Collingwood R(obin) G(eorge) (1889–1943), English philosopher and historian. His father, W. G. Collingwood, John Ruskin’s friend, secretary, and biographer, at first educated him at home in Coniston and later sent him to Rugby School and then Oxford. Immediately upon graduating in 1912, he was elected to a fellowship at Pembroke College; except for service with admiralty intelligence during World War I, he remained at Oxford until 1941, when illness compelled him to retire. Although his Autobiography expresses strong disapproval of the lines on which, during his lifetime, philosophy at Oxford developed, he was a university ‘insider.’ In 1934 he was elected to the Waynflete Professorship, the first to become vacant after he had done enough work to be a serious candidate. He was also a leading archaeologist of Roman Britain. Although as a student Collingwood was deeply influenced by the ‘realist’ teaching of John Cook Wilson, he studied not only the British idealists, but also Hegel and the contemporary Italian post-Hegelians. At twenty-three, he published a translation of Croce’s book on Vico’s philosophy. Religion and Philosophy (1916), the first of his attempts to present orthodox Christianity as philosophically acceptable, has both idealist and Cook Wilsonian elements. Thereafter the Cook Wilsonian element steadily diminished. In Speculum Mentis (1924), he investigated the nature and ultimate unity of the four special ‘forms of experience’ – art, religion, natural science, and history – and their relation to a fifth comprehensive form – philosophy. While all four, he contended, are necessary to a full human life now, each is a form of error that is corrected by its less erroneous successor. Philosophy is error-free but has no content of its own: ‘The truth is not some perfect system of philosophy: it is simply the way in which all systems, however perfect, collapse into nothingness on the discovery that they are only systems.’ Some critics dismissed this enterprise as idealist (a description Collingwood accepted when he wrote), but even those who favored it were disturbed by the apparent skepticism of its result. A year later, he amplified his views about art in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. Since much of what Collingwood went on to write about philosophy has never been published, and some of it has been negligently destroyed, his thought after Speculum Mentis is hard to trace. It will not be definitively established until the more than 3,000 pages of his surviving unpublished manuscripts (deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1978) have been thoroughly studied. They were not available to the scholars who published studies of his philosophy as a whole up to 1990. Three trends in how his philosophy developed, however, are discernible. The first is that as he continued to investigate the four special forms of experience, he came to consider each valid in its own right, and not a form of error. As early as 1928, he abandoned the conception of the historical past in Speculum Mentis as simply a spectacle, alien to the historian’s mind; he now proposed a theory of it as thoughts explaining past actions that, although occurring in the past, can be rethought in the present. Not only can the identical thought ‘enacted’ at a definite time in the past be ‘reenacted’ any number of times after, but it can be known to be so reenacted if physical evidence survives that can be shown to be incompatible with other proposed reenactments. In 1933–34 he wrote a series of lectures (posthumously published as The Idea of Nature) in which he renounced his skepticism about whether the quantitative material world can be known, and inquired why the three constructive periods he recognized in European scientific thought, the Greek, the Renaissance, and the modern, could each advance our knowledge of it as they did. Finally, in 1937, returning to the philosophy of art and taking full account of Croce’s later work, he showed that imagination expresses emotion and becomes false when it counterfeits emotion that is not felt; thus he transformed his earlier theory of art as purely imaginative. His later theories of art and of history remain alive; and his theory of nature, although corrected by research since his death, was an advance when published.
The second trend was that his conception of philosophy changed as his treatment of the special forms of experience became less skeptical. In his beautifully written Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), he argued that philosophy has an object – the ens realissimum as the one, the true, and the good – of which the objects of the special forms of experience are appearances; but that implies what he had ceased to believe, that the special forms of experience are forms of error. In his Principles of Art (1938) and New Leviathan (1942) he denounced the idealist principle of Speculum Mentis that to abstract is to falsify. Then, in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940), he denied that metaphysics is the science of being qua being, and identified it with the investigation of the ‘absolute presuppositions’ of the special forms of experience at definite historical periods.
A third trend, which came to dominate his thought as World War II approached, was to see serious philosophy as practical, and so as having political implications. He had been, like Ruskin, a radical Tory, opposed less to liberal or even some socialist measures than to the bourgeois ethos from which they sprang. Recognizing European fascism as the barbarism it was, and detesting anti-Semitism, he advocated an antifascist foreign policy and intervention in the Spanish civil war in support of the republic. His last major publication, The New Leviathan, impressively defends what he called civilization against what he called barbarism; and although it was neglected by political theorists after the war was won, the collapse of Communism and the rise of Islamic states are winning it new readers. See also CROCE, HEGEL , IDEALISM , PHILOS – OPHY OF HISTORY, WILSO. A.D.