An Essay on Philosophical Method by R. G. Collingwood

Kindle edition

Usually after finishing a book, or at least one that I’ve found compelling (and assuming I’m not overpowered by busyness or laziness), I write a review of the book. But in this case, I’m not going to. Not because Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933) isn’t compelling; it most certainly is compelling. Rather, I don’t believe I’m up to the task. I often read books far above my paygrade (it’s not that hard for an author to reach that level), but I can usually convince myself that I have something worthwhile to add to the conversation started by the book. But EPM is a philosophy book of a high-order, and the insights that I received from it came by way of lightning flashes rather than guideposts from which I could readily recreate my path through Collingwood’s arguments. I’m not a philosopher, and I had only one course from the philosophy department as an undergraduate and that was a course entitled “Philosophy of History.” It was in that course that I would have been first introduced to Collingwood, and I ignored him. Then, after about 40 years, via the serendipity of an Oxford University Press bookstore near our apartment in Jaipur (India), I came across an inexpensive and tantalizing copy of Collingwood’s most famous book, The Idea of History. Thus, most of my encounter with philosophy (and Collingwood) has come through either the lens of history or politics and law. When it comes to logic, ontology and metaphysics, morality and ethics, and epistemology, I’m a rank amateur. None the less, I sometimes get a great deal of pleasure from jumping into the deep end of the pool, even as I tend to flail around and eventually sink.

For those who may want a review, there are plenty to be found (including a couple on Goodreads). This edition that I read includes an exchange of correspondence between Collingwood and his eventual successor as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle. Gilbert wrote a critical review of EPM in the journal Mind, and Collingwood replied via letter. Reading this exchange between these two reminded me that I’m no philosopher, at least not at that level. (“Cracker-barrel” probably best denotes my rank.) But I did get something out of the exchange: Collingwood gave at least as good as he got in this duel of logic and metaphysics with Ryle. Collingwood is the supposed “idealist” (a designation made by Ryle that Collingwood roundly rejects) and Ryle the “analytic” philosopher, but Collingwood suffers no disadvantage that I could discern in his mastery of logic and analysis. And while I’m not in qualified to score the rounds on logic and analysis, I can say that the exchange reinforces my appreciation of Collingwood as a superb English prose stylist. And, to add spice to his prose, he can prove quite cheeky. Perhaps this is what so riled Ryle.

In fact, the one part of EPM that I believe myself most competent to comprehend and appreciate was the final section, entitled “Philosophy as a Branch of Literature.” In this section, as the title suggests. Collingwood, for all the logic and analysis of the earlier part of the book, makes a compelling case for philosophy as a branch of literature. Please grant me leave to quote at length from Collingwood to allow him to make his point and to help me prove mine about Collingwood as a stylist:

The [philosophical] matter does not exist as a naked but fully formed thought in our minds before we fit it with a garment of words. It is only in some dark and half-conscious way that we know our thoughts before we come to express them. Yet in that obscure fashion they are already within us; and, rising into full consciousness as we find the words to utter them, it is they that determine the words, not vice versa.. . . . 

Prose and poetry are philosophically distinct species of a genus; consequently they overlap. Literary excellence, which is the means to an end in prose and the sole end or essence of poetry, is the same thing in both cases.. . . . 

[M]any of the greatest philosophers, especially those who by common consent sent have written well in addition to thinking well, have used nothing that can be called a technical vocabulary. Berkeley has none; Plato none, if consistency of usage is a test; Descartes none, except when he uses a technical term to point a reference to the thoughts of others; and where a great philosopher like Kant seems to revel in them, it is by no means agreed that his thought gains proportionately in precision and intelligibility, or that the stylist in him is equal to the philosopher.. . . . 

It has sometimes been maintained that all language consists of sounds taken at pleasure to serve as marks for certain thoughts or things: which would amount to saying that it consists of technical terms. But since a technical term implies a definition, it is impossible that all words should be technical terms, for if they were we could never understand their definitions. The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it; and a technical term, in so far as it calls for explanation, is to that extent not language but something else which resembles language in being significant, but differs from it in not being expressive or self-explanatory.. . . . 

The duty of the philosopher as a writer is therefore fore to avoid the technical vocabulary proper to science, and to choose his words according to the rules of literature. His terminology must have that expressiveness, that flexibility, that dependence upon context, which are the hall-marks of a literary use of words as opposed to a technical use of symbols.
A corresponding duty rests with the reader of philosophical literature, who must remember that he is reading a language and not a symbolism.. . . . 

Common to all these literary forms is the notion of philosophical writing as essentially a confession, a search by the mind for its own failings and an attempt to remedy them by recognizing them.. . . . 

A philosophical work, if it must be called a poem, is not a mere poem, but a poem of the intellect. What is expressed in it is not emotions, desires, feelings, as such, but those which a thinking mind experiences in its search for knowledge; and it expresses these only because the experience of them is an integral part of the search, and that search is thought itself.. . . . 

[P]hilosophy represents the point at which prose comes nearest to being poetry. Owing to the unique intimacy of the relation between the philosophical writer among prose writers and his reader, a relation which elsewhere exists only in fine art or in the wide sense of that word poetry, there is a constant tendency for philosophy as a literary genre to overlap with poetry along their common frontier.. . . . 

[T]he philosopher must go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, and must use it in their way: as a means of exploring one's own mind, and bringing to light what is obscure and doubtful in it. This, as the poets know, implies skill in metaphor and simile, readiness to find new meanings in old words, ability in case of need to invent new words and phrases which shall be understood as soon as they are heard, and briefly a disposition to improvise and create, to treat language as something not fixed and rigid but infinitely flexible and full of life.

. . . .  

The prose-writer's writer's art is an art that must conceal itself, and produce not a jewel that is looked at for its own beauty but a crystal in whose depths the thought can be seen without distortion or confusion; and the philosophical writer in especial follows the trade not of a jeweler but of a lens-grinder. He must never use metaphors or imagery in such a way that they attract tract to themselves the attention due to his thought; if he does that he is writing not prose, but, whether well or ill, poetry; but he must avoid this not by rejecting all use of metaphors and imagery, but by using them, poetic things themselves, in the domestication of prose: using them just so far as to reveal thought, and no farther.
 

R. G. Collingwood. An Essay on Philosophical Method. Kindle Edition.

Please excuse my extended quotation of Collingwood above, but I hope it demonstrates the quality of his prose and that he practices what he preaches. In fact, as I’ve strung together these quotes, I’ve reached the self-realization that my complaint at the beginning of the review--or rather, appreciation--that Collingwood’s work here was too far out of my league to review is a poor excuse for what is, in fact, some laziness on my part. I could follow much of what Collingwood argued and having done so, I know that if I want to—if I put in a modicum of further effort—I can go deeper with him. (I will, however, note that he does tend to drop Latin phrases in his text and to include quotes in the original ancient Greek, French, and German, which can be annoying to someone as pedestrian in languages as I am.)

I was first drawn to Collingwood for his work about history and how we should understand it and pursue it. While doing this, I discovered that he was also a political thinker for dark times (and so I believe connected in spirit with Hannah Arendt, among others), and then discovered that he has compelling ideas about art, feelings and emotions, morality, and consciousness. So, I will continue my journey, and I look forward to returning to EPM.