柯林武德
Alan Saunders: Yes. Now when we're talking about re-enactment, we're not talking about Civil War enthusiasts in the US getting dressed up as Ulysses S. Grant's troops, we're talking about trying to re-enact the thought that an agent had in performing an action. First of all, why do we do it? Why is that the way in which we proceed, and what's the alternative? And secondly, how do we do it?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Look, he would have been horrified at the idea of people dressing up in fields, he would have expressed outrage I'm sure. Why we do it, is because Collingwood believes that in understanding the thoughts of others, it's perhaps easier to uncover their absolute presuppositions than it is our own, it's less ticklish to do that. But when we do understand other people's presuppositions, we begin to realise that maybe the grounds on which we stand are also moving, and so why we do it is ultimately to understand ourselves a lot better. So history is really about understanding yourself.
And how we do it, well this is the really big debate. Now Collingwood didn't believe minds that they were privacies at all, he believed that re-enactment was a moment in which we share the same, the very same thought, and what he meant by that was we don't share the same thought in terms of numerical or spatial identity, but we share the same concept, and the concept has the same meaning for both of us. And so it's a conceptual view of re-enactment that he holds, that if you use the word 'ouch', and I use the word 'ouch', then we probably have a reasonably good understanding together of the word 'ouch', and so I understand what you're saying.
Now to get his point across he uses a couple of interesting examples. In 1912 he says Imagine that somebody plays a note on a harp, and then stops playing and then starts playing again. When they play it the second time, is it the same note? And most people say Yes, of course it is the same note. And then later on in 1935, he says, 'I write an equation, and then I write it again two years later? Is it still the same equation?' and most people would say Yes, it's the same equation, same letter, same sound. He's saying Well why can't the person who lived 200 years ago and the person today have the same thought, along the same lines? It's a really interesting analogy to get to that conclusion, and I guess a lot of philosophers would say Oh gosh, that's not a very complex way of thinking about things, but for the time it's a really interesting way of thinking about it and one that's led me to really respect and explore the connections between Collingwood's thinking and Wittgenstein's thinking at the same time. There's this kind of understanding that language is really a key in historical understanding, and shared languages, and the rules of language are really key for what history is.
Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking to Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University about the 20th century English philosopher, R.G. Collingwood.
Now thinking more about Collingwood's idea of re-enactment. Suppose I'm thinking about the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. Now Wellington won the battle, and I'm prepared to take a punt and say that that's what he intended to do, that winning the battle was what he wanted to be the outcome. But that doesn't get me very far, does it? So what sort of questions should I be asking?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: We should be thinking about historical evidence as language, and he uses that phrase in The Principles of History, 'I the historian, read this evidence as saying X ...' Now a good historian, he says, not only uses re-enactment, but a good historian is never held hostage to what the historical agent would lead him to believe. So if we took Wellington saying his intention is to win X and Y, an historian not only understands the thought of Wellington, but is critical about that and says, OK, my mind is not entirely taken over by the mind of Wellington here, what I do is I critically and autonomously reflect upon his actions, consider the other evidence, and I work out that he thought about it one way, but actually I think about it quite another way. And this is really interesting, because I remember in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a lot of debate in Britain about the role of empathy and re-enactment in the national curriculum and there were huge debates at the time, people saying, 'Oh, you can't have children re-enacting in history classrooms, because they'll be taken over by the mind of Stalin, and they'll be taken over by the mind of Hitler.' And Collingwood made it quite clear that that's not what a re-enactment is, it's not a form of possession at all, it's always a critical consideration of the presuppositions of another person. It always incorporates our kind of self-reflection upon your own view of what's going on. So we're not held hostage to what that person at that moment thinks. We have a wider view of what's going on.
Alan Saunders: Although it is interesting if you ask yourself what happens if you re-enact the thought of say, a Stalin, you can't really think of Stalin's thought in terms of intention and consequences. There's an element of the irrational in what Stalin got up to. How do we handle irrationality on the part of agents, which is a big thing in history?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Yes indeed, and that was a big criticism made about Collingwood at the time. Toynbee thought that Collingwood was too rationalist when he published his writing, and similarly people have criticised him for excluding the emotions. Now what's interesting is if you'd only looked at what he wrote about re-enactment in The Idea of History, that's what you'd conclude, but when The Principles of History was found in the 1990s and published, Collingwood made it quite clear that he viewed the emotions and even irrationality, as something that we could, in theory perhaps, incorporate into re-enactment. Emotions I think it works well, I think he had quite a conceptual view of the emotions, and he viewed them as rational, so he could accommodate that. On irrationality I think it's more difficult for him, but he doesn't rule it out at all. He's actually quite Crocean in that sense.
Alan Saunders: This is Benedetto Croce the great Italian philosopher.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Right. He translated Benedetto Croce's book What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, and Croce always maintained that in a concept or an idea, there was, even if it was ugliness for instance, there was always a tiny speck of beauty, even in ugliness, and I think Collingwood was influenced by that. So even if someone was acting irrationally, there was always a little speck of rationality in there. And he's such an optimist, he thought that maybe he could grab hold of that and use that as an opportunity to get an understanding of what Stalin was perhaps up to. But he would need to use all these other forms of evidence to really get a good understanding of what was going on.
Alan Saunders: Let's turn to an example of his encounter with something that at first sight he could not understand, and this comes from the autobiography, the Albert Memorial in London, this great Victorian monument which he passes every day, and he finds indescribably ugly. And this has interesting philosophical consequences for him, because it leads him towards his theory of question and answer. How could anybody have created something as ugly as this? What was he trying to do? That's the question to ask.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Yes, now the logic of question and answer is a really interesting feature of Collingwood's thought, because a lot of people talk about it quite separately as a kind of philosophical technique, that it's a little tool that you use, and analytical philosophers like to view Collingwood in that way. But I think the example that you've given is a better way of thinking about Collingwood's own understanding, that this tool, this technique was something that was put to work in order to understand something that appeared not to be understandable, something so horrific, so alien from what he was thinking, in order to get out the presupposition. So the logic of question and answer is that we ask this chain of questions, we follow the answers, and in a way, they, this technique allows us to drive down and identify the presuppositions that are shaping what's going on there.
Now the Albert Memorial is a nice example, I can contrast it with an unpublished paper that he wrote on the Gramophone; the evils of the gramophone. He just was outright horrified that people would reproduce music mechanically, that it would never be as beautiful as the original, and yet in this other example, later on in his life, he's beginning to put the pieces together and say, 'Actually this is maybe the place where the historian's work is most needed, when we find, when we encounter things that are so strange to us, we have the best opportunity to understand ourselves a little better, and other people too.'
Alan Saunders: So if we think in terms of question and answer, we ask what is this site that we're digging in? It looks like a fort, why is there a fort here?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Exactly. That's a nice example. Another little one he gives in The Principle of Histories 'I find a triangular piece of clay on the ground, it's got a hole in it. I pick it up, I as an historian look at the object, I read it and I begin to think, "It's a loom-weight", and I wonder what's a loom-weight doing in the ground when there are these other objects here, and why would a loom-weight be here? What activities are people engaging in? Who's engaging in those activities? So there's an endless chain of questions that's leading me back to understand not only the economic activities that are going on, but also the ways in which people are thinking about the world'. That's ultimately what he's looking for, is how are people understanding the world at that time? All from the basis of a little triangular piece of clay.
Alan Saunders: The history of philosophy, certainly in England in the 20th century, we begin I suppose with the logical endeavours of Bertrand Russell. We then have a bit of input from Vienna, we have the logical positivists for whom the natural sciences are really where the important action is. And then we have linguistic philosophy in the second half of the century, looking at the ideas presupposed in our language. That world looks very differently, does it, if you look at it through the eyes of Collingwood, whose focus is far more historical than any of these people's focus?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Indeed, he wrote one of the little things in The Principles of
History that's most amusing to read, is a little satirical piece called 'Philosophy in Lugardo'. It's a kind of take on Gulliver's Travels where he travels to this little island and there's a group of philosophers who are talking about the idea of beauty and things like that, and what they're doing is, they're measuring physically the idea of beauty by their weight and by their head-size and all of this, and what he's driving at is that these approaches to philosophy miss the point, horribly. He thinks it's right that philosophy at that time described itself as scientific, and that for him is a first-order way of thinking about the world, it's not philosophy, it is scientific activity and it really gloriously misses the point, and if we want to understand the world, we have to move beyond kind of analytical approaches to philosophy and the kind of positive approaches to philosophy as well.
What's really interesting is that of course a lot of commentators after Collingwood's death, read him analytically, and in a fact lament that Collingwood wasn't better analytically. If he'd only just got his concept clear, he would have been a better philosopher, and I think, Well no, that's not I think the way he was trying to approach things, it was a different way of viewing things, yes.
Alan Saunders: Marnie Hughes-Warrington. And to hear us again, you can go to our website, which is also the place to go for our archive, every 'Zone' since 2006.
The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, with technical production by Charlie McKune. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be back next week with another Philosopher's Zone.
2 比尔德 伦敦书评
In February 1938, R. G. Collingwood, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and aged only 48, suffered a small stroke. It was the first of a series, each one more serious than the last, that would kill him within five years. The usual treatment in the 1930s was less effective than modern medical intervention but rather more enjoyable. His doctors recommended a prolonged period of leave from his job, lengthy walks and sea cruises. He was also encouraged to continue writing: even if teaching was deemed bad for the blood vessels, research was supposed to be good for them.
Signing off from Oxford for a year, he immediately bought a small yacht in which he planned to sail, single-handed, across the Channel and around Europe (hardly a leisured cruise perhaps, but relying on the same basic principle that sea air was restorative). Disaster struck. Just a few days into the voyage, he was rescued from a terrible storm by the Deal lifeboat and towed to shore. He set off again but soon suffered another stroke, which he seems to have weathered by anchoring the yacht far out to sea and lying in his bunk until the headache eased and his normal movement returned. By the time he reached dry land again, he had already started writing his autobiography.
After a few months convalescing in his family home in the Lake District, he had finished the autobiography: an outspoken, sometimes boastful little volume, which ended with an unguarded attack on some of the Oxford philosophers ‘of my youth’ as ‘propagandists of a coming Fascism’. The University Press had to overcome a few qualms, and insisted on some revisions, before publishing it the following year. In the meantime, Collingwood had embarked on another journey, this time on a Dutch vessel bound for the Far East. It was onboard this ship, where the captain rigged up an open-air study for him on the bridge, that he began his Essay on Metaphysics, finishing the first draft in a hotel in Jakarta. On the way home, he edited out some of the most offensive passages of the autobiography, while also writing substantial chunks of what he called his ‘masterpiece’: a book that was to be known as The Principles of History.
He stayed in Oxford barely a couple of months after his return. According to his own scarcely credible story (which Fred Inglis appears to take at face value in his new biography), he was accosted by an unknown American student outside Thornton’s bookshop on Broad Street and invited to sail with him and his student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the journey, The First Mate’s Log, appeared from OUP.
This frenetic activity was not typical of Collingwood’s life up to that point. True, he was always an insomniac workaholic, but he had lived undemonstratively, and at a decidedly more gentlemanly, donnish pace. If his career had been at all unusual, it was because of his two parallel, but at first sight quite distinct research and teaching interests: on the one hand, philosophy; on the other, Roman history and archaeology – especially the archaeology of Roman Britain. In fact, before he was elected to the Waynflete chair in 1935, he had held a curious hybrid post, as university lecturer in philosophy and Roman history. Much of his time was spent working on his own peculiar brand of idealist philosophy – increasingly old-fashioned as it must have seemed by the mid-1930s to those who were starting to listen to A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin. The summers he devoted to digging, and to transcribing, recording and drawing Roman inscriptions (from tombstones to milestones), in preparation for a complete collection of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain – a project on which he worked for almost all his academic life. Before 1938, he had published some important studies in Romano-British archaeology and had made one or two notable contributions to academic philosophy. But as Stefan Collini observes in his chapter on Collingwood in Absent Minds, if he had died in 1938 from his first stroke, his work would probably have earned ‘only a small footnote in the more conscientious surveys of 20th-century British philosophy and academic scholarship’ (and, one might add, he would have been thought rather lucky to win the Waynflete chair). It is the work that appeared after the stroke that made his name.
In fact, the pace of his activity – in both his personal and his professional life – increased yet further when in 1941 he became convinced, rightly, that he had very little time left to live. In January he finally resigned from his university chair. Then, with the recklessness of the dying, he divorced his wife and married his mistress, Kate, a former student turned actress, 20 years younger than himself (Inglis reasonably wonders whether all his foreign travel in the late 1930s was driven less by a spirit of adventure and a confidence in the healthy properties of sea air, more by a desire to escape from his complicated domestic affairs). Kate gave birth to their child in December 1941, and Collingwood died in the Lake District in early 1943, increasingly paralysed by further severe strokes. But that was not before he had finished another book, The New Leviathan; or Man, Society, Civilisation and Barbarism, which appeared in 1942. As the title more than hints, it was an uncompromising, sometimes truculent attempt to muster Hobbesian political philosophy in the fight against Fascism – ‘his contribution to the war’, as Inglis sees it. It also included some frankly ‘batty’ attacks, as even admirers such as Inglis concede, on some of his increasingly favoured targets – among them, the educational system whose great beneficiary he had been. Late Collingwood was a passionate advocate of home-schooling, and believed that one of Plato’s biggest crimes was to have ‘planted on the European world the crazy idea that education ought to be professionalised.’
Apart from the Autobiography, with its sometimes tactless, sometimes engaging assertions of the relevance of philosophy to modern politics, his most influential works weren’t published in these final few years but later, after his death, and in some cases long after. His most famous book of all, The Idea of History, with its now familiar attacks on what he called the ‘scissors and paste’ method of historical inquiry, and its defence of history as always a ‘history of the mind’, was published in 1946, compiled posthumously from various surviving manuscript sources by his ex-pupil and literary executor, Malcolm Knox. It has only recently become clear quite how partial Knox’s compilation was – omitting, for example, or toning down much of Collingwood’s critique of Hegel.
There was even more to come over the next half-century. His most lasting contribution to Romano-British studies was the 800-page compendium of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain. This project had been inaugurated by Francis Haverfield before World War One. After the first chosen editor fell in action in the Dardanelles in 1915 Collingwood was selected as his successor and worked on the book, on and off, mostly during the summer vacations, until 1941 – when he passed the material over to his junior editor, R.P. Wright. It finally appeared in 1965, with Collingwood and Wright as joint authors (the latter admitting, plaintively or accusingly, in the preface that ‘the writing of the text took longer than I had been led to expect’). Thirty years after that, The Principles of History, the ‘masterpiece’ that Collingwood started on the trip to the Far East but never finished, finally saw the light of day. It had been believed lost, possibly destroyed after Knox had gutted it in preparing The Idea. But in 1995 two sharp-eyed archivists found the manuscript, hidden away at OUP. It was published in 1999, more than 50 years after his death.
Inglis’s History Man is an enthusiastic appreciation. Unusually for the biography of an academic, it is particularly revealing about Collingwood’s childhood in the Lake District, where his father, W.G. Collingwood, was secretary to the elderly Ruskin, where the sons and grandsons of William Wordsworth were still prominent in the local community, and where Arthur Ransome was a frequent visitor to the Collingwood family home. Inglis, in fact, hazards a guess that R.G. was the inspiration for the elder brother, John Walker, in Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. True or not, it reminds us that when Collingwood set out, single-handed, on his ill-fated voyage into the English Channel in 1938, he had a lifetime of risky sailing experiences behind him. Inglis is rather less surefooted on Collingwood’s life and experiences at Oxford, and trots out many popular clichés about the eccentrically conservative world of the ancient universities between the wars, from the Brideshead circle of the upper-class undergraduates to the buttoned-up, waspish and for the most part bachelor dons. It is impossible not to suspect that Collingwood was getting rather more out of the intellectual air of 1920s and 1930s Oxford than Inglis is prepared to concede. As well as the revolutions in philosophy that were underway, it was the time that Roman history was being rethought (and repoliticised) by Ronald Syme, whose famous Roman Revolution appeared in 1939.
For all the engaging enthusiasm of the book, two important questions about Collingwood’s achievements and his academic profile remain only half convincingly answered. First, how important is The Idea of History, the posthumous book which remains his most famous work? Second, what was the connection, if any, between the two academic sides of his career, the Romano-British archaeology and the philosophy? What, in other words, does the Roman Inscriptions of Britain have to do with The Idea of History, let alone the Essay on Metaphysics?
The Idea of History has had some very distinguished supporters. By his own account, it was the book that inspired Quentin Skinner at the start of his own historical career – and Skinner of course went on to give his own distinctive spin to Collingwood’s slogan about all history being a ‘history of the mind’. And, if only in the absence of much competition (it is a classic, as Collini has observed, ‘in a field not over-supplied with classics written in English’), it used to be the theoretical standby of undergraduates reading history at university, or of sixth-formers wanting to do so. It still appears on general bibliographies and is warmly recommended to their pupils by ambitious schoolteachers (though when, a few years ago, I asked a group of about 50 third-year students studying history in Cambridge whether any of them had read it, not a single one put up their hand). The problem in judging it now is that its big claims seem fairly uncontentious. In part, no doubt, that is a tribute to the book’s popular success. But in part also those claims were never particularly original in the first place, and were expounded in such a way that it would be difficult to disagree. After all, who could possibly claim, in Collingwood’s terms, to prefer ‘scissors and paste’ history to the ‘question and answer’ style of history that he advocated? Could anyone object to the idea that part of the point of studying history was to help us see (as Inglis puts it) ‘how we might think and feel otherwise than as we do’?
Rereading The Idea of History after some 30 years or so, I found myself less impressed than I had been as a student, or at least more counter-suggestible. His image of the mindless, unquestioning narration of ‘scissors and paste’ history, and of generations of historians being content merely to stick one source after another, now seems very largely a self-serving myth. It did not require the birth of narratology or the return to fashion of ‘grand narrative’, to realise that historical narration is always selective and always posing questions about the evidence. No history – not even the most austere chronicle – has ever been as unquestioning as Collingwood paints his imaginary methodological enemy. Maybe also his ‘question and answer’ method is not as self-evidently productive as he claimed, and certainly not in that practical branch of history known as archaeology. In the Autobiography he is vitriolic about those antiquarians, following in the tradition of Pitt-Rivers, who excavated sites out of mere curiosity (the excavations at the Roman town of Silchester were his particular target). The best archaeologists, by contrast, ‘never dug a trench without knowing exactly what information they were looking for’. But this is to ignore the equally important fact that some questions blind the investigator to the wider potential, to the surprises, of their material. Some of the best history, no less than the best archaeology, is curiosity-driven and opportunistic – rather than outcome-driven, as Collingwood and his unlikely descendants in the Arts and Humanities Research Council and other government funding bodies like to imagine.
What finally are we to make of the relationship between the two sides of Collingwood’s academic career, the philosophy and archaeology-cum-history? Collingwood himself recognised the problem, with his constant calls for a ‘rapprochement’ between the two. Where he explicitly ranks his different activities, he puts the philosophy first, characterising the archaeological activity more as a practical application of his ideas about the philosophy of history. After all, despite his hybrid lectureship, he went on to become the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, not the Camden Professor of Ancient History. Most studies of his career have followed this ranking, giving much more weight to his philosophical activity and sometimes relegating the archaeology to a summer hobby. But this must partly be because the writers in question have been philosophers and cultural historians, whose grip on the ancient world and on Collingwood’s importance in the study of antiquity has been fragile to say the least. Inglis is a particularly woeful culprit here. He does not seem aware of the importance of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain; he confuses Virgil’s Eclogues with his Georgics; he imagines that Res Gestae (the Latin for ‘achievements’ used by Collingwood) has something to do with ‘gesture’; and he claims that Alcinous, after whom the boat on which Collingwood sailed to the Far East was named, was the ‘mother of Ulysses’ lover Nausicaa’ (wrong on two counts: Alcinous was Nausicaa’s father and she and Ulysses were not lovers, at least not in Homer’s version). Even Collini manages to stumble over the title of the journal in which many of Collingwood’s major archaeological articles appeared: it was (and still is) the Journal of Roman Studies, not the Journal of Roman History.
As so often, things look rather different if you approach them from a classical standpoint. Collingwood himself may have chosen not to reflect on the influence of his formal education; he became more concerned to attack the whole history of professional pedagogy as far back as Plato. But it is surely crucial that he was a product of the old Oxford ‘Greats’ (that is, classics) course, which focused the last two and a half years of a student’s work on the parallel study of ancient history on the one hand, and ancient and modern philosophy on the other. Most students were much better at one side than the other, and most stories tell of the desperate attempts by would-be ancient historians to cram enough Plato, Descartes and Hume to get their high-flying pass in the final exams (or alternatively of desperate attempts by would-be philosophers to remember enough of the Peloponnesian War or Agricola’s campaigns in Britain to do the same). In the context of Greats, Collingwood was not a maverick with two incompatible interests. Given the educational aims of the course, he was a rare success, even if something of a quirky overachiever; his combination of interests was exactly what Greats was designed to promote.
To put that another way, Collingwood was not simply – as Inglis and others would imply – a philosopher with an archaeological hobby. We might better see him as an unusually successful product of a distinctive Oxford version of classics that is now no more (Greats was ‘reformed’ decades ago). It should come as no surprise that the last voyage he made, with that group of students, was a trip to Greece, and that he went – as he put it in The First Mate’s Log – ‘not so much a tourist as a pilgrim’ to Delphi, where Socrates had travelled two and a half thousand years earlier. ‘If a man looks to Socrates as his prophet,’ he wrote, ‘the journey to Delphi is the journey to his Mecca.’ That is the credo of a Greats-man.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Look, he would have been horrified at the idea of people dressing up in fields, he would have expressed outrage I'm sure. Why we do it, is because Collingwood believes that in understanding the thoughts of others, it's perhaps easier to uncover their absolute presuppositions than it is our own, it's less ticklish to do that. But when we do understand other people's presuppositions, we begin to realise that maybe the grounds on which we stand are also moving, and so why we do it is ultimately to understand ourselves a lot better. So history is really about understanding yourself.
And how we do it, well this is the really big debate. Now Collingwood didn't believe minds that they were privacies at all, he believed that re-enactment was a moment in which we share the same, the very same thought, and what he meant by that was we don't share the same thought in terms of numerical or spatial identity, but we share the same concept, and the concept has the same meaning for both of us. And so it's a conceptual view of re-enactment that he holds, that if you use the word 'ouch', and I use the word 'ouch', then we probably have a reasonably good understanding together of the word 'ouch', and so I understand what you're saying.
Now to get his point across he uses a couple of interesting examples. In 1912 he says Imagine that somebody plays a note on a harp, and then stops playing and then starts playing again. When they play it the second time, is it the same note? And most people say Yes, of course it is the same note. And then later on in 1935, he says, 'I write an equation, and then I write it again two years later? Is it still the same equation?' and most people would say Yes, it's the same equation, same letter, same sound. He's saying Well why can't the person who lived 200 years ago and the person today have the same thought, along the same lines? It's a really interesting analogy to get to that conclusion, and I guess a lot of philosophers would say Oh gosh, that's not a very complex way of thinking about things, but for the time it's a really interesting way of thinking about it and one that's led me to really respect and explore the connections between Collingwood's thinking and Wittgenstein's thinking at the same time. There's this kind of understanding that language is really a key in historical understanding, and shared languages, and the rules of language are really key for what history is.
Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking to Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University about the 20th century English philosopher, R.G. Collingwood.
Now thinking more about Collingwood's idea of re-enactment. Suppose I'm thinking about the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. Now Wellington won the battle, and I'm prepared to take a punt and say that that's what he intended to do, that winning the battle was what he wanted to be the outcome. But that doesn't get me very far, does it? So what sort of questions should I be asking?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: We should be thinking about historical evidence as language, and he uses that phrase in The Principles of History, 'I the historian, read this evidence as saying X ...' Now a good historian, he says, not only uses re-enactment, but a good historian is never held hostage to what the historical agent would lead him to believe. So if we took Wellington saying his intention is to win X and Y, an historian not only understands the thought of Wellington, but is critical about that and says, OK, my mind is not entirely taken over by the mind of Wellington here, what I do is I critically and autonomously reflect upon his actions, consider the other evidence, and I work out that he thought about it one way, but actually I think about it quite another way. And this is really interesting, because I remember in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a lot of debate in Britain about the role of empathy and re-enactment in the national curriculum and there were huge debates at the time, people saying, 'Oh, you can't have children re-enacting in history classrooms, because they'll be taken over by the mind of Stalin, and they'll be taken over by the mind of Hitler.' And Collingwood made it quite clear that that's not what a re-enactment is, it's not a form of possession at all, it's always a critical consideration of the presuppositions of another person. It always incorporates our kind of self-reflection upon your own view of what's going on. So we're not held hostage to what that person at that moment thinks. We have a wider view of what's going on.
Alan Saunders: Although it is interesting if you ask yourself what happens if you re-enact the thought of say, a Stalin, you can't really think of Stalin's thought in terms of intention and consequences. There's an element of the irrational in what Stalin got up to. How do we handle irrationality on the part of agents, which is a big thing in history?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Yes indeed, and that was a big criticism made about Collingwood at the time. Toynbee thought that Collingwood was too rationalist when he published his writing, and similarly people have criticised him for excluding the emotions. Now what's interesting is if you'd only looked at what he wrote about re-enactment in The Idea of History, that's what you'd conclude, but when The Principles of History was found in the 1990s and published, Collingwood made it quite clear that he viewed the emotions and even irrationality, as something that we could, in theory perhaps, incorporate into re-enactment. Emotions I think it works well, I think he had quite a conceptual view of the emotions, and he viewed them as rational, so he could accommodate that. On irrationality I think it's more difficult for him, but he doesn't rule it out at all. He's actually quite Crocean in that sense.
Alan Saunders: This is Benedetto Croce the great Italian philosopher.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Right. He translated Benedetto Croce's book What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, and Croce always maintained that in a concept or an idea, there was, even if it was ugliness for instance, there was always a tiny speck of beauty, even in ugliness, and I think Collingwood was influenced by that. So even if someone was acting irrationally, there was always a little speck of rationality in there. And he's such an optimist, he thought that maybe he could grab hold of that and use that as an opportunity to get an understanding of what Stalin was perhaps up to. But he would need to use all these other forms of evidence to really get a good understanding of what was going on.
Alan Saunders: Let's turn to an example of his encounter with something that at first sight he could not understand, and this comes from the autobiography, the Albert Memorial in London, this great Victorian monument which he passes every day, and he finds indescribably ugly. And this has interesting philosophical consequences for him, because it leads him towards his theory of question and answer. How could anybody have created something as ugly as this? What was he trying to do? That's the question to ask.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Yes, now the logic of question and answer is a really interesting feature of Collingwood's thought, because a lot of people talk about it quite separately as a kind of philosophical technique, that it's a little tool that you use, and analytical philosophers like to view Collingwood in that way. But I think the example that you've given is a better way of thinking about Collingwood's own understanding, that this tool, this technique was something that was put to work in order to understand something that appeared not to be understandable, something so horrific, so alien from what he was thinking, in order to get out the presupposition. So the logic of question and answer is that we ask this chain of questions, we follow the answers, and in a way, they, this technique allows us to drive down and identify the presuppositions that are shaping what's going on there.
Now the Albert Memorial is a nice example, I can contrast it with an unpublished paper that he wrote on the Gramophone; the evils of the gramophone. He just was outright horrified that people would reproduce music mechanically, that it would never be as beautiful as the original, and yet in this other example, later on in his life, he's beginning to put the pieces together and say, 'Actually this is maybe the place where the historian's work is most needed, when we find, when we encounter things that are so strange to us, we have the best opportunity to understand ourselves a little better, and other people too.'
Alan Saunders: So if we think in terms of question and answer, we ask what is this site that we're digging in? It looks like a fort, why is there a fort here?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Exactly. That's a nice example. Another little one he gives in The Principle of Histories 'I find a triangular piece of clay on the ground, it's got a hole in it. I pick it up, I as an historian look at the object, I read it and I begin to think, "It's a loom-weight", and I wonder what's a loom-weight doing in the ground when there are these other objects here, and why would a loom-weight be here? What activities are people engaging in? Who's engaging in those activities? So there's an endless chain of questions that's leading me back to understand not only the economic activities that are going on, but also the ways in which people are thinking about the world'. That's ultimately what he's looking for, is how are people understanding the world at that time? All from the basis of a little triangular piece of clay.
Alan Saunders: The history of philosophy, certainly in England in the 20th century, we begin I suppose with the logical endeavours of Bertrand Russell. We then have a bit of input from Vienna, we have the logical positivists for whom the natural sciences are really where the important action is. And then we have linguistic philosophy in the second half of the century, looking at the ideas presupposed in our language. That world looks very differently, does it, if you look at it through the eyes of Collingwood, whose focus is far more historical than any of these people's focus?
Marnie Hughes-Warrington: Indeed, he wrote one of the little things in The Principles of
History that's most amusing to read, is a little satirical piece called 'Philosophy in Lugardo'. It's a kind of take on Gulliver's Travels where he travels to this little island and there's a group of philosophers who are talking about the idea of beauty and things like that, and what they're doing is, they're measuring physically the idea of beauty by their weight and by their head-size and all of this, and what he's driving at is that these approaches to philosophy miss the point, horribly. He thinks it's right that philosophy at that time described itself as scientific, and that for him is a first-order way of thinking about the world, it's not philosophy, it is scientific activity and it really gloriously misses the point, and if we want to understand the world, we have to move beyond kind of analytical approaches to philosophy and the kind of positive approaches to philosophy as well.
What's really interesting is that of course a lot of commentators after Collingwood's death, read him analytically, and in a fact lament that Collingwood wasn't better analytically. If he'd only just got his concept clear, he would have been a better philosopher, and I think, Well no, that's not I think the way he was trying to approach things, it was a different way of viewing things, yes.
Alan Saunders: Marnie Hughes-Warrington. And to hear us again, you can go to our website, which is also the place to go for our archive, every 'Zone' since 2006.
The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, with technical production by Charlie McKune. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be back next week with another Philosopher's Zone.
2 比尔德 伦敦书评
In February 1938, R. G. Collingwood, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and aged only 48, suffered a small stroke. It was the first of a series, each one more serious than the last, that would kill him within five years. The usual treatment in the 1930s was less effective than modern medical intervention but rather more enjoyable. His doctors recommended a prolonged period of leave from his job, lengthy walks and sea cruises. He was also encouraged to continue writing: even if teaching was deemed bad for the blood vessels, research was supposed to be good for them.
Signing off from Oxford for a year, he immediately bought a small yacht in which he planned to sail, single-handed, across the Channel and around Europe (hardly a leisured cruise perhaps, but relying on the same basic principle that sea air was restorative). Disaster struck. Just a few days into the voyage, he was rescued from a terrible storm by the Deal lifeboat and towed to shore. He set off again but soon suffered another stroke, which he seems to have weathered by anchoring the yacht far out to sea and lying in his bunk until the headache eased and his normal movement returned. By the time he reached dry land again, he had already started writing his autobiography.
After a few months convalescing in his family home in the Lake District, he had finished the autobiography: an outspoken, sometimes boastful little volume, which ended with an unguarded attack on some of the Oxford philosophers ‘of my youth’ as ‘propagandists of a coming Fascism’. The University Press had to overcome a few qualms, and insisted on some revisions, before publishing it the following year. In the meantime, Collingwood had embarked on another journey, this time on a Dutch vessel bound for the Far East. It was onboard this ship, where the captain rigged up an open-air study for him on the bridge, that he began his Essay on Metaphysics, finishing the first draft in a hotel in Jakarta. On the way home, he edited out some of the most offensive passages of the autobiography, while also writing substantial chunks of what he called his ‘masterpiece’: a book that was to be known as The Principles of History.
He stayed in Oxford barely a couple of months after his return. According to his own scarcely credible story (which Fred Inglis appears to take at face value in his new biography), he was accosted by an unknown American student outside Thornton’s bookshop on Broad Street and invited to sail with him and his student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the journey, The First Mate’s Log, appeared from OUP.
This frenetic activity was not typical of Collingwood’s life up to that point. True, he was always an insomniac workaholic, but he had lived undemonstratively, and at a decidedly more gentlemanly, donnish pace. If his career had been at all unusual, it was because of his two parallel, but at first sight quite distinct research and teaching interests: on the one hand, philosophy; on the other, Roman history and archaeology – especially the archaeology of Roman Britain. In fact, before he was elected to the Waynflete chair in 1935, he had held a curious hybrid post, as university lecturer in philosophy and Roman history. Much of his time was spent working on his own peculiar brand of idealist philosophy – increasingly old-fashioned as it must have seemed by the mid-1930s to those who were starting to listen to A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin. The summers he devoted to digging, and to transcribing, recording and drawing Roman inscriptions (from tombstones to milestones), in preparation for a complete collection of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain – a project on which he worked for almost all his academic life. Before 1938, he had published some important studies in Romano-British archaeology and had made one or two notable contributions to academic philosophy. But as Stefan Collini observes in his chapter on Collingwood in Absent Minds, if he had died in 1938 from his first stroke, his work would probably have earned ‘only a small footnote in the more conscientious surveys of 20th-century British philosophy and academic scholarship’ (and, one might add, he would have been thought rather lucky to win the Waynflete chair). It is the work that appeared after the stroke that made his name.
In fact, the pace of his activity – in both his personal and his professional life – increased yet further when in 1941 he became convinced, rightly, that he had very little time left to live. In January he finally resigned from his university chair. Then, with the recklessness of the dying, he divorced his wife and married his mistress, Kate, a former student turned actress, 20 years younger than himself (Inglis reasonably wonders whether all his foreign travel in the late 1930s was driven less by a spirit of adventure and a confidence in the healthy properties of sea air, more by a desire to escape from his complicated domestic affairs). Kate gave birth to their child in December 1941, and Collingwood died in the Lake District in early 1943, increasingly paralysed by further severe strokes. But that was not before he had finished another book, The New Leviathan; or Man, Society, Civilisation and Barbarism, which appeared in 1942. As the title more than hints, it was an uncompromising, sometimes truculent attempt to muster Hobbesian political philosophy in the fight against Fascism – ‘his contribution to the war’, as Inglis sees it. It also included some frankly ‘batty’ attacks, as even admirers such as Inglis concede, on some of his increasingly favoured targets – among them, the educational system whose great beneficiary he had been. Late Collingwood was a passionate advocate of home-schooling, and believed that one of Plato’s biggest crimes was to have ‘planted on the European world the crazy idea that education ought to be professionalised.’
Apart from the Autobiography, with its sometimes tactless, sometimes engaging assertions of the relevance of philosophy to modern politics, his most influential works weren’t published in these final few years but later, after his death, and in some cases long after. His most famous book of all, The Idea of History, with its now familiar attacks on what he called the ‘scissors and paste’ method of historical inquiry, and its defence of history as always a ‘history of the mind’, was published in 1946, compiled posthumously from various surviving manuscript sources by his ex-pupil and literary executor, Malcolm Knox. It has only recently become clear quite how partial Knox’s compilation was – omitting, for example, or toning down much of Collingwood’s critique of Hegel.
There was even more to come over the next half-century. His most lasting contribution to Romano-British studies was the 800-page compendium of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain. This project had been inaugurated by Francis Haverfield before World War One. After the first chosen editor fell in action in the Dardanelles in 1915 Collingwood was selected as his successor and worked on the book, on and off, mostly during the summer vacations, until 1941 – when he passed the material over to his junior editor, R.P. Wright. It finally appeared in 1965, with Collingwood and Wright as joint authors (the latter admitting, plaintively or accusingly, in the preface that ‘the writing of the text took longer than I had been led to expect’). Thirty years after that, The Principles of History, the ‘masterpiece’ that Collingwood started on the trip to the Far East but never finished, finally saw the light of day. It had been believed lost, possibly destroyed after Knox had gutted it in preparing The Idea. But in 1995 two sharp-eyed archivists found the manuscript, hidden away at OUP. It was published in 1999, more than 50 years after his death.
Inglis’s History Man is an enthusiastic appreciation. Unusually for the biography of an academic, it is particularly revealing about Collingwood’s childhood in the Lake District, where his father, W.G. Collingwood, was secretary to the elderly Ruskin, where the sons and grandsons of William Wordsworth were still prominent in the local community, and where Arthur Ransome was a frequent visitor to the Collingwood family home. Inglis, in fact, hazards a guess that R.G. was the inspiration for the elder brother, John Walker, in Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. True or not, it reminds us that when Collingwood set out, single-handed, on his ill-fated voyage into the English Channel in 1938, he had a lifetime of risky sailing experiences behind him. Inglis is rather less surefooted on Collingwood’s life and experiences at Oxford, and trots out many popular clichés about the eccentrically conservative world of the ancient universities between the wars, from the Brideshead circle of the upper-class undergraduates to the buttoned-up, waspish and for the most part bachelor dons. It is impossible not to suspect that Collingwood was getting rather more out of the intellectual air of 1920s and 1930s Oxford than Inglis is prepared to concede. As well as the revolutions in philosophy that were underway, it was the time that Roman history was being rethought (and repoliticised) by Ronald Syme, whose famous Roman Revolution appeared in 1939.
For all the engaging enthusiasm of the book, two important questions about Collingwood’s achievements and his academic profile remain only half convincingly answered. First, how important is The Idea of History, the posthumous book which remains his most famous work? Second, what was the connection, if any, between the two academic sides of his career, the Romano-British archaeology and the philosophy? What, in other words, does the Roman Inscriptions of Britain have to do with The Idea of History, let alone the Essay on Metaphysics?
The Idea of History has had some very distinguished supporters. By his own account, it was the book that inspired Quentin Skinner at the start of his own historical career – and Skinner of course went on to give his own distinctive spin to Collingwood’s slogan about all history being a ‘history of the mind’. And, if only in the absence of much competition (it is a classic, as Collini has observed, ‘in a field not over-supplied with classics written in English’), it used to be the theoretical standby of undergraduates reading history at university, or of sixth-formers wanting to do so. It still appears on general bibliographies and is warmly recommended to their pupils by ambitious schoolteachers (though when, a few years ago, I asked a group of about 50 third-year students studying history in Cambridge whether any of them had read it, not a single one put up their hand). The problem in judging it now is that its big claims seem fairly uncontentious. In part, no doubt, that is a tribute to the book’s popular success. But in part also those claims were never particularly original in the first place, and were expounded in such a way that it would be difficult to disagree. After all, who could possibly claim, in Collingwood’s terms, to prefer ‘scissors and paste’ history to the ‘question and answer’ style of history that he advocated? Could anyone object to the idea that part of the point of studying history was to help us see (as Inglis puts it) ‘how we might think and feel otherwise than as we do’?
Rereading The Idea of History after some 30 years or so, I found myself less impressed than I had been as a student, or at least more counter-suggestible. His image of the mindless, unquestioning narration of ‘scissors and paste’ history, and of generations of historians being content merely to stick one source after another, now seems very largely a self-serving myth. It did not require the birth of narratology or the return to fashion of ‘grand narrative’, to realise that historical narration is always selective and always posing questions about the evidence. No history – not even the most austere chronicle – has ever been as unquestioning as Collingwood paints his imaginary methodological enemy. Maybe also his ‘question and answer’ method is not as self-evidently productive as he claimed, and certainly not in that practical branch of history known as archaeology. In the Autobiography he is vitriolic about those antiquarians, following in the tradition of Pitt-Rivers, who excavated sites out of mere curiosity (the excavations at the Roman town of Silchester were his particular target). The best archaeologists, by contrast, ‘never dug a trench without knowing exactly what information they were looking for’. But this is to ignore the equally important fact that some questions blind the investigator to the wider potential, to the surprises, of their material. Some of the best history, no less than the best archaeology, is curiosity-driven and opportunistic – rather than outcome-driven, as Collingwood and his unlikely descendants in the Arts and Humanities Research Council and other government funding bodies like to imagine.
What finally are we to make of the relationship between the two sides of Collingwood’s academic career, the philosophy and archaeology-cum-history? Collingwood himself recognised the problem, with his constant calls for a ‘rapprochement’ between the two. Where he explicitly ranks his different activities, he puts the philosophy first, characterising the archaeological activity more as a practical application of his ideas about the philosophy of history. After all, despite his hybrid lectureship, he went on to become the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, not the Camden Professor of Ancient History. Most studies of his career have followed this ranking, giving much more weight to his philosophical activity and sometimes relegating the archaeology to a summer hobby. But this must partly be because the writers in question have been philosophers and cultural historians, whose grip on the ancient world and on Collingwood’s importance in the study of antiquity has been fragile to say the least. Inglis is a particularly woeful culprit here. He does not seem aware of the importance of the Roman Inscriptions of Britain; he confuses Virgil’s Eclogues with his Georgics; he imagines that Res Gestae (the Latin for ‘achievements’ used by Collingwood) has something to do with ‘gesture’; and he claims that Alcinous, after whom the boat on which Collingwood sailed to the Far East was named, was the ‘mother of Ulysses’ lover Nausicaa’ (wrong on two counts: Alcinous was Nausicaa’s father and she and Ulysses were not lovers, at least not in Homer’s version). Even Collini manages to stumble over the title of the journal in which many of Collingwood’s major archaeological articles appeared: it was (and still is) the Journal of Roman Studies, not the Journal of Roman History.
As so often, things look rather different if you approach them from a classical standpoint. Collingwood himself may have chosen not to reflect on the influence of his formal education; he became more concerned to attack the whole history of professional pedagogy as far back as Plato. But it is surely crucial that he was a product of the old Oxford ‘Greats’ (that is, classics) course, which focused the last two and a half years of a student’s work on the parallel study of ancient history on the one hand, and ancient and modern philosophy on the other. Most students were much better at one side than the other, and most stories tell of the desperate attempts by would-be ancient historians to cram enough Plato, Descartes and Hume to get their high-flying pass in the final exams (or alternatively of desperate attempts by would-be philosophers to remember enough of the Peloponnesian War or Agricola’s campaigns in Britain to do the same). In the context of Greats, Collingwood was not a maverick with two incompatible interests. Given the educational aims of the course, he was a rare success, even if something of a quirky overachiever; his combination of interests was exactly what Greats was designed to promote.
To put that another way, Collingwood was not simply – as Inglis and others would imply – a philosopher with an archaeological hobby. We might better see him as an unusually successful product of a distinctive Oxford version of classics that is now no more (Greats was ‘reformed’ decades ago). It should come as no surprise that the last voyage he made, with that group of students, was a trip to Greece, and that he went – as he put it in The First Mate’s Log – ‘not so much a tourist as a pilgrim’ to Delphi, where Socrates had travelled two and a half thousand years earlier. ‘If a man looks to Socrates as his prophet,’ he wrote, ‘the journey to Delphi is the journey to his Mecca.’ That is the credo of a Greats-man.
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