Collingwood, Robin George

« philosopher meant by a doctrine until you know the question to which the doctrine was intended as an answer andhow that question arose.

Immediately it follows that you cannot tell whether propositions contradict each otherunless you know that they are answers to the same question.

This is partly a plea for intelligent appreciation of thespace of problems within which different writers work, and in effect Collingwood is highlighting a version of whatlater became called the principle of charity (see Charity, principle of §1).

Indeed, he sometimes embraces oneextreme consequence of a method based on the principle of charity, namely that since we have to read thequestions to which philosophers address themselves back from their answers, there is no possibility of saying thattheir answers are inadequate or muddled or mistaken.

Using his favourite analogy of naval history he asks: ‘Howcan we discover what the tactical problem was that Nelson set himself at Trafalgar? Only by studying the tacticshe pursued in the battle.

We argue back from the solution to the problem' (1939: 70).

He himself notes that thisworks at least mainly because Nelson won the battle, and we may legitimately wonder whether it is right to assumethat the great dead philosophers won all their battles.

But for Collingwood the integrity of the historical questrequires interpreting them substantially as if they did.The upshot is that the scope for fundamental criticism of a philosopher diminishes markedly, and this leads to thesecond theme of constant importance to Collingwood: the identification of metaphysics with history.

At first blushit may seem that he must believe that metaphysics, at least as it is done in critical discussion of the views of greatpast thinkers, has been entirely superseded by the historical problem of discovering the questions and answers theyare proposing.

However, the twist is that solving this historical problem, for Collingwood, requires reliving theproblem and rethinking the issue for oneself.

It requires making the words of the text into one's own, re-centringone's concerns and seeing how these things are to be said or these actions performed in answer to them.

So if themetaphysical problem gives way to a historical one, it is equally true that a historical problem gives way to ametaphysical one: for example, to understand Plato historically requires fully grasping the problem to which thetheory of Forms provides an answer.Collingwood's rapprochement between history and metaphysics here depends upon his insistence that historicalthinking is in this way a matter of living through the thinking of the person confronted with a problem.

This isperhaps the best-known of his doctrines, and he has several interlocking reasons for it.

He holds that to study aperson in respect of their mental features is to study their own self-understanding, and that means the conceptsthatdetermine their plans and activities.

Understanding these concepts is not an atomistic project, a matter of findingindividual elements, perhaps written in the brain, connected by scientific law with other elements.

It is anessentially holistic enterprise that needs to draw on the wider knowledge of the person's human context.

When Icome to understand why you acted as you did I am not concerned to place you in a law-like causal network, but tosee the point of your doings.

In the modern jargon, rationalizing you is a distinct normative activity, not reducibleto seeing your behaviour just as part of what generally happens, part of a scientifically repeatable pattern.

By thenormativity of thought Collingwood means not just that as bystanders we can assess the thoughts of others fortruth or falsity, rationality or the reverse.

He means that thinking itself is essentially a process of which suchassessments are a part.

The thinker is actively engaged in solving a problem, and is constantly evaluatingproposals, withdrawing some and improving others.

What is being done cannot be clocked or recorded orunderstood in terms of a succession of passive occurrences.In all his works, from the early Religion and Philosophy (1916), he opposes this theory of interpretation to‘scientific' psychology.

He sees the scientific psychologist as one who treats the phenomena of mental life asnatural events, surveyable from the outside, and who seeks to generate laws of association and development.

But,he says, the mind regarded in this way ceases to be a mind at all.

He has no objection to this treatment ofessentially passive mental phenomena, such as he takes feelings to be.

It is when the approach is tried uponthinking that he objects.

He is at his most scathing when describing the grotesque failure of psychologists of hisday to engage with thought, even when they purport to be giving its scientific nature.

His critique goes to theheartof the question of method in gaining human understanding.

For although he calls his epistemology a theory ofhistory, it is what is with less dignity called a theory of folk psychology (see Folk psychology).

He is quite clearthat he is not only concerned with the remote past: ‘If it is by historical thinking that we re-think and so rediscoverthe thought of Hammurabi or Solon, it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who writes us aletter, or a stranger who crosses the street' (1946: 219) - and, he adds, our own thoughts of ten years or fiveminutes ago.

The inclusion of self-knowledge is deliberate and impressive, for Collingwood held that there was nodivision between knowing one's own mind and knowing that of others.

In this respect his approach is moresophisticated than the verstehen method of Wilhelm Dilthey.

Its closest successor in current philosophy is the viewthat ascription of belief and desire to others is best seen as an ‘off-line simulation' of their active processes ofthought.

Collingwood's view that the self-controlling normativity of thought unfits it for being the subject of aself-standing science strikingly anticipates the later discussions of interpretation of others given by writers such asDavidson and Dennett.

His hostility to the external, objectifying, professedly ‘scientific' approach to the humanworld is as radical as anything to be found in more recent debates.A final theme that can be isolated as a constant in his work is the dependence of all thought upon absolutepresuppositions.

Collingwood is not here thinking of the a priori, for, this time anticipating Quine, he has no usefor the category.

Rather, at a particular time the identification of questions and the production of answers inresponse to them must go on against a largely unnoticed background of presuppositions.

These themselves are notposed in answer to any questions, and therefore cannot be assessed as true or false.

To use the analogy withwhichWittgenstein in On Certainty characterized the same doctrine (which he held for the same reason - the absence ofamethod for raising and answering the question of truth) they are the hinges on which the door swings.

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