If you read here regularly, you will know that I’m a big fan of the criminally underrated British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, who lived and wrote in the first half of the 20th century.
Although his ideas about metaphysics are just as insightful, he is probably best known for making us think in entirely new ways about our relationship with history and how history should be studied properly.
Central for him was his idea that we must “re-enact” history if we are to understand it and its meaning. This isn’t the same as putting thinkers and events in their proper historical context, although that’s part of it. No, it’s more: it’s about doing your best to get into people’s heads and figure out what occupied their minds, what problems they were trying to solve, for whom they wrote and why they communicated—what “thought world” they inhabited.
For instance, it won’t do to just make fun of the boomer generation, or even to blame them for saying certain things in the 1960s and 70s. That’s as childish as condemning Kant for some of his views on race (yes, people are doing that lately, ugh). But nor will it do to “excuse” those things by simply declaring that those people were children of their time, and everybody thought how they thought, so it’s not their fault.
No, it’s about letting go of these moralistic sledgehammers wielded from the present, where we inhabit an utterly different time and thought world, altogether.
We can then do our best to truly understand where people in another era were coming from, to transfer our own mind to another time and establish a tentative relationship with the overall thought background of that time. I have attempted such a project here on this substack with the development of neo-Marxist and postmodernist thought after WWII, for example.1
This is not some magical method, however, nor can it be done by mere “subjective” thinking. It requires hard work: reading lots and lots of material. Thinking a lot. Reading some more—the works of past authors, histories, letters, secondary literature, and also: biographies and autobiographies. Connecting all that we got from these works with our own experience, our own historical moment, understanding the connections, thinking and reading some more.
At some point, we can reach such a degree of saturation that it clicks, and we begin to understand and feel—at least to a degree—the truth of the major lines of force that were foremost on people’s minds in the past, lines of force they chose to interact with for their own reason.
Part of it, in fact, is the opposite of making excuses, of claiming that people in the past had just been children of their time, and that they didn’t really mean what they said—rather, it’s about taking seriously what they said, because they did really mean it. It’s just that these things are unintelligible for us if we look at them through the lens of our own most sacred presuppositions.
All of this is possible, Collingwood says, because there’s something present in us and our times from all of our history, if often just in latent form: part of the mind space of past generations survives, and even if it may be buried for a long time, it is still “encapsulated” (Collingwood) in the present, and can therefore burst forth again if conditions change.
Time Travel to Turn of the Century England
Which brings us to the splendid, lovely, and insightful biography of Collingwood by Fred Inglis.2 I can highly recommend it both as a primer on Collingwood’s ideas and as a source that lends itself to understanding early 20th century history as Collingwood envisioned.
The book brings us right back to the late 19th century Lakeland and to early 20th century Oxford. We get a feel for the original public school system that British elites went through, as well as the university system of another era that produced so much of the thought that still has such a massive impact on our own minds. If we have any sensitivity for historical shifts, we get to understand on a visceral level how far we have fallen compared to those days, and how quickly this trend has accelerated even since 2009 when the book was published. We can also see some of the currents of liberal thought, why it emerged, why some of its aspects have been criticised, and how it germinated into some of our modern liberal ideas.
The chapters about Collingwood’s childhood are also deeply uplifting, because it can serve as an example for an almost perfect upbringing—an upbringing, of course, that had its place in a very specific historical setting and is therefore not repeatable, but is very moving and inspirational nonetheless.
I warmly recommend this book if you want to better understand an important aspect of modern history. It is extremely well-written, full of wisdom, and a pleasure all around.
Again: reading biographies and autobiographies is, I think, a crucial part of coming to understand where we came from, what people were up to in the past, and therefore how they shaped us. For Collingwood, history was the queen of the sciences, and the more I think about it, the more I agree: the deeper we can get into it, feel and think the background against which people labored in the past, back into existence—flimsy as this revived background may be, the more we understand about the universe, the world, our civilization, and ourselves.
After all, as Collingwood said, history is what shapes our very perception and judgement, and is therefore prior to everything, including science. Biographies are one important way to access this treasure trove and realize the continuity of our historical existence, dialectical breaks and ups and downs and all, especially if they are as insightful, empathetic, and imaginative as Inglis’ work on one of the great unsung intellectual heroes of our recent past.
Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood, Princeton University Press, 2011 (2009)
I've really enjoyed books that immerse me into that world, so I can get a sense of how people lived and acted. You kind of only get a vague sense even from the very best writers (Frederick Douglass, for instance, or maybe Winston Churchill), and the sense is more than enough to fuel a journey into another world, amplifying my understanding of the author's main points.