History – Modern (Collingwood)

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

“… It seemed to me as nearly certain as anything in the future could be, that historical thought … would increase in importance far more rapidly during the 20^th; and that we might very well be standing on the threshold of an age in which history would be as important for the world as natural science had been between 1600 and 1900”.

 

R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography

 

One may find rather illuminating - when considering Eduard Meyer’s artificially reconstructed (along Kantian lines) Egyptian dynastic ‘history’ in contrast to real objective Egyptian history - the Kantian-influenced professor R. G. Collingwood’s approach to history, as summarised by Gavin Ardley, in Aquinas and Kant: the foundations of the modern sciences (Chapter XIV: History as Science)?

 

Professor Collingwood

 

The modern progressive science of physics commenced when, in the words of Kant, we ceased to be like a pupil listening to everything the teacher chooses to say, but instead like a judge, compelled Nature to answer questions which we ourselves had formulated. It has been suggested in recent years that a progressive science of history might be started if a like Copernican revolution could be brought about in historical studies.

The late Professor R. G. Collingwood [d. 1943] was one of the leading exponents of this view. His thought is permeated through and through with Kant’s great idea about the Galilean epistemology, and he believed he could see a future for history as brilliant as the career of physics since Galileo.

He writes in his Autobiography [Ch. VIII].

 

Until the late 19^th an early 20^th centuries, historical studies had been in a condition analogous to that of natural science before Galileo. In Galileo’s time something happened to natural science (only a very ignorant or a very learned man would undertake to say briefly what it was) which suddenly and enormously increased the velocity of its progress and the width of its outlook. About the end of the 19^th century something of the same kind was happening, more gradually and less spectacularly perhaps, but not less certainly, to history.

… It seemed to me as nearly certain as anything in the future could be, that historical thought, whose constantly increasing importance had been one of the most striking features of the 19^th century, would increase in importance far more rapidly during the 20^th; and that we might very well be standing on the threshold of an age in which history would be as important for the world as natural science had been between 1600 and 1900.

 

History in the past was what Collingwood calls a ‘scissors and paste affair’. This was like physics before Galileo. Collingwood writes:

 

If historians could only repeat, with different arrangements and different styles of decoration, what others had said before them, the age-old hope of using it as a school of political wisdom was as vain as Hegel knew it to be when he made his famous remark that the only thing to be learnt from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.

 

But what if history is not a scissors and paste affair? What if the historian resembles the natural scientist in asking his own questions, and insisting on an answer? Clearly, that altered the situation.

The past with which the historian deals is not a dead past, but a past which is living on in the present. With the Copernican revolution in our approach to this living past, history, so Collingwood hopes, will become a school of moral and political wisdom.

Collingwood peaks of political ‘wisdom’ being the Baconian fruits of this revolution. But on the analogy of the natural sciences ‘wisdom’ seems hardly the right term. Terms such as power, control, utility, prediction, would be more appropriate. This really is what Collingwood envisages in other passages. He writes: [Ch. IX].

 

It was a plain fact that the gigantic increase since about 1600 in his power to control Nature had not been accompanied by a corresponding increase, or anything like it, in his power to control human situations….

It was the widening of the scientific outlook and the acceleration of scientific progress in the days of Galileo that had led in the fullness of time from the water-wheels and windmills of the Middle Ages to the almost incredible power and delicacy of the modern machine. In dealing with their fellow men, I could see, men were still what they were in dealing with machines in the Middle Ages. Well meaning babblers talked about the necessity for a change of heart. But the trouble was obviously in the head. What was needed was not more good will and human affection, but more understanding of human affairs and more knowledge of how to handle them.

 

This increase in our ability to handle human affairs, then, is to be brought about by the same revolution which transformed natural science in the 17^th century, the nature of which revolution was first recognised by Immanuel Kant.

As Collinwood sees it, history as a science of human affairs did not begin to emerge until the 20^th century. In the pre-scientific history age men perforce searched elsewhere for a science of human affairs. The 18th century looked for a ‘science of human nature’. The 19th century sought for it in the shape of psychology. These both turned out to be illusory. But since the revolution in history, history has revealed itself as the one true science of human affairs. [Ch. X].

 

The Two Histories

 

We might point out, however, something which Collingwood does not make clear, and about which he was probably not at all clear himself. This is the matter to which we drew attention when we doubted the appropriateness of the word ‘wisdom’ for the knowledge acquired through the new science of history, and suggested such epithets as control, power, utility, etc., in its place. For, as we have insisted throughout this book, the fact that we have a Procrustean science does not mean that we have in any way abolished the structure of Nature, or that we can no longer know Nature in the way in which the philosophia perennis knows it.

Collingwood’s proposed Kantian revolution in history will give us, of course, a Procrustean categorial science of history. But real objective history will carry on just as before. The relation between the two will be like the relation of modern so-called ‘physics’ to real physics, i.e. of nomos to physis. [cf. e.g. modern sociology on the one hand and ethics on the other (Ch. XIII), or Freudian therapeutic psychology and rational psychology (Ch. XV)]. The term ‘wisdom’ is more appropriate to knowledge of the physis than to the categorial structure devised by the ingenuity of man. The latter, in the case of history, is a practical instrument of manipulation for the prince, the former is the pursuit of the real nature of history.

 

The Character of Scientific History

 

Collingwood laid down the general principle which must be followed if history is to become a science, but he did not pursue the subject into specific terms.

We might develop a scheme of procedure in history by following the analogy of modern physics. This suggests the introduction into history of laws, fictions, artificial constructions, etc., as in physics. The concepts of ordinary life must be replaced by others more convenient for our purpose. For instance, in the exact physical sciences, the English term ‘hard’, which is a familiar and vague expression, is replaced by a number of artificial but exact terms, such as malleability, shear modulus, tensile strength, etc. This would lead to a monstrous jargon in history akin to the formidable technical terminology of the Procrustean natural sciences. The new Procrustean history would now be only for specialists and would soon become as unintelligible to the layman as is modern physics. But its justification, if indeed it could be constructed, would be the pragmatic sanction of practical utility. It would be a handy machine for princes. It should be remembered too that the new history would be potentially a dangerous weapon, just as dangerous, if not more so, than the control we now possess over inanimate Nature.

Whether such a Procrustean scheme will ever be born remains to be seen. For the inherent tractability or intractability of the raw material forming the primary subject matter of the Procrustean science must have some bearing on the ease with which such a science can be developed. The Procrustean method has had its greatest triumph in modern physics. In the biological sciences it has made much less progress, and in the human sciences and history has hardly started. Is this comparative failure outside physics due merely to dilatoriness and ineptitude, or is there a more underlying cause: that the subject matter in the animate and rational worlds is so much more intractable that it does not lend itself to Procrusteanisation?

If a Procrustean history does emerge, as Collingwood hopes, there may possibly be in consequence an initial reaction away from classical history, like the reaction away from Aristotelian science, and indeed all things Aristotelian, in the times of Galileo. But such a reaction in historical studies would be as ill-founded as was the 17th century reaction.

Let wiser counsels prevail, and the two pursuits may go on side by side. To prevent confusion of the two, which caused so much trouble with the old and new physical sciences, it would be better to find a new name for the new Procrustean history. To go on calling it ‘history’ would be a perpetual source of confusion with real history. We would suggest the term nomics except that we have already applied that term to post-Galilean ‘physics’. No doubt some new term appropriate to the situation could be found.