R. G. Collingwood: A Research Companion

James Connelly, Peter Johnson, Stephen Leach

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441140722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

R. G. Collingwood is an important 20th-century historian, archaeologist and philosopher whose works are the subject of continued interest, analysis and study. There is an unquestionable need to support this research activity with the provision of a reference guide which is fully up-to-date, informed and authoritative. The Companion therefore lists all primary and secondary material relevant to the study of Collingwood in all his fields of expertise - historical theory, philosophy and archaeology. It also provides a guide to archive material relevant to his life, together with sources and locations. The resulting volume is an essential companion to the understanding of the life and thought of R. G. Collingwood.

1

Introduction

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) was a major philosopher whose work in aesthetics and in the philosophy of history is rightly regarded as seminal. In the fields of metaphysics, political philosophy and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of nature, Collingwood’s writings continue to stimulate reflection and controversy. His writings on theology and the philosophy of religion retain their originality and significance. Collingwood was, too, a respected archaeologist whose investigations in the area of Romano-British archaeology were extensive, thought-provoking and, in some cases, well ahead of their time.

As this Research Companion shows, Collingwood’s published and unpublished writings in philosophy, history and archaeology, including autobiographical and miscellaneous material, are diverse and wide-ranging. When we add to this large corpus of work the letters he wrote to a great variety of correspondents, many of whom were influential figures in the scholarly and academic life of the twentieth century, we arrive at a veritable Who’s Who of figures in Collingwood’s own circle – and beyond. Faced with a lifetime’s activity of such volume and intensity, students of his life and thought, both experienced and beginners, will surely appreciate a helping hand. By bringing together these many strands of Collingwood’s writings in one volume, it is the primary aim of the Research Companion to provide that help, structured in the most useful way possible.

The need to catalogue exactly what Collingwood wrote and when he wrote it was recognised soon after his death, and all subsequent bibliographers owe a debt of gratitude to the first workers in this field: foremost amongst these are T. M. Knox, ‘Notes on Collingwood’s Philosophical Work: with a Bibliography’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 29, 1943, 469–75, and I. A. Richmond, ‘Appreciation of R. G. Collingwood as an Archaeologist’ and ‘R. G. Collingwood: Bibliography of Writings on Ancient History and Archaeology’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 29, 1943, 476–85. Bibliography, however, is a provisional science; its results are dependent on the material to hand. New discoveries have to be recorded and made available to researchers. All bibliographers build on the efforts of their predecessors and this work is no exception. Our forerunners in this enterprise include W. J. Van Der Dussen, History as a Science, The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1981, Bibliography I, II, III and IV, pp.445–71; Donald S. Taylor, R. G. Collingwood, A Bibliography, Garland Publishing, New York and London, 1988; and Christopher Dreisbach, R. G. Collingwood A Bibliographic Checklist, The Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1993. For Collingwood’s manuscripts and papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, see the Catalogue of the Papers of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) (Dep. Collingwood 1–28), compiled by Ruth A. Burchnall, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1994.

As will be apparent from these references, it is close on two decades since the last major bibliography was published. In that time a significant quantity of writing by Collingwood, particularly reviews and letters, has come to light, and previously unpublished work by him in the philosophy of history, political philosophy and aesthetics has appeared in published form. Much new and often innovative writing on Collingwood, in particular scholarly monographs and articles, has been added to the already substantial secondary literature. Some of these contain highly specialised bibliographies of work in their particular fields of philosophy, history and archaeology. Our objectives in this Research Companion are, first, to provide a systematic, comprehensive, accurate and detailed listing of all Collingwood’s writings, including all the new material known to date; second, to provide an up to date bibliography of secondary works on Collingwood; and third, to aid the understanding of Collingwood’s intellectual biography by providing a calendar of his life and activities, together with a Family Tree describing his antecedents and family background. We will feel we have succeeded if, at the very least, we encourage all those who are interested in Collingwood to return to his work with a deeper appreciation of its scope and complexity.

We are grateful to all those who have assisted with this project, particularly: R. G. Collingwood’s daughter, Mrs Teresa Smith; the many librarians and custodians of Collingwood material, including letters, who have answered our queries; our editors at Bloomsbury, Rhodri Mogford and Emma Goode, whose patience knows no bounds; and all those friends and family members whose enthusiasm for talking about the minutiae of Collingwood’s life and writings at any hour of the day or night almost equals our own.

James Connelly is grateful for the support of the University of Hull which enabled him to visit archives at St Andrews, Cardiff, Oxford, Kendal and Ambleside and to employ Stephen Leach on archival work.

The authors would be grateful to hear of any omissions from the primary bibliography and any additions to the secondary bibliography.

JC, PJ, SL

2

A Brief Biography

R. G. Collingwood was a noted philosopher, archaeologist and historian. As a philosopher his reputation rests mainly on his work in aesthetics and the philosophy of history. As an archaeologist and historian he worked mainly on Roman Britain. The connections between Collingwood’s researches in both of these fields are many and various. Readers may therefore find a short biographical account of his life and main works useful.

Robin Collingwood* was born on 22 February 1889 in the village of Cartmel Fell at the southern end of Windermere. He was the son of William Gershom and Edith Mary Collingwood, who were both artists newly resident in the Lake District. When Collingwood was a young boy his parents moved to Lanehead, a house on the edge of a different lake, Coniston. Family life at Lanehead reflected the interests and values of his parents. Art, in the shape of music, sculpture and painting, was ever present and Collingwood, together with his three sisters, was encouraged to develop the skills of self-expression and appreciation: such skills imply standards and standards imply discipline. Art was Collingwood’s first introduction to a life lived in common with others. He learnt that knowing meant doing, and doing would be impossible without the recognition that some achievements are better than others and that some represent an excellence which is unconditional.

The belief that life should be shaped by art reflected the principles of John Ruskin, the great Victorian artist and social critic, who lived at Brantwood, a short walk away from the Collingwood home. W. G. Collingwood had been Ruskin’s secretary and in the course of his early upbringing his son grew to take this ideal to heart. The power of art to educate and transform remained a constant feature in all of Collingwood’s writings; but with the dawning of reflective thought he saw with rapidly increasing clarity that there were questions which art was unable to answer. His early schooling took place mainly at home and his years at Rugby School were rewarding only in the most formal and minimal sense. If Rugby was Collingwood’s educational engine, providing him with a formal training in Latin and Greek, his inspiration remained Lanehead and the example given to him by his parents. Listening to his mother playing the piano, as the sun rose over the lake in front of the family home, left Collingwood with an attachment to music that he never lost. The personal experience of following his father’s investigations in local history and archaeology sparked an involvement with history which deepened over time to become a major preoccupation. As with art, however, history raised puzzles that it was unable to solve and so Collingwood’s turn towards philosophy came naturally. Philosophy, art and history came to be the subjects that would dominate Collingwood’s life. They are the pillars on which his later academic reputation rests.

In 1908 Collingwood arrived at his father’s old college, University College, Oxford, to begin his university education. By his own account he soaked himself not only in the life and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, but also in fine art and music, joining in discussions on contemporary philosophy and the problems of religious belief, as well as the contentious political and economic issues of the day. To many at the time it came as no surprise that, just over three years later, shortly before graduating with a congratulatory First in Classics, Collingwood was appointed a Fellow in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford. This was a post he would hold until 1935 when he moved to Magdalen College, Oxford to replace J. A. Smith, a philosopher Collingwood greatly admired, as the holder of the Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy.

What would now be called Collingwood’s teaching and research was a reflection of his startling intellectual range and ambition. At Oxford, Collingwood was uniquely a teacher of both archaeology and philosophy. An early disciple of realism in philosophy, Collingwood soon became dissatisfied with its simplistic account of knowledge and its inability to explain any form of human communication beyond the most elementary. Human understanding is diverse, both in theory and practice, so it is the job of philosophy to uncover the forms of understanding which make human beings what they are. Art, religion, science, history and philosophy itself are distinct modes of thought, each with its own presuppositions. Collingwood was a polymath by inclination and upbringing; however, in the early 1920s, under the influence of the fashionable school of Italian Idealist philosophers Croce, de Ruggiero and Gentile, he saw the need to become one from philosophical choice. But Neo-Hegelianism, the creed seeping into Oxford thought from across the Channel, was anathema to the empiricist mainstream of English philosophy which followed Bertrand Russell in his view that the methods of philosophy were abstract and analytical. For Collingwood, however, a philosophy modelled on the procedures of scientific enquiry was, particularly in the aftermath of a devastating world war, precisely not what was needed.

Written under the influence of Italian idealism, Speculum Mentis (1924) was Collingwood’s first book to be published after the First World War. It reflected a shift from the realism present in his youthful first work, Religion and Philosophy (1916), to a philosophical idealism which was intended both to transcend the weaknesses of realism and to find room for its obvious strengths. In politics, no less than in philosophy, Speculum Mentis was a work of reconciliation, but in 1924 Collingwood’s philosophy of practice was largely undeveloped and so in a series of important articles in the second half of the decade he began to examine economics and politics from a philosophical point of view, building the foundations for the historically informed philosophical liberalism which is his defining stance in political philosophy.

The pattern of Collingwood’s working life was set by his appointment to the Fellowship at Pembroke. Writing and lecturing during term times was balanced with archaeological work during the vacations, when he would get his hands dirty in directing excavations mainly at Roman sites in the north of England. Collingwood’s philosophical account of history went hand in hand with this detailed experience of how knowledge in history was actually acquired. Such work, on Hadrian’s Wall and Roman inscriptions (to take two of the better known examples), was both time-consuming and exhausting, but the many books and articles he published subsequently laid the basis both for Collingwood’s reputation as one of the foremost historians of Roman Britain and for many of his insights into how historical method works.

Collingwood’s reflections on history throughout the 1920s told him that realism as an account of historical method was a failure. Developing an alternative would take much of Collingwood’s time in the following decade. Indeed, the distinctive insights of Collingwood’s own philosophy of history, that history is both a systematic form of knowledge and autonomous, emerged gradually in lectures and papers written during the 1930s and then collected posthumously as The Idea of History (1946). In Speculum Mentis the nature of the unity of the human mind was Collingwood’s main preoccupation. Even so, during the 1930s the idea of a phenomenology of human knowledge slipped into the background of Collingwood’s thinking, with philosophy and its relations with history receiving greater prominence and direction. It is not that philosophy defects in favour of history but rather, as the elegantly argued Essay on Philosophical Method (1933) with its stress on the doctrine of the scale of forms clearly shows, that neither philosophy nor history can be construed independently of the other. This position is stated quite explicitly in his Autobiography (1939), where he speaks of searching for a rapprochement between philosophy and history and between theory and practice. If these are Hegelian aims it nonetheless remains the case that Collingwood’s treatment of them is distinctively his own.

In the years following the publication of An Essay on Philosophical Method Collingwood’s attempts to chart the relations between philosophy and history take more than a single route. His lectures on nature, delivered in 1933–4 and posthumously published as The Idea of Nature (1945), replicate his technique in his philosophy of history. Historical periods are characterised by different conceptions of nature, as they are of history. This does not mean that the philosophy of science becomes the history of science or that the philosophy of history becomes the history of philosophy. Philosophy has its own distinctive character and mode of operation. Indeed, no rapprochement with history would be possible if that were not the case. Later, in An Essay on Metaphysics (1940), Collingwood examined how history was related to metaphysics, resisting the claim that metaphysics is a science of pure being and insisting instead that metaphysical questions are historical questions. In this book the ideas which make up a given way of life or intellectual discipline are analysed further into absolute and relative presuppositions. Metaphysics is analysis, but historical analysis of a special kind.

The nature of history was Collingwood’s main preoccupation in philosophy during the mid–1930s, but it was not his only one. Aesthetics continued to exert a strong fascination over him and so in 1937, turning once again to the nature of art and the role played by art in human education and development, he wrote The Principles of Art (1938), the work which contains the mature statement of Collingwood’s expressionist view of art. The distinction it formulates between art and craft is often seen as basic to any aesthetics worth the name. Moreover, there is much in the book, on the philosophy of language and on philosophical psychology (to take two examples), which is valuable to philosophers quite independently of their role in Collingwood’s own theory of art. Collingwood’s title indicates his belief that art has principles which can be revealed through philosophical investigation and that it is the job of the philosopher to tell us what these are. It is worth noting that The Principles of History (1999) operates in a similar way. This was written in 1939 but left uncompleted, and for many years was lost. It was intended by Collingwood to be his final work in the philosophy of history.

Illness, travel and political events are the governing features of Collingwood’s last years. Events in the form of the rise of Fascism and, as Collingwood thought, the weakness of the western democracies in facing up to it, are the essential political background to Collingwood’s later writings, in particular The New Leviathan (1942), his masterpiece in political philosophy. These later writings are not, however, isolated from his earlier work or from his philosophy of history. In The Idea of History Collingwood took the view that human understanding follows the model of historical understanding. He also argued that there is nothing in this claim which requires that human action is always at the mercy of events or that our place in history is pre-determined. It is in this spirit that Collingwood challenged the policy of appeasement adopted by the Chamberlain government as the only method for dealing with Nazi Germany, and wrote The New Leviathan to convince his fellow citizens that in the face of barbarism a rational defence of liberalism is both necessary and possible.

There is no doubt that Collingwood’s worsening health throughout the second half of the 1930s influenced what he decided to write about and when, if not the content of his writing. An Autobiography (1939) was written in its author’s belief that he did not have long to live, and he passed his work on Roman inscriptions to another archaeologist to complete. This was later published as The Roman Inscriptions of Britain (1965), with R. P. Wright. Recuperation from illness and travel are often found together. Travel gave Collingwood the opportunity to write as well as to recover from the series of strokes which he suffered during the late 1930s. His long sea voyage to the Dutch East Indies produced An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) and a diary of his experiences, the Log of a Journey to the East Indies 1938–9, now published for the first time in An Autobiography and Other Writings (2013). The First Mate’s Log of a Voyage to Greece in the Schooner Yacht Fleur de Lys in 1939 (1940), although not itself a philosophical work, is full of insights into Collingwood’s life and thought, as well as being a vivid record of immediate pre-war experience. The New Leviathan (1942), bravely written while its author was experiencing, especially towards the end of its composition, increasing physical frailty, was Collingwood’s final work. The completion of The New Leviathan stands as a testimony to Collingwood’s powers of endurance, to his energy as a philosopher and to his belief that philosophy should not be practised too far from the challenges of life. With his text for troubled times finished and ready to be published Collingwood moved back to Lanehead, the house near Coniston where his life’s direction had been formed, and where he died on 9 January 1943.

* He took the second name George on his baptism in 1905.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Brief Biography
• 3 Collingwood Family Tree
• 4 Selective Chronology
• 5 The Letters of R. G. Collingwood
• 5a The Letters of R. G. Collingwood
• 6 Primary Bibliographies
• 7 Secondary Bibliographies
• 8 Collingwood Archives
• Copyright