Robin G. Collingwood's The Idea of History consists of three parts. The first part deals with the history of the idea of history. The structure of this part is one of temporal sequence. It traverses the time between the pre-Greek theogonists and the post-Hegelian positivists. The goal here is to see how the present idea of history has been constituted. The second part deals with scientific history as it is practiced contemporaneously with Collingwood. The structure of this second part is spatial differentiation, and Collingwood surveys each country's own way of doing historical research. The third and final part is titled "Epilegomena," where Collingwood develops his own idea of history. This part is properly creative, and it is still in the form of a concept which awaits full development in actual academic practices.
Each part is divided into a large number of sub-sections, and each sub-section contains gems of insight. Naturally I cannot survey all of it in my own language. What drew my attention, as always, is Collingwood's superb interpretation of Hegel, and how much the former held the latter in high regard. So much so, in fact, that Collingwood's criticism of Hegel is not that Hegel was wrong in some way, but that he was not consistent with what he himself developed. In other words, Collingwood accuses Hegel of not being Hegelian enough at times.
Each part is divided into a large number of sub-sections, and each sub-section contains gems of insight. Naturally I cannot survey all of it in my own language. What drew my attention, as always, is Collingwood's superb interpretation of Hegel, and how much the former held the latter in high regard. So much so, in fact, that Collingwood's criticism of Hegel is not that Hegel was wrong in some way, but that he was not consistent with what he himself developed. In other words, Collingwood accuses Hegel of not being Hegelian enough at times.
Hegel's Philosophy of History is the chief target of Collingwood's criticism. Collingwood begins by noting that Hegel's work is really a compilation of the strong elements of historical thought which was prevalent around that time, and that Hegel's originality lies not so much in the independent ideas as in how they are systematized and purified into a strong order. According to this system, historical thought must proceed under a few guiding principles.
[Hegel] proposes a new kind of history, to be called the philosophy of history (the proposal and the terminology being as old as Voltaire); but the philosophy of history is for him not a philosophical reflection on history but history itself raised to a higher power and become philosophical as distinct from merely empirical, that is, history not merely ascertained as so much fact but understood by apprehending the reasons why the facts happened as they did. This philosophical history will be a universal history of mankind (here Hegel follows Herder) and will exhibit a progress from primitive times to the civilization of to-day. The plot of this story is the development of freedom, which is identical with the moral reason of man as exhibited in an external system of social relations, so that the question which philosophical history has to answer is the question how the State came into existence (all this is taken from Kant). But the historian knows nothing of the future; history culminates not in a future Utopia but in the actual present (this is Schiller). Man's freedom is the same thing as his consciousness of his freedom, so the development of freedom is a development of consciousness, a process of thought or a logical development, in which the various necessary phases or moments of the concept are successively achieved (this is Fichte). Lastly, philosophical history exhibits no merely human process but a cosmic process, a process in which the world comes to realize itself in self-consciousness as spirit (this is Schelling). Thus, every one of the characteristic features of Hegel's philosophy of history is drawn by him from his predecessors, but he has combined their views with extraordinary skill into a theory so coherent and so unified that it deserves independent consideration as a whole (113 - 114)
Ontologically, history is the temporal manifestation (an external or immediate phenomenon) of the logical structure of a concept (the inner, unifying existence of temporal reality). This, however, does not mean that history is the same as logic. Hegel does argue that logic is a pre-requisite to studying history. But history has empirical content, whereas logic only deals with pure thoughts. History ought to start by empirical observation of past objects and documents. Through these, the historian comes to experience a serious constraint or discipline imposed upon his thought by these items. It is within this constraint that the historian must then turn to logic and try to understand the inner, thoughtful movements which the items point to. These movements are none other than the movements once experienced by past human beings. Only whereas past people tend to "be in the moment" and thus are not fully in command of how they are being bound by and contributing to the large-scale picture of their age, the historian is able to self-consciously experience the same sequence of thoughts from the bird's eye point of view. It is this latter step which Hegel calls the philosophy of history.
Why does Collingwood think that the Philosophy of History is defective nonetheless? For Collingwood, this work exemplifies a tension which exists between Hegel's ontology and his idea of history. We have already seen that for Hegel history begins with empirical discovered items and proceeds to deduce the concept which the people living contemporaneously with these items held in their minds. The implication of this method is that material things - the historical items - must be of such a kind that they serve as guidelines for the historian's thoughts. The reverse way of stating the same thing is to say that historical facts are those which must be capable of being materialized into objects which can exist beyond subjective thoughts. On the other hand, the subject-matter of Hegel's Philosophy of History is politics. However, politics is subjective, and as such only exists as facts of experience, not as historical items (this is a subtle point which Collingwood takes for granted and is present in Kant). Thus, politics is a topic incapable of satisfying the conditions which Hegel's idea of history lays down. In this sense, Collingwood writes:
It is a striking fact, and one which many readers have noticed, that as an historian Hegel was at his best in his lectures on the history of philosophy, which are a genuine triumph of historical method and have been the model for all subsequent histories of thought ... When Hegel repudiated the Kantian distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, he repudiated by implication the Kantian doctrines that all history is political history and that history is a spectacle. Hence the central position of the State in his Philosophy of History is an anachronism, and to be consistent with himself he ought to have held that the historian's business is to study not so much the process of objective mind as the history of absolute mind, i.e. art, religion, and philosophy ... The Philosophy of History is an illogical excrescence on the corpus of Hegel's works (120 - 121)
Thus, from Collingwood's point of view, Hegel initiated an important step towards the full concept of a philosophy of history, but he failed to fully practice what he preached. It is true that Hegel left his Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, and the History of Philosophy as examples of universal history in concreto. Hegel's failure lay merely in not fully making the connection between his ontology of mind - where art, religion, and philosophy occupy the position of the "absolute" - and his methodology in history.
Other than this small defect, however, Collingwood is very sympathetic to Hegel's position. Indeed, upon sober reflection it is difficult not to agree with it. Any kind of history implies that an event has not merely happened out of the blue, but that that event is a result of previous strife and deliberation on the part of many people, and that moreover this result then will give rise to further events. To assert the reality of a historical event, therefore, one is obliged to present the rationale underlying that event, and it is in this sense that the "real is the rational and the rational is the real." As far as empirical evidence goes, however, history cannot get beyond the present, for otherwise it will launch into unscientific polemics concerning the "hopes and fears" (to use a Hegelian phrase) without any ground. And if freedom is thought of as self-consciousness, then indeed history is the amplification of material for thought which is comprised of thoughts, meaning that thought is progressively able to grasp how it behaves when such and such actions and events take place materially. As a consequence, thought, by running through history, progressively becomes more self-conscious and thus freer.
Other than this small defect, however, Collingwood is very sympathetic to Hegel's position. Indeed, upon sober reflection it is difficult not to agree with it. Any kind of history implies that an event has not merely happened out of the blue, but that that event is a result of previous strife and deliberation on the part of many people, and that moreover this result then will give rise to further events. To assert the reality of a historical event, therefore, one is obliged to present the rationale underlying that event, and it is in this sense that the "real is the rational and the rational is the real." As far as empirical evidence goes, however, history cannot get beyond the present, for otherwise it will launch into unscientific polemics concerning the "hopes and fears" (to use a Hegelian phrase) without any ground. And if freedom is thought of as self-consciousness, then indeed history is the amplification of material for thought which is comprised of thoughts, meaning that thought is progressively able to grasp how it behaves when such and such actions and events take place materially. As a consequence, thought, by running through history, progressively becomes more self-conscious and thus freer.
After dealing with Hegel, Collingwood devotes the last section of the first part to "Positivism" which takes place after Auguste Comte. The rise of positivism, according to Collingwood, was due mainly to the development of sophisticated techniques for analyzing historical items. This led to the compartmentalization of history in academia, and it also vastly increased the amount of work for the historians. Historians were no longer needed to engage in a philosophy of history in order to continue their research and keep their jobs. The problems which they faced, minute thought they may be, were complicated and demanding enough, so that they had no extra time or energy to devote to philosophy. This resulted in the substantial amassing of historical material, and an incredible accuracy in chronology. This is the positive feature of positivism. However, the negative feature is that history deteriorated into a most boring science, and historians were no longer able to educate the public at large on issues that actually mattered, i.e. thoughts which past people held and still influence how people live at present. As a parallel phenomenon, philosophy became exclusively focused on non-historical disciplines such as mathematics and logic, which equally led to the deterioration of the subject itself, for who cares about abstract thoughts which have no anchoring in their actual manifestations in how people lived or still live every day?
Such is the critical attitude with which Collingwood brings the first part to a close. The implications are clear: historians are encouraged to take advantage of the vast archive of historical facts in order to construct a map of historical thought, a philosophy of history, much more detailed than anything conceivable in the times of Hegel and his contemporaries.
