical example, that of nineteenth century British constitutional history, also serves to highlight his historical turn of mind. Ultimately, Collingwood perceives civilization to consist in extending non-coercive attitudes to all mankind as well as in exploiting the natural world in an intelligent fashion.52 Civilization promotes freedom and reason. Men and women are to respect the rationality of one another by recognizing their common freedom to pursue rational purposes and by recognizing their shared capacity to deliberate over the public good. Collingwood imagines the ideal of civility to represent the intensive and extensive development of freedom and rationality in conduct. He recognizes that this ideal of civility depends upon its continuous assiduous cultivation within a free society by parents, educators and a range of social institutions and practices. Collingwood understands the process of civilization to demand its preparation by educating the young to become free and practise the ideal of civility. He recommends that civility be best nurtured by parents assuming direct responsibility for the education of their offspring. Parents are presumed to possess an emotional sensitivity to their children’s moods and characters and to maintain the flexibility and resourcefulness of non-specialists. Collingwood considers that young people will flourish in contact with people whom they know well and who themselves are engaged in the non-specialist task of conducting their practical lives. Collingwood warns that specialized educators are liable to suppress the vitality and free spirit of their pupils. Collingwood’s critique of modern institutionalised forms of education reflects his own positive experience of education at home and his disaffection at Rugby school.53 It also reflects his wider critique of the desiccated character of modernity, in which religion, metaphysics and the cultivation of emotions in art recede before the pervasiveness of a rationalist cult of utilitarianism and the provision of amusements.54 Collingwood’s determination to counter the homogenizing, instrumentalist aspect of modernity by recommending countervailing nonstandardized forms of education reflects his conceptions of the practical role of theory and the prevalent fragility of civilized values. Collingwood’s sensitivity to the vulnerability of civilization alerts him to the dangers of indifference to international responsibilities and a contemporary monochromatic pursuit of wealth, which promotes extreme economic inequalities in modern civil society.55 Inequality, for Collingwood, undermines the prospect of civil, uncoerced transactions between individuals, just as the unchallenging routines of modern administration threaten to undermine the vitality of modern citizens.

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Collingwood imagines inequality in wealth to undermine civility because it entails that interactions between unequals are subject to the coercive influence exerted by the predominating wealth of one of the parties to the interaction.

Conclusion Collingwood’s political philosophy culminates in an ideal of political action as being the practice of dialectic, which is the practical recognition of the unity of distinct and seemingly contrary standpoints. This practical dialectical spirit renders political actors ready to listen to contrary viewpoints. It enables discussants to conceive of disagreement not as a threat but as an opportunity to reconsider arguments. The provenance of this deliberative form of dialectical practice resides in Collingwood’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic. Its consonance with Collingwood’s reading of Hegel is declared by Collingwood in his Ruskin’s Philosophy. Collingwood acknowledges the force of Hegel’s philosophical reconciliation of contrary elements in an accommodating system in Ruskin’s Philosophy. He remarks, ‘The core of Hegel’s philosophy may indeed be described as a sustained attempt to live up to the maxim that in every contact or dispute there is right on both sides.’56 The affinity between The New Leviathan and Hegel’s political philosophy is signalled by the close parallel between its arguments and the ways in which Collingwood interprets Hegel in a number of published and unpublished writings. The New Leviathan’s conformity with Collingwood’s persisting Hegelianism confirms the continuity of Collingwood’s philosophy and vindicates preceding Hegelian interpretations of the work.57 Collingwood’s overarching Hegelian sense of philosophy as a way of connecting concepts via a scale of forms informs the theory and practice of his philosophizing from the outset of his career to its conclusion.58 A close reading of The New Leviathan reveals its Hegelian features. Its systematic dialectical rethinking of mind and society and its rational reconstrual of practical and intellectual historical developments, such as social contract theory, family structures and educational institutions as phases in the achievement of a free political association follow the systematic inclusive paradigm of The Philosophy of Right. Collingwood follows Hegel in perceiving the rational freedom of the individual agent to be both integral to and realised by the freedom of political association. For Collingwood and Hegel alike, the freedom of individuals and the rational order of a

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political association depend upon the flourishing of intermediate institutions, such as the family and economic associations.59 They envisage these intermediate institutions as harmonizing with the aspirations of individual agency and the collective welfare of members of the political community, even if Collingwood differs from Hegel in taking this process of harmonization to involve the democratic participation of citizens in the state’s arrangements. A Hegelian reading of The New Leviathan, however, must contend with Collingwood’s express disparagement of Hegel. Doubtless, this disparagement is to be explained in part as an example of the passion with which Collingwood embraced the struggle to support civilization against ‘barbarism’.60 Moreover, the contemporary war against Nazi barbarity explains at least in part the severity of Collingwood’s censure of the German, Hegel. The menace of the Nazis and the onset of war, however, raise questions about Hegel’s philosophy and the force of Collingwood’s critique of Hegel that are not to be dismissed as examples of propaganda. Collingwood’s dismissal of Hegel as assimilating the logic of things to the logic of words is a formulaic response to what he knows to be a complex philosophical reading of politics and history. He condemns Hegel peremptorily for thinking that ‘…a dialectical world is a world where everything argued itself into existence’.61 Notwithstanding the peremptory character of this dismissal of Hegel, Collingwood’s understanding of civilization poses demanding questions to Hegel’s reading of history. Collingwood perceives civilization to be a delicate, contingent achievement, which depends upon the continued development of inter-connected practices and the sustained application of will, emotion and knowledge to operate them. This perception of civilization highlights the possibility that a regress from civilization might possess a logic that challenges Hegel’s assumptions about an end of history. Hegel conceives of freedom and reason to be immanent and necessary within historical development. He assumes history to be susceptible of a summative interpretation, which excludes alternative interpretations and which tends to underplay the contingency and complexity involved in historical action and large-scale narratives. Hegel’s confidence in the overall trajectory of historical development is reflected in his absolutist justification of his rational state.62 Collingwood, himself, in The New Leviathan presents what can be styled as a grand narrative of the development of European liberal civilization. But his grand narrative recognizes its contingency and alternative forms of civilization.63 Collingwood’s justification of liberal

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civilization is acknowledged to rest upon a contestable rethinking of its ideals of conduct to establish norms that respect and express the rationality and freedom native to the human mind. It is a rethinking that neither presumes a single course of historical development, nor assumes the inviolability of its argument. The historical contingency of liberal civilization is highlighted by Collingwood’s parallel account of the rise of barbarism. His frank recognition of the prospect of a regress from civilization challenges Hegel’s reading of history. Hegel’s philosophical reading of the development of freedom in history as a necessary process is not implausible given the freedom of agency, which is a conceptual presupposition of historical action. Its necessity, as McCarney indicates, turns upon the progress of freedom evincing a logic that its regress lacks.64 Human beings are inherently free and rational, and a retrospective review of civilization interprets the record of human action as tending to exemplify and develop these capacities in concrete, ascertainable ways. The coherence between the inherent freedom of mankind and the actual record of the development of freedom underpins the rationality of progress, while a regress from freedom appears to undermine the freedom and rationality that are presumed in historical study.65 Adorno and Lyotard invoke Auschwitz and the Holocaust to undermine the credentials of a philosophy of history that assimilates brutality and inhumanity to a learning curve for humanity whose progress is not to be denied by the appearance of regression.66 Collingwood in The New Leviathan understands contemporary fascism as a revolt against civilization. Fascism highlights the real possibility of regress from civilization by revealing its fragility. For Collingwood, the imminent possibility of barbarism dramatizes the contingency of history, and militates against an immanentist conception of reason’s development in history.67 While Lyotard’s strictures against classic modern grand narratives of Hegel and Marx are plausible given their tendency to override contingency and complexity, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a large-scale narrative of human development.68 Indeed, contemporary theorists such as MacIntyre and Rorty highlight the indispensability of large-scale narratives that respect historical contingency.69 Even Rawls, the most notable exponent of recent analytical liberal theory, draws upon a narrative of historical development to explain the character and role of liberal politics.70 The contingency, fragility and complexity of human achievements, however, demand that the categorization of grand narratives be regarded as contestable.71 Developments in late modernity such as

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feminism, globalization and ecologism betoken a continual need to rework the categorial frameworks of historical understanding. Hegel’s own comments on the openness of political prospects in the wake of the French Revolution in the conclusion to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History tend to undermine the express confidence in the realization of the end of freedom, which is urged in its Introduction.72 Moreover, Hegel’s sense of the significance and irresolvability of poverty in the modern state points to the problematic character of a neatly progressive reading of historical development. Collingwood’s rethinking of the conditions of a free polity and a free civilization evidently owes much to Hegel in form and content. Hegel’s philosophical understanding of a rational state is a systematic rethinking of the synchronic and diachronic conditions of a free political association that anticipates Collingwood in seeing social practices and institutions, such as the family and civil society, as constitutive conditions of social and political freedom. Collingwood, like Hegel, operates with a grand narrative of the development of liberal civilization, which interprets the native freedom and rationality of human beings as informing elaborated social and political expressive practices of freedom. These practices deepen appreciation of native human endowments, secure the freedoms of citizens within a liberal political society and allow for the wider recognition of the rationality and freedom of those without the state. Collingwood’s own theory of a free polity and a liberal civilization is emphatically Hegelian, due to its combination of historical and philosophical forms of rethinking. Collingwood, like Hegel, combines conceptual rethinking of the conditions of a free society, which is predicated upon the prior development of a liberal political culture, with a transformative historical rethinking of past political philosophers. Collingwood also follows Hegel in identifying problematic aspects of modernity that jeopardize its achievements, for example its standardization of education and its tendency to entrench unequal economic relations. Collingwood’s Hegelianism, however, is critical in that it is shaped by Collingwood’s rethinking of Hegel in the context of the reemergence of barbarism and Collingwood’s own sensitivity to the contingency of historical situations. Hegel, unlike the later Collingwood imagines a philosophical rethinking of experience to provide a secure account of its rationality. For Hegel, a redemptive philosophical perspective supersedes the imperfect rationality of practice, and the restrictive or metaphorical character of non-philosophical thought.

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Collingwood takes philosophical reason to contribute to practice, rather than providing an absolute justification of the course of historical development, in which the vicissitudes of practice and history are superseded. Collingwood considers that The New Leviathan is a practical contribution to the contemporary war effort. It highlights the character of a rational polity so as to reinforce the commitment to civilized values on the part of liberal citizens. It contributes to a battle whose outcome is undecided, just as the relations between history, practice and philosophy are shaped by their interplay rather than by the conceptual priority of philosophical reason. The unity of theory and practice, for Collingwood, entails that citizens understand civilized values, adhere to them and support them emotionally. Whereas the political arrangements of Hegel’s state do not presume an energetic involvement of the citizenry in processes of public deliberation, Collingwood is committed to a form of democracy in which citizens engage in rational debate and respond sensitively to disagreements. Moreover, Collingwood envisages that rational and free citizens acknowledge and express their emotions, and recognize aspects of their lives that either promote or retard the prospects of civilization.73 For Collingwood the complexities of modernity do not subordinate art to the rationality of philosophy. Collingwood entertains the complex interplay between distinguishable aspects of experience. Above all, Collingwood’s historical and philosophical rethinking of liberal civilization avoids the endism and absolutism of Hegel’s thought without maintaining an undiscriminating relativism. Collingwood’s exploration of the conditions of modern European civilization traces the recognitive freedom, which is practised in civilized conduct to the freedom and reason native to the human mind. Its achievement, however, is recognized to be contingent, and to be subject to the possibility of regress. He explains and justifies this free civilization in terms of the harmony between its ideals, the developing historical conditions of its achievements, and the general features of the human mind. Collingwood recognizes a diversity of civilizations, which are linked by their common aspirations to extend their remits and by their normative convergence. Their norms converge in so far as they are to be evaluated in terms of their harmony with the evaluative reasoning mind, which is presupposed in rational conduct. For Collingwood the value of a particular civilization is contestable, and its contestability is a testimony to the freedom of the mind, which is to be defended via the philosophical process of diagnosing its vulnerability.

7 Conclusion: Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice

Collingwood Collingwood’s first major work Speculum Mentis privileges philosophy in taking it to be the pre-eminent conscious activity. Philosophy conceives the world to be coeval with the activity of consciousness. The process of becoming aware of the world corrects the perspectives of subordinate modes of consciousness such as science, art, history and religion, which enact but misperceive the reciprocity of world and consciousness. Philosophy’s reflexive celebration of its apprehension of the role of consciousness raises a number of questions over its interpretation of experience and its evaluation of forms of consciousness. The temptation to dismiss Speculum Mentis as a piece of youthful and exuberant idealism that rejects the objectivity of the world should be resisted. Collingwood’s reluctance to identify himself as an idealist derives from his appreciation of how its label is liable to misrepresentation as a form of world-denying subjectivism. He is at pains to distance himself from such a categorization throughout his career. In Speculum Mentis Collingwood subscribes to an objective idealism that assumes the world to be independent and objective, and yet to be correlated to the succession of ways by which it is apprehended. If Speculum Mentis does not succumb to subjectivism, its deprecation of non-philosophical forms of experience reduces the complexity of experience. Philosophical self-awareness resolves the questions and issues, which are raised but not resolved by other perspectives. The absoluteness that is attributed to philosophical knowledge limits the interplay between philosophy and other forms of experience to the philosophical exposure of the necessary errors of subordinate standpoints. 144

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Speculum Mentis is evidently Hegelian.1 Collingwood follows the paradigmatic phenomenological review of consciousness, which is undertaken by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel, like Collingwood, interprets philosophical knowledge as achieving the absolute self-awareness of mind, which understands ‘…the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose and has its end for its beginning.’2 In his writings subsequent to Speculum Mentis, Collingwood revisits and reworks his conception of the relationship between philosophy and other experiential activities. Mind’s supremacy is retained, but Collingwood envisages a genuinely dialectical interplay between the activities of mind, rather than presuming a hierarchical relationship in which philosophy supersedes other activities by recognizing how they are misguided. Collingwood continues to imagine that the several activities of consciousness constitute a unity, but whereas in Speculum Mentis experiential unity is consummated by philosophical thinking, Collingwood’s later thought imagines the unity of experience to be the practical achievement of a rational society and civilization. Collingwood’s final book, The New Leviathan perceives the unity of mind, social theory and practice to consist in civilization, which depends upon practical political activity. Civilization itself involves a multi-faceted commitment to rationality in several activities, such as art, science, morality and politics, and it is to be understood by a combination of theoretical perspectives, notably art, history and philosophy. Collingwood’s later reconfiguration of the unity of experience in primarily political rather than exclusively philosophical terms, endorses his retrospective review of his intellectual career, in which he highlights his interest in effecting the dual rapprochements, between history and philosophy, and between theory and practice.3 In Collingwood’s later thought philosophy neither dictates to historical understanding, nor supersedes artistic experience. History and philosophy work together, just as theory, arising out of reflection on practice in turn contributes to the practical political task of sustaining civilization. The concept of a rapprochement between forms of thinking, and between theory and practice, is not the same as the subordination of one form of thought or activity to another. No particular activity or form of experience exerts a mastery over another in Collingwood’s later thought. Philosophy is not superseded by history, and theory is not rendered subservient to practice. Collingwood conceives of an interplay between philosophy, art, history and practice that culminates in a political focus upon explaining and defending civilization against

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its enemies. The task of explaining and defending civilization is a complex one, in which science, history, art and philosophy invigorate the political practice of civilization, which in turn enables them to develop and flourish. The complex interplay between philosophy and history, and between theory and practice, involves Collingwood’s cultivation of two distinct but inter-related styles of rethinking, historical and philosophical. Collingwood considers historical understanding to constitute a form of rethinking that reveals the past thoughts of historical actors. These thoughts can be reconstructed from the evidential traces that persist in present experience. Thought is circumscribed neither spatially nor temporally. The universality of a thought is evidenced by its capacity to be rethought at a subsequent vantage point by a thinker, who does not share the same physical spatial and time frame of the original thinker of the thought. Philosophical rethinking appraises the conceptual character of an aspect or area of experience by reconsidering systematically its logical conditionality. It attends to the connections between the overlapping concepts that underlie the practice of the activity or area of experience. Philosophy rethinks a practice that develops historically; just as historical thinking is a practice that is explained philosophically by showing the overlapping conceptual conditions that make it possible. The interplay between history and philosophy is of a piece with the interplay between theory and practice. History rethinks the development of a practice, and philosophy reconsiders the logic of a practice, and both history and philosophy are theoretical contributions to the practical task of understanding the practices that constitute civilization. They enable a principled defence of civilization. Likewise, art expresses the feelings of those who experience civilized life, its stresses and strains, achievements and possibilities, and thereby allows for an expressive commitment to, and defence of, civilized values. Collingwood’s conception of the complex interplay between forms of experience in his later writings retains scope for philosophical inquiry. He identifies philosophy as a civilized, rational form of inquiry that is integral to the maintenance of the conditions of a rational and liberal civilization. Collingwood’s later formulation of the unity underlying forms of experience can be styled ‘political’ in so far as he sees civilization as depending crucially upon the development of a liberal political regime, and due to his identification of a primary task of theory to consist in its principled defence of liberal civlization against its contemporary political opponents. Collingwood’s acceptance of the

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political obligations of theory, however, does not compromise his commitment to the autonomy of philosophical understanding. Philosophy is related to the historical development of forms of experience, but operates according to criteria that are independent of its historicity. Collingwood conceives of philosophy as operating criteriologically, that is, as possessing the means to evaluate the appropriateness of concepts. Mind, for Collingwood, is distinct from nature. It is rational and free, and these qualities enable it to be self-determining and reflexive about its own reflective activities. In contrast, natural phenomena are determined by external forces and are explained by external theories and observations. The capacities for freedom and reflexivity inform and shape the human sciences. Systematic philosophical rethinking arises out of reflexive critical evaluation of thought, whereby the extent to which concepts register the rationality and freedom that are hallmarks of thought, are evaluated on a common scale. The mind itself is subjected to systematic evaluation in The New Leviathan, where the several functions of mind are judged according to their success in establishing and developing the inherent freedom and rationality of mind. Civilization is assessed according to the degree that it promotes conduct, which allows for the mutual recognition of rational, selfdetermining minds. In ‘Notes on Historiography’ Collingwood offers a hostage to philosophical fortune by coining the epigram, ‘…philosophy as a separate discipline is liquidated by being converted into history.’4 This arresting formulation of Collingwood’s later concern to effect a rapprochement between philosophy and history, coupled with emphatic statements on the historicity of philosophical inquiry in An Essay on Metaphysics and in his Autobiography, appears to signal a decisive shift away from his continued respect for the autonomy of philosophical understanding.5 The rhetorical force of Collingwood’s epigrammatic use of language, however, tends to obscure his meaning. Dray, in a considered assessment of Collingwood’s style, observes, ‘Collingwood’s work is characterized not only by problematic pronouncements due to his use of language, but also by a proneness to exaggeration, paradox, and even apparent contradiction.’6 The prospective liquidation of philosophy, even in the arresting formulation in ‘Notes on Historiography’ is a qualified one. It refers to the status and prospects of philosophy as a separate discipline. What is not being proposed in this formulation and is unsupported elsewhere, is the unqualified destruction of philosophy. Rather, philosophy, though it is to be pursued in conjunction with history, operates by means of irreducibly independent criteria.

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Philosophy, for Collingwood, as is signalled by D’Oro in Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience and Rubinoff in Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, remains a first order activity that appraises the distinctive concepts of activities. Philosophical argument remains indispensable, given its irreducible role in examining what is to count as an example of an activity.7 Philosophy and natural science operate in differing ways, and the specification of what counts as scientific and historical activities turns upon their a priori specification by philosophy. Philosophical reasoning, for Collingwood, however, is concerned with more than the designation of distinctive conceptual features of activities. It traces conceptual connections between them. Philosophy is systematic and self-conscious about its conjunction with history, and about the unity of theory and practice. It recognizes its abstractness when it is taken to be a discipline that operates in isolation from others, but this very recognition signals its continuing and irreducible significance. Collingwood’s later works show the interplay between philosophy and other activities, without overriding the autonomy of the systematic conceptual analysis that is characteristically to be employed by philosophy. In An Essay on Metaphysics Collingwood defends metaphysics against its positivistic detractors by accepting that metaphysics is not concerned to advance propositions that are susceptible of verification. He allots metaphysics the role of identifying the fundamental presuppositions in the historical operation of scientific activities. Collingwood takes these fundamental metaphysical presuppositions to be absolute, in that the particular suppositions defining the activities of a science can be linked to more fundamental ones, and ultimately can be shown to derive from those which are absolute in not admitting of further derivation. They are historical in so far as the structures of the sciences change over time, and the changing character of fundamental presuppositions are therefore to be traced historically. In discussing absolute presuppositions, however, Collingwood maintains that they are related together in clusters and that they must be susceptible of being presupposed simultaneously. He understands relations of compatibility to consist in their consupponibility. In the specific examples of metaphysics that Collingwood provides in An Essay on Metaphysics, the work of determining their compatibility is shown to be carried out by philosophical analysis. Metaphysical analysis, as Connelly highlights, does more than merely catalogue absolute presuppositions; it provides a systematic review of their relations to one another.8 Discordance between absolute presuppositions that point to tensions in the practice of

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science can be highlighted by philosophical or metaphysical analysis.9 Collingwood’s later conception of metaphysics, therefore, maintains a significant role for logical analysis even if his construal of its role as indicating the consupponibility of terms is somewhat obscure and tends to deflate its significance. Rubinoff in Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics acknowledges both the later Collingwood’s continued recognition of the autonomy of philosophical analysis, and the problematic character of Collingwood’s formulation of its autonomy. He observes, ‘It is my contention, therefore, that the doctrine of consupponibility (together with the whole theory of absolute presuppositions of which it is a part) is an unfortunate and misleading attempt to expound, in neutral language, the implications of dialectical logic as set forth in Speculum Mentis and An Essay on Philosophical Method.’10 While Rubinoff overplays the continuity between Collingwood’s later philosophy and the youthful Speculum Mentis, he is insightful in recognizing the later Collingwood’s persisting adherence to the irreducible role of philosophical analysis in appraising concepts. He is also perceptive in pointing to the way this role is obscured by Collingwood’s use of a rhetoric that plays down associations with preceding dialectical metaphysicians. Collingwood’s continued commitment to the role of philosophical analysis in analyzing concepts is evident in The Principles of History and The Principles of Art. In the former Collingwood distinguishes the character of the concepts constituting historical knowledge and shows their conceptual compatibility. In the latter, the nature of artistic activity is analyzed by exploring the experiential role that is performed by artistic emotional expression in clarifying attitudes and feelings. In both these studies, the scope and practice of philosophy assume the systematic Hegelian character that is imputed to philosophy in An Essay on Philosophical Method, and which is endorsed by Collingwood in numerous published and unpublished writings.11 History is shown to be an activity that both explores and confirms the freedom and rationality, which informs all human thought and conduct. Art is explained to be crucial in expressing emotions that underpin civilization. The continuity of the systematic character of Collingwood’s philosophizing is confirmed by his last published work, The New Leviathan, in which he develops a systematic account of the concepts pertaining to mind and society by showing how they are inter-connected in a theoretical explanation of a liberal civilization and are integral to its practical, patriotic defence. A liberal and rational civilization, for Collingwood, is an historical construction, which requires the simultaneous rational development of

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art, science, history and metaphysics, as well as the appropriate functions of mind, forms of social practice and political structures. The New Leviathan is a systematic work, in which the political impetus to explain and defend a liberal civilization provides a framework to house and show the unity underlying Collingwood’s philosophical conception of the inter-relatedness between forms of theory and between theory and practice. The breadth of Collingwood’s synoptic vision of civilization encompasses his recognition of the way nature is to be understood and treated. Central to Collingwood’s general understanding of experience is the contrast between nature and mind, and the related contrast between naturalistic and non-naturalistic forms of explanation. Human understanding of nature, for Collingwood develops historically, and as The Idea of Nature indicates, it is an historical development that incorporates the entire repertoire of conceptions belonging to successive civilizations.12 If the culture of a civilization is the context within which conceptions of nature are maintained, the progress of on-going rational investigation into and cultivation of metaphysical conceptions of nature is an index of the rationality and flourishing of a civilization.13 Moreover, the overall sense of the interdependence of mind and nature, which is exhibited in the subordination of nature to mind in the teleological cosmology of modern metaphysics, and which is vindicated in Collingwood’s own unpublished metaphysical cosmology, underpins his perception of the rational, practical exploitation of nature as constituting a mark of civility.14 Nature and mind, for Collingwood, are both rational. The rationality of mind, though, is expressly self-determining and completes the rationality of nature by comprehending its inherently rational processual patterns and by exploiting its potential by transforming it so as to achieve rational practical goals.15

Collingwood and Hegel The rapprochements between history and philosophy and between theory and practice, which are executed by Collingwood’s later works, involve his reworking of the status of philosophy vis-à-vis other activities. It is a reworking that is a movement away from Hegel in so far as Hegel accords an absolute status to philosophy. Yet this movement away from Hegel is effected by Hegelian means. Hegel’s thought, like Collingwood’s, is multi-dimensional, in that his philosophy aims to incorporate and evaluate the conceptual conditions of a range of human activities. While the pre-eminence allocated to philosophy is a

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feature of Hegel’s thought, he also maintains that there is reciprocity between history and philosophy. It is this latter feature of Hegel’s thought that is observed by Collingwood in his early unpublished writings on Jane Austen, the prospective peace following World War, and more elaborately in his Ruskin and Philosophy.16 Hegel, like Collingwood, understands history and the history of philosophy to be reciprocally related. Where Collingwood rethinks Hegel transformatively and tellingly is in his revision of the Hegelian notion that historical development is uni-directional. For Hegel, the unity of philosophy and history, which is rehearsed in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, is governed by the absolute priority of philosophical knowledge, in that philosophy conceives of, and thereby determines the underlying necessary features of historical development. For Hegel, there is an inherent directionality to historical action and historical understanding in that the very notions of an historical event and historical cognition imply freedom and rationality, which are exhibited in progressive historical action that is recorded in the public culture. The public recognition of free, rational action provides the context of historical inquiry, which in turn documents the freedom and rationality of progressive historical action. For Collingwood, philosophy is not to be taken as overriding the inherent contingency of historical action. Historical understanding for Collingwood implies an indeterminacy of thinking, for thoughts and rational actions are developed and undertaken freely in response to the contingent understandings of situations, which are entertained by historical actors. The contingency of history is not to be supplanted by an overarching philosophical conception of the progressive and rational development of mind and society. Collingwood’s mature critique of Hegel’s philosophical overriding of historical contingency accords with his identification of a continuing and irreducible role for art that breaks with the Hegelian notion of the supersession of art. It also resonates with his early criticisms of the tendency of Hegel’s absolutism to suppress dissonance in favour of identity.17 Collingwood, like Hegel, takes history and philosophy to be integrally related, so that philosophy can supervene upon historical understanding to analyse and evaluate the rational progress established in a civilization, but the scale of rational progress that is constructed by philosophizing does not override the conceptual conditions of historical and practical action. Contingency is not to be compromised by philosophical necessity. Collingwood’s reading of civilization frames what may be styled a grand narrative of historical development, but it is an historical

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transformation or rethinking of an Hegelian style of grand narrative. For Collingwood, it is a grand narrative that respects the contingency of historical events, while at the same time breaking with Hegel’s restriction of its role to that of retrospective endorsement of historical development. For Hegel, the necessity of historical development precludes the influence of theory upon events, but Collingwood conceives of a grand perspective on civilization as sharpening, clarifying and highlighting features of the present that require practical action and intimating what is to be done in the light of the present circumstances and requirements of civilization. Hegel’s relative quietism reflects his confidence that theory is able to trace an indisputable order of reason in events, and a countervailing sense of the dependence of theory on the cultural context in which it is situated.18 Collingwood recognizes the validity of Marx’s implicit critique of Hegel, which is offered in his Theses on Feuerbach, and he endorses a reading of theory and practice that allows for a genuine reciprocity between the two.19 For Collingwood, if theory can diagnose contemporary problems, it can also contribute to their solutions. Collingwood’s reflections upon liberal civilization accept that civilization is a contingent achievement, which is susceptible to decline and collapse as well as to continued progress. Collingwood is alert to the seemingly invisible problems and underlying deficiencies that signal and contribute to decline. Collingwood’s grand narrative of historical development reveals problems as well as achievements. Modernity tends to sweep away the emotional force of commitments, due to its remorseless application of instrumental techniques to the practical questions that are posed to a civilization. The pervasiveness of an instrumental mentality and an accompanying craving for amusement undercut commitment to the values and features of civilization and contribute to a malaise that undermines the energy of society.20 The fetishizing of scientific techniques captivates the imagination of theorists, who presume to promote naturalistic over non-naturalistic forms of investigation and knowledge .21 The prospective eclipse of religion and metaphysics endangers the most fundamental aspects of a civilization; its absolute but neglected presuppositions. Likewise the one-dimensional character of the work that is demanded by modern administration, the homogenisation and centralization of education and the coercive power of wealth in a marketized economy are impediments to the flourishing of liberal civilization.22 Unlike Hegel, Collingwood perceives art’s capacity to express emotions as an antidote to the contemporary neglect of emotional self-knowledge. Again, unlike Hegel,

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Collingwood considers that philosophy must assume a practical as well as theoretical guise. The New Leviathan represents a philosophical contribution to the political defence of liberal civilization by identifying and highlighting its constitutive features so as to consolidate commitment to its values. For Collingwood, the Owl of Minerva, the Hegelian metaphor for philosophical refection, reflects in Hegelian fashion on the actual conditions of historical development, but the flightpath of the philosophical owl is shaped as much by the critical power of reflective thought as by the rational course of historical development. Collingwood’s critical remarks on Hegel’s philosophy in The New Leviathan focus upon aspects of the Hegelian standpoint, which are genuinely problematic. Collingwood’s criticism obscures the debt in which his philosophy continues to stand to Hegel, but it highlights the tendency of Hegel’s philosophy of history to underrate the contingency of history and the possibilities of alternative readings of historical development. Collingwood’s general philosophical conception of history allows for the possibility of regress as well as progress, and for the continual need to reconsider historical development. Grand narratives of historical development are contestable, as Graham remarks in his recent defence of their employment in The Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach to History.23 Their contestability derives from their generality and from the contingency of the connections that they establish between events. Collingwood’s acknowledges the contestability of his own account of the historical development of civilization. He recognizes the possibility of diverse civilizations and does not privilege liberal civilization by invoking its necessity. Collingwood’s characterization of liberal civilization, however, is challenged by developments and standpoints that have either emerged or have become more pronounced in subsequent years. Collingwood tends to ignore the persisting differential experiences of women and men. He recognizes that former political cultures have rested upon formal inequalities between the sexes in respect of civil rights and political participation, but he ignores the persistence of this inequality and the informal ways in which gender inequalities inform social practices. Likewise, Collingwood’s appreciation of how the intelligent exploitation of nature constitutes a measure of civility now appears problematic. Collingwood’s notion of intelligent exploitation of nature is that mankind applies intelligence in rendering nature amenable to its purposes. There is no express consideration of how the exploitation of nature might require restraint in the use of natural

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resources or that a recognition of the inherent value in preserving natural species and fauna might constitute an intelligent interaction with nature. Collingwood appears to operate with an anthropomorphic view of nature. Moreover, Collingwood’s assumption that the nation state plays the key role in developing the capacities, values and attitudes that constitute civilization, is challenged by subsequent theories of globalization that highlight the global pressures that circumscribe the sovereignty of nation states.24 Collingwood, however, does not focus on the national to the exclusion of the international. He recognizes that civility, while incubated in nation states, is to be practised at the international level, and he anticipates contemporary cosmopolitan theories, and more specifically, Walzer’s contemporary formulation of the need to balance ‘thick’ moral codes within specific political communities with ‘thin’ cross-cultural cosmopolitan moral commitments.25

Lyotard, Rawls and MacIntyre Assessment of the contemporary value of Collingwood’s reading of liberal civilization can be afforded by relating his thought to three distinct and significant social theorists, Lyotard, Rawls and MacIntyre. These theorists can be seen as succeeding Collingwood in reviewing the fate of liberal civilization from a vantage point that incorporates late twentieth century developments. Like Collingwood, they aim to link theory and practice, and to combine history and philosophy, in reformulating the terms according to which liberal civilization is to be maintained, revived or abandoned. Rawls and MacIntyre acknowledge directly the impact of Collingwood upon their thinking.26 Like Collingwood, they review the condition of liberal civilization from a post-Enlightenment perspective, in which the project of regulating conduct by reason is recognized to be complex and historical. Rawls follows Collingwood in adverting to the constructed, historical character of individual and social experience, and in taking a liberal society to consist in an association of free individuals, who pursue distinct conceptions of the good. MacIntyre theorizes the historical conditionality of ethical and political perspectives, and, like Collingwood, he is alert to the underlying rationalism of modernity, which elevates natural science, while deprecating the normative, criteriological practices of ethics and philosophical analysis. His critique of the contemporary reduction of ethics to standpoints, such as emotivism, proceduralism and utilitarianism that abstract from social practices,

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which endow meaning to moral life, echoes Collingwood’s critique of the enervating trends within modern civilization. Lyotard, unlike Rawls and MacIntyre, does not expressly acknowledge a debt to Collingwood. Nonetheless, his critical engagement with grand narratives of historical development and his sensitivity to the contingency of events and the diversity of discourses mark his affinity with Collingwood. Lyotard, though, is a critic of liberal civilization, whose engagement in revolutionary disruption betokens his abrogation of the liberal values to which Collingwood adhered. Lyotard’s critique of a monochromatic instrumentality that he identifies in social development and his impassioned commitment to countervailing norms of aesthetic creativity and cultural diversity, however, rehearse Collingwood’s strictures against prevalent aspects of modernity that foster positivism, utilitarianism and coercion at the expense of art, commitment to practical and intellectual pursuits and open political debate. Affinities between Collingwood and Lyotard, Rawls and Macintyre are highlighted by an appreciation of their common critical engagements with Hegel. Their engagements with Hegel are distinct but overlapping. Lyotard is an arch critic of Hegel; his postmodernism is defined by its critical distance from the modernity of Hegelianism. Rawls’s later concern to frame an historical and social context for liberalism is advanced via a conspicuous engagement with Hegel, which respects Hegel’s critique of classic social contract theory while repudiating absolutist and illiberal features of Hegel’s philosophy. MacIntyre’s historicized critique of contemporary liberalism accommodates to Hegel’s recognition of the socially and historically situated character of ethical and political practice, while reneging on the unificatory trajectory of his philosophy. Their critiques of Hegel resonate with Collingwood’s suspicions of Hegel’s treatment of history, while the turn towards Hegel on the part of Rawls and MacIntyre in respectively advancing and criticizing liberalism, rehearse aspects of Collingwood’s historical, social liberalism. Lyotard, Rawls and MacIntyre criticize Hegel in ways that are prefigured by Collingwood, though in doing so they assume standpoints that are distinct from that of Collingwood. They share scepticism over Hegel’s comprehensive absolutism. Lyotard’s postmodernism is a signature for a scepticism, which rejects any move to unite standpoints and discourses via philosophical or political mediation. Rawls’s liberalism is predicated on a scepticism over the possibility of individuals agreeing to a substantive notion of a common good. His later

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thought accentuates this scepticism by restricting the boundaries of liberal justification to what he takes to be a specifically political sphere. MacIntyre’s critique of contemporary liberalism respects openness to differing traditions of moral inquiry and to diverse possibilities of political engagement. MacIntyre argues that the differences between traditions resist the closure to which Hegel subscribes in a univocal reading of history and politics. These theorists’ scepticism over the claims of Hegelian absolutism resumes Collingwood’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Likewise, Collingwood’s affirmation of the contingency of history, the ireducibility of art and his recognition of the contestability of liberalism are of a piece with Lyotard’s perspectivalism, anticipate Rawls’s sensitivity to the problems of philosophical justification and political argument and cohere with MacIntyre’s acceptance of a plurality of traditions of thought and forms of political practice. The openness of Collingwood’s political theorizing, however, operates together with a comprehensive and unambiguous defence of liberal values that contrasts with the standpoints of Lyotard, Rawls and Macintyre, who range from attacking liberalism to providing a qualified, rather than comprehensive defence of its values.

Lyotard Lyotard’s connection with Collingwood is indirect rather than direct. He neither engages expressly with Collingwood, nor focuses upon the express issues, such as civilization, metaphysics, philosophical method and the philosophy of history, upon which Collingwood concentrates. The singularity of the idioms in which they theorize, is signalled by the particularities of the respective intellectual and political contexts in which they operate. The intellectual traditions within which Lyotard theorized, and against which he rebelled include French Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, and his political commitments were shaped and developed by his membership of the dissident Marxist group Socialisme ou barbarie, his reflections on the FrenchAlgierian conflict, his participation in the events of May 1968, and his recognition of the significance of the collapse of Marxism in Eastern Europe.27 In contrast, Collingwood sharpened his thinking by combating post-idealist early twentieth century English philosophical doctrines such as realism and logical positivism, via an idiosyncratic engagement with a range of intellectual activities including philosophy, history and archaeology.28 Nonetheless, Lyotard’s thinking bears an affinity with Collingwood’s, even if it is conducted in a dis-

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tinctive style and is addressed to different audiences. Theorizing the relations between theory and practice and philosophy and history preoccupies Lyotard, like Collingwood. Whereas Collingwood aims to effect rapprochements between philosophy and history and theory and practice, Lyotard aims to disturb the hegemony of theory over practice and the elevation of grand narratives over the contingencies and differences that are evidenced in history and society. Lyotard, in his own idiom, recognizes the dangers that are posed to the autonomy of differential forms of activity by absolutist theory and the pervasiveness of instrumentality, just as Collingwood is alert to the presumptions of positivism, the philosophical absorption of contingency and the enervation of the vital forces of civilization. Moreover, an overlapping feature of the intellectual contexts of both Lyotard and Collingwood is their engagement with Hegelianism. Amidst the changing formulations of his theorizing, Lyotard is a constant critic of Hegel and Marx and their dialectical ambitions to achieve definitive resolutions of philosophical controversy and the clash of political standpoints. Lyotard is consistently antagonistic to the Hegelian tradition of systematic comprehensive theorizing. His characteristic valorization of contingency, perspectivalism and irreducible difference harmonizes with Collingwood’s resistance to Hegel’s philosophical readings of history and art and his insistence that historical situations are constituted by the contingent and multifarious perceptions of agents. Lyotard’s first major work, Phenomenology, is a defence of Marx and materialism, but it is a defence that signposts revisionism by taking seriously the focus upon consciousness of phenomenology.29 Subsequently, Lyotard’s preoccupation with the Algerian conflict precipitates his rejection of key aspects of Marxism, notably its economic reductionism and its essentialized reading of class and the proletarian revolutionary struggle.30 Lyotard’s participation in the events of May 1968 exemplifies his commitment to the openness of practical struggle and to a revolutionary indeterminacy over the subordination of history and the possibilities of practice to the hegemony of theory.31 Libidinal Economy is a polemical radical rejection of Marxism that repudiates the claims of theory to master the motions of desire. Lyotard’s subsequent dismissal of modernity defines modernity in terms of its misguided subordination of history and practice to unificatory theoretical grand narratives. The postmodernism that is celebrated in The Postmodern Condition rejects the essentialisms of the proletariat and the Hegelian system in favour of dissonant creativity and pluralistic relativism.32

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Lyotard’s pluralism is intensified in The Differend, in which Hegel is expressly criticized for employing a reductive dialectic that purports to serve as a meta-language to unify differences.33 Lyotard himself conceives of phrases as being articulated within irreducibly distinct phrase regimes. For Lyotard, there is no bridge linking discourses such as the artistic and scientific, and a Holocaust survivor survives at the price of being misunderstood, and, as survivors die, the Holocaust itself may be denied by antagonistic discourses.34 For Lyotard, there is no overriding goal of politics such as a liberal vision of establishing fair and equal conditions of social co-operation between free individuals. There is an aim to testify to what dominant discursive regimes exclude. Difference and postmodern creativity are threatened, for Lyotard, by the on-going development of a technological rational society, in which a pervasive instrumentalism overrides discordance and creativity. On renouncing Marxism and the optimism of 1968, Lyotard offers no countervailing political strategy to contend with the remorseless advance of instrumentality. In his late works he merely counterposes an aesthetic that intimates what cannot be said in the dominant discourse of instrumentality. Art attests to the discordant sublime sense of what reason cannot compute.35 Although Lyotard eschews systematic theorizing, his thought resembles Collingwood’s, in that it embraces a range of disciplines, including politics, philosophy, history, aesthetics. Again, like Collingwood, Lyotard is critical of absolutist Hegelianism that overrides the contingency, openness and discordance of history and practice. Moreover, Lyotard is sensitive to the imperialism of theoretical discourses such as philosophy or science that do not respect the limits of their competence, just as Collingwood is alert to the inappropriateness of a scientific discipline such as psychology when it attempts to explain thought and action, and to the autonomy of historical understanding from the claims of philosophy.36 Like Lyotard, Collingwood recognizes a plurality of perspectives that constitute experience rather than conceiving forms of explanation as being assimilable to one another. Lyotard’s postmodern perspectivalism reflects Collingwood’s recognition of the plurality of ways in which human beings act and think, just as his repudiation of a necessary directionality to history recalls Collingwood’s emphatic identification of contingency as a postulate of history. Lyotard’s thought also resembles Collingwood’s due to its sensitivity to the fragility of differential perspectives in the context of the prevalence of one-dimensional instrumentality in contemporary society that threatens, for example,

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the traditional pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, artistic creativity and the cultivation of privacy. Lyotard’s invocation of art as an expressive form of resistance to totalitarian social development also harmonizes with Collingwood’s sense of art’s capacity to express emotions that are repressed by the relentless absorption of individuals in the utilitarian concerns of society and the escapist attractions of the amusement industry.37 If Collingwood and Lyotard are united by their distinctively expressed concerns over absolutizing theoretical schemes and the homogenising tendencies of modernity, there remain significant differences between them. Collingwood continues while criticizing Hegelianism, whereas Lyotard repudiates the entire tradition. While the mature Collingwood maintains that philosophy is not to override the autonomy of history and the claims of practice, he aims to connect the concepts underlying areas of experience and to recognize conceptual links between features of experience. Whereas Lyotard rejects the dialectical enterprise of connecting discursive genres, Collingwood perceives and explains what he takes to be the unity of experience in constituting the conditions of liberal civilization. Lyotard disconnects history from the grip of philosophy, while Collingwood takes the practice of history to be susceptible of philosophical specification and history is shown philosophically to be a rational evidential mode of inquiry. Lyotard’s opposition to modernist forms of philosophy that purport to provide general explanations of the world engenders his postmodern scepticism over the possibilities of establishing a standpoint that is more than a particular perspective. For Lyotard, a genuine consensus on politics is an impossibility, given the incomensurabilities that exist between standpoints. Collingwood is critical of aspects of modern politics and civilization. He is sensitive to an attenuated commitment to the values of liberal civilization, and the tendency for utility and amusement to supersede openness to political debate and to artistic experience. He is alert to the precariousness of liberal values in the face of antagonistic forces, such as fascism. While Collingwood is at one with Lyotard in accepting that any particular expression of civilization is a contingent and contestable achievement, he nonetheless provides a systematic defence of liberal civilization. He develops a justification of liberal civilization via an examination of the conditions of free rational agency, and a historical review of the development of social and political practices that allow for the full expression of the freedom and rationality of agency.

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Collingwood’s political theory is predicated upon an expressly fallibilist reading of history and a view of political association that allows for profound differences between associates. He aims to combine unity and difference by advocating a deliberative mode of democracy, in which individuals self-consciously attend to alternative standpoints. The differences between Lyotard and Collingwood are highlighted by an appreciation of Lyotard’s reflections on the Holocaust. Lyotard regards the Holocaust as a rupture in social and political experience, which refuses to be assimilated into a Hegelian conception of historical progress. For Lyotard, it is a prime example of the specificity of events that subvert general readings of society and history. He presses the uniqueness of the events constituting the Holocaust so as to suggest its historical comprehension is compromised by the disappearance of survivors and by the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. For Collingwood, as for Lyotard, the Holocaust would highlight the possibility of regress as well as progress in history, and so militates against a teleological reading of history. But according to Collingwood’s conception of history, historical comprehension of the Holocaust would neither be jeopardized by its denial nor by the disappearance of its survivors. Collingwood conceives of the practice of history as resting upon the rethinking of past thought. Given the capacity of mind to know mind in the light of a scrutiny of relevant evidence, the Holocaust can be the object of historical knowledge. This knowledge is defeasible but is susceptible of evidential justification.38 Collingwood’s notion of history differs from postmodernist readings, because he maintains that a systematic understanding of historical concepts shows how historical truth is to be distinguished from fictionality. Collingwood’s understanding of history demonstrates the presuppositions of historical knowledge, and is thereby distinct from what Zagorin represents to be the postmodern aestheticization of history.39

Rawls Rawls in reflecting upon his own conception of the history of moral philosophy has expressly admired Collingwood’s recognition of the historicity of political theory.40 Rawls’s approbation of Collingwood harmonizes with his own practice of rethinking past ethical and political theories in formulating his own analyses of liberalism and justice. Rawls reflects upon late twentieth century liberal society, its standard intuitions and principles and its most significant modes of justification in advancing a theory of liberalism. The aim of his theory and the point of

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his methodological strategy are to incorporate what is valuable in liberal practice while providing a theoretical defence of a liberal society that appeals to a wide variety of liberals.41 Like Collingwood, Rawls takes theory both to arise out of practice and to perform the vital task of providing convincing theoretical support for liberal practice. There is a close affinity between Rawls’s political philosophy and Collingwood’s in that they combine philosophical and historical modes of rethinking. In early and late writings Rawls takes the procedure of political theorizing to involve the scrutiny of an historic practice of politics and the reconsideration of its principles, intuitions and practices. This review is undertaken to develop an equilibrated theory that accommodates what Rawls terms ‘our considered convictions of political justice, at all levels of generality.’42 This resulting reflective equilibrium is then represented by Rawls as a set of abstract conceptions that underpin constructive theorizing, which is dedicated to the reasonable goal of articulating principles allowing for fair co-operation between individuals in society.43 Rawls’s constructivism and his affiliated rethinking of judgements that are maintained in a liberal democratic polity at a variety of levels of generality, have evident affinities with the constructivist rethinking of political practice undertaken by Collingwood in The New Leviathan. Moreover, Rawls follows Collingwood in refashioning transformatively social contract theory.44 Rawls, like Collingwood, expressly takes account of Hegel’s critique of social contract theory, in formulating the idea of a social contract so that it does not represent a transaction between abstractly conceived individuals.45 In his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy Rawls endorses Hegel’s analysis of the historical and social conditions in which individual freedom is to be enjoyed. In his lectures on Hegel Rawls recognizes that individuals acquire and practise a reasonable political perspective by means of their induction into and participation within the plurality of practices within a polity.46 Rawls is at one with both Collingwood and Hegel in assuming individuals to be neither asocial nor ahistorical. The conception of the reasonable and rational individual that is presupposed in Rawls’s Political Liberalism is expressly derived from a liberal democratic political culture.47 Rawls understands a liberal democratic political culture to be an historical product, which reflects the modern recognition that individuals can be divided by their divergent, reasonable conceptions of the good. In the light of a consequential chronic tendency for conflict over ends to occur, Rawls recognizes that individuals should be allowed to be free to pursue their

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own conceptions of the good.48 If Rawls accepts the Collingwoodian and Hegelian conception of the historical context of political theorizing, his express discussion of the implications of presuming a largescale historical narrative is less developed and less nuanced than his predecessors. Rawls is also linked to Collingwood and Hegel by his discrimination of the role of political theory from the pursuit of a moral conception of the good. The logic of Collingwood’s discussion of mind and society is of a piece with Hegel’s recognition that the terms of political association are not to be derived from a particular conception of the moral good. Hegel in the The Philosophy of Right highlights how moral consciousness cannot establish an ethical community either by asserting or aggregating the pursuit of moral, determinate conceptions of the good on the part of individuals. Collingwood follows Hegel and anticipates Rawls in recognizing that an ethical political community is a regime that allows for the exercise of individual moral agency and the pursuit of diverse goods, and hence does not itself pursue any determinate conception of the good.49 If Rawls is closer to Collingwood than is imagined in standard literature on analytical political theory, their standpoints should not be assimilated. In his late work, Political Liberalism, Rawls diverges from Collingwood and the Hegelian tradition in maintaining that political liberalism is best theorized and supported by separating a political conception of liberalism and its justification from an aspiration to provide a general or comprehensive explanation of its principles. Collingwood is critical of Hegelian absolutism and imagines an ideal polity to be significantly more liberal, democratic and Rawlsian than Hegel. He is at one with Hegel, however, in maintaining that a rational political regime and civilization demands a comprehensive form of justification. Collingwood, like Rawls, expressly recognizes the contestability of political argumentation, but he maintains that liberal values should underlie all aspects of a liberal civilization. Collingwood is decisively Hegelian in construing concepts as overlapping so that delimitation of a sphere, such as the political, is part of a comprehensive form of philosophical explanation, rather than a relatively uncontroversial procedural device that facilitates widespread consensus on the terms of political association.50 Rawls’s assumption that the burdens of judgement, to which theories are subject, render a comprehensive philosophical explanation of politics vulnerable and uncertain, whereas a delimited justification of political liberalism is not, is theoretically problematic. Rawls assumes, without justification,

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that an explanation of how a part is detachable from related aspects of experience is not susceptible to strains that are similar to those involved in providing an explanation of a whole. If Rawls’s explanatory strategy of providing a specifically political conception of justice is problematic theoretically, then, as Bellamy and Castiglione maintain, its desirability is also questionable.51 Its questionability is highlighted by its contrast to Collingwood’s standpoint, which pointedly requires openness in debate over what constitutes the competence of the public sphere. The culmination of Collingwood’s dialectical comprehensive account of politics is his celebration of ideal political action as itself being the practice of dialectic, in which there are no restrictions on deliberative debate on the part of citizens. Political debate, for Collingwood, is only to be guided by a spirit of openness and with a commitment on all parties to reconcile differences. This commitment to untrammelled debate epitomizes the aspiration to be civil and to respect the freedom of all persons, and is not to be circumscribed in the interest of minimising conflict. Collingwood’s commitment to open debate contrasts with the later Rawls, who, in his late essay, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ observes that ‘Citizens realize that they cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines.’52 This negative assessment of the possibilities of bridging theoretical disagreements resembles Lyotard’s absolute rejection of the possibility of mediating argumentative differends. The possibilities of mutual understanding are in fact insusceptible of such summary treatment; they depend on circumstances and the pragmatic interplay between interlocutors. Interlocutors in dispute always share things in common, but there is no way of specifying in advance the amenability of their differences to mediation. Rawls aims to achieve a social consensus by narrowing the possibilities of debate and disagreement. His presumption of widespread acceptance of his concept of a specifically political discursive sphere that is determined by restrictive constructive argumentation is disputable. It is highly contentious to maintain that political questions can be separated from broader moral and social opinion. Political values and assumptions are linked to the background culture of society and the possibilities for disagreement over political principles are not to be reduced by their segregation from wider moral argument. The regulation of social practices does not allow for a neat and uncontroversial divide between their public and non-public aspects, given that the maintenance of individual liberties depends upon the orientation of

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educational provision, the conduct of family life and the protection of minority cultures. It is by no means either feasible or desirable that political consensus be procured by a methodological device to avoid confrontation over general doctrines. Political liberties are liable to chronic contestation, given the incommensurabilities between differing interpretations of them.53 Collingwood’s defence of liberalism rests upon an acceptance of widespread disagreement at a variety of levels and a comprehensive if contestable justification of liberal values. His strategy recognizes how political debate tends to invoke general principles and appreciates how the vitality of a liberal civilization depends upon its values permeating its inter-connected practices and the fundamental commitments of citizens.

MacIntyre MacIntyre’s self-consciously follows a Collingwoodian paradigm in his social and ethical theory. In A Short History of Ethics, MacIntyre acknowledges his debt to Collingwood. The book’s argument is Collingwoodian in that it takes both the object and form of ethical theory to be historical, so that philosophy and history are brought together in a way that is reminiscent of Collingwood. MacIntyre diagnoses the problems of contemporary moral philosophy, notably its unconvincing abstractness, which is exemplified in standpoints such as emotivism and prescriptivism, to arise out of their reduction of morality to forms of choice, which are severed from their rootedness in historical and sociological patterns of virtuous living. MacIntyre signals his debt to Collingwood specifically in A Short History of Ethics by remarking upon the force of Collingwood’s critique of ethical intuitionism. MacIntyre observes, ‘Collingwood, whose attack (on intuitionists) extended to many other recent writers on ethics, attacked them for their lack of historical sense, for their tendency to treat Plato, Kant and themselves as contributors to a single discussion with a single subject matter and a permanent and unchanging vocabulary… We ought rather, according to Collingwood in the Autobiography, to understand moral and other concepts in terms of a developing historical sequence. What this might entail I shall consider later in this chapter.’54 MacIntyre concludes A Short History of Ethics by spelling out what is entailed by Collingwood’s historical approach to ethics. He recognizes how the necessarily historical character of ethics is obscured by contemporary abstract formulas, which in turn reflect the deracination of con-

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temporary moral life from sustaining social practices. He reads contemporary ethics as an historical phenomenon, whose historicity is exemplified by its specifically modern denial of its historicity. MacIntyre accepts, however, like Collingwood, but unlike Hegel, that there is an irreducible variety to moral practice and ethical thought, which cannot be reduced to a single line of historical development and an absolutized set of moral concepts.55 In subsequent works, notably After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre extends his critique of modern society and contemporary social theory to encompass an indictment of modern liberal society and its standard forms of philosophical justification. In so doing, his standpoint is standardly assimilated to that of other critics of liberalism, who are labelled as communitarians because they highlight the significance of the social contexts in which individuals develop and due to their characteristic support for the values of social solidarity and community.56 The label of communitarianism is as confusing as it is enlightening, for it encompasses a diversity of standpoints and individuals, a number of whom, including MacIntyre, reject the designation. While the label communitarianism is problematic, for instance, in raising but not resolving questions over what is meant by community, the label does highlight a feature of MacIntyre’s critique of standard forms of contemporary liberal argument, which links him to other contemporary theorists, such as Sandel and Taylor, as well as connecting him further to Collingwood. MacIntyre shares with Collingwood and others, a sense that ethical and political theory must relate conduct and choices to social practices. In After Virtue MacIntyre criticizes standard forms of liberal argument because they abstract individuality from contexts of social practice, and deprive ethical and political argument from recourse to notions of the good and human virtues, which are developed and displayed in social practices. MacIntyre maintains that the notion of the good is used in a variety of ways, and that a significant form relates to participation within social practices in which the rules and standards inherent to the practice endorse the good performances of its practitioners. While engagement with specific practices, such as chess or historical study, legitimate specific notions of the good, the overall value of a moral life is held by MacIntyre to turn upon the way in which the narrative of an individual’s life displays a coherent pattern of virtues due to his or her reflective engagement with a variety of social practices.57

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MacIntyre’s reading of social practices and the connections between social context and a virtuous life evokes Collingwood’s distinctive analysis of the conditions of liberal civilization. Collingwood, like MacIntyre, maintains that there are a variety of practices for example, history, science and art, which engender distinctive internal virtues. Moreover, Collingwood conceives of a liberal polity to constitute an historic form of life that is composed of a variety of practices that fit together to form a liberal civilization. Civilized, liberal individuals are taken by Collingwood to develop an overall integrative way of acting that recognizes the virtue of fellow citizens in participating intelligently in a common deliberative associative framework, which sustains liberal civilization. MacIntyre’s thought is also affiliated to Collingwood’s in maintaining that conceptions of ethics and politics are historical and that there is no single way of reading their historical development. He maintains that there are distinct traditions of inquiry, which condition the kinds of questions and answers that are posed and offered in morality. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? And Three Versions of Moral Enquiry MacIntyre aims to show how his historicized notion of ethical inquiry can accommodate recognition of significant diversity of standpoint without collapsing into a relativism that jars with the justificatory dimension of ethical argument. He develops and elaborates an historicist notion of ethics, which he perceives to provide a basis for a conversation between traditions of ethical inquiry. Although he is prepared to defend the Aristotelian, Thomist tradition within this conversation, and to indicate that one tradition might deflect to another due to its lack of internal resources in tackling contemporary issues, he recognizes that there are no absolute clear-cut criteria for deciding between traditions of ethical inquiry or even between distinct theoretical formulations within a tradition. In his postscript to the second edition of After Virtue he expressly distances himself from Hegel’s absolutist historicist position, ‘Hence this kind of historicism, unlike Hegel’s, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of historicism which excludes all claims to absolutist knowledge.’58 MacIntyre’s decisive rejection of Hegel should not obscure an evident affinity between his approach and that of Hegel’s. Both MacIntyre and Hegel subscribe to a developmental form of ethics in which ethical standpoints are linked to distinct political cultures. If MacIntyre is linked to Hegel, his thought is even more closely connected to that of Collingwood, in that he, like Collingwood, takes civilization to develop historically so that a grand narrative of its development may

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be framed, but, again, like Collingwood, he is critical of an absolutist non-fallibilist reading of this narrative. At the outset of After Virtue, MacIntyre specifically cites Hegel and Collingwood as theorists, whose productive employment of an historical approach to philosophizing offers an alternative to contemporary analytic standpoints.59 MacIntyre’s most recent book, Dependent Rational Animals, confirms the close affinity between his thought and Collingwood’s, while also registering significant differences. MacIntyre’s thought as a whole can be seen as following both Hegel and Collingwood in constituting a critique of the Enlightenment notion of reason as an ahistorical instrument that can be used to apply universal truths to particular situations and problems. In Dependent Rational Animals he subjects to critical scrutiny the Enlightenment assumption that the agent of reason, the subject who formulates and applies rational arguments is able-bodied, independent and generally unproblematic. The assumption is, of course facilitated by presuming the rational agent’s male sexuality, as men are standardly, if egregiously, taken to be independent. MacIntyre observes that, in fact, the lives of individuals are not so clear-cut and that their life experiences incorporate periods of dependence as well as independence. At the outset of their lives, of course, individuals are wholly dependent upon adults, who nurture them and prepare them for a life in which they are to act as independent practical reasoners, and in old age individuals are also likely to be dependent upon others. Moreover, the exigencies of life throw up a variety of circumstances, such as are occasioned by ill-health and emotional strain that render individuals dependent upon the help of friends, relatives, colleagues, associates, charities and welfare institutions. MacIntyre also observes that the exercise of practical reason in human beings cannot be distinguished sharply from the purposeful activities of other animals, such as dolphins, who can be understood as flourishing or not in terms of their attainment of goods that are shaped by their shared participation with other dolphins in activities such as play and hunting.60 MacIntyre maintains that human beings resemble other animals in their dependence on social contexts in which they acquire, enact and sustain their capacities for flourishing. He recognizes, though, that the distinctively human capacity to reflect upon reasons for action, demands special sets of virtues, which are promoted by specifically human forms of nurturing and modes of protection. MacIntyre’s conception of human beings as being dependent rational animals, whose flourishing depends upon the cultivation of virtues in social practices,

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such as families and educational institutions evokes key features of Collingwood’s thought. Collingwood, like MacIntyre, emphasizes that individual virtues are not to be disassociated from social practice and that the rational and free individuals who are to participate in free political associations are dependent upon others to nurture them and prepare them for the life of independent civilized actors. Again, like MacIntyre, Collingwood conceives of the lives of individuals as demanding the ethical integration of their diverse talents and particular pursuits.61 MacIntyre’s mode of arguing also reflects Collingwood’s characteristic style of reasoning in that he construes rationality as developing a range of attributes on a common overlapping scale. For instance, like Collingwood, MacIntyre construes animals and human beings as exhibiting related forms of rationality, in which the higher order conduct of human beings is to be seen as a development of attributes, which are displayed by other animals.62 He observes, ‘To acknowledge that there are animal preconditions for human rationality requires us to think of the relationship of human beings to members of other intelligent species in terms of a scale or a spectrum rather than of a single line of division between “them” and “us”.’63 MacIntrye’s dissent from being labelled a communitarian derives from a number of sources.64 He balks at rejecting the liberal notion that ethical and political values are to override the reflective independence of individual reasoners, as is implied in hyperbolic conceptions of community. He is also a severe critic of the modern state, and unlike some self-styled ‘communitarians’, he repudiates the notion that the highly bureaucratic, complex and powerful modern state might provide a context in which individuals are able to develop ethical forms of life in which there can be giving and receiving amongst mutually recognizing reflective agents. He acknowledges that in the technologically sophisticated, complex modern world, in which there are many conflicting economic and social interests, there is a need for the administrative agency of the state.65 It is to small-scale local communities of mutually acknowledging individuals that MacIntyre looks to provide the contexts for the development of rational deliberation and the virtues of practical reasoners, who can display the just generosity that is demanded of mutually dependent rational actors. He cites as examples of these kinds of contextual networks, farming co-operatives in Donegal, fishing communities in New England and Welsh mining communities.66 These examples of smallscale, traditional communities highlight MacIntyre’s disenchantment with aspects of modernity that estrange individuals from one another

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and which concentrate power either in large-scale units or fluid global networks. MacIntyre’s critique of modernity is nostalgic in its favouring of small-scale face-to-face communities, such as fishing communities in which adversity fosters ties of mutuality. These ties of mutuality appear unsustainable in distinctively modern conditions that blend technological efficiency with a relentless promotion of individualism and consumerism. Collingwood’s notion of civilization invokes a scale of civility, whereby the local, the national and the international are inter-linked sites for its cultivation. It appears to be more attuned to the complex global world, and its multiple sites of sovereignty, in which contemporary citizens are situated.

Conclusion Collingwood’s thought deserves to be rethought today for several interconnected reasons. Historically, his thought represents a perceptive critical rethinking of Hegel that opposes contemporary English strains of realism and positivism by recognizing the connectedness of forms of thought and action. His critical Hegelianism focuses attention upon a central and problematic aspect of Hegel’s philosophy, namely his unitary reading of the course of historical development, which excludes alternative readings of history and the possibility of regression. The acuity of Collingwood’s critical Hegelianism underlies the contemporary philosophical and political relevance of Collingwood’s thought. This contemporary philosophical and political relevance is exhibited in the affinities and disparities between Collingwood’s thought and the social and political theories of Lyotard, MacIntyre and Rawls, who offer distinctive but influential recent interpretations of liberal and post-liberal civilization. Collingwood anticipates many lines of the inquiries that are conducted by Rawls, Lyotard and MacIntyre, while posing critical questions to their standpoints and conclusions. Lyotard’s postmodernism is an eloquent epitaph for European Marxism. The end of grand narratives is self-consciously formulated as a requiem for the grand theorizing of Hegel and Marx, and for the emancipatory ambitions of political radicals in aiming to refashion society. Collingwood’s scepticism over the possibility of providing definitive large-scale theories of historical development, his affiliated recognition of the contingency and differentiation of rational action and his appreciation of the value of aesthetic creativity anticipate much of the force of postmodern scepticism over universalizing notions of reason and political practice.

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Collingwood, however, retains a commitment to positive constructive theorizing, which is neglected in Lyotard’s postmodernism. He abandons neither the theoretical reach of Hegel and the Hegelian tradition, nor a practical commitment to the political goal of sustaining a civilization in which the freedom, equality and rationality of individuals are recognized. Rawls’s thought, especially in his later works, is akin to Collingwood’s historical and social treatment of liberalism. He self-consciously recognizes Collingwood’s paradigmatic approach to the history of thought, and he specifies the historical and social conditionality of liberalism. In Political Liberalism he affirms that his conception of a socially constructed liberalism, in which the component practices of a liberal society make possible the rational and reasonable individual agent. Rawls’s elliptical history of the development of a liberal civilization follows Collingwood in recognizing how a mutual respect for individuality amongst individuals emerges out of historical experience. If Rawls’s liberalism cannot be dismissed as an unhistorical asocial theory that assumes the fiction of disembedded selves, there remain problems in his formulation of liberalism, which can be highlighted by relating it to Collingwood’s preceding account. Rawls’s awareness of the historical susceptibility of individuals to be divided by their comprehensive, general beliefs motivates him to defend liberalism by limiting the way it is to be theorized and practised. He maintains that liberal political theory and practice should be conducted via a specifically constructed and delimited political model of public reason, which allows individuals to maintain an overlapping consensus. The overlapping consensus arises out of the presumption that individuals who subscribe to a variety of large-scale theories are able to agree on specifically liberal political arrangements, with which their beliefs are compatible. The presumption that individuals will be content to exclude their general beliefs from the sphere of public debate is highly problematic, as is the notion that liberal society may be indifferent to the conduct of familial and educational arrangements. Collingwood’s express recognition of the need to present a comprehensive and yet contestable defence of liberalism, which informs a society’s internal practices and attitude to outsiders, avoids these problems. Collingwood’s synoptic vision of liberal civilization demands that citizens attune liberal politics to highly general doctrines, because a liberal civilization embraces the conduct of intellectual inquiry, the interface between human beings and nature and the nurturing and pedagogic practices that prepare individuals for the

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demands of citizenship. In the face of a menacing threat to liberal civilization, Collingwood argues, to some purpose, that it is only such a comprehensive and unqualified defence of liberalism that can secure liberal values. The affinity between Collingwood and MacIntyre highlights the unconventional aspects of Collingwood’s conception of liberal civilization. Collingwood shares with MacIntyre an understanding of the baleful effects of key aspects of modernity, such as its tendency to promote an arid and abstract rationalism and to escape into a fantasy world of amusement rather than to recognize the value of practical and intellectual pursuits. In The First Mate’s Log Collingwood reflects upon the vacuity of the modern instrumentalist mentality that is epitomized by utilitarianism.67 The spectre, which haunts both MacIntyre and Collingwood, is of a civilization that has severed its connections with vitalizing social activities. Collingwood’s most powerful indictment of modernity is contained in The Pinciples of Art in which he points to the dangers to civilization that are posed by the contemporary reluctance of individuals to express and understand their emotions. Failure to recognize emotionally the desiccation of contemporary life is seen by Collingwood to be a key factor in its continuation. Collingwood, like MacIntyre, is alert to the dangers to society that are constituted by the centralization of education and the professionalization of practical life, whereby parents, who are vital in promoting integrative forms of practical reasoning tend to be supplanted by professional providers of specialist skills.68 MacIntyre’s pessimism over modernity, though, threatens to override the prospects for renewal, as is reflected in his nostalgic celebration of insular face-to-face communities. Collingwood’s commitment to reinvigorate forms of civilization at the local, national and international levels anticipates the contemporary turn towards recognition of the differential levels at which sovereignty and politics are to be practised.69 Collingwood’s philosophy and political theory are living contributions to theory and practice. Their liveliness is reinforced by the way in which they stand in comparison with influential forms of recent liberal and post-liberal theory. To recognize Collingwood’s continuing relevance is to appreciate the subtle ways in which he combines historical and philosophical perspectives and in which he recognizes the reciprocity of theory and practice. Collingwood’s sensitivity alerts him to history and the changing ways in which images and conceptions of the natural and human worlds are constructed and reconstructed. His respect for history is reinforced by his philosophical

172 Rethinking R. G. Collingwood

appreciation of the metaphysical and epistemological conditions that make possible its understanding of the past. The philosophical clarification of the presuppositions of history underpins the independence of historical understanding, rather than either subordinating history to the dictates of a speculative philosophical narrative of historical progress or aestheticizing history in the service of a postmodern relativism. To recognize Collingwood’s achievement, however, is not to endorse all that he wrote. His critique of Hegel is suggestive and forceful and yet it is by no means definitive. It rests on a thorough and persisting engagement with Hegel’s writings, and co-exists with a sensitive and sympathetic appreciation of the plausibility of Hegel’s systematic objective idealism that inspires Collingwood’s own Hegelianism. There are countless interpretations of Hegel, which read him as a nonmetaphysical theorist, who works with rather than against the contingency and openness of history.70 Collingwood himself, at times, operates with a charitable reading of Hegel, which recognizes the complexity of Hegel’s reading of nature and society, and which plays down the closure of Hegel’s system. Collingwood’s engagements with Hegel, however, from his early invocation of Hegel in framing his own developmental logic, to his later preoccupation with Hegel’s philosophies of history, are interesting precisely because they appreciate Hegel’s accomplishment in relating conceptual investigations of experience to the dynamics of historical development, while acknowledging that Hegel’s absolutism forecloses on the openness of those dynamics. Collingwood’s own philosophy remains of interest, above all, because he provides an expressly open and fallibilist systematic interpretation of the conceptual inter-connections that compose experience. Collingwood’s last work, The New Leviathan is his most highly charged. Its rhetoric is infused by the crisis of civilization to which it is addressed. It is, however, a sophisticated resolution of the various pressures to which Collingwood’s thought was subject. It represents a subtle unification of philosophy and history and theory and practice, and indicates how a range of activities such as family life, art, the natural sciences and metaphysics depend upon a rational civilization that is in turn supported by these activities. It shows that the rapprochements between theory and practice and philosophy and history that Collingwood self-consciously aimed at effecting could be achieved without compromising the character of philosophy and the independence of theory, as some commentators have suggested.71 The theoretical explanation of liberal civilization that is conducted by

Conclusion: Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice 173

Collingwood has much to recommend it. Its object is frankly admitted to be contingent and its argument is presented as contestable. The argument, however, appeals on account of its comprehensiveness in connecting a variety of practices and principles to a shared practical commitment to respect the freedom and rationality of individuals. Liberal civilization is shown to harmonize with defining conceptual conditions of mind and society, and to offer a vision of a fair and equal association for open-minded and civil individuals, who are prepared to deliberate with others in sustaining their values.

Notes Chapter 1 Rethinking Collingwood: Dialectic in Theory and Practice 1. R. G. Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 3. 2. L. O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 16. 3. See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, Edited and with an Introduction by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). This publication contains the material, which Collingwood completed of the projected The Principles of History and the two alternative Conclusions of the Lecture courses on Nature and Mind that Knox edited and published under the title The Idea of History with a different Conclusion. 4. For an informative account of Knox’s editorship of Collingwood’s writings, and in particular for his treatment of The Principles of History and The Idea of Nature, see D. Boucher, ‘The Principles of History and the Cosmology Conclusion to The Idea of Nature’, Collingwood Studies, 2, 1995. 5. T. M. Knox, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 6. Ibid. pp. xviii–xx. 7. See D. Boucher, op. cit. 8. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics (Toronto and Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1970). See also, L. Rubinoff, ‘Collingwood and the Radical Conversion Hypothesis’, Dialogue 5/1, 1966. 9. N. Rotentstreich, ‘Metaphysics and Historicism’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 199. 10. S. Toulmin, ‘Conceptual Change and the Problem of Relativity’ in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, p. 213. 11. See A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 12. G. Collingwood, Letter to Clarendon Press, Oxford (KS), 6th August 1941, Clarendon Press Archives, PB/ED/001549, in which Collingwood remarks disparagingly on the style of the last part of The New Leviathan. 13. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Historiography’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, p. 238. 14. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, pp. 14–26. 15. See the following chapters. T. Madood, ‘Collingwood and the Idea of Philosophy’, A. Oldfield, ‘Metaphysics and History in Collingwood’s Thought’ and R. Martin, ‘Collingwood’s Claim that Metaphysics is a Historical Discipline’ in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History 174

Notes 175

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

and Civilization – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). G. D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). R. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, p. 27. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 56. L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, p. 3. Ibid. p. 57 Ibid. p. 75. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, p. 63. L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood R. G. Collingwood, Letter to G. de Ruggeiro, 24 August, 1923, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dep. 26. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 90–99. G. D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, pp. 140–143. R. Martin, Historical Explanation: Re-enactment and Practical Inference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). G. D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, p. 142. P. Johnson, R. G. Collingwood: An Introduction (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998), p. 30. A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, p. 156. J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), p. 74. I was able to read this book very shortly before completing my own. Its line of argument is largely compatible with and complementary to my own. It argues cogently for the continuity of Collingwood’s philosophizing, affirming Collingwood’s continuous commitment to the autonomy of philosophy. It supports this line of argument by a number of routes, including the fact that Collingwood himself did not advertise a break in his philosophizing and that his later books were planned to be published in a way which flagged their continuity. These lines of argument reinforce substantive arguments about the character of Collingwood’s early and late work, though, arguments deriving from what an author does not say about their work and about how his books were planned to be presented cannot in themselves be decisive. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition, edited with an Introduction by R. Martin) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 192. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, pp. 112–114. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’ in The Idea of History – Revised Edition ed. W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 332. On occasions Collingwood balks at talking of progress, because he imagines the distinctness of historical situations as rendering the putative choice between scientific ideas meaningless. Nonetheless, he considers that thinking develops via reflection on previous thought. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collngwood, An Essay on Metaphysics. It is also worth noting that

176 Notes

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Collingwood’s standpoint allows for the hermeneutic aspect of thought, whereby past and present are mutually determining so that a present standpoint emerges from the past but also reviews the past in the light of present interests and knowledge. Hence, Gadamer is wrong to criticize Collingwood for not being sensitive to the present perspective in which the past is examined. ‘With Collingwood we can say that we understand only when we understand the question to which something is the answer, but the intention of what is understood in this way does not remain foregrounded against our own intention.’ H-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), p. 374. Notably, L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, and L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, and J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. H. S. Harris, ‘Croce and Gentile in Collingwood’s New Leviathan’ in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 128. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Report on M. B. Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel’, Oxford, Clarendon Archives, PB/E/D/0020054, p. 7. Ibid. p. 9. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, p. 328. The two alternative Conclusions to The Idea of Nature have been published in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (ed. W. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The shorter one is referred to as ‘The Conclusion of 1935’ and the longer one, which is a first order work of cosmology is termed, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’. For an informative and interesting discussion of Hartman and a nonmetaphysical reading of Hegel, see F. Beiser’s review of Engelhardt and Pinkard’s Hegel Reconsidered, ‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysician? A Polemic’, in the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, No. 32 (Autumn/Winter 1995). Collingwood’s criticisms of Hegel include his early criticisms of Hegel’s treatment that are dealt with in Chapter 2, his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history, which is examined in Chapter 4 and his final onslaught on Hegel’s treatment of politics and history in The New Leviathan, which is focused upon in Chapter 6. Collingwood’s positive appreciation of Hegel is revealed above all in the way he himself tackles philosophical questions, which is in the spirit of Hegel, and which is predicated upon Hegel’s insight into the modern notion of how philosophical thinking, like all thinking, must register the freedom of thought. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 19. R. G. Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, p. 4 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics. See R. G. Collingwood, Notes towards a Metaphysic, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18/ 3–7, and ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, Collingwood Manuscripts 18/2. (Most of the latter manuscript is included in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition).

Notes 177 48. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945). 49. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition), p. 401. 50. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, p. 177. 51. R. G. Collingwood, Notes towards a Metaphysic. 52. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 77. 53. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (ed. D. Boucher) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 54. For a classic statement of Hegel’s views on theory and practice, see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 13; G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 27. For a review of wide-ranging interpretations of Hegel’s political philosophy, see M. Riedel (ed.), Materialen zu Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–5). 54. R. G. Collingwood and A. H. Hannay, ‘Preface’, to G. de Ruggeiro, Modern Philosophy (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1921), p. 6. 56. Collingwood’s positive appraisal of classic social contract theory is framed by his transformative and Hegelian reading of the social contract. (See Chapter 6 for a detailed justification of this reading of Collingwood). Collingwood’s Hegelian reading of Whitehead and Alexander is evident in The Idea of Nature but it is also evident in Notes towards a Metaphysic. 57. G. D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience. 58. See, for instance, R. G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy – 1921’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Dep. 4, p. 5.

Chapter 2

Philosophy; Rethinking Thought

1. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 110–119. 2. For a clear statement of Collingwood’s notion of the practice of philosophy as rethinking, see R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 189. See also the reference in this book on p. 226. 3. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind trans. Sir J. Baillie (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1971); G. F. Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel), Die Phaenomenlogie des Geistes. 4. A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 263. 5. See R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition: edited with An Introduction by R. Martin) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 72, and R. G. Collingwood ‘Notes on Historiography’ in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 238. 6. See R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, pp. 53–76. 7. See. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 162–180. See also Collingwood’s trenchant remarks on the baleful effects of the nineteenth and

178 Notes

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

twentieth century positivist attacks on metaphysics in R. G. Collingwood, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition), pp. 380–385. Ibid. pp. 64–70. See R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history. Collingwood discusses the impact of Hegel upon Speculum Mentis in his letter to De Ruggeiro, 24th August 1924, photocopy, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 26. See R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 15. See Collingwood’s extended commentary on how Hegel’s dialectical examination of categories is compatible with his own notion of metaphysics as the investigation of absolute presuppositions in R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collingwood An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised edition), p. 401. Collingwood reads Hegel’ s logical examination of categories as removing misconceptions about metaphysical presuppositions, rather than providing a revisionary account of those presuppositions. See the following R. G. Collingwood, ‘Truth and Contradiction’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/1; R. G. Collingwood, ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’ Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/3; R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Formal Logic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/4; ‘Draft of opening chapters of a “Prolegomena to Logic”’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/5; R. G. Collingwood, ‘Libellus de Generatione’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 28. R. G. Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy (Thoemmes Press: Bristol, 1994), p. 117. For a classic statement of his philosophical method, see R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method. See also R. G. Collingwood, ‘Report on M. B. Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel’ (Oxford: Clarendon Archives, PB/E D/002054). For a classic statement of the necessary inter-connections between individuals, and between unity and difference, see R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 130–137. R. G. Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy, p. 116. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 42. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Truth and Contradiction’. Note the following comment, ‘Just as Hegel’s criticism of the law of identity from which we started sprang from a recognition of the mutual dependence of identity and difference – of the fact that identity can only exist in difference and difference in identity – so our own treatment of the laws of contradiction and excluded middle seems to imply a similar connection between truth and error’. Ibid. p. 10. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, p. 1. Ibid. p. 2. Ibid. p. 1. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Draft of opening chapters of a “Prolegomena to Logic”’, p. 1. Ibid. p. 3.

Notes 179 26. Ibid. p. 3. 27. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobography, p. 99. 28. See the Preface to R. G. Collingwood, ‘Libellus de Generatione’, where he states the fundamental importance of appreciating that ‘…reality is becoming’. 29. Ibid. p. 38. 30. Ibid. p. 43. 31. Ibid. p. 54. 32. Ibid. p. 78. 33. Ibid. p. 95. 34. See M. Iiritano, ‘From the Principle of Non-Contradiction to Contradiction as a Principle: the beginnings of Collingwood’s revolution in logic’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, Vol. 9, p. 54. 35. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Hegel’s Logic’, Collingwood Manuscripts’, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/2, p. 1. 36. R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis or the Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 15–38. 37. Ibid. p. 55. 38. Ibid. p. 299. 39. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind; G. W. F. Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 3 (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel), Die Phaenomenlogie des Geistes. 40. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 192. 41. Ibid. p. 159. 42. Ibid. p. 191. 43. For Collingwood’s justification of the ontological argument, see Ibid. pp. 124–128. See also his correspondence with Ryle on this topic, ‘Copies of correspondence between Collingwood and Gilbert Ryle concerning the ontological argument’, May–June 1935, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 26/3. Hegel’s discussion of the ontological argument prefigures Collingwood’s, in that he, like Collingwood, justifies the argument in a revisionary way as affirming the reality of thought. Both Collingwood and Hegel develop their arguments in similar ways and in an expressly post-Kantian context. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel Logic – Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), translated by William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). G. W. F. Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 8 (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel). 44. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 13. G. W. F. Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 7, Grundlinienen der Phlosophie des Rechtes oder Naturrecht und Staatswissen im Grundrisse, p. 27. 45. See, for instance, Collingwood’s letter to Clarendon Press (KS), 3 June, 1939, where he describes An Essay on Philosophical Method as ‘…my most important work to date’, Clarendon Press Archives, PB/ED/001626. 46. R. G. Collingwood ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition), p. 356. 47. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, (A series of five red exercise books containing notes on metaphysics placed on microfilm), Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18/3, 1.

180 Notes 48. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Central Problems of Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 20, 105. 49. Ibid. p. 123. 50. Ibid. pp. 107–108. 51. See T. M. Knox, ‘Editor’s Preface’ in R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History; A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood; and the following articles W. Walsh, ‘Collingwood and Metaphysical Neutralism’, N. Rotentstreich, ‘Metaphysics and Historicism’ and S. Toulmin, ‘Conceptual Change and the Problem of Relativity’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 52. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 32; R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 72. 53. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 66. 54. Ibid. pp. 338–343. 55. See Collingwood’s letter to De Ruggeiro, 12 June 1937, in which he observes the greater plausibility accruing to his philosophy of history from its presentation as developing out of previous notions of history. R. G. Collingwood letter to De Ruggeiro, 12 June, 1937, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 27. 56. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Concerning Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19/7. 57. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 401. 58. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945) and R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history. 59. R. Martin, ‘Collingwood’s Doctrine of Absolute Presuppositions and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge’, in L. Pompa and W. H. Dray (eds), Substance and Form in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), p. 84. 60. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, p. 383. 61. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes for An Essay on Logic’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition), p. 424. 62. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 186–227. 63. See J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), pp. 161–205. 64. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition, edited with an Introduction by Rex Martin) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 401–402.

Chapter 3

Nature and Mind

1. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 2. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, and R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, Dep. Collingwood, 18. [A series of five red notebooks, containing notes on metaphysics and now on microfilm in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Extracts from these notebooks have been published in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in

Notes 181

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

philosophy of history ed. W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).]. Collingwood’s two alternative conclusions to the lectures on nature and mind have now been published in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other philosophical writings. In this chapter and elsewhere in this book, the longer alternative conclusion entitled ‘The Conclusion of 1934’ by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen in its published form is termed ‘The Cosmology Conclusion’. In doing so, I am following the usage of D. Boucher who offers a well-informed account of the three conclusions to the lectures on nature and mind in his, ‘The Principles of History and the Cosmology Conclusion to the Idea of Nature’, Collingwood Studies, 2, Perspectives, 1995. The two alternative conclusions have been published in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history. The shorter one in this publication is termed ‘The Conclusion of 1935’ and the longer Cosmological Conclusion is termed, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Fragment on action and mind’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/11, p. 1. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Fragment on mind and thought’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/12, p. 1. Ibid. p. 1. Collingwood’s notion of the mind as activity is related to the view of mind as pure act that is espoused by Gentile. It should be noted, however, that Gentile’s standpoint in turn derives from Hegel, whose emphasis upon historical development derives from his recognition of the significance of action and development for the mind. For a discussion of the relationship between Gentile and Collingwood, see J. Connelly, ‘Art Thou the Man: Croce, Gentile or de Ruggeiro?’ and H. Harris, Croce, and Gentile in Collingwood’s New Leviathan, both of which are located in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis or the Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 299. Ibid. p. 299. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, pp. 78–110. A concise statement of Collingwood’s notion that the human sciences are criteriological is contained in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) For a considered discussion of Collingwood’s notion of the criteriology of the human sciences, see D. Boucher, ‘Collingwood and Anthropology as a Historical Science’, History of Political Thought, Vol. xiii, Issue 2, Summer 2002. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 278. L. O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic (Bloomington and London, University of Indiana Press, 1969), p. 17. A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 156. See G. K. Browning, ‘The Nature of Nature in Collingwood and Hegel’, in Collingwood Studies, Vol. 4, 1998.

182 Notes 16. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (trans. A. V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), § 247 (Zusatz); G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), Vol. 8. 17. Ibid. § 246 (Zusatz). 18. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, § 1 & 2. 19. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition; edited and with an Introduction by R. Martin) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 20. Ibid. p. 4. 21. Ibid. p. 8. 22. Ibid. p. 25. 23. Ibid. p. 21. 24. A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, p. 156. 25. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, pp. 121–124. 26. Ibid. p. 122. For an extended discussion of the relations between the philosophies of Plato and Hegel, including their philosophies of nature, see G. K. Browning, Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophizing about Politics (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1991). 27. Ibid. p. 123. 28. Ibid. p. 131. 29. Ibid. p. 127. 30. Ibid. p. 128. 31. Ibid. p. 164. 32. Ibid. p. 170. 33. Ibid. p. 174. 34. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Conclusion of 1935’ in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, pp. 251–254. 35. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’ in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, p. 255. 36. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, pp. 130–131. 37. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’, p. 257. 38. Ibid. pp. 265–266. 39. Ibid. p. 266. 40. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic (trans. A. V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 82–112; G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 83–113. 41. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Conclusion of 1934’, p. 266. 42. Ibid. p. 267. 43. Ibid. p. 268. 44. R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, Dep. Collingwood 18/2, 10. This consists of two unpublished lectures Collingwood gave by way of introduction to a series of lectures on metaphysics by various speakers in January 1934. These lectures by Collingwood treat metaphysics in a similar way to that developed in the ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’. Most of these lectures are reproduced in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition; edited with an Introduction by R. Martin) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 45. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, 18/3, p. 1.

Notes 183 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Ibid. 18/3, p. 4. Ibid. 18/3, p. 23. Ibid. 18/3, p. 40. Ibid. 18/3, p. 67. Ibid. 18/3 p. 78. Ibid. 18/4, p. 3. Ibid. 18/4, p. 3. Ibid. 18/4, p. 30. Ibid. 18/4, p. 76. For Hegel’s discussion of infinity, see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 139; Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe Vol. 5, p. 152. The difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ infinites plays a key role in Hegel’s philosophy. The notion, for instance of a quantitative specification of infinity is a ‘bad’ endless indeterminacy which strains rather than satisfies thought. The rethinking of thoughts, however, or the maintenance of a political community in which citizens can recognize their own character in its laws exemplifies a ‘good’ infinity in which there is determinate unity in plurality. 55. Ibid. 18/6, p. 123. 56. N. Rotentstreich, ‘Metaphysics and Historicism’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 57. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 15.

Chapter 4 Practice

History: Past and Present; Principles and

1. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 77. 2. The lively aspect of the writing in the Autobiography is anything but detached, and there is little sense of its author sifting evidence before commenting upon events in his intellectual development. The style of the Autobiography is captured in its last paragraph, where Collingwood avers, ‘I am not writing an account of recent events in England: I am writing a description of the way in which those events impinged upon myself and broke up my pose as a detached thinker … I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. 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’ Ibid. p. 167. 3. Note the following, ‘Historicism was already beginning to show itself as the philosophy of the future. The teaching in which it was systematically expressed, that of Hegel, superseded all previous philosophies when once it was understood’. R. G. Collingwood, Ruskin’s Philosophy (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1922), p. 14. Collingwood also observes, ‘in quite a real sense he [Ruskin] was a Hegelian…’, Ibid. p. 15. 4. W. H. Dray, History as Re-enactment – R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 16–22. 5. See W. H. Dray, History as Re-enactment – R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History and G. D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (London and New New York: Routledge, 2002), Chapter 8.

184 Notes 6. See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (Edited and with an Introduction by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 7. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 77. 8. Ibid. pp.144–145. 9. R. G. Collingwood, Roman Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 17. 10. Ibid. p. 16. 11. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition; Edited with an Introduction by R. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 97–99. 12. See W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson and Co. Ltd, 1951). 13. Ibid. pp. 30–116. 14. See the chapter on Hegel, Ibid. pp. 134–150. 15. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, pp. 113–122. 16. See Collingwood’s The Principles of History in which he recognizes how both he and Hegel approached the subject of history in this dual way. The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, p. 60. 17. W. J. van der Dussen, History as a Science – The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), p. 3. 18. Ibid. p. 3. 19. See L. Goldstein, ‘Conceptual Openness: Collingwood and Hegel’ in D. Boucher (ed.) Collingwood Studies: Vol. 1, Life and Thought (University of Wales, Swansea: Collingwood Society, 1994) and R. Peters, ‘Collingwood on Hegel’s Dialectic’, Collingwood Studies: Vol. Two, Perspectives (University of Wales, Swansea: Collingwood Society, 1995). 20. For Knox’s explanation of how he uses the material of The Principles of History, see T. M. Knox. ‘Editor’s Preface’, in R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1946). 21. D. Boucher, ‘The Principles of History and the Cosmology Conclusion to the Idea Of Nature’, Collingwood Studies: Vol. Two, Perspectives (University of Wales, Swansea: Collingwood Society, 1995). 22. See T. M. Knox, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). 23. W. J. van der Dussen, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Revised edition), (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), xii–xv. 24. See W. H. Dray, ‘Broadening the Historian’s Subject Matter in The Principles of History’ in Collingwood Studies: Vol. 4, Variations: themes from the manuscripts (Unversity of Wales, Swansea, Collingwood Society, 1998). 25. W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiii–xxiv and liii–lvii. 26. Ibid. p. lvi. 27. Ibid. p. lvii. 28. G. D’Oro, ‘On Collingwood’s Conceptions of History’, in D. Boucher, B. Haddock and A. Vincent (eds), Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, Vol. 7, Identities and Differences (University of Wales, Cardiff: Collingwood Society, 2000), p. 58.

Notes 185 29. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Historiography’, in R. G. Collingwood, Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history. 30. R. G. Collingwood, Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, p. 40. 31. See, A. F. Wilson, ‘Collingwood’s Forgotten Historiographic Revolution’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, Vol. 8, 2001. 32. R. G. Collingwood, Principles of History, p. 60. 33. Ibid. p. 60. 34. Ibid. p. 98. 35. See for instance Sir I. Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’ and P. Gardiner. ‘Introduction’ in P. Gardiner (ed.), The Philosophy of History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). 36. A. F. Wilson, ‘Collingwood’s Forgotten Historiographic Revolution’, pp. 57–58. 37. See Goldstein’s perceptive remarks on the affinity between Collingwood and Hegel on the way they conceive of concepts, L. Goldstein, ‘Conceptual Openness: Collingwood and Hegel’. 38. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (translated with Introduction by Leo Rauch), (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), p. 6. Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 12, Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte, (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 10. 39. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 4; Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 8. 40. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 8; Vorlesungen die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 12. 41. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 82; Vorlesungen die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 89. 42. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History. p. 14; Vorlesungen die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 18. 43. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History. p. 22; Vorlesungen die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 26. 44. For a nuanced account of Hegel’s philosophy of history, which recognizes its derivation from Hegel’s conception of the freedom and rationality of human beings, see F. C. Beiser, ‘Hegel’s historicism’, in F. C. Beiser (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 45. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, pp. 69–75. 46. Ibid. p. 107. 47. Ibid. pp. 58–60. 48. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, p. 57; Vorlesungen die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 61. 49. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, p. 98. 50. W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1951), p. 17. 51. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (Edited with an Introduction by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 107. 52. Ibid. p. 107.

186 Notes 53. D. Boucher, ‘The Principles of History and the Cosmology Conclusion to the Idea of Nature’, pp. 169–170. 54. P. Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan Then and Now’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 1 (University of Wales, Swansea: Collingwood Society, 1994). 55. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992).

Chapter 5

Aesthetics: Art, Mind and Community

1. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 316. 2. A. Ridley, R. G. Collingwood – A Philosophy of Art (London: Phoenix Paperbacks, 1998), p. 17. 3. Ibid. pp. 17–19. Ridley’s misleading reading of Collingwood’s ‘philosophical baggage’ is indicated in the following quotation, where he speculates on the reason why Collingwood is liable to be (mis) interpreted as meaning that art is a purely mental activity. ‘Why, then, does he [Collingwood] speak as if works of art enjoyed some sort of purely mental existence’? The most general answer is because Collingwood comes to his philosophy of art already convinced that everything enjoys a purely mental existence. Collingwood was an idealist. Ibid. p. 21. Collingwood, of course denied emphatically throughout his career that he subscribed to any sort of subjective idealism, whereby the world is reduced to subjective mental representations. This explain the force with which Collingwood defends ‘objective idealism’ against ‘subjective idealism’ in his, ‘Central Problems of Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts’, Bodleian Library, Dep. 20, 104–106. See also Collingwood’s spirited rebuttal of subjective mentalistic pictures of the world in Speculum Mentis or the Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics – Lectures on Fine Art Vol. 1 (trans. T. M. Knox) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 7; Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), Vol. 13, p. 18. 5. R. G. Collingwood, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 95. 6. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics – Lectures on Fine Art Vol. 1, p. 10, Hegel:Werke. 7. Theorie Werkausgabe, Vol. 13, p. 21. 8. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 96. 9. Ibid. p. 96. 10. Ibid. p. 96. 11. Ibid. p. 97. 12. Ibid. p. 119. The affinity between Collingwood and Wittgenstein has been observed by a number of commentators. A judicious review of their thought which focuses upon aesthetics is P. Lewis, ‘Collingwood and Wittgenstein: Struggling with Darkness’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 5, 1998. Lewis recognizes differences between the aesthetics of Collingwood and Wittgenstein, notably over Collingwood’s view of aesthetics as being essentially expressive, but overall he highlights affinities, such as their recog-

Notes 187

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

nition of its social character, its distinct idioms and their joint resistance to rationalistic conceptions of language. For a clear statement of Collingwood’s conception of the sociality of individuals, see R. G. Collingwood, ‘Central Problems in Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library Dep. 20/1, p. 86, where he writes, ‘Our conception of our own individuality takes shape gradually pari passu with our conception of these other persons and their relations with ourselves’. In the same manuscript, (p. 118) he praises Hegel for the latter’s recognition of the reciprocity of unity and plurality. Collingwood’s developmental notion of truth is evident throughout his career. See, for instance, his youthful concern to establish a developmental conception of logic, R. G. Collingwood, ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/4; and his final book, R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) in which he presents a developmental account of mind, society and civilization. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics – Lectures on Fine Art – Vol. 1, p. 43., Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe, Vol. 13, p. 56. Ibid. p. 55; Werke Vol. 13, p. 66. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Truth and Contradiction’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/1, in which Collingwood highlights the need for logic to accommodate the recognition of the importance of error for the achievement of truth. Collingwood’s lifelong commitment to the notion of a dialectical perspective in which truth is not seen as the vanquishing of contrasting false views but emerges out of inquiry into differing standpoints should also be noted. See for instance, R. G. Collingwood ‘Man Goes Mad’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24, in which Collingwood defines and praises liberalism for its practical commitment to dialectic, whereby problems are to be resolved through the free expression of opposing views. A. Ridley, R. G. Collingwood – A Philosophy of Art, pp. 12–13. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 23. Ibid. p. 53. Ibid. pp. 65–69. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Folklore’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 21/4 (fairy tales). Ibid. p. 14. D. Boucher, ‘Collingwood and Anthropology as a Historical Science’, History of Political Thought Vol. xiii, issue 2, Summer 2002, pp. 322–323. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Fascism and Nazism’ in R. G. Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy edited with an Introduction by D. Boucher (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989). R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, pp. 68–69. Ibid. p. 95. Ibid. p. 103. D. Boucher, ‘R. G. Collingwood: The Enemy Within and the Crisis of Civilisation’, in D. Boucher and A. Vincent British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 205. R. G. Collingwood, Outlines of A Philosophy of Art, pp. 26–45.

188 Notes 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 158. Ibid. p. 201. Ibid. pp. 203–206. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (trans. Sir James Baillie) (London and New York: George, Allen and Unwin and Humanities Press, 1967) pp. 149–160; Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), Vol. 3, pp. 75–86. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 201. Ibid. p. 219. For Collingwood’s recognition of the affinity between his understanding of the suppression of emotion and psycho-analysis, see Ibid. p. 220. Hegel’s interpretation of the alienated, unhappy religious consciousness, see G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 251–267; Hegel: Werke 3, pp. 180–194. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 248. Ibid. p. 268. G. Graham, ‘Croce, Collingwood and Expression’, in B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 130. R. G. Collingwood, Fascism and Nazism in R. G. Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy (edited with an Introduction by D. Boucher) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Ibid. p. 189. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Folklore’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 21/4 (Fairy Tales), p. 16. Graham urges that Collingwood is wrong to attach aesthetic weight to audience reaction, just as it is wrong to judge the merits of a work of art according to the sincerity of its author. See, Graham, ‘Croce, Collingwood and Expression’, p. 127. Collingwood’s sense of the relationship between the artist and society, however, is that the artist’s imaginative acuity serves to identify and make sense of the feelings of a civilization. Artists are not to be judged by the preformulated feelings of their audiences.

Chapter 6

The Dialectic of Political Theory and Practice

1. See T. M. Knox, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946); A. Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1969). 2. See D. Boucher, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xxxvii–xxxviii. 3. Boucher’s discussion of this issue is careful and balanced; see ibid. pp. xxxvii–xl. 4. See R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. lvii–lxi. 5. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 147. 6. For a heartfelt and illuminating account of how theory and practice are to be seen as inter-linked, see R. G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy – 1933’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 8, 127–130.

Notes 189

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

Collingwood expresses his hope that his students’ future actions will be informed by the spirit of the lectures, notably in recognizing the developmental character of the moral life, and in appreciating how they are to prize rationality and freedom in their own moral and political practice. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Historiography’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (ed. W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Ibid. p. 246. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 270–277. Collingwood is acutely sensitive to the need for liberalism to address social issues. In ‘Man Goes Mad’ he points to the failure of contemporary liberalism, ‘… to affect the inner life of communities’. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24, 127. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’ in R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History (ed. W. J. van der Dussen) (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Boucher observes the often implicit criticism of Hobbes that informs The New Leviathan. See, for instance, D. Boucher The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 100. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 74–82. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. 3 (London: Kegan, Trench and Tryber, 1892), pp. 316-317. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 7 (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 226–227. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 181–183; for Plato’s account of dialectic, see Plato, The Republic of Plato trans. F. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 225–226. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 1–129; Plato, The Republic of Plato, pp. 221–227. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy – 1921’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 5. For an account of Hegel’s relationship to Plato, see G. K. Browning, Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (London and New York: Macmillan, 1999), Chapters 2 and 3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1971); G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 3 (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). R. G. Collingwood, R. G. ‘Report on M. B. Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel’, 1933, Oxford: Clarendon Press Archives, PB/ED/002054, p. 7. Ibid. p. 4. Ibid. p. 9. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 257–268. See P. Nicholson, P. ‘Why Hobbes not Hegel?’ Collingwood Studies 1, 1994 and A. Vincent, ‘Review Article: Social Contract in Retrospect’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2, 1995.

190 Notes 27. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Hegel’s Logic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/2; R. G. Collingwood, ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Dep. 16/3. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Libellus de Generatione’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Dep. 28. 28. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, in R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition: edited with an Introduction by R. Martin) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 29. See J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), pp. 97–160. 30. See R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 185–338. 31. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. lix–lxi. 32. Ibid. pp. 119–124. 33. Hegel in The Philosophy of Right takes his starting point to be the concept of mind and freedom, and he refers readers to his Philosophy of Mind for his philosophical conception of mind as free. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 7 (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 9 (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). 34. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 7, § 105–141. 35. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Observations on Language’. Oxford, Bodleian Library Collingwood Papers, no date. 36. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 148. 37. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 171. 38. See T. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology – The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994). 39. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe, 71. 40. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy – 1921’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 4, p. 102. 41. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 257–268. 42. Ibid. p. 260. 43. For an elaborated discussion of the laws of politics, see R. G. Collingwood, The Three Laws of Politics (L. T. Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture, No. 11) (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). 44. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 184–192. 45. Ibid. p. 122. 46. Ibid. p. 23. 47. Ibid. pp. 257–268. 48. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Folklore’, mid 1930s?, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 21/2, 10. 49. ‘One does not refute philosophies, one continues them; and the hedonism of Hobbes fails of being satisfactory because he did not continue it far enough’. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy – 1921’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 4, p. 35.

Notes 191 50. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 210–211. 51. Collingwood’s great respect for Plato and Heel is evident throughout his writings. Note how he develops his account of philosophical method via analysis of Plato and Hegel, see R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995). See also R. G. Collingwood, ‘A Footnote to Future History’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, 12/1, where civilization and its understanding are discussed in terms of the pre-eminence of Plato and Hegel. 52. Ibid. pp. 293–298. 53. For an account of his experiences at Rugby see R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, pp. 7–11. 54. Collingwood’s critique of the rationalistic dessicated character of contemporary civilization is evident in his depiction of its prevalent attitude as ‘… hard-headed, or thick-skinned, or rationalistic …’, R. G. Collingwood, ‘Folklore – IV Magic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, 21/7, 14. See also the sympathetic treatment of T. S. Eliot’s depiction of the decay of civilization in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 333–336. For an informed discussion of aspects of Collingwood’s critique of modern civilization, see D. Boucher, ‘R. G. Collingwood: The Enemy Within and the Crisis of Civilisation’ in D. Boucher and A. Vincent, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 55. These dangers are the subject of R. G. Collingwood, ‘Man Goes Mad’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24. 56. R. G. Collingwood, Ruskin’s Philosophy. An Address delivered at the Ruskin Centenary Conference (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1922). 57. See, for instance, P. Nicholson, ‘Why Hobbes not Hegel?’ Collingwood Studies 1, 1994. 58. See J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. Connelly emphasizes the continuity of The New Leviathan with Collingwood’s preceding work. 59. For more discussion in the resemblances between Collingwood’s and Hegel’s conceptions of society and Politics, see G. K. Browning, ‘New Leviathans for Old’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2, 1995. 60. Evidence of this passion informs many of the later writings of Collingwood, see, for instance, R. G. Collingwood, ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Philosophy 15, 1940. 61. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 278. 62. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 7; 3. 63. For a further elaborated account of civilization in which Collingwood emphasizes its contingent, contestable character, see R. G. Collingwood, ‘What Civilisation Means’ in R. G. Collingwood The New Leviathan. 64. J. McCarney, Hegel on History (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 85–100. 65. Ibid. pp. 85–100. 66. See T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1972) and J-F. Lyotard, ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz” in A. Benjamin (ed) The Lyotard Reader’. (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989).

192 Notes 67. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 375–391. See also, R. G. Collingwood, ‘Fascism and Nazism’. 68. See J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 69. See A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985) and R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 70. See ‘Introduction’ to J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 71. MacIntrye and Rorty stress the contingency of the large-scale narratives that they see as performing invaluable roles in history. See A. MacIntrye, After Virtue, and R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. 72. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), pp. 452–457. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe 12 (eds. E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 457–462. 73. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, pp. 300–324. See also R. G. Collingwood, ‘Fascism and Nazism’.

Chapter 7 Conclusion: Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice 1. See the contemporary reviews of Speculum Mentis that are held in the Clarendon Press Archives, Oxford, PB/Ed/001541. (The anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement in October, 1924 highlights Collingwood’s agreement with Hegel). 2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (trans. Sir James Baillie) (London and New York: George, Allen and Unwin and Humanities Press, p. 81. Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michels), Vol. 3 Die Phaenomenologie des Geistes, p. 39. 3. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 77. 4. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes on Historiography’ in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 238. 5. See R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 66, where Collingwood refers to the purely historical character of metaphysics and R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition: edited with an Introduction by R. Martin) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 58. Collingwood refers to metaphysics as an historical science. 6. W. H. Dray, History as Re-Enactment – R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 28. 7. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 245. G. D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 140. 8. J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003), p. 153.

Notes 193 9. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 185–227. 10. L. Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, p. 237. 11. See R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. 176–198. See also ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18, and ‘Libellus de Geratione’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleain Library, Dep. 28. 12. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). 13. See R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 162–171, where he maintains that the contemporary attack on metaphysics threatens the foundations of science and thinking. 14. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleain Library, Dep. 18. For an explanation of how rational patterns in nature are implicit and await human perception and cognition for their express appreciation. For Collingwood’s account of civilization, which includes reference to mankind’s interaction with nature, see R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 280–292. 15. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18, p. 4. 16. R. G. Collingwood, ‘Jane Austen’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 17/3; R. G. Collingwood, ‘A Footnote to Future History’ Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 12/1; R. G. Collingwood, Ruskin’s Philosophy: an address delivered at the Ruskin Centenary (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1919), pp. 15–22. In these writings, where Hegel is not the principal subject, reference is made to the significance of Hegel’s combination of philosophy and history. 17. See R. G. Collingwood, ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/3, and R. G. Collingwood, ‘Libellus de Generatione’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 28. 18. Hegel’s lecture series on the philosophy of right tend to be less quietistic, prompting some commentators to suggest that Hegel’s more conservative standpoint in The Philosophy of Right does not represent his fundamental beliefs. In fact, the lecture series do not alter fundamentally the perspective of The Philosophy of Right. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ueber Rechtsphilosopie (ed. K. H. Ilting) (Stuttgart: Froman Verlag, 1974). Ilting in the Introduction urges that the lectures cast a new light upon Hegel, indicating the strategic considerations behind his overt conservatism. For a more extended discussion of the matter, see G. K. Browning, Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (London and New York: Macmillan, 1999), Introduction. 19. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, pp. 1–2; K. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach in D. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 20. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 96. 21. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 11. 22. R. G. Collingwod, An Essay on Metaphysics, pp. 162–171. 23. G. Graham, The Shape of the Past – A Philosophical Approach to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1–45.

194 Notes 24. For a contemporary discussion of nation states in an era of globalization see, D. Held, A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, Global Transformations (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 32–85. 25. M. Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). 26. See J. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge Massachussets and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 329–373, and A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 3. 27. For a more detailed consideration of the background of Lyotard’s thought, see G. K. Browning, Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). See J-F. Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form and Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 28. For a condensed account of Collingwood’s intellectual context, see R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography. 29. J-F. Lyotard, Phenomenology (trans. B. Bleakley) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991). 30. See J-F. Lyotard, Political Writings (trans. B. Readings and K. Geiman) (London: UCL Press, 1993). 31. See his writings on the events of May 1968 in J-F., Lyotard, Political Writings, (London: UCL Press, 1993), pp. 33–85. 32. J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowedge (trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 33. J-F. Lyotard, The Differend (trans. G. Van Den Abbeele) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 11. 34. Ibid. §. 14. 35. J-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 36. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 171. Collingwood discusses the inappropriateness of psychology for examining human thought and action. 37. See Ibid. pp. 325–336; and see also J-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 38. See R. G. Collingwood, the Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history, ch. 1. 39. See P. Zagorin, ‘Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations’ in B. Fay, P. Pomper and R. T. Vann (eds) History and Theory – Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), § 203–204. 40. J. Rawls, ‘Burton Dreben: A Reminiscence’ in J. Floyd and S. Shieh (eds), Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 41. Rawls’s project of rethinking political theory in the light of its past and the present configuration of social and political practices is evidenced in all of his work, notably in the notion of reflective equilibrium and the revival of the metaphor of the social contract in J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), and in his reflections

Notes 195

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

upon the historical emergence of liberalism in J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. xxi–xxvii. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 28. Ibid. p. 49. A. Vincent, ‘Review article: Social Contract in Retrospect’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 285–288. J. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, pp. 329–373. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 329–365. Ibid. pp. xii–xxxiv. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 138–148. Collingwood’s distinction between a society and community implies that a society allows the individuals that compose it to follow their own conceptions of the god. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 154–158. Here, Rawls sets out the distinctness of political liberalism and its justification. R. Bellamy and D. Castiglione, ‘Constitutionalism and Democracy – Political Theory and The American Constitution’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, 1997, p. 604. J. Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in J. Rawls, Collected Papers (ed. S. Freeman) (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999). For a thoughtful discussion of Rawls’s political philosophy and the difficulties it faces in dealing with contestable interpretations of liberty, see J. Horton, ‘Rawls, Public Reason and the Limits of Political Philosophy’, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 2, Number 1, March, 2003. A. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 255. Ibid. p. 269. Mulhall and Swift classify MacIntyre as a communitarian in their excellent book, S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992). A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 226–246. Ibid. p. 270. Ibid. p. 3. A. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999), pp. 21–28. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 119–129. A. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 43–53. Ibid. p. 57. See A. MacIntyre, ‘A Partial Response to My Critics’, in J. Horton and S. Mendus, (eds) After MacIntyre – Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge And Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), p. 302. A. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 130–146. Ibid. p. 143. R. G. Collingwood, The First Mate’s Log (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 150. Collingwood’s critique of utility approaches Marx’s critique of a commodity economy in that he likens the invocation of utility to

196 Notes

68. 69.

70. 71.

judge actions to an economy in which commodities only possess exchange value. R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, pp. 308–317. On the complex state of sovereignty in the contemporary world see, for instance J. Rosenau, ‘Governance in a Globalizing World’, in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Polity, 2000). See G. K. Browning, Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (London and New York, Macmillan, 1999). See, for instance, T. M. Knox, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Select Bibliography (Books, articles and papers drawn upon in the writing of this book)

Works by R. G. Collingwood (Published) (1916) (1921)

Religion and Philosophy (London: Macmillan Press). ‘Preface’, to G. de Riggeiro Modern Philosophy (with A. H. Hannay) (London: George, Allen and Unwin). (1921) ‘Hadrian’s Wall: A History of the Problem’, Journal of Roman Studies, 11, 1921. (1921) Ruskin’s Philosophy: an address delivered at the Ruskin Centenary (Kendal: Titus Wilson). (1922) ‘Can the New Idealism dispense with Mysticism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement 3, 1923. Reprinted in L. Rubinoff (ed.) Faith and Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by R. G. Collingwood (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968). (1923) Roman Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (1924) Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (1925) Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Reprinted (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994). (1925) ‘Economics as a Philosophical Science’, International Journal of Ethics, 35, 1925. (Reprinted in D. Boucher (ed.) Essays in Political Philosophy. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). (1927) ‘The Roman Frontier’, Antiquity, 1, 1927. (1928–9) ‘Political Action’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 29, 1928–9. Reprinted in D. Boucher (ed.), Essays in Political Philosophy. R. G. Collingwood. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). (1930) The Archaeology of Roman Britain (London: Methuen, 1930) (1933) An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (1935) ‘The Present Need of a Philosophy’, Philosophy, 9, 1935. Reprinted in D. Boucher (ed.), Essays in Political Philosophy. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). (1936) Roman Britain and the English Settlements (with J. N. L. Myres) (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (1938) The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (1938) ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’ published in An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). (1939) An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Reprinted with a new introduction by Stephen Toulmin (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970). (1939) ‘Notes for an Essay on Logic’, published in An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition) (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

197

198 Bibliography (1940)

(1940)

(1940)

(1941) (1942)

(1945) (1946) (1964) (1965) (1968)

(1989) (1999)

(1999) (1999)

An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Revised Edition with an Introduction and additional material edited by R. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Philosophy, 15, 1940. Reprinted in D. Boucher (ed.), Essays in Political Philosophy: R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The Three Laws of Politics. L. T. Hobhouse memorial trust Lecture, No. 11, (London: Oxford University Press). Reprinted in D. Boucher (ed.), Essays in Political Philosophy. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The First Mate’s Log (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Reprinted with an introduction by Peter Johnson (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994). The New Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Revised Edition, with additional material, edited by D. Boucher, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press). The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Revised edition, edited by W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Essays in the Philosophy of Art (edited by A. Donagan) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Essays in the Philosophy of History (edited by W. Debbins) (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press). Faith and Reason, Essays in the Philosophy of Religion: Essays in the Philosophy of religion by R. G. Collingwood (edited by L. Rubinoff) (Chicago: Quadrangle). Essays in Political Philosophy. R. G. Collingwood (edited by D. Boucher) (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (ed. W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen) (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ‘The Conclusion of 1934’, published in the Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history. ‘The Conclusion of 1935’, published in The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history.

Unpublished Manuscripts of R. G. Collingwood (1917) (1919) (1919) (1919)

(1920)

‘Truth and Contradiction. Chapter 11’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘A Footnote to Future History’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 12. ‘Lectures on the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 2. ‘Money and Morals’, Lecture to the Student Movement London Branch on May 27, 1919, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 6/8. ‘Notes on Hegel’s Logic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16.

Bibliography 199 (1920) (1920) (1920) (1920) (1920–21) (1921) (1921) (n.d. c. 1921) (c.1922–23) (1925) (1926) (1928) (1929) (1929) (1932) (1932) (1933) (1933) (1933) (1933–4) (1934) (1934) (1934) (1935) (1935)

‘Notes on Croce’s Philosophy. July 1920’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19/1. ‘Libellus de Generatione’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 28. ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘Notes on Formal Logic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16/4. ‘Draft of opening chapters of a “Prolegomena to Logic”’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’. (For Michaelmas Term, 1921), Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 4. ‘Jane Austen-Johnson Society Nov. 27. 1921’, Collngwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 17/2. ‘Jane Austen’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 17. ‘Fragment on Neo-Realism’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘Some Perplexities about Time’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18. ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 14/1. ‘Stray Notes on Ethical Questions’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 6/1. ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 10. ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History’, Trinity Term 1929, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 12/6. ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 7. ‘The Philosophy of History’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 14. ‘Report on M. B. Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel’, Oxford, Clarendon Press Archives’, PB/ED/002054. ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleain Library, Dep. 8. ‘Outline of a Theory of Primitive Mind’, Dep. 16/8. ‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18. ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18. ‘Rough draft on “Pure Existence”, “Space and Time” and “Matter”’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19/2. ‘Man Goes Mad’, Collingwood Papers, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24/4. ‘Method and Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19/3. ‘Experiment in New Realism’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19/4.

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‘Reality as History’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 12/9. ‘Method and Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 18. ‘Notes on Causation’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleain Library, Dep. 19. ‘Folklore’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 21. ‘Goodness, Right and Utility: Lectures delivered in H.T. 1940’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleain Library, Dep. 9. ‘Incomplete Manuscript Concerning Metaphysics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19. ‘Fragments of early drafts of The New Leviathan’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24/12. ‘Causation in Spinoza’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 19. ‘Observations on Language’, Collingwood Manuscripts’, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘Fragment on mind and thought’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘Fragment on action and the mind’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 16. ‘Rough notes on subjective and objective idealism’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 20. ‘The breakdown of liberalism’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24. ‘The Good and the Useful’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 6/6. ‘Utility, Right and Duty’, Colingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 6/3. ‘Rough notes on Politics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24/8. ‘Notes towards a Theory of Politics as a Philosophical Science’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24/6. ‘Outlines of a Concept of the State’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 24/9. ‘Notes on L. A. Reid’s A Study in Aesthetics’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 25/6. ‘Comment of the Preface to Kant’s Vernunft’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 22/4. ‘Notes on Descartes’ Principia’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 22/5.

Translations Croce, B., An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). Croce, B., The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (London: Howard Latimer, 1913).

Bibliography 201 de Ruggeiro, G., The History of European Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). de Ruggeiro, G., Modern Philosophy (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1921) (with A. H. Ramsay).

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(1935)

‘Photocopies of letters from Collingwood to Guido de Ruggiero’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 27. ‘Letters to Clarendon Press, Oxford’, Clarendon Press Archives. ‘Photocopies of letters from Collingwood to Samuel Alexander’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 26. ‘Letter to H. W. B. Joseph, July 15, 1932’, Bodleian Library. MS ng. Lett. C.453. ‘Photocopies of Correspondence between Collingwood and H. A. Prichard’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 26. ‘The Collingwood-Ryle Correspondence’, Collingwood Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Dep. 26/3.

Works by other authors Adorno, T., Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1972). Ayer, A. J., A History of Modern Philosophy (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1984). Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollanz, 1936). Beiser, F. C., ‘Hegel: A Non-Metaphysician? A Polemic’, in the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, No. 32 (Autumn/Winter 1995). Beiser, F. C., ‘Hegel’s historicism’, in F. C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Bellamy, R. and Castiglione, D., ‘Constitutionalism and Democracy – Political Theory and the American Constitution’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, 1997. Berlin, I., ‘Historical Inevitability’ in P. Gardner (ed.), The Philosophy of History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Berlin, I., ‘History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History’, in History And Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1960. Boucher, D., ‘Collingwood and Anthropology as a Historical Science’, History of Political Thought Vol. xiii, issue 2, Summer 2002. Boucher, D., ‘Editor’s Introduction’, R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Boucher, D., ‘R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Enemy Within and the Crisis of Civilisation’, in D. Boucher and A. Vincent British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Boucher, D., ‘The Principles of History and the Cosmological Conclusion to The Idea of History’, in Collingwood Studies 2, 1995. Boucher, D., ‘The Significance of Collingwood’s Principles of History’, in Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997).

202 Bibliography Boucher, D., The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Boucher D., Connelly, J., and Madood, T. (eds) Philosophy, History and Civilization: interdisciplinary perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). Boucher, D. and Vincent, A., British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Bradley, F. H., Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). Bradley, F. H., Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). Browning. G. K., Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy (London and New York: Macmillan, 1999). Browning, G. K., Lyotard and the End of Grand Narratives (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000). Browning, G. K., ‘The Nature of Nature in Collingwood and Hegel’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 4, 1998. Browning. G. K., ‘New Leviathans for Old’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2, 1995. Browning, G. K., Plato and Hegel: Two Modes of Philosophizing about Politics (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1991). Connelly, J., ‘Art Thou the Man: Croce, Gentile or de Ruggeiro?’, in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). Connelly, J., Metaphysics, Method and Politics – The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). Daniels, N. (ed.), Reading Rawls (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1989). Donagan, A. The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Donagan, A., ‘Collingwood and Philosophical method’, in M. Krauz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1987). D’Oro, G., Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). D’Oro, G., ‘How Kantian is Collingwood’s Metaphysics of Experience?’, Collingwood Studies 6, 1999. D’Oro, G., ‘On Collingwood’s Conceptions of History’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 7 (2000). Dray, W. H., ‘Broadening the Historian’s Subject-Matter in The Principles of History’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. iv, 1998. Dray, W. H., ‘R. G. Collingwood and the Understanding of Actions in History’, in William. H. Dray, Perspectives on History (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1980). Dray, W. H., Laws and Explanations in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). Dray, W. H. (ed.), Philosophical Analysis and History (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Dray, W. H., Philosophy of History (London: Prentice Hall Inc., 1964). Dray, W. H., History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

Bibliography 203 Dray, W. H. and van der Dussen, W. J., ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and other writings in philosophy of history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Fay, B., Pomper, P., and Vann R. Y., (eds) History and Theory – Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Foster, M. B., The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935). Gadamer, H-G., Truth and Method (Revised Second Edition) (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989). Gardiner, P., The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). Gardiner, P. (ed.), The Philosophy of History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Gaut, B. and Lopes, D. M., The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Gentile, G., Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960). Goldstein, L. J., ‘Conceptual Openness: Hegel and Collingwood’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 1, 1994. Graham, G., ‘Croce, Collingwood and Expression’, in B. Gaut and D. M. Lopes, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Graham, G., The Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Harris, H. S., ‘Croce and Gentile’ in Collingwood’s New Leviathan in D. Boucher, J. Connelly, and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics – Lectures on Fine Art Vol. 1 (trans. T. M. Knox) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Logic (trans. A. V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Logic – Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), (trans. by William Wallace) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hegel, G. W. F., Introduction to the Philosophy of History (translated with Introduction by Leo Rauch), (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988). Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Mind (trans. Sir James Baillie) (London and New York: George, Allen and Unwin and Humanities Press, 1. Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History (trans. J. Sibree) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (trans. W. Wallace) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (trans. A. V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (trans. T. M. Knox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel: Werke Theorie Werkausgabe (eds E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970).

204 Bibliography Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen ueber Rechtsphilosopie (ed. K. H. Ilting) (Stuttgart: Froman Verlag, 1974). Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., and Perraton, J., Global Transformations (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1999). Held, D. and McGrew, A. (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Polity, 2000). Hempel, C., ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, Journal of Philosophy, 39, 1942. Hogan, J. P., Collingwood and Theological Hermeneutics (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989). Horton, J., ‘Rawls, Public Reason and the Limits of Political Philosophy’, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 2, No. 1, March, 2003. Horton, J. and Mendus, S. (eds), After MacIntyre – Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1994). Iiritano, M., ‘From the Principle of Non-Contradiction to Contradiction as a Principle: the beginnings of Collingwood’s revolution in logic’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, Vol. 9. Johnson, P., The Correspondence of R. G. Collingwood. An Illustrated Guide (The Collingwood Society, 1998). Johnson, P., R. G. Collingwood: An Introduction (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998). Knox, T. M., ‘Editor’s Preface’ to The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). Krausz, M. (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Lewis, P., ‘Collingwood and Wittgenstein: Struggling with Darkness’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 5, 1998. Lyotard, J.-F., The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (trans. G. Van Den Abbeele) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Lyotard, J-F., ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz”‘ in A. Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). Lyotard, J-F., The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Lyotard, J-F., Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (trans. E. Rottenberg) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). Lyotard, J-F., The Lyotard Reader (ed. A. Benjamin) (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). Lyotard, J-F., Peregrinations: Law, Form and Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Lyotard, J-F., Phenomenology (trans. B. Bleakley) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991). Lyotard, J-F., Political Writings (trans. B. readings and K. Geiman) (London: UCL Press, 1993). Lyotard, J-F., The Postmodern Conditon: A Report on Knowledge (trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Lyotard, J-F., Postmodern Fables trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). MacIntyre, A., ‘A Partial Response to My Critics’, in J. Horton and S. Mendus, (eds), After MacIntyre – Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1994).

Bibliography 205 MacIntrye, A., After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981). MacIntyre, A., Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999). MacIntyre, A., Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990). MacIntyre, A., Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988). Madood, T., ‘The Later Collingwood’s Alleged Historicism and Relativism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, 1989. Martin, R., ‘Collingwood and von Wright on Verstehen, Causation and the Explanation of Human Action’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 1, 1994. Martin, R., ‘Collingwood’s Claim that Metaphysics is a Historical Discipline’ in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization Interdisciplinary perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). Martin, R., ‘Collingwood’s Doctrine of Absolute Presuppositions and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge’, in L. Pompa and W. H. Dray (eds), Substance and Form in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). Martin, R., Historical Explanation: Re-enactment and Practical Inference (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). Marx, K., Theses on Feuerbach in D. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Milne, A. J., ‘Civilization and the Open Society’ in D. Boucher, J. Connelly, and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). Mink, L. O., ‘The Autonomy of Historical Understanding’, in W. H. Dray (ed.), Philosophical Analysis and History (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1966). Mink, L. O., Mind, History and Dialectic (Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1969). Mulhall, S., and Swift, A., Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Nicholson, P., ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan: Then and Now’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 1, 1994. Oakeshott, M., Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Oakeshott, M., On History and Other Essays (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983). Oakeshott, M., Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962). Oldfield, A., ‘Metaphysics and History in Collingwood’s Thought’, in D. Boucher, J. Connelly and T. Madood (eds), Philosophy, History and Civilization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). Peters, R., ‘Collingwood on Hegel’s Dialectic’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2, 1995. Pompa, L. and Dray, W. H. (eds), Substance and Form in History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Rawls, J., ‘Burton Dreben: A Reminiscence’ in J. Floyd and S. Shieh (eds), Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Rawls, J., Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge Massachussets and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

206 Bibliography Rawls, J., Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Rawls, J., ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in J. Rawls, Collected Papers (ed. S. Freeman) (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999). Ridley, A., R. G. Collingwood – A Philosophy of Art (London: Phoenix, 1998). Rorty, R., Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Rosenau, J., ‘Governance in a Globalizing World’, in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Polity, 2000). Rotenstreich, N., ‘Metaphysics and Historicism’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays On the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Rubinoff, L., ‘Collingwood and the Radical Conversion Hypothesis’, Dialogue 5/1, 1966. Rubinoff, L., Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). Ryle, G., ‘Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument’, Mind 44, 1935. Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin Books, 1990). Smith, T., ‘R. G. Collingwood: “This Ring of Thought”: Notes on Early Influences’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 1, 1994. Sweet, W., Idealism and Rights: the social ontology of human rights in the political thought of Bernard Bosanquet (Maryland: University Press of America, 1997). Taylor, D. S., R. G. Collingwood: A Bibliography (Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1988). Toulmin, S., ‘Conceptual Change and the Problem of Relativity’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). van der Dussen, W. J., History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981). van der Dussen, W. J., ‘Collingwood’s Lost Manuscript of the Principles of History’, History and Theory 36, 1997. van der Dussen, W. J., ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in R. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Revised edition), (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Vincent, A., ‘Review Article: Social Contract in Retrospect’, Collingwood Studies, Vol. 2, 1995. Walsh, W. H., An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson University Press, 1967). Walsh, W. H., Metaphysics (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1963). Walsh, W. H., ‘Collingwood’s Metaphysical Neutralism’, in M. Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Walzer, M., Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). Wittgenstein. L., On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963). Zagorin, P., ‘Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations’ in B. Fay, P. Pomper and R. T. Vann (eds), History and Theory – Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Index a priori, 6, 7, 47, 148 absolute, 67, 68, 100, 102, 122, 145, 150, 152 absolute mind, 54 absolutism, 16, 17, 18, 34, 37, 39, 140, 143, 151, 155, 156, 158, 162, 165–167, 172 Adorno, T., 141 aesthetic(s), 82, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103–106, 117, 155, 158, 160, 169, 172 Alexander, S., 20, 25, 26, 52, 53, 59, 61, 62, 63, 71 Algerian, 157 alienation, 109 Ancient Greece, 58 Ancient Greek(s), 70, 105, 136 anger, 112 animal(s), 55, 167–168 anthropology, 5, 107, 108 archaeology, 156 Aristotle, 46, 60, 62, 64, 105 Aristotelian, 46, 166 art, 9, 13, 17, 18, 22, 23, 26, 30, 31, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 54, 76, 77, 88, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 166, 171, 172 art as amusement, 109, 110, 118 art as craft, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110 art as entertainment, 107 art as expression, 105, 111, 117 art as magic, 107, 108, 109, 110 art as representation, 104, 105, 107 art history, 59, 77, 88 Auschwitz, 141 barbarism, 24, 28, 95, 121, 124–125, 130, 140–142

Battle of Hastings, 35 Being, 19, 28, 42, 61, 65–67, 69, 71 Becoming, 35, 36, 38, 42, 65, 69 Bellamy, R., 163 Berkeley, G., 114 Berlin, I., 87 biography, 73 biology, 52, 59 Bodleian Library, vi, 10, 34, 36 body politic, 135–136 Boucher, D., vii, 6, 53, 82, 94, 108, 110 Britain, 76, 120 British History, 77 Castiglione, D., 163 category, 6, 11, 33, 35, 45, 65, 69, 71, 79, 141–142, 144 Celtic, 76 choice, 115, 116, 164 Christian(ity), 33, 50, 59, 115, 118 citizen(ship), 125–127, 131, 135–136, 163–164, 166, 171 civil society, 142 civility, 56, 130, 137–139, 153–154, 169 civilization, 2, 3, 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 23–24, 28, 30, 34, 45–46, 49, 55–56, 58–59, 70, 72–73, 75, 84, 95–96, 98, 101, 103, 105–106, 107–108, 110–111, 117–125, 127, 129, 130–131, 133–134, 136, 138, 140–143, 145–146, 149, 150–155, 157, 159, 162, 166, 171–172 European civilization, 107, 121, 140, 143 European-American civilization, 118–119 historical civilization, 122, liberal civilization, 49, 75, 95, 108, 118, 121, 123, 127, 140, 142, 146, 149, 152–153, 155, 159, 162, 164, 166, 169, 170–171, 173

207

208 Index civilization – continued post-liberal civilization, 169 Western Civilization, 45 cognitivism, 117 Collingwood, R. G., aspects of his thought: absolute presuppositions, 29, 44–46, 75, 122, 148–149, 152 consupponibility, 29, 31, 46, 49, 148–149 criteriological, 14, 47, 55, 78, 113, 132, 147, 154 re-enactment, 14 scale of forms, 24, 28, 30, 40, 42, 67, 112, 127, 130, 132, 139, 168 Collingwood, R. G., works of: ‘A Footnote to Future History’, 151 An Autobiography, 8, 18, 22, 29, 34, 36, 44, 73, 74, 76, 147, 164 An Essay on Metaphysics, 4, 5, 6, 12, 19, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 58, 70, 71, 72, 75, 78, 95, 121, 122, 130, 131, 147, 148, 149 An Essay on Philosophical Method, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 19, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43, 48, 49, 67, 98, 112, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 149 ‘Central Problems of Metaphysics’, 42 ‘Concerning Metaphysics’, 45 ‘Fascism and Nazism’, 108, 118 ‘Folklore’, 108, 118, 137 ‘Fragment on action and mind’, 53, 54 ‘Fragment on mind and thought’, 53, 54 ‘Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’, 19, 45, 46, 131 ‘Jane Austen’, 151 ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy (1921), 128, 134, 137 ‘Libellus de Generatione’, 36 ‘Notes for an Essay on Logic’, 46 ‘Notes on Formal Logic’, 35 ‘Notes on Hegel’s Logic’, 37 ‘Notes on Historiography’, 6, 85, 147

‘Notes towards a Metaphysic’, 21, 42, 45, 51–52, 66–69, 71 ‘Observations on Language’, 134 Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1, 18, 22, 100, 111 ‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’, 14, 125 ‘Prolegomena to Logic’, 35 Religion and Philosophy, 32, 33, 34, 37, 48 ‘Report on M. B. Foster’s The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel’, 128 Roman Britain, 77 Ruskin’s Philosophy: an address delivered at the Ruskin centenary, 73, 139, 51 ‘Sketch of a Logic of Becoming’, 35, 37 Speculum Mentis, 3, 7–11, 13, 18, 22, 30–32, 34, 37–41, 48–49, 54, 56, 74–75, 97–98, 100, 144–145, 149 ‘The Conclusion of 1934’ (to The Idea of Nature), 45, 53, 64, 66 ‘The Conclusion of 1935’ (to The Idea of Nature), 53, 63–64 The First Mate’s Log, 171 The Idea of History, 6, 14, 74, 79–84, 93 The Idea of Nature, 2, 4, 8, 16–17, 20, 45, 51–53, 56, 58, 61–62, 64, 66–68, 70–71–72, 75, 95, 150 ‘The Nature of Metaphysical Study’, 42, 66–67 The New Leviathan, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 23, 24, 28, 29, 43, 47, 49, 53, 55, 72, 75, 95, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139–141, 143, 145, 147, 149–150, 152, 161, 172 The Principles of Art, 5, 22–23, 27, 49, 97–101, 104–105, 108, 110–112, 114, 117, 121, 134, 149, 171 The Principles of History, 4, 8, 21–22, 30, 43, 47, 49, 53, 63– 64, 74,

Index 209 78, 80–85, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 121, 122, 123, 132, 149 ‘Truth and Contradiction’, 34, 35 Collingwoodian, 132, 162, 164 Communitarian, 165, 168 community, 97, 124, 135–136, 162, 165, 168, 169 concept(ual), 2, 5, 8, 13–14, 17, 19–22, 24, 27–29, 31, 34–36, 40–42, 47–49, 52, 55, 64–65, 68, 70–72, 77, 98, 103, 112–113, 121–122, 124, 127, 130, 131, 139, 141, 143, 146, 148–152, 160, 162, 165, 172 concrete universal, 35 Connelly, J., vii, 6, 12, 47, 131, 148 conservatives, 137 constructivism, 161 contingency, 16–17, 25, 28, 75, 83, 90–93, 96, 129, 133, 140–143, 151–153, 156–157, 169 cosmology, 4, 20–21, 26, 42, 45, 51–53, 56, 59, 60–67, 71–72, 150 cosmopolitan, 154 cosmos, 62, 65–66, 75 Croce, B., 12, 81 culture, 52, 58, 70, 88, 90–92, 107, 136, 142, 150, 153, 161, 163–164, 166 dancing, 107 de Ruggeiro, G., 26 deliberative democracy, 137, 160 democracy, 108, 127, 136, 137, 140, 143, 160 Descartes, R., 114 dialectic(al), 2–3, 7–9, 11–12, 17, 22, 24–25, 32, 34, 37–38, 40, 45, 54, 56, 60, 65–66, 69, 89, 93, 99, 103–104, 116, 120–121, 123, 126–127, 131, 134–135, 137, 139–140, 145, 149, 157–158, 163 Donagan, A., 5, 28, 43, 60, 120 Donegal, 168 D’Oro, G., vii, 6–7, 10–11, 26, 75, 84, 148 Dray, W. H., 63, 74–75, 80–83, 147 dualism, 37 duty, 132–133, 136

Eastern Europe, 156 ecologism, 143 economy, 152 education, 135–136, 138–139, 142, 152, 164, 171 Eliot, T. S., 101, 121 emotion(al), 97–103, 107–112, 115–119, 121, 137, 149, 152, 159, 171 emotivism, 164 empirical, 38, 40, 57 empiricism, 62, 113–115 endism, 143 England, 64, 77, 120 English history, 77, 114 English(ness), 127, 169 Enlightenment, 167 epistemological, 22, 76, 78, 112, 115, 172 ethics, 2, 16, 55, 103, 128, 134, 154, 162, 164–166, 168 ethical intuitionism, 164 European, 89, 92, 118–119, 121, 140 European Marxism, 169 evolution(ary), 59, 61, 62, 64, 68–69 existential(ism), 10, 115 expression, 101–105, 107, 111–112, 115, 117, 119, 121, 128–129, 159 expressivism, 117, 146 fairy tales, 108 family, 135–136, 138–140, 164, 172 fascism, 118, 120, 141–142, 159 feeling(s), 101–105, 112–118 feminism, 142 Feyerabend, P., 5 finite, 65, 69 Foster, M. B., 15, 128 Frazer, J. G., 107 free(dom), 2, 17, 20–21, 24–25, 27, 42, 47, 49, 55–56, 63, 68, 75, 78–80, 83, 84, 86, 89–93, 95–96, 115, 121–123, 126–12, 134, 135–143, 147, 154, 170, 173 French-Algerian conflict, 156 French Marxism, 156 Freud, S., 103

210 Index Gadamer, H-G., 81 Gardiner, P., 87 German, 81, 87, 114, 124, 129, 140 global, 169 globalization, 142, 154 God, 34, 46, 49, 57, 59, 65, 68–69 Goldstein, L., 81, 87 Good, 161, 162, 165, 167 goodness, 40 Graham, G., 117, 153 grand narratives, 140–141, 151–153, 157, 166 Greek(s), 60, 89 Hannay, A. H., 26 Hanson, N. R., 5 Harris, H. S., 15 Hegel, G. W. F., vi, vii, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 49, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 78–84, 86–95, 99–105, 111–112, 114–118, 124–130, 133–134, 137, 139–143, 145, 150–153, 155–157, 161–162, 165–167, 169, 170, 172 Hegel, G. W. F., works of; Aesthetics – Lectures on Fine Art, 99, 103–104 Hegel’s Science of Logic, 42, 45, 65 Hegel’s Logic (Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), 41 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, 133 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 57, 69 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 41, 129, 133–134, 139, 162, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 87, 142, 151 The Phenomenology of Mind, 9, 10, 16, 18, 22, 31, 39, 99, 112, 114, 128, 134, 145 Hegelian(ism), vi, 4, 7, 12, 16–18, 25, 35, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 67, 68, 74, 83– 84, 95, 99, 100, 104, 128–129, 130, 132–133, 139, 142, 149–150, 155, 156–160, 162, 169, 170, 172 historicism, 4, 5, 120, 166

historiographical, 79, 81, 83, 85, 147 history, v, 1, 3, 5–9, 13–18, 20–32, 36, 38–39, 41, 43, 46–47, 49, 51–64, 70, 72, 73, 75–81, 83–96, 108, 114, 120–123, 125–127, 129, 132–135, 138–147, 149–162, 164–167, 169–170, 172 critical history, 88–89 original history, 87–88 pragmatic history, 88 reflective history, 87–89, 93 philosophical history, 87, 89, 91–93 universal history, 88 Hobbes, T., 25, 114, 120, 123, 125, 126–127, 131, 134, 136, 137 Leviathan, 123, 126, 131 Hobbesian, 131 holis(m)tic, 33, 34, 37, 58 Holocaust, 141, 158, 160 Hume, D., 114 Idealism, 25, 26, 33, 66, 81, 99, 114, 144 absolute idealism, 62 British Idealists, 36 German idealism, 114 Italian Idealism, 25–26 Objective idealism, 36–37, 43, 48, 60, 61, 68, 99, 128, 144 Post-idealist, 156 subjective idealism, 33, 36, 42–43, 66, 98 imagination, 38, 98–100, 102–105, 111–112, 114–115, 117–118, 152 imperialism, 158 individual(ity), 33, 37, 97, 133, 135, 137, 155, 161, 165, 167–168, 170 inductive, 40 inequality, 138–139, 142, 153 infinite, 65, 69 illuminism, 119 Ionian, 58 Iiritano, M., 37 Johnson, P., 11 justice, 160–161 Kant, I., 25, 26, 36, 60, 114, 128, 164 Kantian, 133

Index 211 Knox, T. M., 4–6, 21, 43, 52–53, 56, 62, 63, 80–84, 93, 120 language, 102, 105–107, 116, 117, 134 Lévy-Bruhl, C., 107 liberal, 10, 24, 34, 50, 75, 95, 108, 118, 121, 123, 127, 135–137, 141–143, 146, 152–156, 159–162, 164–166, 168–171 liberal democracy, 108, 127, 161, 162 liberalism, 155–156, 160, 162, 164–165, 170–171 Locke, J., 25, 114, 123, 125, 126 logic(al), 2, 16, 18, 24, 32, 34–36, 38, 41, 45–46, 55, 60, 62, 64–65, 67–69, 71, 79, 83–84, 91–94, 116–117, 140–141, 146, 149 formal logic, 35 logic of becoming, 35 logic of being, 35, 65, 67 logic of question and answer, 34 logical positivism, 23, 25, 29, 44, 113, 115, 156 Lyotard, J-F., 25, 141, 154–160, 163, 169 Libidinal Economy, 157 Phenomenology, 157 The Differend, 158 The Postmodern Condition, 157

May, 1968, 156–157 McCarney, J., 141 mechanistic, 59, 70 medieval, 115 metaphysics, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 19, 23, 28–29, 31–32, 42–45, 47–50, 56, 58, 60, 66, 67, 69–72, 75–76, 78, 95, 121–122, 130–131, 138, 147–150, 152, 172 method, 4, 6, 9, 12–14, 16, 19, 30–31, 40, 45, 48, 67, 78, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92– 93, 95, 98, 112, 123, 128, 130–132 methodology, 54, 63, 67, 69, 72, 74, 85, 93, 123, 128, 161, 164 Michelangelo, 107 mind, 2, 5, 11, 13, 16, 18–23, 27, 33, 37–39, 41, 51–58, 60–61, 63–68, 70, 72, 78, 89, 3, 95, 97–100, 104, 117, 120–121, 123, 126–128, 130–135, 141, 143, 145, 147–148, 150, 160, 173 Mink, L. O., 7, 8, 9, 10, 56, 57, 120, modern(ity), 37, 58, 59, 60–61, 64, 70, 78, 79, 89, 100–101, 108, 109, 114, 118–119, 128–129, 134, 136, 138, 141–142, 152, 154–155, 159, 161, 165, 168, 171 moral(ity), 28, 55, 99, 101, 103–104, 122–123, 128, 133, 137, 145, 156, 162, 165, 166

MacIntyre, A., 25, 141, 154–156, 164–169, 171 A Short History of Ethics, 164 After Virtue, 165–166 Dependent Rational Animals, 167, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 165–166 Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 165–166 Madood, T., 6 magic, 107–110 Martin, R., 6, 10, 44 Marx, K., 57, 141, 152, 157, 169 Theses on Feuerbach, 152 Marxism, 158 materialism, 33 mathematics, 40, 116

nation state, 154 nationalism, 47, 77 nationality, 78 nature, 2, 13, 16, 19–20, 26, 42, 51–53, 55–71, 82, 85–86, 93, 95, 104, 114, 121, 150, 153, 172 Nazi(ism), 24, 118, 140 necessity, 16, 24, 65, 90, 92, 93, 140, 151, 152 neo-Kantian, 6, 7, 26 New England, 168 Newton, I., 60 Nicholson, P., 95, 129 nisus, 60, 64, 67–68 normative, 47, 55, 75, 113, 128, 132, 143, 154 nothing, 42, 65, 67, 71

212 Index Oakeshott, M. O., vi Oldfield, A., 6 ontological argument, 41 ontology, 21, 32 organic, 62 organism, 58–59 painter, 106–107 Parliament(ary), 59, 77 past, 22, 73–74, 76, 85–86, 88, 121, 124 Patristic fathers, 46 Perception, 98, 116 perspectivalism, 157, 159 Peters, R., 81 phenomenology, 9–11, 16, 39, 157 philosophy, 2, 5–21, 22–23, 25–34, 38–43, 47, 49, 52, 54–57, 62, 64, 66, 69–81, 83–84, 87, 89, 91–94, 97–100, 102, 112–115, 117–118, 121–132, 135, 139–151, 153–154, 156–162, 164–165, 169, 171–172 analytical philosophy, 10 critical philosophy of history, 79, 83–84 history of moral philosophy, 160–161 history of philosophy, 14–15, 30, 36, 43, 94, 114, 124–126, 160 linguistic philosophy, 10–11 moral philosophy, 164 philosophy of history, 79–81, 83–84, 87, 89, 91–92, 141, 153, 156 political philosophy, 15, 123–124, 128–129, 139 speculative philosophy of history, 79, 80, 83, 84 physics, 52, 57, 59, 61 Plato, 15, 25, 60, 66, 104–105, 123, 127–129, 131, 135–137, 164 The Republic, 127 Platonic, 37, 129, 132 Pleasure, 112 Poets, 106 politics, 12, 91, 92, 99, 121, 124–126, 128–131, 134–135, 137, 139, 142, 146, 150, 154–156, 159–163, 169, 171 portraiture, 107

positivism, vii, 29, 44, 72, 113, 155, 169 post-Enlightenment, 154 post-Kantian, 26, 114 post-liberal, 171 post-structuralism, 156 postmodernism, 156–160, 169–170, 172 practice, 3, 8, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 35, 39, 46, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 64, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 81, 83, 86, 93, 108, 117, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128, 130, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165–166, 171, 173 pragmatism, 10 prescriptivism, 164 presuppositions, 3, 6, 12, 19, 29, 44, 46, 49, 52, 56, 58, 61, 106, 122, 130, 149, 160, 172 primitive people(s), 107–108 process, 62–66, 71–72, 77, 84, 89, 97–99, 103–105, 107, 112, 133, 135, 137–138, 143, 145 proceduralism, 154, 162 progress(ive), 14–15, 67, 80, 89–90, 94, 102–103, 112, 114, 123, 125, 141–142, 151–152, 153, 172 propaganda, 120, 126 proletarian, 157 psychoanalysis, 104, 115 psychology, 158 public reason, 163 Pythagorean, 58 radical conversion hypothesis, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 28 rationalism, 118–119, 128, 138, 154 Rawls, J., 25, 141, 154–156, 160–163, 169–170 Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, 161 Political Liberalism, 161, 162, 170 ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, 163 realism, 25, 35, 42, 156, 169 reductivism, 157 reflective equilibrium, 161

Index 213 reflexivity, 4, 9, 16, 27, 39, 100, 144, 147 regress(ion), 141, 143, 153, 169 regularian, 132 relativism, 4, 5, 52, 120, 125, 143, 157, 172 religion, 9, 13, 30, 33–34, 38, 39, 41, 48, 54, 100, 102, 119, 138, 144 Renaissance, 58–59, 70 Ridley, A., 98, 106 Roman, 77, 89, 101 Roman Britain, 76, 77 Romanticism, 100 Rorty, R., 141 Rotenstreich, N., 5, 31, 43, 71 Rousseau, J-J., 25, 123, 125, 136 Rubinoff, L. J., 4, 6, 8–11, 16–17, 148–149 Ruskin, J., 73–74

space, 68, 69, 113 Spinoza, B., 114 Spinozist, 37 state, 168 state of nature, 134 subjectivism, 62, 99, 128, 144 system(atic), 5, 7, 9–14, 16, 18, 24, 30, 35, 40–41, 47, 49, 52–53, 57, 60, 66, 75, 117, 121–124, 128–131, 139, 146–147, 149, 157–159, 172

Sandel, M., 165 savage, 108 scepticism, 11, 74, 114, 155, 159 science, 9, 13, 18, 20, 30, 38–41, 44, 46–48, 50, 54–58, 61, 63, 70, 85, 93, 107–108, 116, 132, 144–148, 150, 152, 154, 158, 166, 172 scissors and paste history, 84–85, 87 Second World War, 130 sensation, 27, 112–115, 134 sense, 69, 105, 112, 114 sensuous, 100, 102, 104, 112 sex(uality), 153, 167 Shakespeare, W., 107 Sisyphean, 38 slavery, 134 social contract, 95, 123, 125–127, 135–137, 139, 155, 161 socialisme ou barbarie, 156 sociality, 33, 103 Socratic, 105

unity, 33–34, 36–37, 42, 53, 57, 59, 64–65, 75, 92, 96, 103, 109, 117, 121, 130, 143, 145, 146, 151, 159 utilitarian(ism), 40, 103–104, 118–119, 132, 138, 154–155, 159

Taylor, C., 165 teleological, 24, 58, 60, 62, 64, 68–69, 91, 92, 131, 160 theology, 33 time, 68, 69, 113 Toulmin, S., 5, 43 truth, 34, 99, 102–105, 110, 117

van der Dussen, W. J., 63, 80–83 Vincent, A., 129 Walsh, W. H., 43, 79–81, 83–84, 87, 92–93 Walzer, M., 154 Welsh, 168 Whitehead, A., 20, 25, 52, 59, 61–62, 64, 71 William the Conqueror, 35 Wilson, A. F., 85, 87 Wittgenstein, L., 102 Zagorin, P., 160