HST287: 16-Sept-2004 Reading Notes
Collingwood, Idea of History
Epilegomena

About the Epilegomena:
Knox compiled it from 1930s lectures and portions of a late 30s book. Thus, we are seeing his revision of Collingwood's works, edited during the war. Collingwood wrote The New Leviathan at about the same time as the lectures. In it he works out his ideas against nazism and fascism and about duty "which is related to civilization and the gradual elimination of force from the relations between people." He is moving history beyond the realm of the merely theoretical, beyond even re-enactment, and into action.

Human Nature and Human History

The science of human nature
1) observe
2) determine patterns/laws based on observations

In this section he is arguing that (p. 228-230)
1) Methods of modern history gew up under ideas of natural science, to wit, history consists of events to be observed, classified, and categorized. This leads to problems such as mistaking culture and tradition for race and pedigree.
2) Those who tried to create a "science of human nature" assumed that human nature was consistent throughout history or that humans do not learn as history progresses. They do not situate the historical person in their own historical place.
(Thus, they can look at historical people and assume "weren't they stupid for not realising...")

This one is the key to why Collingwood is still good to read: he's meta- izing historical thought! People with historical consciousness will take from history, develop and criticize, and use that heritage to their advantage. So, even if Collingwood's ideas themselves are incomplete, we can take his ideas, add other historical ideas of the 20th century, and go from there. If that is the case, Collingwood will not be wrong, just incomplete.

3) The question of psychology: it should stay out of history and focus simply on mind (he's prophetic: in the 21st century: brain p.231)

"The science of human nature [understanding what understanding is] broke down because its method was distorted by the analogy of the natural sciences." (p. 208)

He says history "is recognized as a special and autonomous form of thought, lately established, whose possibilities have not yet been completely explored." (p. 209) [relate this to humanities computing]

His thesis: the science of human nature was a false attempt--falsified by the analogy of natural science--to understand the mind itself, and that, whereas the right way of investigating nature is by the methods called scientific, the right way of investigating mind is by the methods of history.
Natural process: past dies and is replaced by present
Historical process: past survives in the present (p. 225)

He says historians must be concerned with both the inside and outside of history--outside: what happened, inside: what were the motivations or thoughts of those involved (p.213) Science only deals with the "outside"

History is not an account of change (one damn thing after another), it is re-enactment in the mind of the historian.
 
Parochialim and bias: "It was easy for men of the 18th century to make this mistake ["mistaking the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life"] because their historical perspective was so short, and their knowledge of cultures other than their own so limited, that they could cheerfully identify the intellectual habits of a western European in their own day with the intellectual faculties bestowed upon Adam and all his progeny." (p. 224)

Evolutionist p. 225
(Thought: He believes in evolution but what he is saying is not dependant on evolution: people can learn through history, rather, what has happened in the past will shape what happens in the present and so human cultures will change, but that does not necessarily imply evolution)

2. The Historical Imagination

History resembles philosophy (why) and science (because knowledge is inferred and reasoned) but is neither. It is a third thing,
1) The "Common sense" theory: essentials are memory (write down the truth) and authority (believe the writer). The historian must not tamper with the Facts.
Consequences: that's silly. Historians always select with bias.And when they agree with an authority they are actually saying "I believe this so you should believe me" i.e. they are claiming that mantle of authority.
2) The Bradley belief: the historian is free to jettison historical information at will if it does not meet with his own presuppositions. The historian judges his authorities.
Consequences: well duh
3) The historian must be detective: gathering evidence, examining it critically, imagining the event,

3. Historical Evidence

History is not science in the sense that you can gather data, observe and experiment.
"History...is a science whose business is to study events not accessible to our observation, and to study those events inferentially, arguing to them from something else which is accessible to our observation, and which the historian calls 'evidence' for the events in which he is interested." (p. 252)

History is inferential: it is inferred from evidence
Testimony should always be suspect.
Scissors-and-paste (multiple testimony, multiple sources) is also suspect.

Two movements away from scissos-and-paste history: (esp. Vico)
1) The historian must be critical, meaning evidence should be weighed carefully, and also the historians assumptions about the evidence should be weighed. Vico: look for the meaning behind the words. Qustion your interpretation, don't dismiss out of hand.
2) use archaeology

Just funny:
"Scissors-and-paste historians who have become disgusted with the work of copying out other people's statements, and, conscious of having brains, feel a laudable desire to use them, are often found satisfying this desire by inventing a system of pigeon-holes in which to arrange their learning." p. 264

19th century: the art of turning scissors-and-paste historians into "natural scientists" by collecting facts, looking for patterns, and extrapolating from the patterns a theory of universal history (p. 265)
The problem: you can always find patterns ("things that are things") but they mean nothing without critical interpretation

The detective story analogy (except of course the daughter actually poisoned him...)

"The potential evidence about a subject is all the extant statements about it. The actual evidence is that part of these statements we decide to accept...everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever..." (p. 280)
Daunting to the s&p historian--how can you round up enough evidence. Not daunting to the scientific historian who realises that "every time he asks a question he asks it because he thinks he can answer it...he has already in mind a preliminary and tentative idea of the evidence he will be able to use. Not a definite idea about potential evidence, but an indefinite idea about actual evidence." (p. 280-1)

Holmes vs. Poirot: s&p gathering vs. little grey cells cogitation (Lord Acton: Study problems, not periods." (p. 281)

4. History as Re-enactment of Past Experiences

1) An act of thought can be sustained, revived in one mind, and revived in another across time.
2) Does that make all history impossible? Just a re-working of one's own experience? No, because with enough critical evidence (and an understanding of our subjectivity limitations) we can re-enact past thoughts.

"Historical knowledge is that special case of memory where the object of present thought is past thought, the gap between present and past being bridged not only by the power of present thought to think of the past, but also by the power of past thought to reawaken itself in the present." (p. 294)

Autobiography: coloring the past with knowledge of the present--seeing how the consequences came about from what happened.

To be sure of how one felt/acted in the past one must have evidence from that time, not just a recollection colored by subsequent events.

Thought is both immediacy (flow of consciousness) and mediation (detached from that flow).

"Thus, the mere fact that someone has expressed his thoughts in writing, and that we possess his works, does not enable us to understand his thoughts. In order that we may be able to do so, we must come to the reading of them prepared with an experience sufficiently like his own to make those thoughts organic to it." (p. 300)

5. The Subject-matter of History

"Of what can there be historical knowledge? Of that which can be re-enacted in the historian's mind." (p. 302)

What is not?
 - nature, because changes are not conscious of change
 - experience, because it is either sensation (feeling) or psychology (empathizing with feelings of others)
 - the act of thought, because it occurs in time and time passes

There can be histories of:
 - politics
 - warfare
 - economics
 - morals
 - science
 - art (or at least artistic achievement)
 - philosophy
 - religion
because these are all a function of reflective thought in pursuit of solving a problem. As such they can be re-enacted in the mind of the historian (pp. 310-313) Isn't this circular?

6. History and Freedom

7. Progress as created by Historical Thinking

Historic progress is not evolution. The idea of historical process...refers to the coming into existence not merely of new actions or thoughts or situations belonging to the same specific type, but of new specific types." (p. 324)

The "optical illusion" of judging history as good periods and bad periods based on the prejudices of the historian (p. 328)

Is history "evolution" or "Fortune's Wheel?" Hoorah! Collingwood sees that "the historian can never take any period as a whole."
Progress when it happens, happens only in one way: by the retention of the mind, at one phase, of what was achieved in the preceding phase." (p. 333)
So, how does he see historiography? He has explained how previous historians didn't get it, but has implied that they have moved in a particular direction?


Questions
sin of ommission,
there is a "right way of investigating mind" instead of many right ways
there is a historian, instead of many
"historians re-enact critically" but he leaves out the dangers of doing so--bias, lack of evidence (12th cent. bliauts)

sin of commission, Knox's role in determining what becomes the Collingwood canon
bad SCA history - putting our belief systems on those of the past


--------------------------------
Questions Submitted


1) In the section on Human Nature and Human History (pp. 228-230) Collingwood argues that:
a) Methods of modern history gew up under ideas of natural science, to wit, history consists of events to be observed, classified, and categorized. This leads to problems such as mistaking culture and tradition for race and pedigree.
b) Those who tried to create a "science of human nature" assumed that human nature was consistent throughout history or that humans do not learn as history progresses. They do not situate the historical person in their own historical place. Thus, they can look at historical people and comfortably assume "weren't they stupid for not realising..."

This one is the key to why Collingwood is a good read: he's meta- izing historical thought, always a safe practice. People with historical consciousness will take from history, develop and criticize, and use that heritage to their advantage. This applies to Collingwood's theory as well. Critics may call the ideas incomplete, but we can take his ideas, add other historiographic theories of the 20th century, and go from there. If that is the case, Collingwood will not be wrong, just incomplete. His work is malleable enough to cover a variety of circumstances.

So far, so good. The interesting question is what happens when the ground shifts out from beneath him. For example, he was writing in and responding to an environment that included the rise of evolutionism (or worse, social Darwinism) and the changes in the methods and definitions of science (not to mention the impact of the idealogically based WWI and the build-up to WWII). Knox transplanted him into the post-war era, and Dray and Van der Dussen into the 1990s. How will he fare as we move into the world of brain science theory, genetics, and information overload? (No I don't have an answer to that one! Maybe by December...)

2) "The potential evidence about a subject is all the extant statements about it. The actual evidence is that part of these statements we decide to accept...everything in the world is potential evidence for any subject whatever..." (p. 280) He points out that this is daunting to the s&p historian--how can you possibly collect enough evidence? He suggests this is not daunting to the scientific historian who realises that "every time he asks a question he asks it because he thinks he can answer it...he has already in mind a preliminary and tentative idea of the evidence he will be able to use. Not a definite idea about potential evidence, but an indefinite idea about actual evidence." (p. 280-1)

One consequence of this belief in the field of history in the 20th cent. is the push to collect more evidence and, possibly, the effect on contemporary ideas about creating more evidence for future historians. That is,  if we have more information we can make more informed re-enactments. The 20th century has seen many efforts in the area of  getting better data - inclusion (east/west, gender, race), better collection methods (archaeology, paleography, etc.), better methods for quatification. But what are some consequences? "Even with all these aids, he may still miss an important piece of testimony, and thus provide sport for his friends; but on any given question the amount of testimony that exists is a finite quantity, and it is theoretically possible to exhaust it." (p. 278)

Collingwood may have thought the testimony available in his day was a finite quantity. This may or may not have been true when he wrote this (I doubt it). But the consequence of this push to collect more data, combined with the technological ability to do so leads to a point where there is too much data to make observation and study of it practical. Thus, the historian must select the data to be studied. Collingwood may hope that selection will be based on critical thought, not prejudice and bias, that the questions themselves will not be made from a place of bias. Hence, the charge that he is an idealist?

3) Is history "evolution" or "Fortune's Wheel?" Is man moving forward, monolithically, on a progressive path, or just moving through period after period (Who was it that said "History: it's just one damn thing after another"?) Hoorah! Collingwood sees that "the historian can never take any period as a whole." "Progress when it happens, happens only in one way: by the retention of the mind, at one phase, of what was achieved in the preceding phase." (p. 333) That is, a society may show progress in one area and regress in another.
So, how does he see historiography? He has explained how previous historians didn't "get it," but has he implied that they have moved monolithically in a particular direction. In so implying, does he see his own work as evolutionary?


By the way, his ideas about  history as re-enactment reminded me of your question about teaching women's/African-American, etc. history without the experience of being a woman/Afircan-American, etc. Collingwood seems to think the historian can enter the mind and truly experience (p. 296--Nietzche and the wind in his hair)--if we have sufficient evidence are the thoughts we create comparable to theirs. I'm not quite willing to follow Collingwood all the way there. I can't help but think the answer is no for experiencing, but yes as far as teaching.

And favorite quote that shows his lectures may have been rather fun:
"Scissors-and-paste historians who have become disgusted with the work of copying out other people's statements, and, conscious of having brains, feel a laudable desire to use them, are often found satisfying this desire by inventing a system of pigeon-holes in which to arrange their learning." p. 264

This page: http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/personal/portfolio/hst287/notes-9-16.html


hope.greenberg@uvm.edu, created/updated: 16-Sept-2004
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