Essays in the Philosophy of History

R. G. Collingwood

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528766852
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophes

This collection of essays features some of the best of R. G. Collingwood's work concerning the relationship between history and philosophy.

First published posthumously in 1965, Essays in the Philosophy of History is a collection of R. G. Collingwood's best work. He explores the philosophy of history, its aims, limitations, and relevance. Highly recommended for students of philosophy and those interested in historical cycles.

The contents of this volume feature: - Croce's Philosophy of History - Are History and Science Different Kinds of Knowledge? - The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History - Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles - The Limits of Historical Knowledge - A Philosophy of History - A Philosophy of Progress

Croce’s Philosophy of History*

AN ALLIANCE between philosophy and history is no new idea in this country. Most Englishmen who know or care anything about philosophy have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the “Greats” school at Oxford; and the distinguishing mark of this school is the connection which it maintains between the study of ancient history and that of ancient philosophy. It is this connection that gives Oxford philosophy its chief merit, a fine tradition of scholarship and interpretation in Plato and Aristotle; and it is, perhaps, the failure to extend the same principle to the study of more recent thought that has led in this school to a much lower standard in the interpretation of modern philosophy, unsupported as it is by any study of modern history.

The ideal of a combined study of philosophy and history is energetically supported by Croce. Himself a philosopher of eminence and an accomplished historian, he feels acutely in his own person the profit which each of his pursuits in turn derives from the other. The historian must study the philosophy of his period if he is to understand those forces which ultimately shaped its destiny; if he does not follow the thoughts of the men whose actions he is studying he can never enter into the life of his period, and can at best observe it from outside as a sequence of unexplained facts, or facts to be explained by physical causes alone. And the philosopher must in his turn study history. How else is he to understand why certain problems at certain times pressed for solution on the philosopher’s mind? How else is he to understand the individual philosopher’s temperament, his outlook on life, the very symbolism and language in which he has expressed himself? In short, if the philosopher is to understand the history of philosophy he must study the general history of humanity; and a philosophy which ignores its own history is a philosophy which spends its labour only to rediscover errors long dead.

History without philosophy is history seen from the outside, the play of mechanical and unchanging forces in a materialistically conceived world: philosophy without history is philosophy seen from the outside, the veering and backing, rising and falling, of motiveless winds of doctrine. “Both these are monsters.” But history fertilised by philosophy is the history of the human spirit in its secular attempt to build itself a world of laws and institutions in which it can live as it wishes to live; and philosophy fertilised by history is the progressive raising and solving of the endless intellectual problems whose succession forms the inner side of this secular struggle. Thus the two studies which, apart, degenerate into strings of empty dates and lists of pedantic distinctions—“To seventeen add two, And Queen Anne you will view,” “Barbara celarent darii ferioque prioris”—become, together, a single science of all things human.

This is the point of view from which Croce proposes, and in his own work carries out, a closer union between philosophy and history. It is a point of view which must interest English readers; the more so as in these days, when the pre-eminence of classical studies in English education is a thing of the past, the position of philosophy as a subject of study demands the closest attention.

In the past the Oxford “Greats” school has stood for this ideal of the cross-fertilisation of history and philosophy, even when the coordination of the two sides has been worst, and the undergraduate has seemed to be merely reading two different schools at once, under tutors who regarded each other as rivals for his attention; but in the future the whole question will be reopened, and philosophy may either contract a new alliance with the natural sciences, or retire into single blessedness as an independent subject of study like Forestry or Geography, or force herself into the company of Modern History, disguised perhaps under the inoffensive name of Political Theory. To solve this problem in the best way it is necessary to have a clear idea of what philosophy is, and what are its relations to these other subjects of study. These, of course, are controversial questions, on which no one can lay down the law; but the conclusions of Croce demand at least our attention, and we propose here to discuss his views on the nature of history and its relation to philosophy. As our purpose is rather to criticise than to expound, we shall select some of his views and examine these as typical of the whole.

The book in which he expounds them is the Teoria e Storia della Storiografia (Bari, 1917), which, like many of Croce’s books, falls into two sections, a theoretical and a historical. The relation between the two is close; the ideas which are discussed in the former are exemplified in the latter, and the process of development followed in the latter is only intelligible in the light of the principles laid down in the former. Our concern here is especially with the theoretical section; not because it is the most striking—the historical section is a rapid but extremely brilliant survey of the progress of historical thought, in which the characteristics of succeeding periods are set forth with a penetration and fairness which could hardly be bettered—but because our present business is the explicit statement of theoretical principles.

In order to arrive at a clear concept of what history is, Croce begins by telling us what it is not. It is not annals. That is to say, it is not the lists of dates with which a superficial observer confuses it. To the outward eye, a book may consist of mere chronological tables; but to the historian these tables mean real history, not because they are, but because they stand for, the thought which is history. History goes on in the mind of the historian: he thinks it, he enacts it within himself: he identifies himself with the history he is studying and actually lives it as he thinks it, whence Croce’s paradox that “all history is contemporary history.” Annals, on the other hand, belong to the past; the schoolboy learning a list of dates does not live them in his thought, but takes them as something alien imposed upon him from outside—brute facts, dead and dry; no living reality such as his teacher, if he is a good historian, can enjoy in reading the same list. Annals, then, are past history, and therefore not history at all. They are the dry bones of history, its dead corpse.

This is illuminating, and satisfactory enough until we begin to reflect upon it. History is thought, annals the corpse of thought. But has thought a corpse? and if so, what is it like? The corpse of an organism is something other than the organism itself: what, for an idealistic philosopher like Croce, is there other than thought, in terms of which we can give a philosophically satisfactory definition of the corpse of thought?

Croce’s general “philosophy of the spirit” supplies him with a ready-made answer. Nothing exists but the spirit; but the spirit has two sides or parts, thought and will. Whatever is not thought is will. If you find some fact which cannot be explained as an instance of thought, you must explain it as an instance of will. Thought is the synthesis of subject and object, and its characteristic is truth: will is the creation of an object by the subject, and its characteristic is utility. Wherever you find something which appears at first sight to be an example of thinking, but which on inspection is found not to possess the quality of truth, it follows that it must be an example of willing, and possess the quality of usefulness. Such, in a rough outline, is the principle of analysis which Croce applies in this book and elsewhere. History is thought: there is here a perfect synthesis of subject and object, inasmuch as the historian thinks himself into the history, and the two become contemporary. Annals are not thought but willed; they are constructed—“drawn up”—by the historian for his own ends; they are a convention serving the purposes of historical thought, as musical notation serves the purposes of musical thought without being musical thought; they are not true but useful.

This is the answer which Croce gives, or rather tries to give, to the question we raised. But he does not really succeed in giving it. He cannot bring himself to say that annals are simply devoid of truth, are in no sense an act of thought. That would amount to saying that annals are the words, and history their meaning: which would not be what he wanted. So he says that annals are (p. 9) “sounds, or graphic symbols representing sounds, held together and maintained not by an act of thought which thinks them (in which case they would once more be supplied with content), but by an act of will which thinks it useful for certain purposes of its own to preserve these words, empty or half empty though they be.” “Or half empty.” This is a strange reservation. Are the words of which annals are composed, then, not empty after all? Are they half full, half full, that is, of thought? But if so, the distinction between the act of thought and the act of will has broken down: annals are only history whose words mean less indeed than the same words as used by history proper, but still have meaning, are still essentially vehicles of thought. And Croce would be the first to admit and insist that a difference of degree has nothing to do with a philosophical question like this.

This is not the only passage in which Croce’s clearness of vision and common sense break through the abstractions of his formal philosophy. He tries to maintain a philosophy according to which every act of the spirit falls under either one or the other of two mutually exclusive heads (theoretical and practical), subdivided into four sub-heads (intuition and thought; economic willing and ethical willing), so related that the second and fourth sub-heads involve the first and third respectively (thought is also intuition, ethical action is also economic action), but not vice versa. Now this formal philosophy of the mind is purely psychological and empirical in character; it is what Croce himself calls “naturalism” or “transcendence.” And with that side of himself which never ceases to combat all kinds of naturalism, he combats this philosophy of his own with the rest. To go into this fully would involve a detailed analysis of Croce’s other works, and we shall not pursue it here. But we must refer to it, and insist upon this general principle: that there are two Croces, the realist, dualist, empiricist, or naturalist, who delights in formal distinctions and habitually works in dualistic or transcendent terms, and the idealist, whose whole life is a warfare upon transcendence and naturalism in all their forms, who sweeps away dualisms and reunites distinctions in a concrete or immanent unity. A great part of Croce’s written work consists in a debate between these two, one building up dualisms and the other dismantling them; sometimes failing to dismantle them. This we shall find throughout the present book. In fact, at the end of our inquiry, we shall see reason to suspect that this double-mindedness has now become so intolerable to Croce himself that he feels impelled to destroy altogether a philosophy so deeply at variance with itself, and to take refuge in a new field of activity.

The dualism between history and annals is really, if I understand it aright, an expository or “pedagogic” dualism, confused by the attempt to interpret it as a real or philosophical dualism, to which end it has been mistakenly identified with the distinction between a symbol and its meaning. An expository dualism is a common enough device: in order to expound a new idea one frequently distinguishes it point by point from an old, thereby developing what looks like a dualism between them, without, however, at all meaning to imply that the dualism is real, and that the old conception has a permanent place in one’s philosophy alongside of the new. Thus the antithesis between the flesh and the spirit, developed in order to define the term spirit, is misunderstood if it is hardened into a metaphysical dualism: so again that between mind and matter, art and nature, and so forth. In such cases the two terms are not names for two co-ordinate realities, but an old and a new name for the same thing, or even an old and a new “definition of the Absolute,” and the new supersedes the old: if the old is compelled to live on alongside the new, it sets up a dualism whose effect is precisely to destroy the whole meaning of the new conception and to characterise the whole view as a naturalistic or transcendent philosophy.

This is curiously illustrated by Croce’s chapter on “History and Annals.” “History is living history, annals are dead history: history is contemporary history, annals are past history: history is primarily an act of thought, annals an act of will” (p. 10). Here again the word primarily gives everything away; but, ignoring that, it is strange that the category in which annals fall is indifferently, and as it were synonymously, called the past, dead, and the will. Here—and numerous other passages could be quoted which prove the same thing—Croce is really identifying the distinction of thought and will with the distinction of living and dead, spirit and matter. The will is thought of as the nonspiritual; that is to say, the concept of dead matter has reappeared in the heart of idealism, christened by the strange name of will. This name is given to it because, while Croce holds the idealistic theory that thought thinks itself, he unconsciously holds the realistic or transcendent theory that the will wills not itself but the existence of a lifeless object other than itself, something unspiritual held in existence by an act of the will. Thus, wherever Croce appeals from the concept of thought to the concept of will, he is laying aside his idealism and falling back into a transcendent naturalism.

But now the idealist reasserts himself. A corpse, after all, is not merely dead: it is the source of new life. So annals are a necessary part of the growth of history: thought, as a philosopher has said, “feeds saprophytically upon its own corpse.” Annals are therefore not a mere stupid perversion of history, but are essential to history itself. Annals are a “moment” of history, and so therefore is will of thought, matter of mind, death of life, error of truth. Error is the negative moment of thought, without which the positive or constructive moment, criticism, would have nothing to work upon. Criticism in destroying errors constructs truth. So historical criticism, in absorbing and digesting annals, in showing that they are not history, creates the thought that is history. This is idealism; but it stultifies the original dualism. The distinction between history and annals is now not a distinction between what history is (thought) and what history is not (will), but between one act of thought (history) and another act of thought of the same kind, now superseded and laid aside (annals), between the half-truth of an earlier stage in the process of thought and the fuller truth that succeeds it. This is no dualism, no relation between A and not-A, and therefore it cannot be symbolized by the naturalistic terminology of thought and will; it is the dialectical relation between two phases of one and the same development, which is throughout a process of both thinking and willing.

The same fundamental vice underlies the very attractive discussion of “pseudo-histories.” We all know the historian who mistakes mere accuracy for truth, the “philological” historian; and him who mistakes romance for history, the “poetical” historian; and him who imagines that the aim of history is not to tell the truth but to edify or glorify or instruct, the “pragmatic” historian. And Croce characterises them and discusses their faults in an altogether admirable way. But he wants to prove that he has given us a list of all the possible forms of false history, and this can be done by appealing to the list of the “forms of the spirit.” But the appeal not only fails in detail—for his list of pseudo-histories tallies very ill with the list of forms of the spirit—but is false in principle.

For “poetical” history, to take an example, is only a name calling attention to a necessary feature of all history. Croce shows how Herodotus, Livy, Tacitus, Grote, Mommsen, Thierry, and so forth, all wrote from a subjective point of view, wrote so that their personal ideals and feelings coloured their whole work and in parts falsified it. Now, if this is so, who wrote real history, history not coloured by points of view and ideals? Clearly, no one. It is not even desirable that anyone should. History, to be, must be seen, and must be seen by somebody, from somebody’s point of view. And doubtless, every history so seen will be in part seen falsely. But this is not an accusation against any particular school of historians; it is a law of our nature. The only safe way of avoiding error is to give up looking for the truth.

And here, curiously, Croce breaks out into a panegyric on error, as if conscious that he was being too hard on it. The passage is a most interesting combination of naturalism and idealism. Error, says Croce, is not a “fact”; it is a “spirit”; it is “not a Caliban, but an Ariel, breathing, calling, and enticing from every side, and never by any effort to be solidified into hard fact.” This image implies that error does not, as such, exist; that is, that no judgment is wholly or simply erroneous, wholly devoid of truth: which is orthodox idealism, but quite contrary to Croce’s general theory of error. But it also implies that error as such is valuable and good: he speaks definitely of the “salutary efficacy of error”; and this conflicts not only with the description of pseudo-histories as “pathological”—and therefore, presumably, to be wholly avoided—but also with Croce’s own idealism, and with the view which surely seems reasonable, that the indubitable value and efficacy of errors belongs to them not qua errors but qua (at least partial) truths. An error like historical materialism is, as Croce says, not a fact; that is because, its falsity discovered, it is banished, it becomes a memory. Also, as Croce says, it is, or rather we should say was, useful: it superseded a worse error, historical romanticism. But it was once a fact, and then it was a truth—the best truth that could be had then, anyhow; and then, too, it was useful, as an improvement on its predecessor. To-day it is not a fact (except for historians of thought), nor true, nor yet useful. The passage is confused because Croce is assigning to error as such the merits of truth; which is an attempt to express the fact that error as such does not exist, and that what we call an error is in part true and therefore has the “salutary efficacy” which belongs to truth alone. This confusion is due to the vacillation between naturalism, for which some statements are just true and others just false, and idealism, for which truth and falsehood are inextricably united in every judgment, in so far as it creates itself by criticising another, and becomes itself in turn the object of further criticism.

This vacillation is the more interesting as much of Croce’s treatment of error is purely naturalistic, and shows no trace of idealism. His general theory of error, in the Logica, is absolutely naturalistic. Thought, he there argues, is as such true, and can never be erroneous: an error, whatever it is, cannot be a thought. What is it, then? Why, an act of will. We need hardly point out the absurdities of such a theory. We only wish to point out its naturalistic character; to lay stress on the distinction implied between a truth, as containing no error, and an error, as containing no truth, correlative with that between pure thinking and pure willing, and based on the same naturalistic or transcendent logic. So again his inquiry into the varieties (phenomenology) of error, in this book and elsewhere, and the list of pseudo-histories, are purely naturalistic; and so again is a highly “transcendent” type of argument not uncommon with him, which traces the origin of a philosophical error to the baneful influence of some other activity of the spirit. Thus philosophical errors, which by their very nature can only have arisen within philosophy itself, are ascribed to science (p. 45, the fallacy of the independent object) and religion (p. 51, the dualism of a priori and a posteriori truths), errors whose only connection with science or religion is that when philosophers believed in them they applied them to the interpretation of these activities: whereupon Croce, having rejected them as general philosophical principles, uncritically retains them as adequate accounts of activities to which he has not paid special attention, and thus credits these activities with originating them. The result is a kind of mythology, in which Philosophy or Thought takes the part of a blameless and innocent heroine led into errors by the villains Science and Religion. Th...