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.