Comparing the Thought of Hannah Arendt with That of R.G. Collingwood: Some Surprising Similarities--Part 1

[N.B. This is a work in progress, shared at this point to focus my thinking and, I hope, to elicit suggestions and criticisms. When circumstances allow (I hope no later than mid-July), I plan to return to this essay and continue the exploration in more depth.]

Hannah Arendt (`906-1975)

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) 

The focus of this blog post is to explore the similarities and differences (to a lesser extent) between the thinking of Hannah Arendt and R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood died before Arendt gained her fame as a political thinker and before she'd published anything of significance in English (if anything at all). In all likelihood, Collingwood had no acquaintance whatever with Arendt, and he didn't engage directly with her mentors Heidegger and Jaspers. Neither have I found Arendt engaging Collingwood, although I'd be surprised if she was not aware of his posthumously published work The Idea of History (1946), which became the most important work about the philosophy of history in her lifetime. Her peers, such as Leo Strauss, reviewed Collingwood's The Idea of History. But as yet I've found no reference by Arendt to Collingwood's work. But despite their lack of direct engagement, I contend that these two thinkers, informed and prompted by the Great War, the Crisis Years (1919-1939), and the Second World War, share a great deal in common, especially in their understanding of politics and related matters, such as the importance of thinking, freedom, action, speech and other topics within the sphere of politics and life. It's my intention in this post to begin this exploration and then in later posts drill down into their similarities---and differences--as they become apparent. This initial blog includes some background about both thinkers that readers may already know.

I offer this summary of points of similarities between these two thinkers that I intend to explore in this post and one or more later posts:

1. Background
1. Both report an early interest in Kant that led to an interest in philosophy in general.
2. Both exhibited a deep desire to understand from an early age.
3. Both pursued an early interest and aptitude for learning Greek and Latin that resulted in profound knowledge of classical culture.
4. Both displayed an early interest and commitment to thinking.
5. Both thinkers report that they were prompted to action in response to the political turmoil caused by the rise of fascism in the 1930s,
6. Both shared deep and perceptive readings of Marx, although neither was a Marxist.
7. Both thinkers were deeply steeped in the Western philosophical tradition.
2. Mature thinking 
1. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on action.
2. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on freedom, especially freedom as exhibited in thought and action.  Collingwood often refers to action as res gestae. 
3. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on the importance of speech.
4. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on the political community (Collingwood preferred the term "society" but he uses it in a sense quite distinct from Arendt's formulation of the term).
5. Both thinkers placed a premium on thinking.
6. Both thinkers placed an emphasis on practice informing theory.
7. Both were critical of traditional Western metaphysics.
8. Both opposed illiberalism (with liberalism understood in its original sense of emphasizing individual liberty and dignity, the rule of law, etc.).
9. Both acknowledged the importance of the state.
10. Both were outspoken in their profound critiques of fascism. 
3. Miscellaneous topics
1. Both were critical of psychology as a field of study and of psychoanalysis in particular.
2. Both wanted to separate "economics" from politics, although Arendt is much stricter in her desire for separation, while Collingwood seems to want only to emphasize the distinctness of the two fields. 
3. Both often sprinkled their texts with ancient Greek and Latin words and phrases, which can prove daunting for the reader. (Query: why doesn't Kindle have a translator function at least for Latin?)
4. Both were wary--and at times downright dismissive--of academia and academic discourse. 
5. Neither of these thinkers founded a school of thought in any traditional sense, although both had (and have) those who've hailed and extolled their work. Neither thinker seems to have desired to found or foster any unique school of thought, nor did either of them adhere to any particular school. In short, both thinkers are unique. But neither founded a school, unlike some of their illustrious processors, like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, or their peers, who promoted schools of thought like phenomenology, logical positivism, pragmatism, and such. 

[N.B. You can skip the next two paragraphs if you choose, these simply recount my path to these two thinkers and how I now see each in light of the other. In other words, it's a "how I got here" narrative. I (sometimes) appreciate a writer's personal narrative about how she or he came to a topic and the path of the writer's inquiry, but you may not.]

As an undergraduate student in political theory, I developed an intellectual crush on Hannah Arendt. I become quite enamored of her thought, even to the point that in a class in which her work was only one of many considered, the instructor had to remark on my final evaluation that he'd have preferred that I'd not focused my interest so markedly on Arendt. And while you might say that I outgrew my intellectual crush, her thought continues to inform my thinking about politics (and law) over the years. The advent of Trump and his despotic, authoritarian bent--perhaps we might even say his fascism--sent me back to thinking about Arendt and referencing her insights. 

Also, while an undergraduate, I was exposed to the thought of R.G. Collingwood in a philosophy of history class. That exposure didn't take. I believe that I read the assigned piece taken from Collingwood's The Idea of History, but it didn't sink in, and I came away with only a name in the back of my head. Now fast-forward from my undergraduate days at the University of Iowa in 1974 to 2012, when I took up residence for about a year in Jaipur, India. Not far from where we lived in Jaipur was an Oxford University Press bookstore with relatively cheap "South Asia" editions of many titles, including Collingwood's The Idea of History (rev. ed.). I bought it, knowing that it was a classic in the field of thinking about history. Politics and history are two topics that had intrigued me since I was a kid (the law came later). I bought a copy. I didn't really dig into the book until we were living in China in 2014-2015, but when I (finally!) read IH for the first time, I was quite taken with both the book and with Collingwood. I've been reading and re-reading Collingwood since then, delving into his work not only about history, but also his work in moral theory, politics, art, religion, anthropology, and metaphysics. (He published widely in Roman history and archeology as well, but the prior topics are quite enough for me.) If Arendt was a youthful crush, Collingwood has proved a late summer romance. (I don't want to admit to autumn just yet.)

This spring, under the cover of the pandemic, I returned to Arendt via a Virtual Reading Group sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Thus, I've been reading Arendt along with Collingwood (primarily his The New Leviathan, his volume dedicated to thinking deeply about politics), and I've been struck by the many similarities in their thinking. Thus, I propose in the remainder of this post to explore some of the similarities (and differences) that I've noticed. I'll start on the surface and then work my way down into some of the particulars of the intersections of their thought.

R.G. Collingwood was born in the Lake Country in northern England near Connistan Lake in 1889. He was "home-schooled" until he departed for Rugby School at age 13. Collingwood describes his schooling in his Autobiography:

UNTIL I was thirteen years old I lived at home and was taught by my father. Lessons occupied only two or three hours each morning; otherwise he left me to my own devices, sometimes helping me with what I chose to do, more often leaving me to work it out for myself. It was his doing that I began Latin at four and Greek at six; but my own that I began, about the same time, to read everything I could find about the natural sciences, especially geology, astronomy, and physics; to recognize rocks, to know the stars, and to understand the working of pumps and locks and other mechanical appliances up and down the house. 

Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

Here is one particular event that struck young Collingwood and that stuck with him. He reports the incident and reflects upon its effect:

My father had plenty of books, and allowed me to read in them as I pleased. Among others, he had kept the books of classical scholarship, ancient history, and philosophy which he had used at Oxford. As a rule I left these alone; but one day when I was eight years old curiosity moved me to take down a little black book lettered on its spine ‘Kant’s Theory of Ethics’. It was Abbott’s translation of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; and as I began reading it, my small form wedged between the bookcase and the table, I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand. Then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them. Disgraceful to confess, here was a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baffled me. Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own. It was not like the common boyish intention to ‘be an engine-driver when I grow up’, for there was no desire in it; I did not, in any natural sense of the word, ‘want’ to master the Kantian ethics when I should be old enough; but I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed. 

There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think.’ What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absent-minded in company, or sought solitude in order to think without interruption, I could not have said, and still cannot say, what it was that I actually thought. There were no particular questions that I asked myself; there were no special objects upon which I directed my mind; there was only a formless and aimless intellectual disturbance, as if I were wrestling with a fog. [Emphasis added.]

Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

In this extended quote, make a mental note of Kant, understanding, thinking, and solitude.

Collingwood went on to Oxford before The War and then to the Admiralty during The War (because of a bad knee). Collingwood completed his undergraduate work (before the War) with flying colors. Classicist Mary Beard describes Collingwood's educational experience at Oxford:

But it is surely crucial that [Collingwood] was a product of the old Oxford ‘Greats’ (that is, classics) course, which focused the last two and a half years of a student’s work on the parallel study of ancient history on the one hand, and ancient and modern philosophy on the other. Most students were much better at one side than the other, and most stories tell of the desperate attempts by would-be ancient historians to cram enough Plato, Descartes and Hume to get their high-flying pass in the final exams (or alternatively of desperate attempts by would-be philosophers to remember enough of the Peloponnesian War or Agricola’s campaigns in Britain to do the same). In the context of Greats, Collingwood was not a maverick with two incompatible interests. Given the educational aims of the course, he was a rare success, even if something of a quirky overachiever; his combination of interests was exactly what Greats was designed to promote.

Later, Collingwood would hold not only the Waynflete Chair in Metaphysical Philosophy but also positions in Roman history and archeology. Collingwood spent many summers working at archeological sites around Britain.  The takeaway here: Collingwood was extremely well versed and active in classical studies.

Let us now turn to the background of Hannah Arendt. Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, making her almost a generation younger than Collingwood. Arendt lost her father at a young age, and she was raised in Konigsberg, Germany, the lifelong residence of Immanuel Kant. She was raised in an assimilated Jewish family, although she reports "I did not know from my family that I was Jewish. My mother was completely a-religious." (Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (p. 6). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition). Yet she became aware from an early age--because of anti-Semitic comments made at school--that her Jewish background made her "special" in some ways. As to her education and interests, Arendt reported the following in an interview on German television with Gunter Gauss broadcast in 1964:

GAUS: You studied in Marburg, Heidelberg, and Freiberg with professors Heidegger, Bultmann, and Jaspers; with a major in philosophy and minors in theology and Greek. How did you come to choose these subjects?
ARENDT: You know, I have often thought about that. I can only say that I always knew I would study philosophy. Ever since I was fourteen years old.
GAUS: Why?
ARENDT: I read Kant. You can ask, Why did you read Kant? For me the question was somehow: I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself, so to speak. But not because I didn’t love life! No! As I said before—I had this need to understand.… The need to understand was there very early. You see, all the books were in the library at home; one simply took them from the shelves. [Emahasis added.]

Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (pp. 8-9). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Later, to complete her graduate studies under Karl Jaspers, Arendt wrote her dissertation about the concept of love (caritas) in St. Augustine, which she continued to revise even after her emigration to the United States. (This book was translated and published in English in 2014 as Love and Saint Augustine.)

Finally, I should note that Arendt reported that "I have always loved Greek poetry. And poetry has played a large role in my life. So I chose Greek [as a topic of study] in addition [to philosophy and theology]. It was the easiest thing to do, since I read it anyway!" Id. (p. 9).

Collingwood's education at Oxford in the pre-war period, in addition to his work in "the Greats," was overseen by professors who came to be labeled the "Oxford realists," who had displaced the British idealist tradition of Green, Bosanquet, and Bradley from the summit of British philosophy. Collingwood later came to sharply criticize the Oxford realist school of philosophical thinking. Collingwood taught himself Italian to read Dante in the original, and his fluency in Italian allowed him to be greatly influenced in his early years by the contemporary Italian philosophers Benedetto Croce (whom he translated), Guido De Ruggiero, and Giovanni Gentile (although Collingwood came to distance himself from Gentile's work, which turned overtly fascist after The Great War and the rise of Mussolini). After the War, Collingwood took up teaching at Oxford, and he eventually ascended to the Waynflete professorship in 1935. But despite his long tenure at Oxford and the prominence to which he rose there, he issued some sharp criticisms of academia. And despite his pleasant demeanor and popularity as a lecturer, Collingwood remained a philosophical lone wolf. Starting in the 1920s and growing in the 1930s, British philosophy was marked by the rise of logical positivism and linguistic analysis with the likes of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein (early and late), J.L. Austin, A.J. Ayer, and Gilbert Ryle starting to come to the fore and establish schools of thought that took the main stage. And the philosophy of history, one of Collingwood's long-running topics of investigation, was shunted to the side by followers of the new mainstream of thought. Collingwood had many readers and admirers, but no followers or successors in the sense that there is a Collingwoodian tradition in philosophy.

While Collingwood was establishing himself in Oxford in the 1920s, Hannah Arendt was beginning her collegiate education. Her education included studying with some of the biggest names in German thinking at the time: Heidegger, Jaspers, Bultman, and Husserl, along with a cohort of exceptional peers. She was matriculating through the German academic system until the Depression arrived in 1929 when a new round of anti-Semitism wouldn't allow a young Jewish woman to gain an academic position. The 1933 Reichstag fire sealed her fate. She was arrested but released after eight days. She fled Germany and went to Paris. There she became active in a Zionist organization, although she herself was not a Zionist. With the successful invasion of France by Germany in 1940, Arendt escaped France and proceeded to the U.S., where she lived and worked for the remainder of her life. Upon settling in the U.S., she turned her attention to the politics and realities of totalitarianism and published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1950, which brought her into the limelight. After the events in Germany in 1929 and the early 1930s, she abjured the label "philosopher," and she came to call herself a "political theorist," although her last work, The Life of the Mind, which was published after her death in December 1975, seems to have marked a return to philosophy. At no time in her life did she hold a tenure track professorship, keeping her distance from the formalities and practicalities-- and what she believed to be the pitfalls--of academia.

The final surface similarity that I want to touch upon is perhaps the key one; that is, the impingement of events upon these two individuals from the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the outbreak of war. In Arendt's case, the effect upon her is obvious and easily understood: a young Jewish woman fled the Nazi regime in 1933 after her arrest, becoming a refugee in France before fleeing (one may say in a nick of time) to the U.S.  Arendt's young life was totally upended and altered by the course of political events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. That she should turn to political action (especially in France before the war) and then to political theory to understand what happened is not surprising.

Collingwood's case, however, is more complicated. Through most of the 1930s, Collingwood was deeply engaged in his work as a philosopher at Oxford. Like Britain as a whole, many in the community at Oxford were not keen to become involved in international affairs or to push Britain into a more active role in opposing the rise of Hitler. But by 1937 both the affairs of the world and Collingwood's health were declining. Collingwood suffered from uncontrolled high blood pressure, and the only recognized treatment at the time was "the rest cure," which Collingwood undertook by sailing and also taking a long voyage to Indonesia. Despite these steps, he began to suffer a series of increasingly serious strokes. Collingwood traveled in addition to his seafaring, visiting Catalonia and the Mediterranean in the 30s and seeing first-hand the effects of the civil war in Spain and the rise of fascism in Italy. But the public didn't learn of his thoughts about the crisis in Europe until he published his An Autobiography in 1939 (written in 1938). In that remarkable work, Collingwood wrote about his upbringing and education and his thoughts about philosophy and philosophers. He also revealed his newfound political ardor. In his Autobiography, he frames his new political consciousness as a part of his effort to reconcile theory and practice. He writes:

I can now see that I had three different attitudes towards this survival [of the medieval distinction between contemplation and action]. There was a first R. G. C. who knew in his philosophy that the division was false, and that ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, being mutually dependent, must both alike suffer frustration if segregated into the specialized functions of different classes.  

There was a second R. G. C. who in the habits of his daily life behaved as if it had been sound; living as a professional thinker whose college gate symbolized his aloofness from the affairs of practical life. My philosophy and my habits were thus in conflict; I lived as if I disbelieved my own philosophy, and philosophized as if I had not been the professional thinker that in fact I was. My wife used to tell me so; and I used to be a good deal annoyed.

 But underneath this conflict there was a third R. G. C., for whom the gown of the professional thinker was a disguise alternately comical and disgusting in its inappropriateness. This third R. G. C. was a man of action, or rather he was something in which the difference between thinker and man of action disappeared. He never left me alone for very long. He turned over in his sleep, and the fabric of my habitual life began to crack. He dreamed, and his dreams crystallized into my philosophy. When he would not lie quiet and let me play at being a don, I would appease him by throwing off my academic associations and going back to my own part of the country to address the local antiquarian society. It may seem an odd form of ‘release’ for a suppressed man of action; but it was a very effective one. The enthusiasm for historical studies, and for myself as their leader in those studies, which I never failed to arouse in my audiences, was not in principle different from the enthusiasm for his person and his policy which is aroused by a successful political speaker.

 Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

Collingwood continued his reflection by noting his enthusiasm when reading Marx:

The third R. G. C. used to stand up and cheer, in a sleepy voice, whenever I began reading Marx. I was never at all convinced either by Marx’s metaphysics or by his economics; but the man was a fighter, and a grand one; and no mere fighter, but a fighting philosopher. His philosophy might be unconvincing; but to whom was it unconvincing? Any philosophy, I knew, would be not only unconvincing but nonsensical to a person who misunderstood the problem it was meant to solve. Marx’s was meant to solve a ‘practical’ problem; its business, as he said himself, was to ‘make the world better’. Marx’s philosophy would necessarily, therefore, appear nonsensical except to a person who, I will not say shared his desire to make the world better by means of a philosophy, but at least regarded that desire as a reasonable one. According to my own principles of philosophical criticism, it was inevitable that Marx’s philosophy should appear nonsensical to gloves-on philosophers like the ‘realists’, with their sharp division between theory and practice, or the ‘liberals’, such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that people ought to be allowed to think whatever they liked because it didn’t really matter what they thought. In order to criticize a gloves-off philosophy like that of Marx, you must be at least enough of a gloves-off philosopher to think gloves-off philosophizing legitimate. 

Id.

Collingwood interrupted the recounting of his newfound creed by reporting that

My attitude towards politics had always been what in England is called democratic and on the Continent liberal. . . . I thought that no authoritarian government, however strong, could be so strong as one which rested on a politically educated public opinion. As a form of government, I thought its essence lay in the fact that it was a nursery-garden where policies were brought to maturity in the open air, not a post office for distributing ready-made policies to a passively receptive country . . . . I did not think that our constitution was free from faults. But the discovery and correction of these faults was the function of governments, not of individual voters. For the system was a self-correcting one, charged with amending its own faults by legislation. . . . 

The whole system, however, would break down if a majority of the electorate should become either ill informed on public questions or corrupt in their attitude towards them: by which I mean, capable of adopting towards them a policy directed not to the good of the nation as a whole, but to the good of their own class or section or of themselves.

Id.  

Collingwood continued his account by discussing changes in British politics during his lifetime and the rise of socialism and fascism on the continent. Collingwood looked favorably upon socialism in its striving for the "collective good," but he disdained fascism:

The great exponents of Fascism have been specialists in arousing mass-emotion; its minor adherents, tacticians and plotters.

Id.

He moved to a discussion of the Spanish Civil War and arrived at the conclusion that

The Spanish civil war was a straight fight between Fascist dictatorship and parliamentary democracy. The British government, behind all its disguises, had declared itself a partisan of Fascist dictatorship. 

Id. 

Collingwood concluded his work with these words:

Fascism. 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.  

Id. 

More of the same attitude and an even deeper look at politics came from Collingwood's The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (1942), the last work published during his lifetime. (Collingwood died in January 1943.) The New Leviathan furthers the intent laid down in the Autobiography to gain a greater understanding of political life. In the preface to The New Leviathan Collingwood states:

My own book [in distinction from Hobbes's work] is best to be understood as an attempt to bring the Leviathan up to date, in the light of the advances made since it was written, in history, psychology, and anthropology. The attempt was undertaken, and the writing of the book begun, almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war; when first it became evident that we did not know what we were fighting for, and that our leaders were unable or unwilling to tell us. 

Collingwood, R. G., The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd., Kindle Edition. 

I will not go into further detail about that book here except to say that it lays out a very complete statement about non-social and social (political) life. (If you're worried about his selection of Hobbes as a role model, please take a look at my recent review, where I quote Collingwood about his selection of a role model, which he addresses in his Preface.)

[End of Part 1. Because of my commitments over the next couple of weeks or more, it will probably be a week or more into July before I can return for another post that will drill down into the particulars of each thinker's ideas about politics in general and particulars such as thinking, understanding, freedom, and so on.]

An Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood

I wimped out in my review of Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method, claiming that I could only "appreciate" it. I thought that this work would prove as intimidating, but I'm feeling more ambitious, so I'll call this a review, albeit an awed and tentative one. Let's dive in!

If the business of metaphysics is to reveal the absolute presuppositions that are involved in any given piece of thinking, the general class of study to which metaphysics belongs is clearly the study of thought. 

Collingwood, R. G.. An Essay on Metaphysics. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Collingwood set forth a plan for writing about history, art, and metaphysics in the 1930s. His declining health (a series of strokes from uncontrolled high blood pressure) prevented him from completing his project, but he remained immensely productive to near the end of his life in 1943. He published the Essay in 1940, and it was his next-to-the-last publication before his death, with only his The New Leviathan to follow the Essay. The Essay (hereinafter EM) is composed of complex yet fluid and lucid prose. In it, Collingwood sets forth the need for metaphysics and it's history (which is an intimate relation). The account begins with Aristotle, addresses Kant, and does battle with the logical positivists of his day, who wanted (in essence) to abolish metaphysics.

What I have chiefly tried to do in it is neither to expound my own metaphysical ideas, nor to criticize the metaphysical ideas of other people; but to explain what metaphysics is, why it is necessary to the well-being and advancement of knowledge, and how it is to be pursued.

The most significant aspect of this work arises from his contention that metaphysics must always begin with "absolute presuppositions" and not "propositions." A proposition or relative presupposition may be either true or false, but not so an absolute presupposition, which is neither true nor false. (Collingwood distinguishes "relative presuppositions" from "absolute presuppositions" on this point.) An absolute presupposition is a starting point that is neither true nor false but is a given, somewhat like an axiom in geometry. Presuppositions are--like all knowledge--embedded in history. Thus, the presuppositions of Aristotle differ from those of Descartes because of changing attitudes and beliefs about natural science and mathematics in their respective cultural milieus. What Collingwood's ideas about "presuppositions" ground metaphysics in history and recognizes the impossibility of avoiding a sense of the given in constructing any metaphysics. Although he doesn't reference it, it strikes me that what Collingwood has done for metaphysics is like the role of Godel's theorem for math and logic; it "proves" that one must begin with a given, an arbitrary starting point. (N.B. Don't trust my understanding of Godel. I'm not qualified to judge his work, and I'm not sure that I have even an accurate layman's understanding, but what I've said here is the impression I've gotten over the years having encountered discussions of it here and there--such as in Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that I read many years ago. Or make the same point via the popular fable "it's turtles all the way down."

Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them, because, as I have already said, to speak of verifying a presupposition involves supposing that it is a relative presupposition. If anybody says ‘Then they can’t be of much use in science’, the answer is that their use in science is their logical efficacy, and that the logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend on its being verifiable, because it does not depend on its being true: it depends only on its being supposed (prop. 3).


The logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend upon the truth of what is supposed, or even on its being thought true, but only on its being supposed.

Of course, all of this means that there will be--and have been--grounds for changing the presuppositions of metaphysics throughout history. Based on this, many analytic or logical positivist philosophers of Collingwood's day (Ayer, for instance) take the position that metaphysics is all poppycock because we can't prove its "absolute presuppositions" true or false. To the logical positivists, everything is a true-false test. Collingwood fights this simplistic attitude via a careful review of the history of metaphysics.

If anybody says that metaphysics, as the name of a science, means according to those who expound it simply ontology [the study of "pure being"], and that ontology, according to the view put forward in the preceding chapter, is a chimera; and if he goes on to infer that whatever is expounded under the name of metaphysics is erroneous or nonsensical, all he is doing is to demonstrate that he cannot or will not distinguish between what people are actually doing and what they think they are doing. This may be mere stupidity on his part; but it may also, like many sophistical arguments, involve a certain disingenuousness.

Collingwood also expounds what he calls (not as such in this work) his "logic of question and answer." Louis Mink, in his study of Collingwood, makes the important point that Collingwood is not propounding a new "logic" in any formal sense, but what might be better described as a mode of inquiry. The logic of question and answer is best known through Collingwood's works on history. For Collingwood, the logic of question and answer must guide what he calls "scientific history." He argues that the same principle applies to metaphysics and that any question must "suppose" an answer.

All metaphysical questions are historical questions, and all metaphysical propositions are historical propositions. Every metaphysical question either is simply the question what absolute presuppositions were made on a certain occasion, or is capable of being resolved into a number of such questions together with a further question or further questions arising out of these.

Metaphysics is about a certain class of historical facts, namely absolute presuppositions. The problems of metaphysics are historical problems; its methods are historical methods. We must have no more nonsense about its being meritorious to inhabit a fog.

But lest one think that Collingwood is one of those philosophers with his head in a cloud (a tiresome stereotype), he always brings metaphysics back to natural science. The point of metaphysics, as Collingwood describes it, is to provide a foundation upon which science can work. Collingwood argues at length that metaphysics is not a "deductive science" but a historical enterprise. And because history involves change, so too, the absolute presuppositions of metaphysics will change. Scientists, as he notes, don't always like this reality. Collingwood notes:

In my own experience I have found that when natural scientists express hatred of ‘metaphysics’ they are usually expressing this dislike of having their absolute presuppositions touched. I respect it, and admire them for it; though I do not expect scientists who give way to it to rise very high in the scientific world.

Collingwood turns his attention to "psychology," which he finds a pernicious influence upon metaphysics. Collingwood wants to draw a strict line between the thinking process involved in metaphysics and the claims made by psychology as an academic discipline. After setting forth a critique of metaphysics by an imaginary psychologist, Collingwood begins his reply with his typical aplomb:

If psychology is really the science which tells us how we think, it is beyond doubt that what I have called metaphysics falls within its province. And there I would gladly leave it if once I could satisfy myself that this phrase, even if not a complete account of psychology, is a correct one so far as it goes. But on this point I ask to be fully satisfied. The work of metaphysics is too important, too intimately bound up with the welfare of science and civilization (for civilization is only our name for systematic and orderly thinking about what are called ‘practical’ questions), to be handed over to any claimant on the strength of his own unsupported assertion that he is its rightful owner.

And then psychology takes a drubbing, at least to the extent that Collingwood perceives it as encroaching upon the activities of the mind as the thinking process. He starts by examining the history of psychology and psychological thinking. And as is his custom, he's prepared to go back to the ancient Greeks to ground his inquiry. Of them, he writes,

What they [the ancient Greeks] regarded as peculiar to mind was not having ends but being aware of this and having opinions, in some cases knowledge, as to what its own ends were. If a mind is something which has opinions as to what it is trying to do, its possession of these opinions will in certain ways complicate its behaviour. An organism unconsciously seeking its own preservation will simply on any given occasion either score another success or score for the first and last time a failure. A mind aiming at the discovery of a truth or the planning of a course of conduct will not only score a success or a failure, it will also think of itself as scoring a success or a failure; and since a thought may be either true or false its thought on this subject will not necessarily coincide with the facts. Any piece of thinking, theoretical or practical, includes as an integral part of itself the thought of a standard or criterion by reference to which it is judged a successful or unsuccessful piece of thinking. Unlike any kind of bodily or physiological physiological functioning, thought is a self-criticizing activity. The body passes no judgement upon itself. Judgement is passed upon it by its environment, which continues to support it and promote its well-being when it pursues its ends successfully and injures or destroys it when it pursues them otherwise. The mind judges itself, though not always justly. Not content with the simple pursuit of its ends, it also pursues the further end of discovering for itself whether it has pursued them successfully.

Thus distinguishing mind and body, Collingwood describes the norms which govern the operation of the mind. (N.B. No mention of "brain" here!) The criteria for judging the mind arise in ethics (governing actions) and logic (governing thought processes). Collingwood notes that these are often referred to as "normative" standards, but he prefers to label them as "criteriological." He goes on to observe that the rise of psychology in the sixteenth-century didn't arise from a dissatisfaction with logic or ethics, but instead it "arose from the recognition (characteristic of the sixteenth century) that what we call feeling is not a kind of thinking, not a self-critical activity, and therefore not the possible subject-matter of a criteriological science." EM. Collingwood continues:

The business of thinking includes the discovery and correction of its own errors. That is no part of the business of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and experiencing the emotions associated with them. These activities were thus not activities of the ‘mind’, if that word refers to the self-critical activities called thinking. But neither were they activities of the ‘body’. To use a Greek word (for the Greeks had already made important contributions to this science of feeling) they were activities of the ‘psyche’, and no better word could have been devised for the study of them than psychology.

But Collingwood describes psychology as going off the rails in the seventeenth and eighteen-centuries by encroaching on what was previously the exclusive purview of logic and ethics. Collingwood describes the change:

In the theory of knowledge the same revolt [against the Aristotilian tradition] was at work. Here it took the form of maintaining that intellectual activities, or operations of thought, were nothing but aggregations and complexes of feelings and thus special cases of sensation and emotion. Theoretical reason or knowledge was only a pattern of sensations; practical reason or will, only a pattern of appetites. Just as the aim of materialistic biology was to wipe out the old biology with its guiding notion of purposive function, so the aim of what I will call ‘materialistic epistemology’ was to wipe out the old sciences of thought, logic and ethics, with their criteriological methods and their guiding notions of truth and error, good and evil. Just as materialistic biology hoped to study organisms by substituting for the old biological methods the modern methods of Newtonian physics, so materialistic epistemology hoped to study the processes of thought, theoretical and practical, by substituting for the old methods of logic and ethics the modern methods of psychology, the science of feeling.

But less one think that Collingwood is a metaphysical and science troglodyte, he continues this line of thought with a concession and a cutting metaphor:

This programme, as the more acute and painstaking thinkers of the eighteenth century especially in its later years were not slow to realize, was foredoomed to failure. It might very well be true that a revolt against the old logic and ethics had been desirable and had proved beneficial; for it might very well be true that people who professed those sciences had misunderstood their normative character, and had claimed a right of censorship over the thoughts and actions of other people; and for the sake of scientific progress such tyranny might very well have to be overthrown. When it is a case of overthrowing tyranny one should not be squeamish about the choice of weapons. But the tyrannicide’s dagger is not the best instrument for governing the people it has liberated. Epistemological materialism, in attacking the criteriological science of logic (for brevity’s sake I shall henceforth say nothing about ethics) and offering to replace it by psychology, deliberately proceeded on the assumption that thought did not possess that power of self-criticism which had in the past been rightly regarded as distinguishing it from feeling. If any one who thinks has before his mind a criterion, the double notion of truth and falsehood, by reference to which he judges his thought, any science of thought which repudiates the character of a criteriological science becomes thereby a pseudo-science of thought.

Collingwood has no tolerance for what he brands a "pseudo-science of thought." Collingwood continues with a brief critique of Freud and some contemporary academic psychology. After his discourse about certain psychologists, Collingwood devotes an entire chapter to "The Propaganda of Irrationalism." This chapter is in some ways out-of-place in the book because it deals with social and political attitudes, and it may give too much weight to what may be an academic (in the multiple senses of the word) dispute that has only limited relevance to the larger society. However, if one could only read one chapter from this book, I'd say read this one because of its contemporary significance. One of the reasons I've become fascinated by Collingwood's work arises from the fact that he was living and writing his most important work in the 1930s and early 1940s as totalitarianism (Soviet Communism and German National Socialism (Nazis)), fascism (Italy & Romania), and authoritarianism (Vichy France, Franco's Spain) were dominating the European landscape. Collingwood responded to these developments viscerally and with thought, and his passionate thought shines through in this chapter. Rather than quote it here, I'll devote a separate blog post to some extended quotations. Suffice it to say, what Collingwood says about the world in this chapter at the time that he wrote EM bears an uncanny and unnerving relevance to now.

I do not wish any reader of these pages to form an impression, or even a suspicion, that I value these achievements at a low rate. The study by psychologists of sensation and emotion, whether in the laboratory or in the consulting-room or in what other conditions soever they think it capable of being pursued, is a most important kind of research and a thing which every friend of science will encourage by every means at his command.

The following chapter (XIV) addresses positivism again, and Collingwood pays his respects before unleashing his criticisms. In short, Collingwood describes the positivists as attempting to have scientific theories without the benefit of history as a form of knowledge, and history as a form of knowledge establishes "facts" that positivism so values. Further, positivists want to believe that science has no need of "absolute presuppositions" (only "propositions"); ergo, no metaphysics upon which to ground the inquiries of science. Collingwood sums up the positivist position

It [positivism] has developed into the following syllogism. ‘Any proposition which cannot be verified by appeal to observed facts is a pseudo-proposition. Metaphysical propositions cannot be verified by appeal to observed facts. Therefore metaphysical propositions are pseudo-propositions, and therefore nonsense.’ The argument has been set forth with admirable conciseness and lucidity by Mr. A. J. Ayer in his book Language Truth and Logic (1936).

The final section of the book deals with three provocative issues in metaphysics: the existence of God, Kant, and causation. While God and Kant have their respective merits as topics, as a lawyer, I found the discussion of causation the most compelling. The concept of causation is crucial in the law, especially in criminal law and torts. In torts, no action, either intentional or negligent, can create liability arising from the person's action (or inaction) unless the act (or inaction) causes harm to another. Much legal ink has been spilled on this topic of causation in the law. Terms like “causation-in-fact,” “legal causation,” and "proximate cause” are among the most dissected concepts in the field of tort law. Civil jury instructions in tort cases instruct jurors to determine whether a defendant's action caused the plaintiff the harm claimed. In other words, the idea of causation is not only a matter of concern to lawyers or philosophers but also to laypeople called to serve on a jury. As an example of a causation instruction, the following is the Iowa Uniform Civil Jury Instruction that defines “causation” in a tort case:

700.3 Cause - Defined. The conduct of a party is a cause of damage when the damage would not have happened except for the conduct.)

To begin his consideration of causation, Collingwood identifies three different senses of the word "cause" in English. Collingwood explores the earliest sense of the word and then the later variations based upon that original sense. In other words, he performs a historical analysis of the uses of the word. (In this, he seems to be adopting a form of inquiry conducted at length by Owen Barfield in his 1926 book, History in English Words.) The original use of the term cause in English according to Collingwood is what he labels “Sense I”:

Sense I. Here that which is ‘caused’ is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it.

This, too, is a familiar use of the word in the law. Lawyers speak of a client having a “cause of action;” for instance, in negligence or libel. In other words, a legal justification for bringing a lawsuit. Rounding out the senses of the term “cause,” are Collinwood’s descriptions of "sense II" and "sense III"

Sense II. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event in nature, and its ‘cause’ is an event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be.

Sense III. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event or state of things, and its ‘cause’ is another event or state of things standing to it in a one-one relation of causal priority: i.e. a relation of such a kind that (a) if the cause happens or exists the effect also must happen or exist, even if no further conditions are fulfilled, (b) the effect cannot happen or exist unless the cause happens or exists, (c) in some sense which remains to be defined, the cause is prior to the effect; for without such priority there would be no telling which is which. If C and E were connected merely by a one-one relation such as is described in the sentences (a) and (b) above, there would be no reason why C should be called the cause of E, and E the effect of C, rather than vice versa. But whether causal priority is temporal priority, or a special case of temporal priority, or priority of some other kind, is another question.

Sense III is the sense of cause that natural scientists adopted and that comes down to us today in many of the natural sciences. Needless to say, given the length of the description Collingwood must use to describe it, this last sense is the one that gives philosophers--and that should give scientists--pause. After laying out the three “senses” of the word “cause” in English (and Collingwood uses the word “senses”), Collingwood describes how the terms are used in the discipline of history. Collingwood writes

In sense I of the word ‘cause’ that which is caused is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it. For ‘causing’ we may substitute ‘making’, ‘inducing’, ‘persuading’, ‘urging’, ‘forcing’, ‘compelling’, according to differences in the kind of motive in question.

Collingwood goes on to supplement this understanding:

A cause in sense I is made up of two elements, a causa quod or efficient cause and a causa ut or final cause. The causa quod is a situation or state of things existing; the causa ut is a purpose or state of things to be brought about. Neither of these could be a cause if the other were absent.

It is clear in these quotes (and the intervening text) that Collingwood is emphasizing the human element in “cause;” the fact that human thought responds to a trigger and formulates a purpose or intention for acting—one might say a pull as opposed to a push (i.e., a simple stimulus and response, like Pavlov’s dogs or Skinner’s pigeons). Collingwood some time exploring “sense II” of causation, which I will pass over here, and he moves into “sense III,” which, to start, involves the dispute between the empiricists and the rationalists of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This long-established but divergent paths still provide a fertile source for thinking about causation. Collingwood also explores a work by Bertrand (“Earl”) Russell, which he admires and critiques. Out of this discourse, Collingwood observes

Causation in sense III is an anthropomorphic idea. Natural scientists have tried to use it as a weapon for attacking anthropomorphic conceptions of nature; but it has been a treacherous weapon. It has led them unawares to reaffirm the view they were attacking. And that may be why, in Earl Russell’s own words, ‘physics has ceased to look for causes’ (op. cit., p. 180).

He continues:

The idea of compulsion, as applied to events in nature, is derived from our experience of occasions on which we have compelled others to act in certain ways by placing them in situations (or calling their attention to the fact that they are in situations) of such a kind that only by so acting can they realize the intentions we know or rightly assume them to entertain: and conversely, occasions in which we have ourselves been thus compelled. Compulsion is an idea derived from our social experience, and applied in what is called a ‘metaphorical’ way not only to our relations with things in nature (sense II of the word ‘cause’) but also to the relations which these things have among themselves (sense III). Causal propositions in sense III are descriptions of relations between natural events in anthropomorphic terms.

History, the acts of humans, keeps creeping into efforts to abstract the human element from every conception of causation. Also, we have the unintentional but not less real fact that any current thinking comes loaded with conceptions received (or smuggled in) from the past. And "the past" has myriad ways of attempting to understand the world. Collingwood writes

The reason why we are in the habit of using these anthropomorphic terms is, of course, that they are traditional. Inquiry into the history of the tradition shows that it grew up in connexion with the same animistic theory of nature to which I referred in discussing sense II of the word ‘cause’, but that in this case the predominant factor was a theology of Neoplatonic inspiration.

Newton, according to Collingwood, adopts “cause” from this Western cultural heritage and seeks to make it fit with his newer ideas about “force” and “motion.” Then comes Kant, who attempts to gather and refine these existing senses of “cause;" i.e., those from empiricists, like Hume, and rationalists like Leibniz; and those of Bacon and Newton. Kant believed he had shaped these traditions into one coherent conception. But Collingwood argues that Kant wasn't successful. Collingwood sums up his criticism of Kant in this paragraph:

It does not follow that Kant was mistaken in thinking both statements [about logical necessity and temporal sequence] to be true. He was trying to state what people (himself included) meant when they spoke of causes. They meant to express a certain absolute presupposition [Collingwood’s term] which they habitually made in the course of their thinking about nature: the presupposition which is called the idea of causation. This presupposition was itself a constellation of presuppositions; and among the elements that went to compose it, if Kant is right, were these: that a cause and its effect are related by a necessary connexion, and that a cause and its effect are related by way of temporal sequence. The logical incompatibility of these two suppositions does not prove that they were not concurrently made; it only proves that, if they were concurrently made, the structure of the constellation that included them both was subject to severe strain, and that the entire fabric of the science based upon them was in a dangerously unstable condition.

This frame of thought continued through the nineteenth century and up to the time of Einstein. Yet, as Collingwood reveals in a representative sample of his contemporaries, many philosophers and natural scientists have not followed the lead of the physicists but have stuck with Kant’s problematic conception. Collingwood concludes his point

All these writers, it will be seen, attach themselves to some group or society of persons to whom they refer as ‘we’. I have ventured to italicize the word in my quotations. What is this group or society? It is the group or society of persons who accept the Kantian definition of the term ‘cause’. They are not, and do not include, contemporary natural scientists: for these, or at any rate those among them who are physicists, have abandoned the term. Nor do they include such philosophers as have, like Whitehead and Russell, understood and accepted the work which these physicists are doing. They are a group of neo-Kantians whose reverence for the master has induced them to accept not indeed all his doctrines but this particular doctrine. I say this because, the doctrine being a self-contradictory one, it can hardly have commended itself to them by its inherent reasonableness; nor can they have had for accepting it the same reason which I suppose Kant to have had, namely the fact that, self-contradictory or not, it was actually presupposed by contemporary physicists. It has somehow got itself fixed in their minds; presumably from their study of Kant. To quote the bitter words of Earl Russell: ‘The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’ (op. cit., p. 180).

Russell, like Collingwood, often displayed a sharp tongue and a gift for metaphor. 

Let me conclude this tour (I now regret the phrase “review;” I’m still not qualified) of Collingwood’s Essay with his concluding words, which address not only the current states of metaphysics and natural science but politics as well.

This movement [to maintain Kant’s conceptions about causality] may impede the advancement of science (and the advancement of science and the existence of science, I repeat, are not two things but one) in two different ways. Politically, by creating in the body politic a demand that scientific thinking should be put down by force. There are places where this is already happening. Academically, by creating in the specialized organs through which society endeavours to further science and learning a feeling of hostility to that furtherance. This feeling of hostility to science as such may be ‘rationalized’ through an obscurantist philosophy which by sophistical arguments pretends to prove that the advances which are actually being made are in fact no advances. Sophistical, because reactionary: based on the assumption that the superseded views are true, and thence proceeding to argue that the views which have superseded them must be false because they do not agree with the views they have superseded. The partisans of such an obscurantist philosophy are traitors to their academic calling. Within the body of persons ostensibly devoted to the advancement of science and learning they are working, unconsciously perhaps but still working, to obstruct that advancement and weaken the resistance with which that body is bound in honour to confront the onslaughts of irrationalism. . . . . Since metaphysics is an indispensable condition of science an enemy to metaphysics is an enemy to science, and a reactionary anti-metaphysician is an enemy to whatever in science is progressive. Trying with a clumsy hand to put back the clock of scientific progress, he stops it. This is my reason for offering to the public what might seem essentially an academic essay, suitable only for readers who are already, like myself, committed to an interest in metaphysics. The fate of European science and European civilization is at stake. The gravity of the peril lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and gown and fed at a college table; but cackling is my job, and cackle I will.

And cackle he has.

Mind, History, and Dialetic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood by Louis Mink

An overview of Collingwood's project

In this work, Louis Mink proves himself a sympathetic but not uncritical expositor of Collingwood's thought. Mink recognizes that Collingwood was a systematic thinker and that Collingwood was also economical in his writing–not often repeating contentions or arguments from book to book. And, of course, Collingwood’s thought developed over time. 

Mink identifies Speculum Mentis (1923) as the template of for Collingwood's later thinking, and he then reveals how RGC (Collingwood) alters and details that map in his later works. I’ve read all of RGC’s major works except Religion and Philosophy (1916), An Essay on Philosophical Method (1932), and An Essay on Metaphysics (1940). By having completed Mink's book, I've gained a greater sense of what I'm missing and how these works tie together in Collingwood's overall project. 

For instance, Mink clarifies Collingwood's ideas about "the logic of question and answer," which, as Mink demonstrates, is not a (propositional) logic at all, but a theory of inquiry. Mink also clarifies Collingwood's notion of "absolute presuppositions," another one of Collingwood's concepts that is often misunderstood and widely criticized, but that makes sense with Collingwood's larger scheme. Mink also addresses many of the sticking points found in The Idea of History (1946--posthumous publication). The way that Mink unpacks some the peculiarities of Collingwood's insights can save readers from the gamut of responses often suffered when reading and contemplating The Ideas of History initially. In my experience, these responses can run from thinking "unique" to "brilliant" to "really? to "dogmatic and arbitrary" to "nonsense!"--all concerning one concept or argument! Mink's efforts to place these ideas, such as "all history is the history of thought," in the context of Collingwood's entire opus allows the reader to (perhaps) return to the initial response of "unique" and "brilliant" that may well have been justified in the first place, Mink's effort may also spares us from suffering unjustified reams of critical complaints based on faulty assumptions. All of this is not to say that Mink isn't critical, but only that he makes sure that he's dug as deeply as possible to get at the fundamental insights that Collingwood has attempted to convey before he levels any criticism.  

One other point of value also worth adding is that Mink briefly explores similarities between Collingwood's thought and that of pragmatism and existentialism. Collingwood didn't directly address these contemporary philosophical schools, but Mink points out some striking similarities. For my part, I also see some intriguing similarities between Collingwood's thought and that of Hannah Arendt, herself a unique offspring of the German existentialist school of thought, especially regarding the topics of political action, the crisis of the 20th-century, and democracy. 

I’ve read only a couple of other book-length considerations of RGC’s work (one focused on The Ideas of History & the Fred Inglis biography, History Man), but Mink’s book has provided the most thorough and well-presented roadmap of Collingwood’s project as a whole that I can imagine anyone writing in a single, 268-page text.

"How the untimely death of RG Collingwood changed the course of philosophy forever" by Ray Monk: A note & link

A very recent appreciation of Collingwood by the biographer of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ray Monk. Monk posits that Collingwood and the later Wittgenstein were kindred philosophical spirits and that British philosophy would have taken a different course if Collingwood would not have died young and been replaced by Gilbert Ryle, a militant analytical philosopher who came to dominate British philosophy in the post-war period. A worthwhile appreciation of Collingwood as a person of diverse interests and an outstanding philosophical project. 

PROSPECTMAGAZINE.CO.UK

How the untimely death of RG Collingwood changed the course of philosophy forever

The passing of this eclectic and questioning man in his prime allowed the narrower and more imperious Gilbert Ryle to dominate British philosophy. Had Collingwood lived, could the deep and damaging schism with continental thought have been avoided?