James Connelly

When philosophers are asked which philosophy book first got them really interested in the subject, an answer that comes up with startling frequency is Collingwood’s An Autobiography, first published in 1939. Why? It is something to do with its readable passion, its firm belief in the value of ideas, and its impassioned rejection of those who fail to live up to the seriousness of their intellectual vocation. Itis my favourite philosophical autobiography, indeed, my favourite autobiography of any kind. I have several copies; I would have more, except that I habitually buy them in order to give them away. I give them away because I regard the book as a beautiful introduction to philosophy for someone standing on the edge waiting to dive in. I do this irrespective of age: I have pressed the book on sixteen and sixty year olds.

When someone says to me “I am interested in philosophy, what shall I read?”, I always ask “what is your philosophical problem and why is it bugging you?” Unless one has a philosophical problem there seems little point in seeking an answer – and there are no general answers, only particular answers to particular questions. If the answer is vague (and often where it is not) I suggest they read Collingwood,because he will stimulate them to discover their interests, to discover which questions are important to them, introduce them to the value of a life in which ideas are taken seriously, and invite them into a cultural world which Collingwood inhabits effortlessly and the rest of us only fitfully.

I like the slightly unfair characterisation of Collingwood by Isaiah Berlin when he remarked in a letter that “Collingwood is very exciting and risky. He is a very sly lively continental sort of philosopher: if he takes an interest in you you will, I think, find him interesting and even sensational. I know really very little about him save that I always found him entertaining, enormously ingenious, and frequently deceitful and unsound. He is the only philosophy tutor in Oxford who is also a man of genuine culture. This is all very good and I wish he taught me too.”

I wish he taught me too – but, wait a moment: he did teach me, through his Autobiography. I have not been the same since I first read it, and I still read it at least once a year. Had I not read that book in the months leading up to my university finals I might never have gained that real enthusiasm and excitement for ideas which has possessed me ever since. Before that time I played with the academic world in a desultory fashion, moving the thoughts, thinkers and theories in front of me as though they were merely so many counters. After I read Collingwood everything changed, and I believe the same can be true for any of its readers.  

The book contains many splendid passages. Amongst my favourites is this denunciation of the “realists”, who “were glad to have eradicated from the philosophical schools that confusion of philosophy with pulpit oratory which was involved in the bad old theory that moral philosophy is taught with a view to making the pupils better men. They were proud to have excogitated a philosophy so pure from the sordid taint of utility that they could lay their hands on their hearts and say it was no use at all; a philosophy so scientific that no one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it, and so abstruse that only a whole-time student, and a very clever man at that, could understand it. They were quite resigned to the contempt of fools and amateurs. If anybody differed from them on these points, it could only be because his intellect was weak or his motives bad.” (p.51)

One does not need to know who or what the realists were to enjoy this: and there are many other examples, all of which I would quote if there were only space enough.  

In his preface, Collingwood says that “the autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought. I have written this book to tell what I think worth telling about the story of mine.” It is the thread of developing thought which enlivens and unifies the book. Although it contains the obligatory passages on childhood, school, university and so on, these are far from the familiar biographical trudge which we so often skip. On the contrary, whether writing of his early life or his philosophy, Collingwood has such expressive powers that he can capture a world in a word and a universe in a phrase. One feels as if one is skating down a hill, so compelling is the forward momentum; miraculously, this is true whether he is writing of archaeology, philosophy of history, metaphysics or contemporary politics.  

Collingwood starts life a little like John Stuart Mill, with Latin at four, Greek at six, and a frustrated attempt to read Kant’s ethics at eight, described in an unforgettable passage:

One day when I was eight years old curiosity moved me to take down a little black book lettered on its spine “Kant’s Theory of Ethics”. It was Abbott’s translation of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten; and as I began reading it, my small form wedged between the bookcase and the table, I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand. Then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them. Disgraceful to confess, here was a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baffled me. Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I 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. It was not like the common boyish intention to ‘be an engine-driver when I grow up’, for there was no desire in it; I did not, in any natural sense of the word, ‘want’ to master the Kantian ethics when I should be old enough; but I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed. (p.4)

His fate led him not only to an extraordinary parallel career in the history and archaeology of Roman Britain and philosophy, but also to a political awakening in the mid-1930s which coincided with his own serious illness, an illness which he knew left him little time to complete his work. In 1937 he wrote one of his most well known and influential books, The Principles of Art but, “before it had gone through the press I was overtaken by the more serious illness which gave me both the leisure and the motive to write this autobiography; whose purpose is to put on record some brief account of the work I have not yet been able to publish, in case I am not able to publish it in full … I am nearly fifty, and cannot in any case hope for more than a few years in which I can do my best work.” (p.118)

This indicates one half of the sense of urgency he felt; there is another urgency: looming war in Europe. Collingwood started life as a pure academic. Like Mill, he had a crisis, although later and for different reasons. He became an intellectual warrior, battling against the forces of irrationalism, Fascism and Nazism and the complicit inactivity of his own government, always insisting that theory and practice had somehow to be brought together. The autobiography shows the story unfolding and culminates with a moment of self-understanding in which he saw that, although he believed in the unity of theory and practice, this had hitherto been a merely intellectual assent. He then introduces his alter egos:

There was a first R.G.C. who knew in his philosophy that the division was false, and that “theory” and “practice”, being mutually dependent, must both alike suffer frustration if segregated into the specialised functions of different classes.

There was a second R.G.C. who in the habits of his daily life behaved as if it had been sound; living as a professional thinker whose college gate symbolised his aloofness from the affairs of practical life. My philosophy and my habits were thus in conflict; I lived as if I disbelieved my own philosophy, and philosophised as if I had not been the professional thinker that in fact I was. My wife used to tell me so; and I used to be a good deal annoyed.

But underneath this conflict there was a third R.G.C., for whom the gown of the professional thinker was a disguise alternately comical and disgusting in its inappropriateness. This third R.G.C. was a man of action, or rather he was something in which the difference between thinker and man of action disappeared. He never left me alone for very long. He turned over in his sleep, and the fabric of my habitual life began to crack. He dreamed, and his dreams crystallised into my philosophy. (p.150-1)

It is this felt need for the unity of theory and practice that gives the book its air of tragedy: the sense of an awakening in which the author feels duty bound to speak out at the precise moment when his voice is being silenced by illness. It was written on the eve of war under the shadow of death. After An Autobiography he continued to write, although suffering an increasingly severe series of strokes, because in his view academics had the duty to publish, and “there are two reasons why people refrain from writing books: either they are conscious that they have nothing to say, or they are conscious that they are unable to say it; and that if they give any other reason than these it is to throw dust in other people’s eyes or their own.” (p.19-20) Collingwood was determined to say what he had to, whatever the cost to himself.

In the final chapter, in which he lays about him with abandon, denouncing appeasement and the dishonest timidity of the British government, he  concludes his voyage from eight-year-old would-be reader of Kant to an intellectual activist in which the world of ideas is indissolubly linked with the world of politics:

It is not the business of this autobiography to ask how completely the country has in fact been deceived, or how long the present degree of deception will last. I am not writing an account of recent political events in England: I am writing a description of the way in which those events impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight. (p.167)

Within four years he was dead, exhausted by his life’s work, having completed his final contribution to the understanding of the principles of politics and civilisation, The New Leviathan (1942). He didn’t live to see An Autobiography published as a Pelican paperback (in 1944) and carried to war in their backpacks by soldiers fighting physically the enemy he fought with ideas. I am sure he would have appreciated this confirmation of the unity of theory and practice.

James Connelly is professor politics at the University of Hull and co-editor of Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford University Press).