HST287: 16-Sept-2004 Reading Notes
Collingwood,
Idea of History
Parts I-IV
Collingwood’s construction of historical thought
“One of the main theses of Collingwood’s
philosophy of
history is the close relation between history a parte objecti,
the
historical process, and history a parte subjecti, the thought
of the
historian. . . The first states that all history should be seen as the
history
of thought and the second that history is essentially the re-enactment
of past
thought.” (p.
xxiv)
Introduction
- defining philosophy of history: philosophy
– thinking
about an object (first degree) and thinking about thinking about an
object
(second degree)
“In the Middle Ages the central problems of
thought were
concerned with theology…the relations of God and man. From the 16th to
the 19th
centuries the main effort of thought was concerned with laying the
foundations
of natural science, and philosophy took as its main theme the relation
of the
human mind as subject to the natural world of things around it in space
as
object.” (p.5)
Historical thought has an object with
peculiarities of its
own
- cannot be measured mathematically because the
events are
no longer happening
- cannot be apprehended theologically because they
are
finite and plural, not infinite
- not by science, which uses observations
and experiment
(duplication) (p. 5-6)
In the 19th cent. realized that these would not
apply to
historical thought
His plan: 1) build up an independent (of other
philosophies)
demonstration of how history is possible
2) work out the connections between this new
branch of
philosophy and old traditional doctrines
He says the book: “is a philosophical
inquiry into
the nature of history regarded as a special type or form of knowledge
with a
special type of object.”
Prime duty of the historian: “a willingness to
bestow
infinite pains on discovering what actually happened.” (p. 55)
2. History’s nature, object, method and value
To “do” history you must be qualified: more than a
superficial knowledge, more than outdated textbook knowledge. Also,
must have
“reflected” on experience of historical thinking (hence historiography
courses!)
a) definition of history: history is a science in
that it is
interesting in finding things out
b) object of history: to answer questions about
human
actions of the past
c) how does history proceed: by interpreting
documentary
evidence
d) what is history for: self-knowledge – knowing
yourself
and your possibilities
PING! c: who wrote the documents?
PING! d: individualism as reflected by
this statement
Occam’s razor: entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem.
plurality should not be assumed without necessity (KISS)
Part I:
Greco-Roman Historiography
The Summerian example is not history because it is
not an
answer to a question, are not the fruits of research, are
assertions of what
the writer already knows, and do not treat with human actions but
godly. It is theocratic
history.
Greeks: research into human actions in a dated
past (moving
right along)
Herodotus (5th century) coined the name history:
to find out
the deeds of man, what and why
Thucydides expands on this by saying explicitly
that human
inquiry rests on evidence (p. 20)
Herodotus was “a genius who was not repeated”
Thucydides
used Herodotus’ line of reasoning only to squash it… (p. 30)
Greeks in general: history is impossible because
it deals
with perceptions and things that change, not permanence (impact of
environment
on thought—they lived in a geologically and politically changing world)
History was useful as a way of determining the
likelihood of
future events so you could guard against them. (p. 24)
Their reliance on eyewitness and cross-examination
meant
that only accounts of recent past are reliable. Also, limited to that
which he
knows around him—can’t go investigate something from time or spatial
distance. And,
no all embracing history.
Hellenistic:
- barbarians can become Greek
- Alexander pulled many societies into one
- a world history could not be written from
eyewitnesses,
hence compilation
Polybius: “like all real historians [he] has a
definite
theme; he has a story to tell, …but he begins that story more than 150
years
before the time of writing.” (p. 33)
He thinks of himself as the first person to
“conceive of
history as such as a form of thought having universal value.” (p. 35)
Man is no longer master of his fate: don’t learn
history to
outwit fate, learn it to stand up to fate’s lashings. (p. 36)
(Romans: history means continuity with the past)
Livy: let’s write a complete history of Rome from
day one. And
only of Rome, because Rome is the world and the only good thing in it.
He
doesn’t make claims of good research (though he claims to be a good
writer). He
emphasizes his moral purpose, and humanism: history is the doings of
man. He
tries to be critical.
Tacitus is pragmatic, history is between good and
evil, his
goal to make a point
Greco-Roman history was humanistic, yes, but
defect is substantialism
“events are important chiefly for the light they throw on eternal or
substantial entities of which they are mere accidents.” (p. 43)
Greco-Roman/pagan/ancient man: “controlling his
actions and
creating his destiny by the work of his intellect” (p. 57)
For Polybius, Rome springs into life already formed
For Livy, Rome’s institutions and people don’t
evolve or change,
they are either good or bad
For Tacitus, a person is good or bad. If a bad
person does
good deeds it is only hypocrisy – they are conceling their true nature
So, for the Romans, history is only pragmatic, it
does not
show evolution or change, not what people are, only what they do.
Part II: The
Influence of Christianity
4th-5th centuries: Christianity jettisons
optimistic idea of
human nature and substantialistic idea of eternal entities
Medieval:
Big ideas:
1) human nature means acting on blind desire and
not knowing
outcome (original sin)
2) God creates, thus things have a beginning, not
“eternal
substance”
Thus, the effect on historiograohy
1) history is working out of God’s processes, not man’s
2) God created something from nothing, thus
“historical
process creates its own vehicles”
3) God created all equal, thus there is no local
history,
only world history
So,
History will describe providence, describe a
universal
history, will look for patterns, and will sub-divide into epochs.
Eusebius of Caesarea, 3rd/early4th, a Chronicle of
world
history showing birth of Christ in the center. A pattern of
apocalyptic
thinking: “The Day the World Changed”
Method: still based on uncritical reliance on
tradition. The
task is to discover the divine plan. The risk is to cast discoveries
forward to
try and foretell the future.
Renaisssance:
Return to humanistic view. “History thus became
the history
of human passions, regarded as necessary manifestations of human
nature.”
Bacon: not divine plan, not foreknowledge: history
for its
own sake, an accurate look at the past.
Descartes: we can’t know what really happened.
History is
escapist, not trustworthy, anti-utilitarian (they can’t really help us
know
ourselves) and fantasy-building (glorify the past).
Cartesian: latter half of 1600s – take Descartes’
ideas as a
challenge - Systematic skepticism and critical thought conclusion –
history is
undoable
Bollandists: rewrite lives of the saints and
dissect the
traditions; compare documentary evidence to archaeological evidence
Anti-cartesian:
Vico – early 18th – formulating the principles of
historical
method
1) periods of history have a general character
2) similar periods recur in order (pendulum)
3) not a circle – a spiral – not always exactly
the same
recurrences, so can’t foretell future
He defines 5 sources of error:
1) exaggeration
2) conceit of nations
3) conceit of learned (‘movers and shakers must
have been
historians and scholars’)
4) fallacy of sources, “when two nations have a
similar idea
or institution one must have learned it from the other” Not!
5) ancients knew more about times near their own
than do we
Some methods:
1) linguistics can throw light on history
2) so can mythology
3) traditions are true, just fractured
4) study savages now to learn about savages then
Locke:
1) knowledge comes through experience
2) knowledge “is concerned not with a reality
distinct from
our ideas but with the agreement and disagreement of our ideas
themselves” (p.
72)
3) all ideas are concrete
4) human knowledge may not reach absolute truth
but its “good
enough for gov’t woik”
Hume: yes, history is a legitimate and valid type
of
knowledge. Those who recorded it meant what we mean today (Caesar, ides
of
March) and those who handed it down did so in good faith, so we can
trust it
sort of.
Enlightenment: secularizing everything. Very
apocalyptic-type history. (Ex: the renaissance happened because
scholars were
expelled from Constantinople, i.e., no systematic look at evolution of
history)
motive: polemical and anti-historical: down with
religion,
only the moderns are interesting, institutions were created to oppress
the
masses
But at least they wrote from a position of asking
for
tolerance and view from the masses, not just a top-down approach. (p.
81)
Montesquieu: man is a part of nature, thus nature
determines
how society will develop. Human nature is a constant altered by his
environment
Gibbon: golden age replaced by triumph of
barbarism and
religion
All of them assume that human nature is forever
and always
the same, thus they could not think of historical process changing
people (or
producing different people, eg east/west) and it made Utopias seem
possible –
learn to get rid of all problems and true human nature will shine
through.
Part III: Romanticism
see positive value in other cultures BUT believes
in
evolution
On the past:
humanists despised Greco-Roman but accepted there
were some
classics
romanticists see past as worthy of study but less
evolved
Herder (1784): organisms develop higher organisms:
universe
– earth, earth – continents, vegetable life – animal life, animals –
human. Man
is the culmination. Man has race, thus human nature is not uniform.
(father of
anthropology: distinguishes different physical types, studies different
customs
as psychological expression of that physical difference)
So, still seeing a fixed character of man,
just of several
different kinds of man.
Kant (1784 – “reply” to Herder, who was his
student):
law of nature = plan of history, i.e. history
proceeds as if
it were governed by immutable phenomena
Problems:
a) treats nature as if it was some spiritual
reality
b) does not take into account effect of viewer on
history
(viewer is spectator only, not participant)
But he saw the study of history as the education
of the
human race to become more free and aware. Man is rational and so can
profit
from the knowledge of others. History is a progress towards rationality.
What force drives man to progress? pride,
ambition, greed
Kant: “Man desires concord; but nature knows better what is good for
his
species.”
Schiller
Improves on Kant – doesn’t place goal of progress
in future
but shows how aim of history is to explain present. Also, expands
beyond
political history to include art, religion, economics, etc.
Fichte:
agrees with Schiller: understand the present.
Every period
of history has a peculiar character of its own.
thesis – antithese – synthesis
blind freedom – authority – revolution so
governors are the
governed
individual has authority over self – objective
truth of
science – freedom of art
Collingwood thinks he got some things right:
1) We are people of our own place and cannot see
the future.
We have a point of view.
2)
Schelling:
The Absolute – history is the self-realization of
the
Absolute
Hegel:
1822-3. Philosophy of History
history is not just empirical – understand why the
facts
happened
Nature and history are different. Nature is
cyclical and is
a system of higher and lower organisms. History is spiral – there are
similar
repetitions but they are always different in some way. He does not
believe in
evolution (Collingwood faults him on this.)
History only applies to humans, that is, beings
that can
act. Also, all history is the history of thought. (Collingwood says:
“Hegel was
certainly right; it is not knowing what people did but understanding
what they
thought that is the proper definition of history.” p. 115) Man is both
rational
and passionate and both contribute to his actions (the cunning of
reason is to
make men passionate for its own ends). And it is logical—it always
works out to
its own ends.
Dialectical – thing, opposite, synthesis (Greece,
Rome, Christianity)
Croce says No! no opposites, just differences
Ideas exist and people can think them because they
are
there.
Marx:
It’s the economics, stupid!
He said: I turned Hegel on his head
Hegel: thought – nature – mind (logic determines
the pattern
on which nature works, nature only determines the environment in which
it
works)
He meant: nature is more than the environment, it
is the
source from which patterns are derived (primitive communism,
capitalism,
socialism). Historical events have natural causes (like the 18th cent.
guys
thought)
Positivism:
“philosophy acting in the service of natural
science” (p.
126)
Positivists definition of natural science;
ascertain facts,
frame laws
Comte demands sociologists: historians get the
facts,
sociologists think about them scientifically
Darwin: it’s not evolution that is the new idea,
but natural
selection
Before: history was progressive, science static
(exploring
fixed things)
Now, both were progressive: exploring things that
change(d)
Early 19th cent. historians were careful to test
evidence in
two ways:
1) distinguish between early and later bits of
documents
2) show how author’s point of view effected
statement of facts
Rules of method:
1) each fact can be ascertained on its own
2) each fact is objective—the historian point of
view must
be (can be?) eliminated
Problems:
1) too much minutiae – no overall view
2) “just the facts” means no thinking about how
the facts
effected historical people (“What did the ancients think about
slavery?” (p.
132)
because in history there is no “just the facts”
like in
science
Part IV:
Scientific History
England
Bradley:
End of 19th cent: “revolt against the philosophy
that which
claimed that science was the only kind of knowledge that existed or
ever could
exist…on the positive side this new movement of thought was an
attempt…to
vindicate history as a form of knowledge distinct from natural science
and yet
valid in its own right.” (p. 134)
Bradley also raises the question of the
subjectivity of the
historian on the observations he makes of history
Oakeshott:
experience includes sensation and judgement,
intuition and
cognition (primary and secondary?)
History is a whole, not isolated events (but the
question of
history has no answer, he says history is either dead past or only
present)
Toynbee:
life of a society is merely biological, history is
mere
spectacle
Germany:
Windelband: let historians alone!
Rickert:
“fails to see that the peculiarity of historical
thought is
the way in which the historian’s mind, as the mind of the present day,
apprehends the process by which this mind itself has come into
existence
through the mental development of the past. He fails to see that what
gives valueto
past facts is the fact that they are not mere past facts, they are not
a dead
past but a living past, a heritage of past thoughts which by the work
of his
historical consciousness the historian makes his own” (p. 169)
France
Bergson:
preserving the unknowable reverbrations of the
past into the
present
Italy:
Croce:
Art is the intuitive vision of individuality.
History is
only to narrate facts. It is the intuition and representation of the
indivisual.
Logic 1909: universal truth is true only as
realized in a
particular instance.
Natural science is action
Autonomy of history, necessity of history:
history is the self-knowledge fo the living mind.
history is not just collecting/transcribing: it
must include
criticism, interpretation, and reliving the past experience in one’s
own mind.
Questions - Observations - Musings
1) The work is deceptively lucid. Collingwood
describes a
progression (indeed he sometimes faults past historians for not seeing
history
as a progression) through various periods of historical thought.
However, in
the section on ‘Scientific History’ he says “…the early sponsors of
these new
ideas did their work under the shadow of positivism, and…had great
difficulty
in disentangling themselves from the positivist point of view. If they
succeeded in overcoming this difficulty at certain points of their
thought,
they relapsed into positivism at others.” (p. 134) This ‘confusion’ and
overlapping of historical ideas, events, thoughts, and periods seems a
more
realistic (or rather, a more recent) view of an idea of history than
Collingwood’s tidy categories. However, it is probably unfair to fault
his work
on what is, probably, a post-modernist, thus historically prejudiced
itself,
judgment.
(Actually, the work resonates with themes and
ideas that
have been carried through and developed later in the century, after the
usual
anti-immediate-past skipping of a generation. Has it been republished
and
referred to so often because it resonates, or does it resonate because
it has
been republished? hmmm…the old dilemma…)
2) Collingwood makes several direct statements
about what
history “is.” For example, : “Hegel was certainly right; it is not
knowing what
people did but understanding what they thought that is the proper
definition of
history” (p. 115) He also condemns past writers of history for failing
to
exhibit the characteristics that he describes in the section ‘History’s
nature,
object, method and value’: history is a science in that it is
interesting in
finding things out, its object is to answer questions about human
actions of
the past, it is done by interpreting documentary evidence, and its
purpose is
for self-knowledge – knowing yourself and your possibilities. And
“Genuine
history has no room for the merely probable or the merely possible; all
it
permits the historian to assert is what evidence before him obliges him
to
assert.” (p. 204) Unfortunately, it would seem that he is postulating a
historiography of exclusion. Obviously a theory of history that
included
everything would be unwieldy to the point of uselessness, but one is
left to
wonder how (or if) inclusion of other historical writers would alter
his
definitions, and how the historian’s choice of evidence directly
effects what
he is ‘obliged to assert.’
3) Not only does he construct a clear view of what
he
believes history is, he suggests certain characteristics of the
Historian (a
very 19th/20th century individual-centric one at that). For example, he
calls
the prime duty of the historian “a willingness to bestow infinite pains
on
discovering what actually happened.” (p. 55) and says of Polybius “like
all
real historians [he] has a definite theme; he has a story to tell” (p.
33)
Also, to “do” history he states that you must be qualified: that is,
have more
than a superficial knowledge, more than outdated textbook knowledge.
And you
must have “reflected” on the experience of historical thinking. (p.
9-10) His
Historian seems firmly grounded in the academic world. While this is
probably a
Good Thing in that it does set a certain standard for the work of
historians,
it does automatically limit what could be a rich mine of other writing
that
could be called historical (or people who pursue history) but that
would not
necessarily have made its way into the academic world. I’m thinking
specifically here about Nina Baym’s recovery of the work of women
writers who
wrote about history during the American antebellum period. Again, it’s
about
recognizing and accounting for exclusion…
And an observation with no particular purpose
beyond
amusement…
At the risk of falling victim to a “Vico-ism” by
positing
that history repeats itself in spiral form (that is, similar events
recur,
though in forms changed by their new historical setting) it is hard not
to
recognize some of his historical categories in works published today.
Specifically, I’m reminded of the favorite apocalyptic form of history
that
results in books with titles like “The Day the World Changed,” “Ten
Events that
Shook the World” etc. (Indeed, anticipating and defining apocalyptic
moments
has become something of an industry in the technology world where
people race
to claim “the next killer app” or “the year of the blog, the year of
wireless
networking…”!)
Resources:
"History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood's
Idea of History."
(Letters in Canada 2000)_(book review) Michael Stack.
University
of Toronto Quarterly Winter 2001
v71 i1 p321(3)
Canadian Journal of History,
April
1997 v32 n1
p145(3)
History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood's
Idea of History.
(book reviews) Joseph M. Levine.
"Better for philosopher’s than
historians”
Collingwood
believed that the doctrine of reenactment could not readily be
understood by
anyone who had not done it” p. 146
History as Re-Enactment. (Review)_(book
reviews)
Lionel Rubinoff.
Dialogue:
Canadian
Philosophical
Review Summer 1999 v38 i3 p679(5)
On History and Philosophers of History.
(book
reviews) Alan Donagan.
History
and Theory
Feb 1991 v30 n1 p90(6)
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