The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

• Publisher: Read & Co. History
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528766838
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Idealism in Philosophy

Robin George Collingwood, FBA (1889 – 1943) was an English historian, philosopher, and archaeologist most famous his philosophical works. Along with "The Principles of Art" (1938), Collingwood's "The Idea of History" was his best-known work, originally collated from numerous sources following his death by a student of his, T. M. Knox. It became a major inspiration for philosophy of history in the western world and is extensively cited to his day. This fascinating volume on history and its relationship to philosophy will appeal to students and collectors of vintage philosophical works alike. Contents include: "The Philosophy of History", "History's Nature", "Object", "Method", "Greco-Roman Histography", "The Influence of Christianity", "The Threshold of Scientific History", "Scientific History", "England", "Germany", "France", "Italy", etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume today in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

PART I

GRECO-ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

§ 1. Theocratic history and myth

BY what steps and stages did the modern European idea of history come into existence? Since I do not think that any of these stages occurred outside the Mediterranean region, that is, Europe, the Near East from the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia, and the northern African coastlands, I am precluded from saying anything about historical thought in China or in any other part of the world except the region I have mentioned.

I have quoted one example of early Mesopotamian history from a document of about 2500 B.C. I say history, but I ought rather to say quasi-history, because, as I have pointed out, the thought expressed in this document resembles what we call history in making statements about the past, but differs from it, first, in that these statements are not answers to questions, not the fruits of research, but mere assertions of what the writer already knows; and secondly, that the deeds recorded are not human actions but, in the first instance at any rate, divine actions. The gods are conceived on the analogy of human sovereigns, directing the actions of kings and chiefs as these direct the actions of their human subordinates; the hierarchical system of government is carried upwards by a kind of extrapolation. Instead of the series: subject, lower official, higher official, king, we have the series: subject, lower official, higher official, king, god. Whether the king and the god are sharply distinguished so that the god is conceived as the real head of the community and the king as his servant, or whether the king and the god are somehow identified, the king being conceived as an incarnation of the god or at any rate as in some way or other divine, not merely human, is a question into which we need not enter, because, however we answer it, the result will be that government is conceived theocratically.

History of this kind I propose to call theocratic history; in which phrase ‘history’ means not history proper, that is scientific history, but a statement of known facts for the information of persons to whom they are not known, but who, as worshippers of the god in question, ought to know the deeds whereby he has made himself manifest.

There is another kind of quasi-history, of which we also find examples in Mesopotamian literature, namely the myth. Theocratic history, although it is not primarily the history of human actions, is nevertheless concerned with them in the sense that the divine characters in the story are the superhuman rulers of human societies, whose actions, therefore, are actions done partly to those societies and partly through them. In theocratic history humanity is not an agent, but partly an instrument and partly a patient, of the actions recorded. Moreover, these actions are thought of as having definite places in a time-series, as occurring at dates in the past. Myth, on the contrary, is not concerned with human actions at all. The human element has been completely purged away and the characters of the story are simply gods. And the divine actions that are recorded are not dated events in the past: they are conceived as having occurred in the past, indeed, but in a dateless past which is so remote that nobody knows when it was. It is outside all our time-reckonings and called ‘the beginning of things’. Hence, when a myth is couched in what seems a temporal shape, because it relates events one of which follows another in a definite order, the shape is not strictly speaking temporal, it is quasi-temporal: the narrator is using the language of time-succession as a metaphor in which to express relations which he does not conceive as really temporal. The subject-matter which is thus mythically expressed in the language of temporal succession is, in myth proper, the relations between various gods or various elements of the divine nature. Hence myth proper has always the character of theogony.

For an example, let us consider the main outline of the Babylonian Poem on the Creation. We have it in a text of the seventh century B.C., but this professes to be, and doubtless is, a copy of very much older texts, probably going back to the same period as the document I have already quoted:

‘The poem begins at the origin of all things. Nothing exists as yet, not even the gods. Out of this nothingness appear the cosmic principles Apsu, fresh water, and Tiamat, salt water.’ The first step in the theogony is the birth of Mummu, the firstborn son of Apsu and Tiamat. ‘The gods increase and multiply. Then they become rebellious against [this original] divine triad. Apsu decides to destroy them. . . . But the wise Ea triumphs by the use of magic. He casts a powerful spell upon the waters, Apsu’s element, puts his ancestor to sleep’, and makes Mummu captive. Tiamat now ‘plans to avenge the conquered. She marries Qingu, makes him head of her army, and confides to his care the tablets of fate.’ Ea, divining her plans, reveals them to the ancient god Anshar. At first Tiamat triumphs over this coalition, but now arises Marduk, who challenges Tiamat to single combat, kills her, cuts her body in two ‘like a fish’, and makes out of one half the heavens, in which he places the stars, and out of the other the earth. Out of Marduk’s blood, man is made.¹

These two forms of quasi-history, theocratic history and myth, dominated the whole of the Near East until the rise of Greece. For example, the Moabite Stone (ninth century B.C.) is a perfect document of theocratic history, showing that little change has taken place in that form of thought for between one and two millennia:

‘I am Mesha, the son of Kemosh, king of Moab. My father was king over Moab thirty years and I became king after my father. And I made this high-place for Kemosh, for he saved me from my downfall and made me triumph over my enemies.

‘Omri, king of Israel, was the oppressor of Moab for many long days because Kemosh was angered against his country. His son succeeded him, and he also said “I will oppress Moab”. It was in my day that he said it. And I triumphed over him and his house. And Israel perished for ever.

‘And Omri took possession of the land of Mehedeba and lived there during his life and half his sons’ lives, forty years; but Kemosh restored it to us in my lifetime.’

Or again, here is a quotation from the account, put into the mouth of Esar-Haddon, king of Nineveh early in the seventh century B.C., of his campaign against the enemies who had killed his father Sennacherib:

‘The fear of the great gods, my lords, overthrew them. When they beheld the rush of my terrible battle, they were beside themselves. The goddess Ishtar, goddess of battle and of fighting, she who loves my priesthood, remained at my side and broke their line. She broke their battle-line, and in their assembly they said “It is our king!” ’¹

The Hebrew scriptures contain a great deal of both theocratic history and myth. From the point of view from which I am now considering these ancient literatures, the quasi-historical elements in the Old Testament do not greatly differ from the corresponding elements in Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature. The main difference is that whereas the theocratic element in these other literatures is on the whole particularistic, in the Hebrew scriptures it tends to be universalistic. I mean, the gods whose deeds are recorded in these other literatures are on the whole regarded as the divine heads of particular societies. The God of the Hebrews is certainly regarded as in a special sense the divine head of the Hebrew community; but under the influence of the ‘prophetic’ movement, that is, from about the middle of the eighth century onwards, they came to conceive Him more and more as the divine head of all mankind; and therefore expected Him no longer to protect their interests as against those of other particular societies, but to deal with them according to their deserts; and to deal with other particular societies in the same way. And this tendency away from particularism in the direction of universalism affects not only the theocratic history of the Hebrews but also their mythology. Unlike the Babylonian creation-legend, the Hebrew creation-legend contains an attempt, not indeed a very well-thought-out attempt (for every child, I suppose, has asked its elders the unanswerable question, ‘Who was Cain’s wife?’), but still an attempt, to account not only for the origin of man in general but for the origin of the various peoples into which mankind, as known to the authors of the legend, was divided. Indeed one might almost say that the peculiarity of the Hebrew legend as compared with the Babylonian is that it replaces theogony by ethnogony.

¹Jean, in Eyre, op. cit., pp. 271 ff.

¹Ibid., p. 364.

§ 2. The creation of scientific history by Herodotus

As compared with all this, the work of the Greek historians as we possess it in detail in the fifth-century historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, takes us into a new world. The Greeks quite clearly and consciously recognized both that history is, or can be, a science, and that it has to do with human actions. Greek history is not legend, it is research; it is an attempt to get answers to definite questions about matters of which one recognizes oneself as ignorant. It is not theocratic, it is humanistic; the matters inquired into are not τὰ θϵ

α, they are τὰ ἀνθρώπινα. Moreover, it is not mythical. The events inquired into are not events in a dateless past, at the beginning of things: they are events in a dated past, a certain number of years ago.

This is not to say that legend, either in the form of theocratic history or in the form of myth, was a thing foreign to the Greek mind. The work of Homer is not research, it is legend; and to a great extent it is theocratic legend. The gods appear in Homer as intervening in human affairs in a way not very different from the way in which they appear in the theocratic histories of the Near East. Similarly, Hesiod has given us an example of myth. Nor is it to say that these legendary elements, theocratic or mythical as the case may be, are entirely absent even from the classical works of the fifth-century historians. F. M. Cornford in his Thucydides Mythistoricus (London, 1907) drew attention to the existence of such elements even in the hard-headed and scientific Thucydides. He was of course perfectly right; and similar legendary elements are notoriously frequent in Herodotus. But what is remarkable about the Greeks was not the fact that their historical thought contained a certain residue of elements which we should call non-historical, but the fact that, side by side with these, it contained elements of what we call history.

The four characteristics of history which I enumerated in the Introduction were (a) that it is scientific, or begins by asking questions, whereas the writer of legends begins by knowing something and tells what he knows; (b) that it is humanistic, or asks questions about things done by men at determinate times in the past; (c) that it is rational, or bases the answers which it gives to its questions on grounds, namely appeal to evidence; (d) that it is self-revelatory, or exists in order to tell man what man is by telling him what man has done. Now the first, second, and fourth of these characteristics clearly appear in Herodotus: (i) The fact that history as a science was a Greek invention is recorded to this day by its very name. History is a Greek word, meaning simply an investigation or inquiry. Herodotus, who uses it in the title of his work, thereby ‘marks a literary revolution’ (as Croiset, an historian of Greek literature, says¹). Previous writers had been λογογράϕοι, writers-down of current stories: ‘the historian’, say How and Wells, ‘sets out to ‘find’ the truth.’ It is the use of this word, and its implications, that make Herodotus the father of history. The conversion of legend-writing into the science of history was not native to the Greek mind, it was a fifth-century invention, and Herodotus was the man who invented it. (ii) It is equally clear that history for Herodotus is humanistic as distinct from either mythical or theocratic. As he says in his preface, his purpose is to describe the deeds of men. (iii) His end, as he describes it himself, is that these deeds shall not be forgotten by posterity. Here we have my fourth characteristic of history, namely that it ministers to man’s knowledge of man. In particular, Herodotus points out, it reveals man as a rational agent: that is, its function is partly to discover what men have done and partly to discover why they have done it (δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην

πολ

μησαν). Herodotus does not confine his attention to bare events; he considers these events in a thoroughly humanistic manner as actions of human beings who had reasons for acting as they did: and the historian is concerned with these reasons.

These three points reappear in the preface of Thucydides, which was obviously written with an eye on that of Herodotus. Thucydides, writing Attic and not Ionic, does not of course use the word ἱστορίη, but he refers to it in other terms: to make it clear that he is no logographer but a scientific student, asking questions instead of repeating legends, he defends his choice of subject by saying that events earlier than those of the Peloponnesian War cannot be accurately ascertained—σαϕ

ς μ

ν εὑρε

ν ἀδύνατα ἦν. He emphasizes the humanistic purpose and the self-revelatory function of history, in words modelled on those of his predecessor. And in one way he improves on Herodotus, for Herodotus makes no mention of evidence (the third of the characteristics mentioned above), and one is left to gather from the body of his work what his idea of evidence was; but Thucydides does say explicitly that historical inquiry rests on evidence,

κ τϵκμηρίων σκοπο

ντί μοι, ‘when I consider in the light of the evidence’. What they thought about the nature of evidence, and the way in which an historian interprets it, is a subject to which I shall return in § 5.

¹Histoire de la littérature grecque, vol. ii, p. 589, apud How and Wells, Commentary on Herodotus (Oxford, 1912), vol. i, p. 53.

§ 3. Anti-historical tendency of Greek thought

In the meantime, I should like to point out how remarkable a thing is this creation of scientific history by Herodotus, for he was an ancient Greek, and ancient Greek thought as a whole has a very definite prevailing tendency not only uncongenial to the growth of historical thought but actually based, one might say, on a rigorously anti-historical metaphysics. History is a science of human action: what the historian puts before himself is things that men have done in the past, and these belong to a world of change, a world where things come to be and cease to be. Such things, according to the prevalent Greek metaphysical view, ought not to be knowable, and therefore history ought to be impossible.

For the Greeks, the same difficulty arose with the world of nature since it too was a world of this kind. If...