Eye Exercise

Collingwood, R. G. (1889-1943)

Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian, and archaeologist.

He was reading his father’s books and learning Latin and Greek by age six (Collingwood 1939, 1). When he encountered a translation of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals aged eight he felt intensely excited that the topics were “things which at all costs I must understand” (p. 3). Indignant, he “felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own…as if a veil had been lifted up and my destiny revealed” (pp. 3–4).

Before becoming a philosophy professor at Oxford he spent almost his whole teaching life showing how to best read philosophical texts (p. 74). This was a distinctly different process to teaching how to criticise a doctrine—his colleagues attended to that (p. 27). The principles he developed aren’t specific to philosophy, though; from his practical advice to his students arose a theory of hermeneutics. His discoveries exemplified his methodology.

The first rule he suggested was: “never accept criticism of any author before satisfying yourself of its relevance” (p. 74). He taught his pupils that before they accepted criticism of a philosopher’s work they must first establish, by first-hand study, that the philosophy being criticised is what the philosopher actually expounded. They must defer their criticism until they were certain of this, and “if the postponement was sine die it did not greatly matter” (p. 27). This was a response to philosophers who refuted others, or who parroted such refutations, without having understood the text in question. When a pupil asked about a refutation on Kant, say, he’d “reach for a book with the words ‘Let us see whether this is what Kant really said’” (ibid.). Not only was this approach better scholarship but it also excited the student who had “been merely repelled by ready-made refutations of a doctrine” (p. 75). We become more active and engaged readers when we return to the sources and observe what the author under dispute was really trying to say.

The information in text-books, by contrast, was “that putrefying corpse of historical thought” (ibid.). This perspective can be partly traced to his childhood when, in reading a compendium of Descartes’ Principa at approximately age nine, he learned (p. 2):

the secret which modern books had been keeping from me, that the natural sciences have a history of their own, and that the doctrines they teach on any given subject, at any given time, have been reached not by some discoverer penetrating to the truth after ages of error, but by the gradual modification of doctrines previously held

That is, when secondary literature presents a modern interpretation of a particular doctrine or domain it erases its historicity by presenting a snapshot of ongoing historical progress as fact. Relying on secondary glosses not only deprives us of the context and colour of the original ideas, but also obscures the process by which the current consensus arose. Learning how ideas develop over time can motivate us to do our own original work, showing how the experts of our day read their peers, and therefore how we can read to the same end. Repeatedly returning to original texts in this way was beneficial to Collingwood, as well as his students (p. 75):

I would return to a passage whose meaning I thought I knew—had it not been expounded by numerous learned commentators, and were they not more or less agreed about it?—to find that, under this fresh scrutiny, the old interpretation melted away and some quite different meaning began to take form

His second rule was: “never think you understand any statement made by a philosopher until you have decided with the utmost possible accuracy, what the question is to which he means to answer” (p. 74). You can’t understand what an author means just by studying their statements, even if they’re perfectly truthful and expertly expressed (p. 31). In order to find out what they meant you must also know what question they were answering—a question in their mind, which they presumed to be in yours (ibid.).

A logical proposition “could not be the right answer to any question which might have been answered otherwise”; a “highly detailed and particularized proposition must be the answer” to a question equally detailed and particular. So, if the question we identify is vague and generalized, we need to reevaluate (pp. 31–32). Put another way, we will mistake the meaning of a proposition unless we correctly identify the question to which it is a response¹ (Collingwood 1939, 33).

It is a historical question to ask: “To what question did So-and-so intend this proposition for an answer?”, and therefore must be resolved with recourse to historical methods (p. 39). Tackling such questions requires you “to see what the different people concerned were trying to do…looking at the situation through their eyes, and thinking for yourself whether the way in which they tackled it was the right way” (p. 58). If you can grasp a philosopher’s questions, you can understand their doctrines (p. 61).

This is difficult because good writers answer the questions that their contemporaries are interested in, and rarely state the questions explicitly. When the writer becomes canonised, and their contemporaries die, the question is forgotten, “especially if the answer he gave was generally acknowledged to be the right answer; for in that case people stopped asking the question” (p. 39).

So, when faced with a difficult passage of philosophy—or similar classical text—we can assume that the author, who is “neither illiterate or idiotic”, has expressed a thought they thought worth expressing (p. 71). Initially, this may seem incomprehensible, but if we further assume that they are answering a precise question, our challenge is to determine this question. A poor reader, instead, assumes that the question is one of which they are vaguely reminded by the passage (ibid.).

Collingwood describes himself as a “slow and painful thinker” who found it difficult to learn from books (pp. 107, 89). The philosophical ideas he summarises in his autobiography “were being worked out for nearly twenty years”: “repeatedly written down, corrected, and rewritten”, but not for publication (p. 116). Rather, “whenever I had a cub to lick into shape, my pen is the only tongue I have found useful” (p. 124). This “long and oppressive period of gestation” in which he learned from what he read required “historical research and reflection” and extensive writing (p. 107).

By repeatedly returning to primary sources, assuring ourselves that we have derived the precise questions that the author is answering through contemplation and studying the author’s historical context, then confirming our understanding by writing and re-writing, we can move from regurgitating secondary sources to profitable, original readings.