The Idea of History

by R.G. Collingwood

there is a peculiar illusion incidental to all knowledge acquired in the way of education: the illusion of finality. When a student is in statu pupillari with respect to any subject whatever, he has to believe that things are settled because the textbooks and his teachers regard them as settled. When he emerges from that state and goes on studying the subject for himself he finds that nothing is settled. The dogmatism which is an invariable mark of immaturity drops away from him. He looks at so-called facts with a new eye. He says to himself: ‘My teacher and textbooks told me that such and such was true; but is it true? What reasons had they for thinking it true, and were these reasons adequate?’ On the other hand, if he emerges from the status of pupil without continuing to pursue the subject he never rids himself of this dogmatic attitude.

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autobiography is not a profession.

Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to earth by insisting that he himself knew nothing, and inventing a technique whereby, through skilful questioning, knowledge could be generated in the minds of others as ignorant as himself. Knowledge of what? Knowledge of human affairs: in particular, of the moral ideas that guide human conduct.

What is really wrong with Tacitus is that he has never thought out the fundamental problems of his enterprise. His attitude towards the philosophical groundwork of history is frivolous, and he takes over the current pragmatic view of its purpose in the spirit of a rhetorician rather than that of a serious thinker.

The great theological and philosophical systems which had provided a basis for determining the general plan of history a priori had ceased to command assent, and with the Renaissance a return was made to a humanistic view of history based on that of the ancients.

To live with men of an earlier age is like travelling in foreign lands. It is useful to know something of the manners of other peoples in order to judge more impartially of our own, and not despise and ridicule whatever differs from them, like men who have never been outside their native country. But those who travel too long end by being strangers in their own homes, and those who study too curiously the actions of antiquity are ignorant of what is done among ourselves today. Moreover these narratives tell of things which cannot have happened as if they had really taken place, and thus invite us to attempt what is beyond our powers or to hope for what is beyond our fate.

Descartes here makes four points which it is well to distinguish: (1) Historical escapism: the historian is a traveller who by living away from home becomes a stranger to his own age. (2)Historical pyrrhonism: historical narratives are not trustworthy accounts of the past. (3) Anti-utilitarian idea of history: untrustworthy narratives cannot really assist us to understand what is possible and thus to act effectively in the present. (4) History as fantasy-building: the way in which historians, even at best, distort the past is by making it appear more splendid than it really was.

The main idea of this new school was that the testimony of written authorities must not be accepted without submitting it to a process of criticism based on at least three rules of method: (1) Descartes’s own implicit rule, that no authority must induce us to believe what we know cannot have happened; (2) the rule that different authorities must be confronted with each other and harmonized; (3) the rule that written authorities must be checked by the use of non-literary evidence.

It is to this period and especially to the Bollandists that we owe the idea of dissecting a tradition, allowing for the distortion of the medium through which it has reached us, and thus getting rid once for all of the old dilemma between either accepting it en bloc as true or rejecting it as false.

Any idea, says Vico, however false, may convince us by its seeming self-evidence, and nothing is easier than to think our beliefs self-evident when in fact they are baseless fictions reached by sophistical argument: once more, a Humian point.

On this principle nature is intelligible only to God, but mathematics is intelligible to man, because the objects of mathematical thought are fictions or hypotheses which the mathematician has constructed.

Search for the thing in itself is for him as pointless as it is futile.

lastly a kind of spendthrift and wasteful opulence which destroys what has been constructed.

He distinguishes five of these sources of error:

1. Magnificent opinions concerning antiquity, i.e. the prejudice in favour of exaggerating the wealth, power, grandeur, &c., of the period which the historian is studying.

2. The conceit of nations.

3. The conceit of the learned. This, as Vico interprets it, takes the special form of a prejudice on the part of the historian which makes him suppose that the people about whom he is thinking were like himself in being scholars and students and in general people of reflective intellect.

The fallacy of sources, or what Vico calls the scholastic succession of nations. This error consists in thinking that when two nations have a similar idea or institution one must have learnt it from the other,

5. Lastly, there is the prejudice of thinking the ancients better informed than ourselves about the times that lay nearer to them.

Vico is not content with negative warnings; he goes on positively to indicate certain methods by which the historian can transcend mere reliance on the statements of authorities.

1. He shows how linguistic study can throw light on history.

2. He makes a similar use of mythology.

3. He propounds a new method (strange as its novelty may appear to us) of using tradition: by taking it not as literally true but as a confused memory of facts distorted through a medium whose refractive index we can to a certain extent define.

4. In order to find the key to this reinterpretation we must remember that minds at a given stage of development wall tend to create the same kind of products.

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The main points of the Lockian philosophy are easily enumerated.

1. The denial of innate ideas and the insistence that knowledge comes through experience.

2. The denial of any argument intended to bridge an alleged gulf between ideas and things, the denial being grounded on the doctrine that knowledge is concerned not with a reality distinct from our ideas but with the agreement and disagreement of our ideas themselves.

3. The denial of abstract ideas and the insistence that all ideas are concrete.

4. The conception of human knowledge as falling necessarily short of absolute truth and certainty, but capable of attaining (in Locke’s words) such certainty as our condition needs; or (as Hume puts it) that reason is incapable of dispelling the clouds of doubt, but that Nature herself (our human nature) suffices for that purpose and lays upon us in our practical life an absolute necessity to live and talk and act like other people.

Of these references I shall consider two.

In the first we find Hume applying the principles of his philosophy to the case of historical knowledge conceived in the spirit of the methods worked out by the scholars of the late seventeenth century:

Secondly, Hume was quite aware that contemporary philosophical thought had cast doubt on the validity of historical knowledge, and he goes out of his way to rebut the stock argument, especially because that argument might claim (unjustly, as he thinks) to be supported by his own principles:

it contained in itself the germs of two immediate developments: a backward-looking or more strictly historical development which should exhibit past history as the play of irrational forces, and a forward-looking or more practical or political development, forecasting and endeavouring to bring about a millennium in which the rule of reason shall have been established.

(a) As examples of the first tendency we may quote Montesquieu and Gibbon.

Montesquieu had the merit of seizing upon the differences between different nations and different cultures, but he misunderstood the essential character of these differences. Instead of explaining their history by reference to human reason, ...

Gibbon, a typical Enlightenment historian, agreed with all this to the extent of conceiving history as anything but an exhibition of human wisdom; but instead of finding its positive principle in the laws of nature which, as it were, replace for Montesquieu the wisdom of man and create for him social organizations which he could not create for himself, Gibbon finds the motive force of history in human irrationality itself, and his narrative displays what he calls the triumph of barbarism and religion.

(b) In its forward-looking aspect, where the golden age is conceived as lying in the near future, this movement may be represented by Condorcet, whose Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain, written during the French Revolution when he was in prison awaiting execution, looks forward to a Utopian future where tyrants and their slaves, priests and their dupes, will have disappeared, and people will behave rationally in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The sunrise of the scientific spirit was, from the point of view of the Enlightenment, a sheer miracle, unprepared in the previous course of events and uncaused by any cause that could be adequate to such an effect.

in a general way they had no satisfactory theory of historical causation and could not seriously believe in the origin or genesis of anything whatever.

Consequently, throughout their historical work, their account of causes is superficial to absurdity.

The science of human nature

They thought of human nature as something which stayed put, however much or however little one knew about it, exactly as nature stays put. They assumed without question a fallacious principle which may be put in the form of a rule-of-three sum: knowledge of nature: nature:: knowledge of mind: mind.

This assumption fatally distorted their conception of history in two ways:

(2) The same error gave them a false view not only of the past but of the future, because it made them look forward to a Utopia in which all the problems of human life should have been solved.

The racial theory of civilization has ceased to be scientifically respectable. Today we only know it as a sophistical excuse for national pride and national hatred. The idea that there is a European race whose peculiar virtues render it fit to dominate the rest of the world, or an English race whose innate qualities make imperialism a duty, or a Nordic race whose predominance in America is the necessary condition of American greatness, and whose purity in Germany is indispensable to the purity of German culture, we know to be scientifically baseless and politically disastrous. We know that physical anthropology and cultural anthropology are different studies, and we find it difficult to see how anyone can have confused them.

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Kant’s ‘idea’, as he calls it, may be summarized in four points: (i) Universal history is a feasible ideal, but demands a union of historical and philosophical thought: the facts must be understood as well as narrated, seen from within and not only from outside, (ii) It presupposes a plan, i.e. it exhibits a progress, or shows something as coming progressively into being, (iii) That which is thus coming into existence is human rationality, i.e. intelligence, moral freedom, (iv) The means by which it is being brought into existence is human irrationality, i.e. passion, ignorance, selfishness.