This review of Fred Inglis’s biography of R.G. Collingwood appears in the current issue of the Literary Review.
Fred Inglis
History Man: The
Life of R.G. Collingwood
Princeton University Press, 400pp, £23.95
Gilbert Ryle, the grey eminence of Oxford philosophy during its heyday in the 1950s, used to say that the correct way to read the great philosophers of the past was to treat their work as if it had appeared in the previous month’s edition of the journal Mind. Read in this fashion, Plato’s Parmenides, for example, turns out to have been an attempt at a theory of types of the sort perfected two millennia later by Bertrand Russell. And lurking in the “transcendental idealist” undergrowth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a modest little essay in what Ryle’s colleague Peter Strawson called “descriptive metaphysics”.
The widespread acceptance of this method of “rationally reconstructing” philosophical classics so as to make them speak to contemporary concerns -often at considerable cost to the internal coherence of the works concerned- completed a process described by the late Bernard Williams as the “complete obliteration … from the collective local consciousnes” of Ryle’s predecessor as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, R.G. Collingwood. For it was one of Collingwood’s most fiercely held intellectual principles that to attribute to a historical author views he never actually held (or, alternatively, to chastise him for failing to hold views one held oneself) was like “planting treasonable correspondence” in someone’s coat pocket.
Despite the existence today of a thriving academic cottage industry devoted to his work, Collingwood’s reputation has never really recovered from the damage done to it after his death in 1943. The hegemony of Ryle, J.L. Austin and the other “linguistic philosophers” in the years following the Second World War was confirmed in 1958, when a survey of English Philosophy Since 1900, written by Austin’s ammanuensis Geoffrey Warnock, contained not a single reference to Collingwood.
Fred Inglis’s vividly written biography is devoted, therefore, to “bring[ing] up the light” on its subject. However, it is also a reminder that, despite his academic achievements (he acceded to the Waynflete in 1935, having been narrowly beaten seven years earlier, at the age of only 39, to the White’s Chair in Moral Philosophy), Collingwood had in fact begun to fade from the “collective local consciousnes” long before he died.
In what Inglis rightly describes as his “best-known and surely classic work”, An Autobiography, published in 1939, Collingwood frankly acknowledged that the corollary of his considerable social and professional success was more or les complete intellectual isolation. As Inglis observes, Collingwood was cut off from both the group of philosophical revoltés that in the mid -’30s had gathered around Austin (and which included Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and A.J. Ayer) and an older generation of “realist” philosophers loyal to the shade of John Cook Wilson.
Collingwood began his career attacking Cook-Wilsonian realism for its indifference to the history of philosophy. He developed in its place something he called the “question-and-answer” method, the gist of which was that in order to grasp the meaning of a proposition, or a historical text for that matter, one must know the question to which it is an answer. In other words, propositions and linguistic utterances do not wear their meanings on their sleeves.
The implications of this method for the study of historical texts were obvious. When a philosophical treatise, say, becomes a “classic” -when, that is, the author’s contemporaries are long dead- the question to which it is an answer is forgotten. Excavating that question requires, Collingwood thought, the “exercise of considerable historical skill”. The alternative to such hard labour is to treat the the author as one’s contemporary - or else to take it for granted that philosophical questions are eternal and unchanging; that our preoccupations are the same as Plato’s.
Inglis’s great achievement in this book is to apply the question-and-answer method to Collingwood’s biography, the “interpreted life” being no more susceptible to instant appraisal than the interpreted text. (With attractive modesty, he describes History Man as merely an “extended gloss” on the story Collingwood himself tells in his autobiography.) He recreates not only the long-forgotten intellectual milieu of Oxford in the 1920s, but also the circumstances of Collingwood’s extraordinary upbringing: until the age of 13, he was educated at home in the Lake District by his artist parents, who were friends and devotees of Ruskin. That “alternative education”, Inglis argues, goes some way to explaining the isolation and marginalisation that Collingwood would feel so keenly later in life.
Collingwood’s separateness was partly self-imposed, however, as Inglis recognises when he considers the remarkable final chapter of An Autobiography. That “ringing sermon” against the political accomodations and complacencies of his contemporaries, delivered in the midst of the “gravest crisis” in the country’s history, reveals Collingwood as, in the words of his biographer, “one of Britain’s best, lost intellectuals of the 1930s”. But as Oxford prepared to vote in the “appeasement” by-election of October 1938, this intellectual manqué was leaving Birkenhead aboard a steamer bound for Java - and leaving Britain “to the care of appeasers with every appearance of eager anticipation of his first extended departure from Europe.”