After reading Collingwood's Autobiography, I started
and am in the midst of James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character about Hillman’s
acorn theory of individuals. (To be reviewed after I finish it.) One of the
first items he considers in his review of biographical material from a variety
of individuals is this quote from Collingwood’s An Autobiography.
My father had plenty of books, and … 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.” … 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.… 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.
Hillman, James (2013-02-06). The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Kindle
Locations 270-280). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, quoting
Collingwood, An Autobiography, 3-4
Hillman uses this quote to
illustrate his contention that each of has a daimon or genius to which we are
called. But it serves as well to locate the subject of the autobiography and
the path he will take. This nerdy, precocious, and rather quiet child became a
man who looks as if he could have been a chartered accountant during the
inter-war period, or at best, a model for Hercule Poirot. (You'd know that Poirot isn't at all a demeaning
model if you read The Idea of History.) But Collingwood's appearance belies his high-voltage thinking. Collingwood was, by his
own admission, a lone wolf even as he rose to the prominence of an endowed
chair in philosophy at Oxford. He had no fellow combatants as he challenged the
linguistic and analytic philosophers that ruled British philosophy in this time, men
like Moore, Russell, Ryle, and Wittgenstein (early version), and their acolytes. And, as Collingwood
laments in his book, although his thinking is quite different from the British
Idealists who preceded him, he did not fit into the idealist tent either. But because he’d rejected the contemporary realist
camp (which taught him in pre-WWI Oxford), having tried it and found it wanting, he was therefore dubbed an ‘Idealist’ and
shunted aside by the unknowing. One of the interesting aspects of this book, which is really a
history—would Collingwood approve of my use of the word ‘history’ here?—of Collingwood’s
intellectual development. He writes very respectfully and without any personal
venom (Russell perhaps excepted) about forbearers and contemporaries of all
stripes, and then he cuts them to intellectual ribbons. This unassuming
appearing man wielded an intellectual switchblade.
What makes this book compelling is
not just the intellectual firepower, the incisive prose, or the pithy aphorisms,
but the fact that this was a man on fire. He was on fire with profound new
ideas. And he was on fire because he knew that death was chasing him,
threatening to cut him down before he made his ideas as widely knownas they should be. The history of this
book tells us a good deal. It was “written at top speed in the late summer of
1938” according to biographer Fred Inglis. (Inglis, Fred (2009-07-06). History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood
(p. 217). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.) Collingwood had already
suffered minor strokes, and he’d realized that he was headed to an early death,
which he suffered in January 1943, just short of his fifty-fourth birthday. Collingwood wanted to
get his ideas out, and he disliked the idea of leaving the problems of
publication to an executor, as he notes in his Autobiography. In fact, Collingwood’s best-known work, The Idea of History, was published
posthumously under the direction of his literary executor, his former student
T.M. Knox. This effort proved problematic, as Collingwood suspected it
would. Some of Knox’s choices are hard to defend now, including his
undervaluation of Collingwood’s late works, like An Autobiography and The New
Leviathan.
Under these time constraints,
Collingwood also wanted to make sure that he contributed to the struggle in the
wider world, especially against fascism. As his autobiography makes clear,
Collingwood wanted not only to think
about the world and history, he wanted to change
the world and the way that we consider and use history. While some of his ideas
about the nature of fascism seem dated, and his failure to address the
ravages of totalitarian communism seems naïve or negligent, the reader does perceive
that this is someone who knows that the world has gone badly awry. He is
deeply critical of some fellow philosophers, many of whom spin theories more
and more abstracted from the outside world. He also lays into the politicians
that created the Treaty of Versailles that made such a mess of the post-war
world. When this seemingly mild-mannered, mild-looking man looks askance at a
person or practice, he can take on the visage of a fire-breathing dragon.
If you’re a Collingwood fan, or you simply want to read more about how one man saw the world and philosophy from about
1910 to 1938 and how he grew within that period, then this is an excellent
book. And if you want to see an A+ philosopher at work, one who bucked the
trends and got a great deal right, then this book is for you.
As I intend to write more about
Collingwood in the future, I won’t write more here, but I’ll share a selection
of quotes from his book. There’s so much here to ponder: applaud, question, and
build upon, but that’s for a later time. Read a bit here and there, and I think
that you’ll get a sense of this underappreciated man.
All quotes from of Collingwood, R.
G. An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd.
Kindle Edition. Following each quote is its Kindle location:
[The natural sciences have a history
of their own, and . . . the doctrines they teach on any given subject, at any
given time, have been reached not by some discoverer penetrating to the truth
after ages of error, but by the gradual modification of doctrines previously
held; and will at some future date, unless thinking stops, be themselves no
less modified. 64
Here I was only rediscovering
for myself, in the practice of historical research, principles which Bacon and
Descartes had stated, three hundred years earlier, in connexion [sic] with the
natural sciences. Each of them had said very plainly that knowledge comes only
by answering questions, and that these questions must be the right questions
and asked in the right order. And I had often read the works in which they said
it; but I did not understand them until I had found the same thing out for
myself. 321
The questioning activity, as I
called it, was not an activity of achieving compresence with, or apprehension
of, something; it was not preliminary to the act of knowing; it was one half (the
other half being answering the question) of an act which in its totality was
knowing. 335
I therefore taught my pupils,
more by example than by precept, that they must never accept any criticism of
anybody’s philosophy which they might hear or read without satisfying
themselves by first-hand study that this was the philosophy he actually
expounded; that they must always defer any criticism of their own until they
were absolutely sure they understood the text they were criticizing; and that
if the postponement was sine die it did not greatly matter. 343
My plan was to concentrate on
the question, ‘What is Aristotle saying and what does he mean by it?’ and to
forgo, however alluring it might be, the further question ‘Is it true?’ 351
My work in archaeology, as I
have said, impressed upon me the importance of the ‘questioning activity’ in
knowledge: and this made it impossible for me to rest contented with the
intuitionist theory of knowledge favoured by the ‘realists’. 381
They were the classical
expressions of a principle in logic which I found it necessary to restate: the
principle that a body of knowledge consists not of ‘propositions’,
‘statements’, ‘judgements’, or whatever name logicians use in order to
designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts is asserted: for
‘knowledge’ means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but of these
together with the questions they are meant to answer; and that a logic in which
the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic. 386
I began by observing that you
cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written
statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of
language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his meaning you
must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed
by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as
an answer. It must be understood that question and answer, as I conceived them,
were strictly correlative. 396
The current logic maintained
that two propositions might, simply as propositions, contradict one another,
and that by examining them simply as propositions you could find out whether
they did so or not. This I denied. If you cannot tell what a proposition means
unless you know what question it is meant to answer, you will mistake its
meaning if you make a mistake about that question. 414
No two propositions, I saw, can
contradict one another unless they are answers to the same question. 417
Meaning, agreement and
contradiction, truth and falsehood, none of these belonged to propositions in
their own right, propositions by themselves; they belonged only to propositions
as the answers to questions: each proposition answering a question strictly
correlative to itself. 421
There have always been people
who saw that the true ‘unit of thought’ was not the proposition but something
more complex in which the proposition served as answer to a question. Not only
Bacon and Descartes, but Plato and Kant, come to mind as examples. When Plato
described thinking as a ‘dialogue of the soul with itself’, he meant (as we
know from his own dialogues) that it was a process of question and answer, and
that of these two elements the primacy belongs to the questioning activity, the
Socrates within us. 435
For a logic of propositions I
wanted to substitute what I called a logic of question and answer. It seemed to
me that truth, if that meant the kind of thing which I was accustomed to pursue
in my ordinary work as a philosopher or historian—truth in the sense in which a
philosophical theory or an historical narrative is called true, which seemed to
me the proper sense of the word—was something that belonged not to any single
proposition, nor even, as the coherence-theorists maintained, to a complex of
propositions taken together; but to a complex consisting of questions and
answers. 456
By ‘right’ I do not mean
‘true’. The ‘right’ answer to a question is the answer which enables us to get
ahead with the process of questioning and answering. 465
What is ordinarily meant when a
proposition is called ‘true’, I thought, was this: (a) the proposition belongs
to a question-and-answer complex which as a whole is ‘true’ in the proper sense
of the word; (b) within this complex it is an answer to a certain question; (c)
the question is what we ordinarily call a sensible or intelligent question, not
a silly one, or in my terminology it ‘arises’; (d) the proposition is the
‘right’ answer to that question. 472
[T]he question ‘To what
question did So-and-so intend this proposition for an answer?’ is an historical
question, and therefore cannot be settled except by historical methods. When
So-and-so wrote in a distant past, it is generally a very difficult one,
because writers (at any rate good writers) always write for their
contemporaries, and in particular for those who are ‘likely to be interested’,
which means those who are already asking the question to which an answer is
being offered; and consequently a writer very seldom explains what the question
is that he is trying to answer. Later on, when he has become a ‘classic’ and
his contemporaries are all long dead, the question has been forgotten;
especially if the answer he gave was generally acknowledged to be the right
answer; for in that case people stopped asking the question, and began asking
the question that next arose. 484
For example, metaphysicians
have been heard to say ‘the world is both one and many’; and critics have not
been wanting who were stupid enough to accuse them of contradicting themselves,
on the abstractly logical ground that ‘the world is one’ and ‘the world is
many’ are mutually contradictory propositions. A great deal of the popular
dislike of metaphysics is based on grounds of this sort, and is ultimately due
to critics who, as we say, did not know what the men they criticized were
talking about; that is, did not know what questions their talk was intended to
answer; but, with the ordinary malevolence of the idle against the industrious,
the ignorant against the learned, the fool against the wise man, wished to have
it believed that they were talking nonsense. 498
[P]hilosophy, from the days of Socrates down
to our own lifetime, had been regarded as an attempt to think out more clearly
the issues involved in conduct, for the sake of acting better. 571
[I urged my students to take] this
subject [moral philosophy] seriously, because whether you understand it or not
will make a difference to your whole lives’. The ‘realist’, on the contrary,
said to his pupils, ‘If it interests you to study this, do so; but don’t think
it will be of any use to you. Remember the great principle of realism, that
nothing is affected by being known. That is as true of human action as of
anything else. Moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action: it can’t
therefore make any difference to the practice of moral action. People can act
just as morally without it as with it. I stand here as a moral philosopher; I
will try to tell you what acting morally is, but don’t expect me to tell you
how to do it.’ 582
The inference which any pupil
could draw for himself [from the realists] was that for guidance in the
problems of life, since one must not seek it from thinkers or from thinking,
from ideals or from principles, one must look to people who were not thinkers
(but fools), to processes that were not thinking (but passion), to aims that
were not ideals (but caprices), and to rules that were not principles (but
rules of expediency). If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of
Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential dupes of every
adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or religion, who should appeal to
their emotions and promise them private gains which he neither could procure
them nor even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could have been
discovered. 590
The school of [T.H.] Green had
taught that philosophy was not a preserve for professional philosophers, but
every one’s business; and the pupils of this school had gradually formed a
block of opinion in the country whose members, though not professional
philosophers, were interested in the subject, regarded it as important, and did
not feel themselves debarred by their amateur status from expressing their own
opinions about it. As these men died, no one took their place; and by about
1920 I found myself asking, ‘Why is it that nowadays no Oxford man, unless he
is either about 70 years old or else a teacher of philosophy at Oxford or
elsewhere, regards philosophy as anything but a futile parlour game?’ The
answer was not difficult to find, and was confirmed by the fact that the
‘realists’, unlike the school of Green, did think philosophy a preserve for
professional philosophers, and were loud in their contempt of philosophical
utterances by historians, natural scientists, theologians, and other amateurs. 607
They [the realists] were proud
to have excogitated a philosophy so pure from the sordid taint of utility that
they could lay their hands on their hearts and say it was no use at all; a
philosophy so scientific that no one whose life was not a life of pure research
could appreciate it, and so abstruse that only a whole-time student, and a very
clever man at that, could understand it. They were quite resigned to the
contempt of fools and amateurs. If anybody differed from them on these points,
it could only be because his intellect was weak or his motives bad. 617
In logic I am a revolutionary;
and like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They
clarify the issue. 634
So far as my philosophical
ideas were concerned, I was now cut off not only from the ‘realist’ school to
which most of my colleagues belonged, but from every other school of thought in
England, I might almost say in the world. 637
Viva voce [discussing] philosophy is an excellent thing as between
tutor and pupil; it may be valuable as between two intimate friends; it is
tolerable as between a few friends who know each other very well; but in all
these cases its only value is to make one party acquainted with the views of
the other. Where it becomes argument, directed to refutation and conviction, it
is useless, for (in my long experience, at least) no one has ever been
convinced by it. Where it becomes general discussion it is an outrage. One of
the company reads a paper, and the rest discuss it with a fluency directly
proportional to their ignorance. To shine on such occasions one should have a
rather obtuse, insensitive mind and a ready tongue. Whatever may be true of
parrots, philosophers who cannot talk probably think the more, and those who
think a lot certainly talk the less. 647
[A]ccording to my own ‘logic of question and
answer’, a philosopher’s doctrines are his answers to certain questions he has
asked himself, and no one who does not understand what the questions are can
hope to understand the doctrines. The same logic committed me to the view that
any one can understand any philosopher’s doctrines if he can grasp the
questions which they are intended to answer. Those questions need not be his
own; they may belong to a thought-complex very different from any that is
spontaneously going on in his own mind; but this ought not to prevent him from
understanding them and judging whether the persons interested in them are
answering them rightly or wrongly. 658
I found it not only a
delightful task, but a magnificent exercise, to follow the work of contemporary
philosophers whose views differed widely from my own, to write essays
developing their positions and applying them to topics they had not dealt with,
to reconstruct their problems in my own mind, and to study, often with the
liveliest admiration, the way in which they had tried to solve them. This power
of enjoying and admiring the work of other philosophers, no matter how widely
their philosophies differed from mine, was not always pleasing to my
colleagues. 680
History did not mean knowing
what events followed what. It meant getting inside other people’s heads,
looking at their situation through their eyes, and thinking for yourself
whether the way in which they tackled it was the right way. 693
‘[R]ealists’ thought that the
problems with which philosophy is concerned were unchanging. They thought that
Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Schoolmen, the Cartesians,
&c., had all asked themselves the same set of questions, and had given
different answers to them. 699
Plato’s πóλις and Hobbes’s
absolutist State are related by a traceable historical process, whereby one has
turned into the other; any one who ignores that process, denies the difference
between them, and argues that where Plato’s political theory contradicts
Hobbes’s one of them must be wrong, is saying the thing that is not. 741
[T]he history of political
theory is not the history of different answers given to one and the same
question, but the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose
solution was changing with it. 744
[M]etaphysics (as its very name
might show, though people still use the word as if it had been ‘paraphysics’)
is no futile attempt at knowing what lies beyond the limits of experience, but
is primarily at any given time an attempt to discover what the people of that
time believe about the world’s general nature; such beliefs being the
presuppositions of all their ‘physics’, that is, their inquiries into its
detail.
. . . . Secondarily, it is the attempt
to discover the corresponding presuppositions of other peoples and other times,
and to follow the historical process by which one set of presuppositions has
turned into another. 782-786
[T]he beliefs whose history the
metaphysician has to study are not answers to questions but only
presuppositions of questions, and therefore the distinction between what is
true and what is false does not apply to them, but only the distinction between
what is presupposed and what is not presupposed. . . . [the] presupposition of one question may be the answer to another
question. The beliefs which a metaphysician tries to study and codify are presuppositions
of the questions asked by natural scientists, but are not answers to any
questions at all. This might be expressed by calling them ‘absolute’
presuppositions. 791-793
[T]he alleged distinction
between the historical question and the philosophical must be false, because it
presupposes the permanence of philosophical problems. 817
For me, then, there were not
two separate sets of questions to be asked, one historical and one
philosophical, about a given passage in a given philosophical author.
There was one set only,
historical. 851-852
[Supposed criticisms of a
philosopher] taught me a second [lesson], namely, ‘reconstruct the problem’;
or, ‘never think you understand any statement made by a philosopher until you
have decided, with the utmost possible accuracy, what the question is to which
he means it for an answer’. 882
For in the history of
philosophy, as in every other kind, nothing capable of being learnt by heart,
nothing capable of being memorized, is history. 894
Nature was no longer a Sphinx
asking man riddles; it was man that did the asking, and Nature, now, that he
put to the torture until she gave him the answer to his questions. 926
[The] chief business of
twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history. 934
[I] had learnt by first-hand experience that
history is not an affair of scissors and paste, but is much more like Bacon’s
notion of science. The historian has to decide exactly what it is that he wants
to know; and if there is no authority to tell him, as in fact (one learns in
time) there never is, he has to find a piece of land or something that has got
the answer hidden in it, and get the answer out by fair means or foul. 959
In this sense, knowledge
advances by proceeding not ‘from the known to the unknown’, but from the
‘unknown’ to the ‘known’. Obscure subjects, by forcing us to think harder and
more systematically, sharpen our wits and thus enable us to dispel the fog of
prejudice and superstition in which our minds are often wrapped when we think
about what is familiar to us. 1014
[It] was a commonplace, though
a concealed one, that all ‘scientific’ knowledge in this way involves an
historical element; and it was clear to me that any philosopher who offered a
theory of ‘scientific method’, without being in a position to offer a theory of
historical method, was defrauding his public by supporting his world on an
elephant and hoping that nobody would ask what kept the elephant up. 1024
[It] seemed to me as nearly
certain as anything in the future could be, that historical thought, whose
constantly increasing importance had been one of the most striking features of
the nineteenth century, would increase in importance far more rapidly during
the twentieth; and that we might very well be standing on the threshold of an
age in which history would be as important for the world as natural science had
been between 1600 and 1900. 1031
A war [WWI] had just ended in
which the destruction of life, the annihilation of property, and the
disappointment of hopes for a peaceable and well-ordered international society,
had surpassed all previous standards. What was worse, the intensity of the
struggle seemed to have undermined, as if by the sheer force of the explosives
it consumed, the moral energies of all the combatants; so that (I write as one
who during the latter part of the war was employed in preparations for the
peace conference) a war of unprecedented ferocity closed in a peace-settlement
of unprecedented folly, in which statesmanship, even purely selfish
statesmanship, was overwhelmed by the meanest and most idiotic passions. We had
been warned some time ago, by Norman Angell, that in modern war there would be
no victors in the sense that no party could be enriched by it; but we now
learned that in another sense too there were no victors: no party whose morale
rose superior to it; no group of statesmen who, by the end of it, had not
become a mob of imbeciles, capable only of throwing away all the opportunities
their soldiers had won them. 1044
The War was an unprecedented
triumph for natural science. Bacon had promised that knowledge would be power,
and power it was: power to destroy the bodies and souls of men more rapidly
than had ever been done by human agency before. This triumph paved the way to
other triumphs: improvements in transport, in sanitation, in surgery, medicine,
and psychiatry, in commerce and industry, and, above all, in preparations for
the next war. 1052
It happened because a situation
got out of hand. As it went on, the situation got more and more out of hand.
When the peace treaty was signed, it was more out of hand than ever. 1057
The contrast between the
success of modern European minds in controlling almost any situation in which
the elements are physical bodies and the forces physical forces, and their
inability to control situations in which the elements are human beings and the
forces mental forces, left an indelible mark on the memory of every one who was
concerned in it. 1059
[F]or sheer ineptitude the
Versailles treaty surpassed previous treaties as much as for sheer technical
excellence the equipment of twentieth-century armies surpassed those of
previous armies. 1062
[It] seemed almost as if man’s
power to control ‘Nature’ had been increasing pari passu with a decrease in his
power to control human affairs. . . . [I]t was a plain fact that the
gigantic increase since about 1600 in his power to control Nature had not been
accompanied by a corresponding increase, or anything like it, in his power to
control human situations.
1063-1065
Not only would any failure to
control human affairs result in more and more widespread destruction as natural
science added triumph to triumph, but the consequences would tend more and more
to the destruction of whatever was good and reasonable in the civilized world;
for the evil would always begin using the engines of destruction before the
good, the fool always before the wise man. I seemed to see the reign of natural
science, within no very long time, converting Europe into a wilderness of
Yahoos. 1068
[A]ny attempt to bring ethics within the field
of psychology (and attempts of that kind had been made often enough), or to do
the same with politics, would necessarily and always result in failure. 1093
Was it possible that men should
come to a better understanding of human affairs by studying history? Was
history the thing which in future might play a part in civilized life analogous
to that of natural science in the past? Obviously not, if history was only a
scissors-and-paste affair. 1115
[An] historian cannot answer
questions about the past unless he has evidence about it. His evidence, if he
‘has’ it, must be something existing here and now in his present world. If
there were a past event which had left no trace of any kind in the present
world, it would be a past event for which now there was no evidence, and
nobody—no historian; I say nothing of other, perhaps more highly gifted,
persons—could know anything about it. 1124
In general terms, the modern
historian can study the Middle Ages, in the way in which he actually does study
them, only because they are not dead. By that I mean not that their writings
and so forth are still in existence as material objects, but that their ways of
thinking are still in existence as ways in which people still think. The
survival need not be continuous. 1135
By about 1920 this was my first
principle of a philosophy of history: that the past which an historian studies
is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the
present. 1138
[H]istory is concerned not with
‘events’ but with ‘processes’; that ‘processes’ are things which do not begin
and end but turn into one another; and that if a process P1 turns into a
process P2, there is no dividing line at which P1 stops and P2 begins; P1 never
stops, it goes on in the changed form P2, and P2 never begins, it has
previously been going on in the earlier form P1. 1139
There are in history no
beginnings and no endings. History books begin and end, but the events they
describe do not. 1143
The old pragmatic idea of
history was futile because its idea of history was the scissors-and-paste idea
in which the past is a dead past, and knowing about it means only knowing what
the authorities say about it. And that knowledge is useless as a guide to
action; because, since history never exactly repeats itself, the problem before
me now is never sufficiently like the problem described by my authorities to
justify me in repeating the solution which then succeeded, or avoiding that
which then failed. 1165
[S]uppose the past lives on in
the present; suppose, though incapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden
beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still
alive and active; then the historian may very well be related to the
non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. 1169
The historian’s business is to
reveal the less obvious features hidden from a careless eye in the present
situation. What history can bring to moral and political life is a trained eye
for the situation in which one has to act. 1173
[I]f ready-made rules for
dealing with situations of specific types are what you want, natural science is
the kind of thing which can provide them. The reason why the civilization of
1600–1900, based upon natural science, found bankruptcy staring it in the face
was because, in its passion for ready-made rules, it had neglected to develop
that kind of insight which alone could tell it what rules to apply, not in a
situation of a specific type, but in the situation in which it actually found
itself. It was precisely because history offered us something altogether
different from rules, namely insight, that it could afford us the help we
needed in diagnosing our moral and political problems. 1182
[T]here are situations which,
for one reason or another, can be handled without appeal to any ready-made
rules at all, so long as you have insight into them. All you need in such cases
is to see what the situation is, and you can then extemporize a way of dealing
with it which will prove satisfactory. 1189
When I speak of action, I shall
be referring to that kind of action in which the agent does what he does not
because he is in a certain situation, but because he knows or believes himself
to be in a certain situation. 1192
I shall not be referring to any
kind of action which arises as a mere response to stimuli which the situation
may contain, or as the mere effect of the agent’s nature or disposition or
temporary state. And when I speak of action according to rule, I shall be
referring to that kind of action in which the agent, knowing or believing that
there is a certain rule, applicable to the situation in which he knows or
believes himself to be, decides to act in accordance with it. . . . I shall not be referring to any
kind of action in which the agent, though actually obeying a rule, is unaware
that he is doing so. 1194;
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Rules of conduct kept action at
a low potential, because they involved a certain blindness to the realities of
the situation. If action was to be raised to a higher potential, the agent must
open his eyes wider and see more clearly the situation in which he was acting.
If the function of history was to inform people about the past, where the past
was understood as a dead past, it could do very little towards helping them to act;
but if its function was to inform them about the present, in so far as the
past, its ostensible subject-matter, was incapsulated in the present and
constituted a part of it not at once obvious to the untrained eye, then history
stood in the closest possible relation to practical life. 1237
[Chapter title] HISTORY AS THE
SELF-KNOWLEDGE OF MIND 1248
History and pseudo-history
alike consisted of narratives: but in history these were narratives of
purposive activity, and the evidence for them consisted of relics they had left
behind (books or potsherds, the principle was the same) which became evidence
precisely to the extent to which the historian conceived them in terms of
purpose, that is, understood what they were for; in pseudo-history there is no
conception of purpose, there are only relics of various kinds, differing among
themselves in such ways that they have to be interpreted as relics of different
pasts which can be arranged on a time-scale. 1276
‘[A]ll history is the history of thought.’ You
are thinking historically, I meant, when you say about anything, ‘I see what
the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed this, &c.) was
thinking.’ Until you can say that, you may be trying to think historically but
you are not succeeding. And there is nothing else except thought that can be
the object of historical knowledge. 1281
Political history is the
history of political thought: not ‘political theory’, but the thought which
occupies the mind of a man engaged in political work: the formation of a
policy, the planning of means to execute it, the attempt to carry it into
effect, the discovery that others are hostile to it, the devising of ways to
overcome their hostility, and so forth. 1284
Consider how the historian
describes a famous speech. He does not concern himself with any sensuous
elements in it such as the pitch of the statesman’s voice, the hardness of the
benches, the deafness of the old gentleman in the third row: he concentrates
his attention on what the man was trying to say (the thought, that is,
expressed in his words) and how his audience received it (the thoughts in their
minds, and how these conditioned the impact upon them of the statesman’s
thought). 1286
On what conditions was it
possible to know the history of a thought? First, the thought must be
expressed: either in what we call language, or in one of the many other forms
of expressive activity. 1292
Secondly, the historian must be
able to think over again for himself the thought whose expression he is trying
to interpret. 1295
I will not offer to help a
reader who replies, ‘ah, you are making it easy for yourself by taking an
example where history really is the history of thought; you couldn’t explain
the history of a battle or a political campaign in that way.’ I could, and so
could you, Reader, if you tried. 1302
This gave me a second
proposition: ‘historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind
of the thought whose history he is studying.’ 1305
‘Historical knowledge is the re-enactment of a
past thought in-capsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by
contradicting it, confine it to a plane different from theirs.’ 1328
Every historical problem
ultimately arises out of ‘real’ life.1331
In the kind of history that I
am thinking of, the kind I have been practising all my life, historical
problems arise out of practical problems. We study history in order to see more
clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act. Hence the plane
on which, ultimately, all problems arise is the plane of ‘real’ life: that to
which they are referred for their solution is history. 1333
In knowing that somebody else
thought it, he knows that he himself is able to think it. And finding out what
he is able to do is finding out what kind of a man he is. If he is able to
understand, by rethinking them, the thoughts of a great many different kinds of
people, it follows that he must be a great many kinds of man. He must be, in fact,
a microcosm of all the history he can know. Thus his own self-knowledge is at
the same time his knowledge of the world of human affairs. 1338
[T]he question that had haunted
me ever since the War. How could we construct a science of human affairs, so to
call it, from which men could learn to deal with human situations as skillfully
[sic] as natural science had taught them to deal with situations in the world
of Nature? . . . . [The] answer was now clear and
certain. The science of human affairs was history.
1342;1344
[T]he revolution in historical
method which had superseded scissors-and-paste history by what I called history
proper had swept away these sham sciences and had brought into existence a
genuine, actual, visibly and rapidly progressing form of knowledge which now
for the first time was putting man in a position to obey the oracular precept
‘know thyself’, and to reap the benefits that only such obedience could confer. 1353
[A] second principle was that,
since history proper is the history of thought, there are no mere ‘events’ in
history: what is miscalled an ‘event’ is really an action, and expresses some
thought (intention, purpose) of its agent; the historian’s business is therefore
to identify this thought. 1478
[The] third principle was that
no historical problem should be studied without studying what I called its
second-order history; that is, the history of historical thought about it. 1526
Just as philosophical criticism
resolved itself into the history of philosophy, so historical criticism
resolved itself into the history of history. 1533
[N]o historian is entitled to
draw cheques in his own favour on evidence that he does not possess, however
lively his hopes that it may hereafter be discovered. He must argue from the
evidence he has, or stop arguing. 1600
If you want to know why a
certain kind of thing happened in a certain kind of case, you must begin by
asking, ‘What did you expect?’ You must consider what the normal development is
in cases of that kind. Only then, if the thing that happened in this case was
exceptional, should you try to explain it by appeal to exceptional conditions. 1618
[The] opposite of this dogma
seemed to me not only a truth, but a truth which, for the sake of his integrity
and efficacy as a moral agent in the wider sense of that term, ought to be
familiar to every human being: namely, that in his capacity as a moral,
political, or economic agent he lives not in a world of ‘hard facts’ to which
‘thoughts’ make no difference, but in a world of ‘thoughts’; that if you change
the moral, political, and economic ‘theories’ generally accepted by the society
in which he lives, you change the character of his world; and that if you
change his own ‘theories’ you change his relation to that world; so that in
either case you change the ways in which he acts. 1698
It could be admitted that the
way in which a man acts, in so far as he is a moral, political, economic agent,
is not independent of the way in which he thinks of the situation in which he
finds himself. . . . If knowledge as to the facts of
one’s situation is called historical knowledge, historical knowledge is
necessary to action. But it could still be argued that philosophical thinking,
which has to do with timeless ‘universals’, is not necessary.
1704-1706
My notion was that one and the
same action, which as action pure and simple was a ‘moral’ action, was also a
‘political’ action as action relative to a rule, and at the same time an
‘economic’ action as means to an end. . . . There were, I held, no merely moral actions, no merely political
actions, and no merely economic actions. Every action was moral, political, and economic.
1715; 1720-1721
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The rapprochement between
theory and practice was equally incomplete. I no longer thought of them as
mutually independent: I saw that the relation between them was one of intimate
and mutual dependence, thought depending upon what the thinker learned by
experience in action, action depending upon how he thought of himself and the
world; I knew very well, too, that scientific, historical, or philosophical
thinking depended quite as much on ‘moral’ qualities as on ‘intellectual’ ones,
and that ‘moral’ difficulties were to be overcome not by ‘moral’ force alone
but by clear thinking. 1728
I did not see that my attempted
reconstruction of moral philosophy would remain incomplete so long as my habits
were based on the vulgar division of men into thinkers and men of action. 1733
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. 1742
The whole system [electoral
democracy], 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. 1786
Then came the Daily Mail, the
first English newspaper for which the word ‘news’ lost its old meaning of facts
which a reader ought to know if he was to vote intelligently, and acquired the
new meaning of facts, or fictions, which it might amuse him to read. By reading
such a paper, he was no longer teaching himself to vote. He was teaching
himself not to vote; for he was teaching himself to think of ‘the news’ not as
the situation in which he was to act, but as a mere spectacle for idle moments. 1791
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. 1926
