On the Unity of Collingwood’s Philosophy- From Process to Self-Creation

REVIEW ESSAY

Chinatsu Kobayashi & Mathieu Marion1

On the Unity ofCollingwood’s

Philosophy: From Processto Self-Creation

Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; andsince nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the onlyclue to what man can do is what man has done. The valueof history, then, is that it teaches us what man has doneand thus what man is. R. G. Collingwood

The availability of Collingwood’s posthumous writings,

deposited at the Bodleian Library, Oxford in 1978 and for a

large part now published as appendices to new editions of

some of his major works (IH, NL, EM and EPM) as well as

in entirely new volumes such as The Principles of History

(PH) and The Philosophy of Enchantment (PE), has brought

about major revisions of his philosophy and a better

appreciation of its relevance for today’s debates. One such

shift has occurred when David Boucher demonstrated the

importance of moral and political philosophy for his over-

[1] Université du Québec à Montréal.

all conception of philosophy, in The Social and Political

Thought of R. G. Collingwood and in his introductions to his

edition of Collingwood’s Essays in Political Philosophy and

to a new edition of The New Leviathan.2 Collingwood’s

abiding interest in moral philosophy had simply been

hitherto mostly overlooked, even though quite a bit went

into print in the last years of his life.3 Collingwood, who

taught the subject regularly throughout the 1920s and

1930s until 1940, believed that moral philosophy was ‘an

attempt to think out more clearly the issues involved in

conduct, for the sake of acting better ‘ (A, 47) and he

despised the Oxford Realists for having turned it into a

‘futile parlour game ‘ (A, 50). His philosophy can indeed

be construed as culminating in moral philosophy: the pro-

cess of development that leads, from ‘pure feeling’,

through ‘conceptual’ and ‘propositional thinking’, to

‘thinking about thinking’ is parallel to the movement from

‘pure feeling’ to ‘appetite’ and then to ‘desire’ and to ‘will’

and ‘intellect’,4 and the latter is but the ability for rational

choice; the very topic of moral philosophy. In The New

Leviathan, Collingwood had already distinguished

between three levels of rational choice, according to util-

ity, right, and duty (NL, chap. XIV-XVIII) and he explicitly

linked thinking about duty with ‘historical thinking’ (NL,

18.52); these ideas had previously been expressed in his

2 Chinatsu Kobayashi & Mathieu Marion

[2] D. Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; ‘Introduction’, in R. G.Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989,1-51; ‘Editor’s Introduction’, (NL, xiii-lvii).

[3] One should note, however, that Louis Mink had already seen that themoral and political philosophy ‘forms the conceptual background of bothThe Principles of Art (1938) and The Idea of History […] although in bothbooks he uses bits and pieces of the theory only as they become relevant toasking and answering specific questions about art and history ‘ (L. O.Mink, ‘Collingwood’s Historicism: A Dialectic of Process’, in M. Krausz(ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, Oxford,Clarendon Press, 1972, 154-178, p. 165). A compelling case could only bemade, however, once the unpublished manuscripts became available.

[4] L. O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic. The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood,Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 1969, p. 177.

lectures notes on ‘Goodness, Rightness, Utility’ (1940),

from which The New Leviathan partly grew (NL, 475-478).

Duty is defined as the consciousness that one can only per-

form one action in a given situation and Collingwood’s

key idea is that one must first achieve (to the best of one’s

ability) self-knowledge and knowledge of one’s situation,

so that the realization of one’s ‘duty’ will follow. Now

self-knowledge is but historical knowledge, so there is an

intimate link between his views on the philosophy of his-

tory and his moral philosophy. As Stein Helgeby put it:

‘We come to act better only through historical self-knowl-

edge’.5

To paraphrase Hegel’s famous words, ‘Bis hierher ist das

Bewusstsein gekommen’, our understanding of Colling-

wood’s thought has reached this far. In his paper on ‘Ac-

tion, Duty, and Self-Knowledge’, from which this

quotation is taken, Helgeby expressed the wish to take the

point even further than Boucher had taken it.6 For

Boucher, the link between history and moral philosophy

allowed us to see how Collingwood’s philosophy leads to

Review Essay 3

[5] S. Helgeby, ‘Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge in R. G. Collingwood’sPhilosophy of History’, Collingwood Studies, 1, 1994, 86-107, p. 94. Aspointed out, the key passage here is (NL, 18.52) and one should note how itwas dismissed by an earlier generation commentators. For example,William Dray calls the result of this identification a ‘far from promising ‘approach to duty in W. H. Dray, History as Re-Enactment. R. G.Collingwood’s Idea of History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 66, n. 51;Louis Mink also points out obvious criticisms without evaluating them inL. O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic, op. cit., pp. 10-12.

[6] S. Helgeby, ‘Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge’, op. cit., p. 93. There are ofcourse other commentators here, Helgeby mentions van der Dussen, butwe should add James Connelly, whose book covers very thoroughlyalmost the same ground as Helgeby’s; presumably, Helgeby was notaware of it when his book into press. See J. Connelly, Metaphysics, Methodand Politics, Exeter, Imprint Academic, 2003. One key difference betweenthe two book is the emphasis, when discussing metaphysics, on ontologyand cosmology in Helgeby’s book, while Connelly focuses on latermaterial on ‘absolute presuppositions’. Connelly shows the importance ofCollingwood’s thinking about method when trying to grasp thefundamental unity of his thought, and this is not properly thematized inHelgeby’s book.

a political philosophy, and, ultimately how they match

Collingwood’s own political views, that is, his defense of

liberalism, since moral philosophy is part of the education

of the responsible, autonomous, free citizens that make up

the liberal society. Helgeby’s Action as History: The Histori-

cal Thought of R. G. Collingwood (hereafter AH) can be seen

has the result of his efforts to go further but, at least in

part, in a different direction. His central claims can be

summarized by saying that all actions are historical or

‘history is an universal aspect of action present in each and

every act ‘ (AH, viii & 7), because they are the result of a

process of answering questions, a process which is at the

same time mental and historical (AH, 141), through which

the mind’s cogitations become objectified in history, this

last point implying that ‘history is constituted by reason ‘

(AH: 139). This is a brilliant attempt to integrate fully both

aspects of Collingwood’s philosophy, on the basis of a

clarification of the underlying metaphysics and a renewed

understanding of his historicism. Although Helgeby fails,

at least in the eyes of the reviewers, fully to deliver the

goods whenever he takes the point further than Boucher

(for reasons to be laid out below), he nevertheless suc-

ceeds into raising some very important points, which

make his book a welcomed addition to Collingwood

scholarship. Another merit of his study, which should be

praised at the outset, is that Helgeby took into account a

great deal of Collingwood’s posthumous papers, includ-

ing pieces such as ‘Truth and Contradiction’, ‘Draft of

Opening Chapters of a Prolegomena to Logic (or the like)’ and

the ‘Libellus de Generatione’.7 Furthermore, Helgeby,


[7] Respectively, Dep. Collingwood 16/1, 16/5, and 27, Bodleian Library,Oxford. As a matter of fact, inasmuch as one can agree with Helgeby thatcommentators such as Louis Mink and Lionel Rubinoff tended to read thewhole of Collingwood from a ‘master plan’ in Speculum Mentis (AH,20-21), one also feels that Helgeby reads the whole of Collingwood fromthese early discarded fragments. Caution should not only be exercised inthe use of these manuscripts for the very reason that he discarded

who had already published on this topic8, has made an

extensive use of Collingwood’s archeology papers, espe-

cially throughout Chapter 8; this is quite remarkable and

one discovers how philosophically informed and rich they

were. It is only to be regretted that the level of exegesis

exhibited in Chapter 8 is not consistently sustained

throughout the book, as the narrative often breaks into

discussion of other philosophers, at the moment when the

reader hopes to see more of Collingwood’s ideas unveiled.

Helgeby’s goal is ‘to move towards an understanding

of Collingwood, rather than to presume it can be pre-

sented and then criticized ‘ (AH, viii). In his 1994 paper,

whose content is integrated to the present study, he had

identified four areas of ‘inadequacy and incompleteness

in Collingwood’s philosophy ‘, to which he proposed rem-

edies.9 This claim has disappeared in the intervening

years, although Helgeby vaguely speaks of the possibility

that Collingwood’s views ‘need to be restated ‘ (AH, 17).

Perhaps he has reached a new understanding of Colling-

wood and that in his eyes the blemishes disappeared. But

we contend that his version of Collingwood goes at times

a bit further than the texts can allow us to go, without giv-

ing us a satisfactory picture—see the last section of this

review. Helgeby’s book covers a lot of ground, some of it

already trodden (especially in Chapters 5-7), and it is not

possible to cover all issues raised in this rich book; after a

brief discussion of Helgeby’s overall agenda and angle of

approach, we shall focus only on three themes: the discus-

sion of the ontology of process and events that unifies

Collingwood’s philosophy, the attempt to demonstrate

Review Essay 5

them—he did say of the ‘Libellus de Generatione’, for example, that it was‘intended only to help the process of crystallization in my own thoughts ‘(A, 99)—and thus that they must be considered an unreliable source to hisconsidered views, Collingwood’s ideas in ‘Truth and Contradiction’, aspresented in (AH, 29-30) seem to involve definite logical errors.

[8] S. Helgeby & G. Simpson, ‘King Arthur’s Round Table and Collingwood’sArchaeology’, Collingwood Studies, 2, 1995, 1-11.

[9] S. Helgeby, ‘Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge’, op. cit., p. 95.

that Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’ is bona

fide logic, and the remarks on ‘historical consciousness’

and ‘historical civilization’.

Collingwood as a Speculative Philosopher of Historyand as an Historicist

Helgeby’s take on Collingwood depends on our seeing

him as part of the historicist tradition (Helgeby calls it the

‘immanent reason tradition’) in ‘speculative’10 philosophy

of history opened by Vico, to which Kant and Hegel con-

tributed, and of which Croce was the last representative

before him (AH, 12-17).11 Nevertheless, Helgeby aligns

himself with the majority of scholars in rejecting Knox’s

hypothesis of Collingwood’s ‘radical conversion’ to

historicism around 1936-38 (AH, 19, n.51). In view of the

fact that he relies throughout the book on early works such

as Religion and Philosophy, Speculum Mentis and the unpub-

lished pieces ‘Truth and Contradiction’ and the ‘Libellus

de Generatione’, it is possible that Helgeby’s reason for

not agreeing with Knox is that he sees Collingwood as

having been an historicist from the beginning to the end,12


[10] We use the term ‘speculative’ here in its usually meaning, e.g., as in W. H.Dray, Philosophy of History, Englewood Cliffs NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1964, p. 1.It is true, on the other hand, that the distinction does not really apply toCollingwood, for reasons stated in the ‘Die’ or ‘Martouret’ manuscript(IH, 434-435), but one should note that the reasons invoked are alsoreasons for not seeing Collingwood as engaged in the same kind ofspeculative project as Hegel’s.

[11] See also S. Helgeby, ‘Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge’, op. cit., pp. 88-92.There are reasons not to describe Kant or Hegel as ‘historicists’, but thisneed not detain us here.

[12] Helgeby’s descriptions of Collingwood, accurate or not, make him soundas an arch-historicist indeed. For example, he claims that ‘Collingwoodcame to see history as the most important activity in the structure of whathe termed […] ‘the modern European mind’ ‘ (AH, 220). This sounds justlike the leitmotif of Friedrich Meinecke, Historism. The Rise of a NewHistorical Outlook (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). For our part,we are, first, not convinced that Collingwood valued history more highlythan art or religion and, secondly, rather convinced that if anythingCollingwood was critical of the ‘modern European mind’ for notconforming to his opinions about the importance of history.

although he ends up denying that Collingwood held a

well-known and much-debated historicist thesis, that of

philosophy being ‘liquidated’ by being converted into his-

tory (AH, 220).13 Be this as it may, the essence of this iden-

tification with this ‘immanent reason tradition’ is that it

allows Helgeby to read an agenda in Collingwood, that of

‘understanding our modern historical consciousness ‘

(AH, 17), which he equates with developments in the past

fifty years, such as post-colonial and feminist movements

in historiography,14 where the possibility of ‘self-creation’

is said to be central.15 According to Helgeby, Collingwood

is a ‘natural ally ‘ of these movements,16 they can be justi-

fied in terms of his account of history (AH, 199). Kant and

Hegel are said to have faced major difficulties and ‘Croce

set the broad terms for Collingwood’s own resolution ‘

which would lie in ‘developing a more fully immanent

conception of reason ‘ (AH, 16-17); as Helgeby puts it:

To show that thought is objectified in history, and that reason

is therefore immanent in history, is to conceive history and

action as jointly dependent, and to conceive action in terms

that move from emotion to thought and to logic. History is

composed of self-creative actions, differentiated from the pro-

Review Essay 7

[13] Helgeby could have cited here Collingwood’s letter to de Ruggiero: ‘Theabsorption is mutual: the product is not philosophy based on history norhistory based on philosophy, it is both of these things at once ‘ (quoted inW. J. van der Dussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G.Collingwood, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, p. 60).

[14] These are examples given in S. Helgeby, ‘Action, Duty andSelf-Knowledge’, op. cit., p. 87. The list would not, presumably, include‘post-modernism’, in light of the criticisms voiced at (AH, 159-160).

[15] Since the concept of ‘self-creation’ appears to be so central to that agenda,it is a pity that what it may have meant in the context of Collingwood’sphilosophy was not thoroughly discussed in Helgeby’s book; see the lastsection of this review. He recognizes here the influence of M. Hinz,Self-Creation and History: Collingwood and Nietzsche on Conceptual Change(Lanham, University Press of America, 1994), but, alas, only mentions thisbook in two footnotes (AH, 5, n 11 & 216, n. 34). The first of these footnotesdoes make a valuable point, however, namely that the issue of‘self-creation’ is best approached, as Helgeby does but not Hinz, through adiscussion of Collingwood on action and process.

[16] S. Helgeby, ‘Action, Duty and Self-Knowledge’, op. cit., p. 87.

cesses of nature because they involve thought. Historical

thinking has an essential constructive role in the world of

action, and historical self-knowledge creates possibilities for

further action. (AH, 17)17 (Our emphasis)

We are not going to discuss the relevance of Helgeby’s

agenda, which is to interpret him in such a way that he is

acceptable to modern historians—the interest of Colling-

wood’s philosophy could also lie it been the basis for a

critical examination of the presuppositions of current his-

toriography. We wish simply to express our qualms about

presenting Collingwood as pertaining to the ‘immanent

reason tradition’, that is as having sought to show, inter

alia, that ‘reason is immanent in history’. Collingwood

rejected the ‘pigeon-holing enterprise ‘ of philosophies of

history that tried to discern a pattern in human history

(IH, 264 & 434),18 there is no parallel drawn in his work

between the mind going through the levels of conscious-

ness—from feeling to appetite, then to desire and finally to

will and intellect—and an historical account of the devel-

opment of civilization, and we do not know texts that sup-

port the claim that he explicitly set out to achieve such a

parallel. However, Helgeby makes claims of that nature

on Collingwood’s behalf, for example, when he says that

The development of the ideas of duty and history could

therefore be seen to represent a development in the moral

history of humanity. (AH, 188)

This is an allusion to the lecture ‘Can Historians be Impar-

tial?’, where Collingwood speaks of an advancement in

(historical) knowledge resulting from a change in the


[17] See also (AH, 221-222).[18] There is also a powerful critique reminiscent of Kierkegaard in The New

Leviathan: ‘Hegel aims at building up the concrete out of abstractions; notrealizing that, unless the concrete is given from the start, the abstractionsout of which it is to built up are not forthcoming ‘ (NL, 33.89). This isrelated with what Helgeby described in not so felicitous terms as theproblem of the ‘divide between the logical and the actual ‘ in the‘immanent reason tradition ‘ from Vico to Hegel, for example at (AH, 16 &221).

‘scale of values’ as ‘an advancement in the whole moral

attitude of humanity ‘ (PH, 218), but this passage in itself

is inconclusive. One needs to see in an Hegelian manner

that the phases of an historical process are phases of the

self-development of a concept. There are some remarks to

that effect in the ‘Notes Towards a Metaphysics’ (PH, 121),

but these are merely of a tentative nature. Furthermore, as

Jan van der Dussen pointed out, Collingwood did not

believe that the concept of progress can be applied to the

realm of morality.19 The following passage from ‘A Philos-

ophy of Progress’ states his reasons:

Goodness, like beauty and happiness, is not a product of civi-

lization. A man’s moral worth depends not on his circum-

stances, but on the way in which he confronts them. It was a

good act to abolish slavery, but the men who are born into a

slaveless world are not automatically made good men by that

fact. All it can do for them is to confront them with moral

problems of a new kind.20

Perhaps Collingwood should have said here ‘the men who

are born into a slaveless world are not automatically made

better men by that fact’. The point is of enormous impor-

tance since it underlies Collingwood’s frequent criticisms

of the idea that the ‘modern European civilization’ is

somehow superior to other civilizations.

The picture that we forge of Collingwood is instead that

of a more empirically-minded philosopher—because of

his work as an archaeologist and as an historian—but also

that of a widely read one, who could find a rich load of ser-

viceable ideas in authors such as Vico, Hegel, or Croce at a

time when most of his colleagues were prejudiced against

them—a testimony to his open-mindedness—, thus not

necessarily that of a ‘speculative’ philosopher of history

Review Essay 9

[19] W. J. van der Dussen, ‘Collingwood and the Idea of Progress’, op. cit., pp.34-35.

[20] R. G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of History, W. Debbins (ed.),Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1965, p. 115.

on a par with them:21 he was, in Wendy James’s apt phrase,

a ‘fieldworker’s philosopher’.22 This ought to have been

apparent to someone who studied so carefully Colling-

wood’s archeological writings. When one finds, for exam-

ple, Collingwood claiming in a paper on ‘Hadrian’s Wall:

1921-1930’ that historians are right to assume that in his-

tory ‘the real is rational and the rational is real ‘23 there is

no need to see more in this than a manner of speaking. At

all events, it is not clear to us why Helgeby needed to fit

Collingwood into this meta-philosophical narrative about

the ‘immanent reason tradition’ in order to fulfill his

agenda; is this necessary?

Collingwood’s Ontology:Processes, Events and Entities

According to Helgeby, the concepts of ‘activity’, ‘becom-

ing’, ‘process’, ‘action’ and ‘history’ played a ‘key role ‘ in

Collingwood’s philosophy from beginning to end, where

they are ‘closely related, and even interchangeable ‘ (AH,

27).24 Chapter 1 provides indeed a list of such key uses,

from Religion and Philosophy to An Essay in Metaphysics.

The essential ideas seem to be that mind cannot be studied

apart from what it does—this being the principle that ‘we


[21] At least not after Speculum Mentis, in which his ‘idealist’ reaction againstthe teachings of the Oxford Realists seems to have culminated, a bookwhich he rejected in his later years (A, 56).

[22] W. James, ‘A Fieldworker’s Philosopher: Perspectives fromAnthropology’, (PE, lvi-xci).

[23] R. G. Collingwood, ‘Hadrian’s Wall: 1921-1930’, The Journal of RomanStudies, 27, 1937, p. 63; quoted in (AH: 173).

[24] To emphasize the fact that these concepts have, in Wittgenstein’sterminology, a ‘family-resemblance’, and that they are perhaps eveninterchangeable is a good thing, but one must nevertheless beware.Throughout the book, Helgeby conflates ‘acts’ of the mind such as‘inferring q from p’ or ‘willing x’ with the more general concept of ‘action’,that covers cases such as crossing the street or the Rubicon, buying organicbanana, giving shelter to a homeless person or voting against QuintonHogg. Surely, important differences are not to be overlooked here.Collingwood already warned against confusion about ‘actions’ (A,148-149).

must never separate what a mind is from what it does ‘,

attributed by Collingwood to Hume (IH, 83 & 221–

222)25—and the ontological thesis that the world is not

composed of substances but of processes. As Helgeby

points out, these two theses are actually closely intercon-

nected: if the ‘concept of mental substance[is] resolved

into the concept of mental process ‘ (IH, 83), and, if the

concept of thought is to be ‘objectified in history ‘, then, as

Helgeby points out, one ‘needs an account of what sort of

world makes such an objectification possible ‘ (AH, 47).

Indeed, Collingwood sought an account of the world as

‘process’, as a matter of fact as early as the ‘Libellus de

Generatione’ in 1920.26

To have brought to the fore and study this deep unity in

Collingwood’s metaphysical outlook is one of the most

valuable contributions of the book.27 Helgeby seems to be

on the right tracks when shifting the emphasis, when

searching for the central pivot of Collingwood’s philoso-

phy, from philosophy of mind to metaphysics (‘ontology’

or ‘cosmology’). Chapter 2 contains a discussion of

Review Essay 11

[25] The central claim that ‘mind is pure act’ is often repeated, for example, at(PH, 220) or (EPM, 341).

[26] About which see the late remarks at (A, 97-99). Incidentally, thatCollingwood held a process ontology is not sufficient qualify him as an‘historicist’, although this is one of the necessary ingredients of thehistoricist outlook. Otherwise, everyone holding that the world iscomposed of sequences of events is an historicist, that would also include,say, Alexander or Whitehead, who could not be labelled as historicists.What one also needs is some further theses about an adequate assessmentof anything being only possible through an understanding of its place androle within these sequences of events (as opposed to, say, it beingsubsumed under generalizations) and some methodological claims abouta proper method for such claims (for example, ‘Einfühlung’ or ‘Verstehen’).Helgeby admits that Collingwood’s ‘re-enactment’ is not amethodological notion (AH, 179-180), but does not thematize adequatelythe ‘individualization vs generalization’ issue. See footnote 39 for moredetails on this point.

[27] There are, however, some notable precedents such as L. O. Mink,‘Collingwood’s Historicism: A Dialectic of Process’, op. cit.; W. J. van derDussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, op. cit., pp.53-56 & ‘Collingwood and the Idea of Progress’, in Reassessing Collingwood,History and Theory, Beiheift 29, 21-41.

Collingwood’s ‘process ontology’ or ‘cosmology’, in rela-

tion with the ‘cosmologies’ of Samuel Alexander and A. N.

Whitehead—both of which extensively discussed in The

Idea of Nature (IN, 158-177).28 Although Helgeby makes

some valuable contributions to a reconstruction of Colling-

wood’s ontology, his treatment is largely incomplete.

After the publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and

Logic,29 Collingwood’s thoughts on metaphysics were

geared towards a refutation of the Ayer’s critique of meta-

physics and he developed his theory of ‘absolute presup-

positions’, first in ‘The Function of Metaphysics in

Civilization’ (EM, 379-421), and later in An Essay on Meta-

physics (EM, 21-48) and his Autobiography (A, 29-43). This

aspect of Collingwood on metaphysics is well-known but,

although he never developed fully an ontology and never

really committed his thoughts to print, he wrote exten-

sively on the topic from 1933 to 1936 (therefore roughly in

between the publication of the Essay on Philosophical

Method and that of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic).

Although the result is left unfinished, Collingwood left

behind in a number of manuscripts, listed here in rough

chronological order, from which a reconstruction can be

attempted: ‘The Metaphysics of F. H. Bradley: An Essay on

Appearance and Reality’ (EPM, 227-252), ‘Notes Towards a

Metaphysics’ (which is more than 500 pages, only a very

small part of which is now in print (PH 119-139)), ‘The

Nature of Metaphysical study’ (EM, 356-378), ‘Method

and Metaphysics’ (EPM, 327-355) and the still unpub-


[28] The praise heaped on Whitehead at (IN, 169-170) makes clear thatCollingwood admired him most but Helgeby cites a letter to Alexander asevidence to the contrary (AH, 54-55). For a detailed discussion of therelations between these two, see G. Vanheeswijck, ‘R. G. Collingwood andA. N. Whitehead on Metaphysics, History, and Cosmology’, ProcessStudies, 27, 1998, 215-236. As Vanheeswijck makes clear, it appears thatCollingwood’s criticisms of Whitehead in The Idea of Nature (IN, 171-173),that are alluded to at (AH, 60), were based on misunderstandings of hisposition.

[29] A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, London, Victor Gollancz, 1936.

lished manuscript of the 1935 lectures on ‘Central Prob-

lems of Metaphysics’, which is approximately 100 pages.30

To these, one should add the relevant parts of The Idea of

History and The Idea of Nature, as well as the two alterna-

tive ‘Conclusions to Lectures on Nature and Mind’ (PH,

251-270). The relations with Alexander and Whitehead, on

which Helgeby focuses, pertain essentially to this period,

and even then his discussion is far from exhaustive. Two

further questions that arise here cannot be answered in

this review: the first concerns the relation between the

thoughts developed during these two periods, that is

between the ontology developed in 1933-1936 and the the-

ory of absolute presuppositions, and the second concerns

the survival and further development of elements of the

earlier ontology when it receded into the background, so

to speak, after 1936. These questions can only be answered

once the ontology is properly understood. At any rate, it is

not clear at first blush that Collingwood intended his

ontology not to be ‘descriptive of the world ‘ but ‘as an

account of the presuppositions that make thought possi-

ble ‘, as Helgeby claims (AH, 56).31 This is more like read-

ing later views into earlier ones.

The key idea in Chapter 2 is that Collingwood recog-

nized two distinct types of processes, natural and histori-

cal (AH, 57).32 Although Collingwood owes a lot to his

Review Essay 13

[30] Dep. Collingwood 20/1, Bodleian Library, Oxford.[31] This is not an isolated remark. For example, Helgeby also claims that ‘To

characterize reality as process […] would be to describe an absolutepresupposition of contemporary thought ‘ (AH, 60) or that ‘process is notmerely absolute but, because absolute presuppositions are themselvesembedded in an account of process, it is also necessary ‘ (AH, 61). Weconfess to have no knowledge of any textual basis for these claims.

[32] ‘[S]o far as our scientific and historical knowledge goes, the processes ofevents which constitute the world of nature are altogether different inkind from the processes of thought which constitute the world of history ‘(IH, 217). This is the distinction between the two types of processes clearlystated. Helgeby also makes heavy weather of the fact that Collingwoodagrees with Alexander in seeing the mind as ‘emerging’ from nature,adducing some evidence from unpublished parts of the ‘Notes Towards a

reading of Alexander and Whitehead and although he

praised them at times,33 his thinking about processes

began in earnest in the ‘Libellus de Generatione’ in 1920,

thus well before his reading of their work and he started

heavily to criticize them some time after 1935, because he

realized that their views were inadequate on an essential

point, since they did not recognize the reality of historical

processes that are independent from natural processes—a

distinction that he had at that stage only recently drawn.34

It is for this reason that he eventually described their

‘cosmologies’ as ‘pseudo-history’ (PH, 244-245).35 So the

influence of Alexander and Whitehead does not extend to

this central distinction in Collingwood’s ontology; it

should not be overplayed.36


Metaphysics’ (AH, 56, 58 & 61); see also (EPM, 354-355). This point, relatedto Collingwood’s introduction of the concept of ‘nisus’, does not seemcentral to the present discussion as will not detain us. One should note,however, that Collingwood was critical of the ‘emergence’ theory ofevolution; see W. J. van der Dussen, History as a Science: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, p. 197, and (PH, 247).

[33] For example in ‘The Present Need of a Philosophy’ (1935), reprinted in R.G. Collingwood, Essays in Political Philosophy, op. cit., p, 169.

[34] One neat way to see Collingwood’s change of thought is to compare thetwo unpublished versions of the conclusion to The Idea of Nature, from 1934and 1935. In the earlier version, the natural and historical processes aredescribed in almost identical terms—for example at §§ 38-39 (PH,265)—while the distinction is drawn in the second version (PH, 253-254),and maintained afterwards.

[35] Helgeby quotes this passage but omits the name of Alexander (AH, 57); healso somewhat misstates the central point of the distinction when hedescribes it as a distinction between ‘action and what is not action ‘ (AH,62). Strictly speaking, processes are composed of events, not ‘actions’,although these might be said to be parts of or encapsulated in events. Atany rate, this obscures the fact that Collingwood’s considered view is thatthe distinction hangs on the fact that an account of historical changesrequires re-enactment on the part of historians, while it is not the case foran account of changes in the natural world (PH, 245).

[36] Furthermore, Collingwood argued in The Idea of History that theirconception of nature threatens the very existence of historiography (IH,211-212), in the last pages of The Idea of Nature, he argued against them thatnatural science as a form of thought depends upon history (IN, 176-177),and in a late manuscript he describes their metaphysics as a new form ofpositivism (PH, 246-247).

As we said, Helgeby’s discussion of Collingwood’s

ontology remains incomplete, even as it focuses on the

influence of Alexander and Whitehead; further exegesis

would have been welcomed as it would reveal more cru-

cial details. It is quite important, for example, to notice

that Collingwood speaks ‘processes ‘: he viewed both nat-

ural and historical worlds as composed of not one but

many ‘sequences of events’—this being one of the reasons

why he thought that ‘speculative’ philosophies of history

will fail to convince: ‘history is too complicated a thing to

be expressible in the form of a single chain of continuous

progress ‘ (IH, 434). Moreover, events ‘change’ into events

along that sequence, or processes ‘turn into one another’,37

presumably through some form of causation, and this

notion of ‘change’ is nowhere discussed by Helgeby,

while Collingwood had a lot to say. For example, how

would his conception of ‘change’ as presented in (PH, 252)

differ, as it does, from the idealist notion known as ‘Cam-

bridge change’? Another important issue is the idea of

‘continuity’, as Collingwood describes historical changes

as ‘continuous’ (PH, 252)—this point is at the basis of one

of his arguments against the use of generalizations in his-

torical explanation (PH, 183-185).38 And what about the

Review Essay 15

[37] Here, a ‘process’ is defined as a ‘sequence of events’ and Collingwoodeven speaks of ‘processes of events ‘ (IH, 217), but he had distinguishedearlier, in the ‘Libellus de Generatione’, between ‘process’ and ‘events’because the former ‘turn into one another ‘, while the latter have abeginning and an end (A, 97-99). See also (NL, 34.58) on the differencebetween ‘mental processes’ and ‘spatio-temporal processes’. Theimplications of this terminological issue cannot be explored here. The ideathat, from one stage to another, an ‘unconverted residue ‘ remains‘encapsulated’ (Collingwood writes ‘incapsulated ‘), is never, however,abandoned, as can be seen from the discussion of Celtic Art in theAutobiography (A, 139-141).

[38] This argument is linked with the key thesis historian does not explain bysubsuming individual events under general kinds, but only describes the(continuous) change from one about individual event to another (PH,183-185); this being dangerously close to fully-fledged historicism (see theprevious note). But Helgeby claims that, according to Collingwood, thehistorian ‘generalizes ‘, but ‘gives knowledge only of the individual ‘

distinction between ‘change’ and ‘development’,39 which

would after all be useful for Helgeby’s interpretation?

Another essential point is left untouched, as a result of

an insufficient analysis of the manuscripts of the period

1933-36 listed above: as these make amply clear, Colling-

wood’s metaphysics is not just a process ontology. He dis-

tinguishes in ‘Method and Metaphysics’ between three

types of entities: ‘abstract entities’, ‘bodies’ and ‘minds’

(EPM, 341). Here are some of the elements of this ontol-

ogy: ‘Abstract entities’ are ‘instanced in bodies or minds ‘

but they are ‘in themselves ‘ (EPM, 242), thus they are

independently from any mental activity (EPM, 245), for

which they are necessary objects (EPM, 346), and minds

come to know them ‘as they are ‘ (EPM, 342).40 ‘Abstract

entities’ are also called by Collingwood ‘immaterial ideas’

in ‘Central Problems of Metaphysics’.41 He describes these

‘ideas’ in almost identical terms in the last of these lec-

tures,42 where he propounds his own version of ‘objective


(AH, 123-124). Helgeby cites in support a passage from ‘Croce’sPhilosophy of History’, whose point he misses: rather, Collingwoodclaims that Croce ‘destroys the distinction between science and history ‘because he argues that ‘as science (abstract classification) enters into thework of the historian, so history (concrete individual thought) enters intothe work of the scientist ‘ (R. G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy ofHistory, W. Debbins (ed.), Austin, University of Texas Press, 1965, p. 19).For Collingwood, the ‘abstractive or generalizing type of thought ‘ is‘non-historical ‘ (IH, 440). There are further remarks of the same natureabout the use of generalizations at (AH, 133 & 203); but compare (IH,222-223).

[39] For example, in sentences such as this one, already quoted: ‘Thedevelopment of the ideas of duty and history could therefore be seen torepresent a development in the moral history of humanity ‘ (AH, 188). Forsome clues about the distinction between ‘change’ and ‘development’, seeW. J. van der Dussen, ‘Collingwood and the Idea of Progress’, op. cit., p. 25.

[40] This metaphysical realism is re-asserted in the last chapter of ‘CentralProblems of Metaphysics’.

[41] To complicate matters, these ‘abstract entities’ are also at times called‘concepts’, for example, as in (PH, 133f.).

[42] ‘Immaterial ideas’ are said not to be abstractions, but in ‘Method andMetaphysics’, ‘abstract entities’ were also said not to be ‘abstractions’(EPM, 341), etc. One should note the importance of the point: ‘abstractions’are, according to Collingwood, not ready-made and there to discover but

idealism’. ‘Bodies’ are called ‘natural things’ and ‘immate-

rial ideas’ are described as ‘logically prior’ to ‘natural

things’, which depend on them and as govern their

changes and processes. This is not the place for a full dis-

cussion of this ontology of ‘abstract entities’, ‘bodies’, and

‘minds’,43 and we wish simply to point out that it is absent

from Helgeby’s book; as a result some key points are over-

looked that bear directly on his discussion.

Another claim in need of emphasis here is the claim that

the events that make up the sequences of history are ‘eter-

nal objects ‘ (PH, 220-224 & 264-265; IH, 218). Of course,

Collingwood did not mean that these events are ‘eternal’

in the sense that they are outside of time, but because they

remain possible objects of knowledge—provided, of

course, the evidence remains—and by this he means that

the thoughts which form their ‘inside’ can be re-enacted at

any time in the future.44 As such, a thought is ‘eternal’ not

in its ‘actuality’ but in its ‘ideality’ (PH, 222). The fact that

thoughts are eternal in this sense underlies, inter alia, what

is at least according to his own lights (A, 112), the answer

to the most difficult problem he faced, namely his claim

that in re-enactment the historian re-enact not a copy but

exactly the same thought as that of the historical agent.45

These ‘realist’ aspects of Collingwood’s ontology are not

fully understood by Helgeby, who speaks at times as if

Collingwood rejected the very idea that there are ‘eternal

objects’ (AH, 62 & 63), and ‘sought to overcome the sepa-

ration of eternal objects and processes that was present in

Review Essay 17

mind-made (NL, 7.22 & 7.67), while the ‘abstract entities’ or ‘immaterialideas’ are said to exist independently of the mind.

[43] We contend, however, that this ‘objective idealism’ has roots in thephilosophy of R. H. Lotze; one more reason not to classify Collingwood inthe tradition that runs from Vico to Hegel.

[44] Collingwood also distinguishes another sense in which they are ‘eternal’,namely as presuppositions of the present, and thus embodied or‘encapsulated’ in it. See, for example, (PH, 264-265), (A, 140-141).

[45] This important theme is only mentioned en passant by Helgeby (AH, 48).The ‘realism’ implicit in it seems to have escaped him.

different ways in Hegel […] and Whitehead, who distin-

guished eternal objects from processes ‘ (AH, 70). Helgeby

seems to be mislead here by Collingwood’s critique of

Whitehead on eternal objects,46 which, when properly

understood, does not entail that there are no eternal

objects: his objection is merely to Whitehead’s view that

instantiations of ‘abstract entities’ are eternal objects, as he

believed himself that they are not. Collingwood further

believed that only thoughts are ‘eternal’ in the above sense

(and thus that the events that embody them as their ‘in-

side’ are also ‘eternal’) and that the objects of pure meta-

physics (such as the categories or God) are ‘truly eternal ‘

(PH, 135).

Events that are historical have, according to one of his

well-known theses, an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ and the lat-

ter is about bodies and their movements (IH, 213), so it is

also part of the natural world. Therefore, events that con-

stitute historical processes must also be recognized as part

of the natural world—this is, we presume, what Helgeby

expresses when he says that ‘action objectifies thought in

history’ –, though they are not caused (at least directly) by

natural processes, but caused, in a qualified sense of the

word ‘cause’, ‘by reasons’. The underlying reasoning can

be re-enacted and form the subject-matter of history but

there is no denial of the reality of the processes of events to

which they give rise, they are ‘as real as you wish ‘ (NL,

18.91), only that they are now past and they left traces in

the natural world. When Collingwood speaks, in the ‘Die’

or ‘Martouret’ manuscript, of the ‘ideality of history ‘ (IH,

440), he opposes ‘ideality’ to ‘actuality’, not to ‘reality’.47

Thus, the ‘ideality of history’ does not mean that it is not


[46] See (IN, 171-73) and (PH, 264).[47] And, in one of the alternative conclusions to The Idea of Nature,

Collingwood distinguishes between ‘existence’, which is transient, and‘being’, which isn’t (PH, 264).

real.48 It seems that this is what Helgeby tried to capture

by saying that Collingwood is a realist at a ‘second-order’

level of theorizing about history (AH, 51). However, when

Helgeby says that ‘history is self-creation in the mind ‘, he

may be right in emphasizing that a past human action

resulting from a decision after deliberation has a ‘creative’

aspect (more about this in the last section of this review),

but that does not mean that the resulting historical event

has an existence in the mind only, as the event also had an

‘outside’, so the way to full subjective anti-realism—the

denial of the reality of the past outside of the mind—is

barred; again, Helgeby expressed essentially the same

thought by saying that ‘constructionism as a first-order

theory is dependent on there having been a real past ‘ (AH,

50). But he does not believe that a realist first-order theory

is right either (AH, 194) and, therefore, does not seem to

hold a clear position of this issue. In our eyes, he was

instead much more of a ‘realist’ (only not an ‘Oxford’ real-

ist) than most commentators, including Helgeby, are

ready to acknowledge. He was, for the reasons just out-

lined, a ontological realist (in the line of Lotze and

Bradley) and only shared with the anti-realist the empha-

sis on the epistemic limitations to knowledge of the past

(as inferences limited to available evidence).

Collingwood’s ‘Logic of Question and Answer’As Logic

Helgeby sees it as an important step in his interpretation

that Collingwood, in order to implement his overall view

of the world as process, developed an account of thought

itself in terms of action, that is in non-static, dynamic

terms; Chapter 3 and 4 are devoted to this issue. After a

brief review of the progress of mind through the levels of

Review Essay 19

[48] Helgeby does not avoid entirely this confusion, for example, when hewrites that Collingwood argued that ‘history is not real, but ideal ‘ (AH,48) or that ‘there is no past as such to understand ‘ (AH, 189).

consciousness, which is supposed to show this, Helgeby

launches in a discussion of the separation between logic

and psychology.49 The gist of it is that through this separa-

tion an element was taken away from the purview of logic,

that of ‘movement, passage, or transition in thought ‘

(AH, 69), and that Collingwood set out to develop his

‘logic of question and answer’ in order to re-introduce it

within logic. At one point, Helgeby cites a later passage,

from 1939:

The aim of logic is to expound the principles of valid thought.

It is idly fancied that validity in thought is at all times one

and the same, no matter how people are at various times

actually in the habit of thinking; and that in consequence the

truths which it is logic’s business to discover are eternal

truths. But all that any logician has ever done, or tried to do,

is to expound the principles of what in his own day passed

for valid thought among those whom he regarded as reputa-

ble thinkers. This enterprise is strictly historical. (PH, 242)

The ideas expressed here are hard to swallow, even if we

notice that Collingwood’s sole example in this passage is

the ‘inductive logic’ of Mill and Jevons: according to him,

it codifies a kind of thinking that ‘hardly existed before

about the sixteenth century ‘ (PH, 242). One may indeed

assume that he would have also said that the principle of

non-contradiction codifies a kind of thinking that hardly

existed before 4th-century BC in Athens… One could eas-

ily argue that the fact that logic is ‘historical’ in that sense

does not render its results ‘relative’ in the least, for the

same reason that the fact that natural sciences can be said

to be historical (for reasons laid out in the last pages of The

Idea of Nature (IN, 174-177)) does not renders the laws of

nature relative to our culture. This being said, one can


[49] As Helgeby points out (AH, 71-73), the idea that logic and psychology areconnected is found in early manuscripts, ‘Truth and Contradiction’, and‘Draft of Opening Chapters of a Prolegomena to Logic (or the like)’.Something must be said, however, for the fact that Collingwood hasabandoned the projected book (even lost most of it) and never really cameback to these ideas.

make some more charitable comments: he was right, after

all, to attack the idea that the ‘laws of logic’ are the ‘laws of

thought’, they really are but a ‘standard of consistency’

that we set for ourselves; it is even worse to speak here of

universal validity of these laws and then start describing

cultures where this ‘standard’ is not adhered to in terms of

a ‘pre-logical mentality’, etc. But Helgeby draws another,

puzzling conclusion from this passage:

… there cannot be a science of thought, joining logic and psy-

chology, if validity and process are considered timeless. To

the extent that psychology professes to study mental pro-

cesses as if they are natural or timeless, it must be replaced by

an historical approach and logic must be thoroughly

historicized. (AH, 74)

We are not sure that one can attribute such a view to

Collingwood; one ought to be charitable and avoid land-

ing him with a view that thoroughly dissolves logic, there-

fore the very study of the inferential process on which

history is based, since, after all history is the art of drawing

inferences from available evidence and the soundness of

these inferences is not a matter of miracles or vague intu-

itive feelings; irrespective of the content, there are good

and bad inferences according to some canon embodied in

formal logic.

Chapter 4 is perhaps at the same time the most ambi-

tious and the least convincing of the whole book, as

Helgeby argues in it that Collingwood’s ‘logic of question

and answer’ is bona fide logic. Collingwood’s claim to have

devised a new logic, while dismissing all propositional

logics (A, 29-43) has been either simply dismissed as

phony or recast, either as a claim concerning the ‘logic of

enquiry’ or, as Louis Mink first proposed, as an ‘herme-

neutics’.50 Helgeby rejects both alternatives but fails to

convince for a number of reasons. First, the term ‘logic’

Review Essay 21

[50] L. O. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic. The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood,op. cit., pp. 131-139.

has been, for more than two millennia, associated with the

study of deductively valid inferences, that is of arguments

(of a type actually used by Collingwood…) where the con-

clusion follows from the premises in such a way that it is

impossible that the premises are true while the conclusion

is false—we leave aside the case of inductively valid infer-

ences, where the premises make it likely, to a given

degree, that the conclusion is true. Deductive logic is thus

concerned with what follows from a given body of propo-

sitions, that is with the relation of consequence. Further-

more, the term is also associated in the past hundred years

with the study ‘systems’ which embody relations of conse-

quence,51 not just by reviled philosophers such as Russell

or Ayer but also by, say, mathematicians and computer

scientists—that last domain owing its existence entirely to

formal logic. To call Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and

answer’ a ‘logic’ is simply out of question unless one pre-

posterously thinks that all this can be overturned by fiat.

Logicians have devised systems for the ‘logic of ques-

tions’, but these are logical systems, ‘propositional’, and

they hardly deal with presuppositions, so they do not cor-

respond to Collingwood’s undeveloped ideas. Moreover,

Helgeby defends the claim by rejecting the separation

between logic and psychology in Chapter 3 and by an

appeal to Dewey’s ‘logic of enquiry’ in Chapter 4. These

won’t do. On the first count, his arguments are certainly

not sufficient to overturn such a fundamental distinction52

but they also overlook the fact that Collingwood, like his


[51] Roughly, a logical system is formed by a formal language (with symbolsfor variables and constants, including the logical ones, punctuation marks,and rules for well-formed formulas), a consequence relation, and a rule forschematic substitution.

[52] When Helgeby claims that ‘An important aspect of thought is neglectedwhen logic is fully separated from psychology, other than throughdeduction or a dialectic considered to be inherent in the conceptsthemselves ‘ or that ‘An account of thought must consider its dynamic (or‘dialectical’) elements; in this respect, it is unlike an account of validity informal languages ‘ or even that ‘an account of thought needs both logical(structural) elements and elements which relate to the nature of mind ‘

colleagues at Oxford, from Bradley to Prichard, had abso-

lutely no respect for psychology:

… when psychology claims to be the science which teaches

us how we think it is covertly describing itself as no science at

all. (EM, 120-121)

… the pseudo-science of psychology, the psychology which

professes to be the heir of logic and the first genuinely scien-

tific science of thought, is not quite on all fours with old

pseudo-sciences like alchemy or astrology. For these at any

rate kept up a pretense of being scientific. (EM, 130-131)

One may of course claim that Collingwood would see

links between logic and some other form of ‘psychology’,

but there is no such thing: Collingwood distinguishes psy-

chology as a ‘science of feeling’ with which he has no

cause for quarrel (EM, 106-111) from psychology as a ‘sci-

ence of thought’, which, as we just saw, he thought was

pseudo-scientific rubbish (EM, 112-132). Of course,

Collingwood believed that psychology as the ‘so-called

science of human nature or of the human mind resolves

itself into history ‘ (IH, 220), but Helgeby cannot appeal to

an historicized form of psychology in his argument, as he

would then appeal to something else and there would be

no point in talking about the relation between logic and

psychology in the first place. He cites in support an earlier,

unpublished manuscript (AH, 71f.), but it seems exegeti-

cally more sound to see An Essay on Metaphysics as the

Review Essay 23

(AH, 69), not only does he not follow Collingwood, but he leaves thereader with no clear idea what it is that he was looking for. To begin with,this looks as if the ‘linguistic turn’ never happened. At any rate, if theworry is that the logical connections between propositions may beperceived as pertaining to a static world, then this is just disagreeing withthe so-called ‘Platonist’ understanding of logic; there are other‘constructivist’ approaches which focus on the dynamic nature ofinference precisely because inference is perceived as an ‘act’ as opposed asdescribing some ideal relation holding in some topos hyperourianos, but thelogical systems in which they issue are different but still ‘propositional’. Itwould be interesting not to condemn these as ‘formal’ or what not, as thetypical reflex in the humanities would have it, but rather to evaluate towhich extent they correspond to Collingwood’s ideas about the dynamicnature of thought.

expression of his considered view. At any rate, since mod-

ern logic has developed on the basis of a sharp distinction

from psychology, it is absurd to wish to call something

logic by arguing that it is not so distinct from psychology

(furthermore that both should end up ‘historicized’),

unless one wishes to launch into a complete reform of the

field, which would be nothing less than a waste of time

and should be resisted at all costs.

This also goes for the second count: it is equally absurd

to argue for Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’

as logic by appealing to Dewey’s ‘logic of enquiry’ since

Dewey himself was also arguing for something else than

logic as it was then and is still now currently under-

stood—furthermore, it implies that Collingwood was con-

tributing to the ‘logic of enquiry’, which is the point

denied. As Helgeby himself remarked, for Collingwood

and Dewey, ‘the role of logic was not to be a technical

study of formal elements of language and reason, but a

theory of systemic activities of contemporary mind in

action ‘ (AH, 75). At all events, that Collingwood’s ‘logic

of question and answer’ is not a proper logical system

does not diminishes its value in the least and it is really not

clear, at least to the reviewers, why Helgeby needed to

vindicate the claim that it is or why seeing the ‘logic of

question and answer’ as part of a theory of interpretation

(the term ‘hermeneutics’ is likely to mislead) is detrimen-

tal to his project.

Since Collingwood’s days, a whole discipline spawned

from the attempt at providing a rigorous mathematical

treatment of decision in terms of formal theories of subjec-

tive probabilities. A contemporary naturalist theory of

interpretation such as Davidson’s may have some points

of contact with Collingwood’s, as Helgeby points out (AH,

11), but it was meant to support an approach to rational


choice in terms of decision theory.53 What makes Colling-

wood interesting in today’s context for those who wish to

reject this heavily nomological ‘theory theory’54 resides

precisely the fact that he did reject any nomological

approach using generalizations—it is thus worth mining

his texts to see if he had some good, serviceable arguments

or not—but this interest would be lost if his enterprise

would boil down to psychology of choice; but it is neither

and Helgeby does not seem to grasp fully what is at stake

here.

Historical Self-Consciousness:Civilization and Self-Creation

The last two chapters of Helgeby’s book are devoted to the

notions of ‘historical self-consciousness’ and ‘historical

civilization’. One of Collingwood’s better known theses is

that ‘all knowledge of mind is historical ‘ (IH, 219); it

implies that not only knowledge of the actions of historical

agents but also knowledge of other minds and one’s own

mind is historical (IH, 219), so the explanation of action in

historical terms covers much more than mere actions in

the past.55 This knowledge of the mind is thus the very

‘human self-knowledge ‘, which is the raison d’être of his-

Review Essay 25

[53] As in, for example, R. Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, New York,McGraw-Hill, 1965. For Davidson’s views, see ‘Could there be a Science ofRationality?’ and ‘A Unified Theory of Thought, Meaning and Action’ inD. Davidson, Problems of Rationality, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004,respectively, pp. 117-134 & pp. 151-166.

[54] Hence the interest of Collingwood for the defenders of ‘SimulationTheory’ in psychology, such as Alvin Goldman (A. I. Goldman,‘Interpretation Psychologized’, Mind & Language, vol. 4, 1989, 161-185)and for philosophers such as Simon Blackburn and Jane Heal. See S.Blackburn, ‘Theory, Observation and Drama’, Mind and Language, vol. 7,1992, 187-203; J. Heal, ‘Replication and Functionalism’, in J. Butterfield(ed.), Language, Mind and Logic. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1986, 135-150.

[55] This is why Gordon Graham, for example, could criticize Collingwood forfailing to explain what makes historical actions specifically ‘historical’, inG. Graham, Historical Explanation Reconsidered, Aberdeen, AberdeenUniversity Press, 1983, pp. 29-30, cited in (AH, 179, n. 45 & 184). AsHelgeby fails to note, Graham is right but as a critique this would be

tory (IH, 10). We now know how this raison d’être is linked

in turn with the moral and political dimension: in a nut-

shell, ‘historical self-knowledge’ is required for one to

make the best choice (or the best answer to a practical

question) and the society needs for its advancement citi-

zens that can make better choices thanks to their ‘historical

self-knowledge’. When discussing ‘historical self-con-

sciousness’ and ‘historical civilization’, Helgeby takes this

connection as his starting point. He defines these terms,

respectively, as follows:

Historical consciousness is […] the self-consciousness of peo-

ple who come to know their own capacity for self-creation.

(AH, p. 188)

In brief, an historical civilization is one in which the free

members of a social community, aware (through historical

thinking) that they are free, decide to understand themselves

and each other historically, and to determine their acts

according to duty. In doing so, they recognize each other’s

freedom, agreeing on their common duty. They will to be

civil, and seek to convert their disagreement to agree-

ment—this is achieved through historical understanding,

including in the field of politics. (AH, 211)56

One could summarize the links between the two notions

by saying that a community whose members would all

fully possess ‘historical consciousness’ would be an ‘his-

torical civilization’:

The emergence of historical consciousness transforms the

rational world, and this transformation can properly be

called the emergence of an historical civilization. (AH, 217)

These definitions are, as far as one can tell, not directly

Collingwood’s but ‘Collingwoodian’, the result of an

attempt by Helgeby at ‘taking the point further’. Alas,

rather than really ‘taking the point further’, Helgeby goes


devoid of merit precisely because Collingwood was seeking after anunderlying, general theory of interpretation which would cover only as aspecial case the actions of historical agents.

[56] See also (AH, 6 & 208) for variants.

on merely defending Collingwood in Chapter 9 against

some possible objections. For example, he refutes the

claim that history is, in Collingwood’s hands, no better

than fiction by showing that Collingwood argued exten-

sively against the conflation of the historian with the nov-

elist, a move that he misleading describes as a ‘claim to

truthfulness ‘ in history (AH, 194).57 In the short conclud-

ing chapter on ‘historical civilization’, Helgeby only beefs

up the meager material at his disposal—essentially (PH,

242) to be quoted below—, through a series of compari-

sons with authors such as Oakeshott, Ortega y Gasset, and

MacIntyre.58

There is not a lot to say about ‘historical civilization’,

and Helgeby admits that what Collingwood said about it

Review Essay 27

[57] As Bernard Williams and Michael Dummett have both recently shown,there is an important conceptual distinction to be made between ‘truth’and ‘truthfulness’. (See B. A. O. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essayin Genealogy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002; and thediscussion of Williams’s views in the last chapter of M. A. E. Dummett,Truth and the Past, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004.) Helgebycites here Collingwood’s inaugural lecture, ‘The Historical Imagination’,where the role of imagination as well as the differences between thehistorian and the novelist are discussed, but the term ‘truthfulness’ is usedonly once by Collingwood in that text, only when talking about theevaluation of the testominy from ‘authorities’ (IH, 237), in other words,this is an innocuous use of the term which is, moreover, not occurring inthe relevant context. Instead, in the relevant passage Collingwood’sspeaks throughout about ‘truth’ and even uses von Ranke’s famous turn ofphrase: ‘Where [the historian and the novelist] do differ is that thehistorian’s picture is meant to be true. The novelist has a single task only: toconstruct a coherent picture, one that makes sense. The historian has adouble task: he has both to do this, and to construct a picture of things as theyreally were and of events as they really happened ‘ (IH, 246) (our emphasis).This manner of speaking also occurs at (PH, 184). On historical judgementbeing assessable in terms of truth and falsity, see also (IH, 439). Grantedthat Collingwood was a ‘realist’ about ‘second-order philosophy ofhistory’, these passages pose a challenge to Helgeby’s reading ofCollingwood as having, rejected a ‘first order realist philosophy of history‘ (AH, 194). He certainly rejected the epistemology of acquaintance of theOxford Realists, which he called the ‘copy theory’, but he did not throwthe baby out with the bath-water and relinquish a robust notion of truth.

[58] Although much different, James Connelly’s discussion in the second partof his Metaphysics, Method and Politics, (op. cit.), is much more substantialand satisfying.

is ‘sketchy ‘ (AH, 6). Collingwood described ‘civilization’

as a process—indeed a ‘mental process’ (NL, 36.1)—in

which either a community gets nearer to an unattainable

ideal of ‘civility’, which is characterized inter alia by the

lowest possible level of use of force in civil intercourse

(NL, 35.44), or gets further from it, towards ‘barbarity’

(NL, 34.51). A necessary condition for getting nearer ‘civil-

ity’ is that the members of the community be educated in

such a way that they acquire free will. As a matter of fact,

the process by which agents acquire free will is identical to

the process by which the community becomes more civi-

lized (Nl, 37.1). The freedom implied here means—and

this is the key point—consciousness of one’s freedom (NL,

37.11).59 It also means the concomitant recognition of the

freedom of others (NL, 3713), so that self-respect equates

with respect of the others (NL, 37.12 & 37.14).60 This is a

recognition of the autonomy of the agent; it was expressed

very clearly a few years earlier in ‘Methods and

Metaphysics’:

By remembering them, we make our past experiences in a

peculiar way not merely past experiences but present experi-

ences too.

The freedom which a mind has to determine its own changes

by its own spontaneous activity is bound up with this power.

We are free in so far as our fresh acts are conditioned not by

our past but by our memories of the past; not by our environ-

ment but by our perception of our environment; in general,

not by facts other than our activity but by our consciousness

of those facts. This consciousness is itself an activity of our

own; when therefore our activity is conditioned by this con-

sciousness, our activity is being conditioned not by some-


[59] This key idea was attributed by Collingwood to Jules Lachelier (IH, 186).[60] One can broach here a topic not tackled by Helgeby, namely the relevance

of Collingwood’s ideas to the debate over the ‘politics of recognition’,involving Charles Taylor, Francis Fukuyama, Nancy Fraser, etc.

thing else but by itself, that is to say, it is free. (EPM,

352-353)61

According to Helgeby’s definitions it looks as if a ‘histori-

cal civilization’ would be as close as anything can be to the

goal of ‘civility’. This raises immediately two questions:

Would an ‘historical civilization’ be the closer a commu-

nity could ever get to the ideal of civility? Or could we not

say that such a community would have actually reached

it? The other question would simply be: Is today’s western

civilization already an ‘historical civilization’ or not?

There is no answer to the first question other than re-iter-

ating that the ideal is in Collingwood’s terms unattainable

(NL, 35.47) and by stating lamely that the ‘historical civili-

zation’ would be a step closer to it, but this is hardly news

to anyone having read Collingwood. Helgeby gives con-

tradictory answers to the second question. He recognizes

that Collingwood believed, in a passage to be quoted

immediately below, that this form of civilization has not

yet emerged (AH, 208), but he states twice that it has (AH,

7 & 217). The very little that Collingwood wrote on ‘histor-

ical civilization’ is indeed hardly more enlightening. After

briefly retelling the distinction between scientific and his-

torical knowledge, he wrote:

If this is worked out carefully, then should follow without

difficulty a characterization of an historical morality and an

historical civilization, contrasting with our ‘scientific’ one.

Where ‘science’ = of or belonging to natural science. A scien-

tific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a

thing to be conquered or obeyed: a[n] historical one will deny

that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into

what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mas-

tering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively

serving them (philanthropy). A[n] historical society will turn

on the idea of understanding them. (PH, 246)

Review Essay 29

[61] As Mink recognized, ‘Collingwood shares the existentialist rejection ofthe notion that human experience can be exhaustively understood andexplained in terms of the causal determinants of experience ‘, L. O. Mink,Mind, History and Dialectic. The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, p. 10.

The contrast between the then current ‘scientific’ society

and the ideal of an ‘historical’ society, between ‘mastering’

and ‘understanding’ people is perhaps too crude. It cer-

tainly shows Collingwood’s disdain towards the emerg-

ing tendencies of European societies in his times, but

seems too easy maneuver to blame all the ills of modern

civilization on ‘scientific thinking’ and to paint to ideal

world in terms of one’s cherished ‘historical thinking’ and

the resulting contrast is more caricature than anything

else: after all, our society is neither that of Aldous

Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984, nor,

perhaps even more to the point in light of Collingwood’s

disdain of ‘scientific’ psychology, B. F. Skinner’s Walden

Two.62 Communism, fascism and Nazism were real threats

to the European civilization at the time Collingwood

wrote—after all Orwell had in mind the Soviet

Union—but it feels as if Collingwood wanted to denounce

a factor inside European civilization which was responsi-

ble for these and which would thus be at work in what

were also the last democratic societies at the time. The

study of recently published manuscripts such as ‘Art and

the Machine’ (PE, 291-304) or ‘Man goes Mad’ (PE,

305-335) might help clarifying this by providing a more

substantial account of the way Collingwood pictured the

society of his days and its defects, in order to relate the

perceived defects with the conceptual analysis. At all

events, that Collingwood was aiming at an imaginary tar-

get or not, that is that, presumably, the insidious factor

would still remains in present-day civilization, is not a

question to be settled here. The foregoing remarks have

raised questions, of course not all of them, that need to be

answered if one wishes to ‘take the point further’. It was


[62] A. Huxley, Brave New World: A Novel, London, Chattus & Windo, 1932; G.Orwell, 1984, Oxford, Oxford Uniuversity Press, 1984; B. F. Skinner,Walden Two, Toronto, MacMillan, 1948.

perhaps not Helgeby’s task in his book, but some more

substantial sketch would have helped.63

Finally, one interesting underlying aspect here, in light

of Helgeby’s agenda, is that of ‘self-creation’. Colling-

wood speaks indeed at times of the mind or history as

being ‘creative’.64 This self-creativity appears to be entailed

by a conception of the mind as identical with its activity

(IH, 83 & 221-222) (EPM, 341) and the conception of free-

dom just quoted (NL, 37.11): a mind is nothing but its own

actions and therefore determines itself through its actions

and, since a free mind is conscious of its own free-

dom/autonomy, it chooses freely the acts that will further

determine it, thereby creating itself. This autonomy is

expressed very clearly in the passage from ‘Methods and

Metaphysics’ just quoted; this point is captured by

Helgeby when he claims that ‘Historical knowledge is

never merely theoretical, but always practical in the sense

of self-creation ‘ (AH, 5) or that ‘Self-knowledge itself

involves self-creation, and to understand one’s own

actions is thereby to make oneself in some sense a different

person, one whose actions are not simply habitual, but

self-determining ‘ (AH, 198).

The expression ‘self-creation’ is, of course, reminiscent

of Nietzsche, and a whole book has already been pub-

lished which is devoted to the comparative analysis of

Collingwood with the great literary figure of nine-

teenth-century Germany,65 but there is but a brief mention

of it (AH, 216). The foregoing remarks on ‘self-creation’

Review Essay 31

[63] For a more detailed and valuable discussion in chapter seven of J.Connelly, Metaphysics, Method and Politics, op. cit., 285-315.

[64] For example: ‘Thus the historical process is a process in which man createsfor himself this or that kind of human nature by re-creating in his ownthought the past to which he is heir ‘ (IH, 22), ‘History is creative in thesense that it brings into being that which, one brought into being, is eternal‘ (PH, 222), or ‘It is characteristic of becoming that it is creative or ratherself-creative ‘ (PH, 264). One should note that the meaning of ‘creative’varies within these quotations.

[65] M. Hinz, Self-Creation and History: Collingwood and Nietzsche on ConceptualChange, op. cit.

sound indeed a bit like Nietzsche,66 but only up to a point

since it is at the same time devoid of the moralistic impli-

cations of the Nietzschean notion (the injunction to ‘be-

come what one is’, as in the subtitle to Ecce Homo, etc.)67.

After all, for all his carping about Christian morality and

‘morals’ in general, Nietzsche remained a great moralist,

and a great deal of his popularity derives from the per-

sonal moral lessons readers extract from his texts. It is a

pity that this point is not clarified by Helgeby, in order

better to define Collingwood’s notion. There is perhaps a

sense in which both authors are rather close to each other

on existential matters, and we would like to conclude on

this point. This is a lesson which is implicit in the discus-

sion of the ‘corruption of consciousness’ in The Principles of

Art (PA, 217-221)—incidentally, a notion which is some-

what analogous to Sartre’s mauvaise foi. According to

Collingwood, when the process of becoming aware of an

emotion is unbearable, the process fails and the mind does

not become fully aware of its own emotion, it disowns it.

Consciousness is thus ‘corrupted’ and the life of the mind

is said to become unhealthy. And Collingwood, who is

also close to Nietzsche here, chastised the ‘modern Euro-

pean civilization’ for educating its citizens in such a way

that this intimate link with their emotions is severed; they

are according to him literally ‘sterilized’ (PA, 162).

Collingwood is thus telling us to look inside ourselves and

not to be afraid of what we will find and to come and

accept it, as this is the only way one can live a genuine and

healthy life; one may think of examples such as becoming

aware of and becoming rationally at peace, so to speak,

with one’s sexuality. In that sense, art as the activity by

which one expresses one’s emotions and becomes aware

of them is ‘self-creation’, and ‘self-creation’ can thus be


[66] F. Nietzsche, Gay Science, B. A. O. Williams (ed.), Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001, § 301.

[67] F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, London, PenguinBooks, 1992.

seen as an artistic solution to a problem; this being again

reminiscent of Nietzsche:68 through such experiences, one

becomes what one is. On a more analytical note, one must

beware here not to conflate two things under the heading

‘self-creation’: becoming oneself by becoming aware of

one’s feelings and creating oneself through one’s deci-

sions to act seen as solutions to practical problems. Be this

as it may, if this is correct, then there is, after all, some-

where in Collingwood’s thought a deep existential lesson

for each and everyone of his readers.

Although Helgeby does not discuss this point, it is one

of the merits of his book to force us, albeit by way of reac-

tion, to understand Collingwood’s thought better. To

speak in terms of a scale of forms, the process of under-

standing this great philosopher has no end and each new

stage incorporates the previous one. Hegelby has contrib-

uted to a new stage and we should be grateful to him. It

now remains for us to take the point further; in this

review, our task was merely to indicate why we think that

some of his suggestions lead to dead ends, while others

are more promising. One lasting influence of Helgeby’s

book might be the shift from philosophy of mind or

method to his process ontology as the skeleton key to

Collingwood’s philosophy.

Review Essay 33

[68] And, Ortega y Gasset, for whom, Helgeby claims, ‘living is deciding whatto do next, and this is to decide what to be ‘ (AH, 210). Helgeby could havealso mentioned French Nietzschean aesthetes such as Bataille andFoucault, and their concept of experience limite, through which one createsoneself. One important distinction here is that Collingwood does not thinkthat becoming fully aware of one’s emotion terminates the process as themind has to deal with them rationally (this is recognized in M. Hinz,Self-Creation and History: Collingwood and Nietzsche on Conceptual Change,op. cit., p. 62 or 66, for example), while such French thinkers violentlydenounced reason as ‘oppression’ and rejected as virulently conceptionsof the autonomy of the agent such as Collingwood’s; they thus remainedutter irrationalists on this score.

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On the Unity of Collingwood’s Philosophy- From Process to Self-Creation