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British Idealism and the Philosophy of History: Sources of Sustenance

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Texts in Context

Part of the book series: Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library ((MNPL,volume 12))

Abstract

The reason for discussing British idealist philosophy, with reference to the nature and scope of this work, is that it informs and inspires much of the recent methodological literature concerning the appropriate manner in which to conduct an enquiry into the ideas of past political thinkers. In this chapter I will be concerned to highlight the sorts of problems that subsequently became germane to most of the present-day discussions concerning the study of the history of political thought.

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Notes

  1. Bosanquet, however, was not as enthusiastic about history as some of his idealist contemporaries. He says, for example, that ‘History is a hybrid form of experience. incapable of any considerable degree of “being or trueness”’ and he also suggests that history is ‘the doubtful story of successivc events’ because it deals with the ‘transitory and particular rather than with the universal’ B. Bosanquet. The Principles of Individuality and Value ( London, Mactnillan. 1912 ). 268.

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  2. F. H. Bradley . Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1930: Ninth Edition). 127.

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  3. M. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 26

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  5. Harold H. Joachim . The Nature of Truth (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1914). chapts. VII. VIII. and XI: Bradley. Appearance and Reality, chap. XXIV

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  6. Joachim, The Nature of Truth, 66.

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  7. G.R. G. Mure, ‘Benedetto Croce and Oxford’. Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1954). 329.

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  9. Joachim, The Nature of Truth, 170.

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  10. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 34. Cf. ibid., 40; Bradley, Essays On Truth and Reality, 218; A. C. Ewing, The Idealist Tradition ( Illinois, The Free Press and Falcon Wing’s Press. 1957 ). 24.

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  11. Bradley. Essays On Truth and Reality. 215.

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  12. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 59. Cf. T. H. Green. Prolegomena to Ethics ( Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1906 ). 16–60.

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  14. Bosanquet, The Principles of Individuality and Value, 268.

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  15. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 47.

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  16. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, I; Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London. Macmillan. 1965). 2. Cf. M. Oakeshott. ‘Philosophical experience, then. I take to be experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification. Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which carries with it the evidence of its own completeness. The philosopher is simply the victim of thought’. Experience and Its Modes. 2.

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  17. Benedetto Croce. Logic as The Science Of The Pure Concept trans. Douglas Ainslie (London. Macmillan, 1917 ). 112–113.

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  18. Harold H. Joachim . ‘“Absolute” and “Relative” Truth’, Mind N.S. XIV (1905). 10.

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  19. The individual person in his independent existence is an historical being. He is determined by his position in time and space and in the interaction of cultural systems and communities. The historian has. therefore to understand the whole life of an individual as it reveals itself at a certain time and place’. Dilthey. Selected Writings. 181.

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  20. G.W. F. Hegel. The Philosophy of Right trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1952 ). 11.

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  21. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 73 and 79.

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  22. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism In Politics and Other Essays(London, Methuen, 1974), 119. 121. 123 and 125.

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  24. Collingwood. Speculum Mentis, 68.

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  25. Bosanquet. Philosophical Theory of the State. 159; Collingwood. Speculum Mentis, 299.

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  26. Bosanquet. The Philosophical Theory of the State. 277. Cf. J. H. Muirhead. The Service of the State: Four Lectures on the Political Teaching of T. H. Green ( London, Murray, 1908 ). 59.

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  27. M. Oakeshott, ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ in Rationalism in Politics, 204–205.

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  28. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics. 105.

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  29. Ibid., 204. Nevertheless, on this and many other points he is not entirely consistent. In one place he docs talk of a permanent human nature; ‘In Principle, of course, the politics which will succeed will be politics adjusted to human nature and especially to the permanent (but not exclusive) egoism of human behaviour’. M. Oakeshott, ‘Scientific Polities’, The Cambridge Journal, I (1947–48). 355.

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  30. M. Oakeshott, ‘The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence’, Politica, III (1938), 360.

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  31. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics. 128.

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  32. M. Oakeshott,‘Rationalism in Politics: A Reply to Raphael’, 92; Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 123.

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  33. Bosanquet. Philosophical Theory of the State, 152.

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  34. Isaiah Berlin. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas ( London, Chatto and Windus. 1980 ), 145–152.

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  35. Werner Brock, Contemporary German Philosophy ( London. Cambridge University Press. 1935 ), 7.

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  36. See, for example. Sir Henry Jones and John Henry Muirhead, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird (Glasgow, James Madehose, 1921), 70 and 36; Edward Caird, Essays on Literature and Philosophy (Glasgow, James Maclehose. 1892 ) vol. I, 230.

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  37. Thomas Hill Green’s Hume and Locke with an introduction by Ramon M. Lcmos (New York. Thomas Y. Comwell, 1968). 5. However, many of the idealists stress the importance of a knowledge of the context in coming to understand texts and human actions. See Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, 152; J. H. Muirhead, ‘Past and Present in Contemporary Philosophy’ in Contemporary British Philosophers ed. J. H. Muirhead (London, Allen and Unwin, 1924), 312.

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  38. Green, Hume and Locke, 5. Also see M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H Green and His Age (London. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), 162 and 227. However, many of the idealists did attempt to relate the life of an author to the ideas he had, and because of their conception of the interrelatedness of life philosophy was often considered in relation to the wider cultural manifestations like poetry, science and politics.

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  39. T. M. Lindsay. ‘Recent Hegelian Contributions to English Philosophy’, Mind, II (1877), 477.

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  40. Exceptions to the rule were W. R. Sorely, ‘The Historical Method’, and D. G. Ritchie, ‘The Rationality of History’ in Essays on Philosophical Criticism eds. Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (London, Longmans Green, 1883), 102–125 and 126–158 respectively. Also see the essay by an opponent of idealism, Henry Sidgwick, ‘The Historical Method’, Mind XI (1886), 203.

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  41. F. H. Bradley, ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’ in Collected Essays ( Freeport, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1968 ).

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  42. Wilhelm von Humbolt. ‘On the Historian’s Task’. History and Theory. 6 (1967). 58.

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  43. Bradley, Collected Essays, 2.

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  44. Ibid., 14.

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  45. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 139. Cf. 240.

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  46. Bradley, Collected Essays, 36; Also see Sidgwick. ‘The Historical Method’.

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  47. Bradley. Collected Essays. 35–36.

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  48. R. G. Collingwood . letter to de Ruggiero, January 9, 1931. Collingwood Ms. Folder 27, Bodleian Library. Oxford. Originals in the care of R. dc Telive (executor to dc Ruggicro), Institute de Storia Moderna, Rome.

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  49. Ibid, June 12, 1937.

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  50. M. Oakeshott, review of The Idea of History in The English Historical Review, LX11 (1947), 85; R. G. Collingwood, ‘Oakeshott and the Modes of Experience’, in The Cambridge Mind ed. E. Homberger ( Boston, Little Brown, 1970 ), 134.

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  51. Vico, The New Science, par. 331. Cf. Dilthey, ‘Mind can only understand what it has created. Nature, the subject-matter of the physical sciences embraces the reality which has arisen independently of the activity of mind’. Dilthey, Selected Writings. 192.

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  52. Rickman. Meaning in History. 107.

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  53. Collingwood. The Idea of History. 215.

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  54. Cf. Croce, ‘The past lives in the present and the pretence of returning to it is equivalent to that of destroying the present, in which alone it lives’. Croce. Logic. 481. Also see Crooe, Theory and History of Historiography, 12. However. Oakeshott’s position differs from that of Croce. In an allusion to Croce. Oakeshott differentiates his position in the following way; ‘The present dominates the past; all history is contemporary history. What I take to be the value of this theory is the emphasis it places upon the present, and its insistence that the facts of history arc present facts. But. for all that, it cannot be countcd a satisfactory view. Behind it lies the notion of a complete virgin world of past events which history would discover if it could, but which it cannot discover on account of some radical defect in human knowledge’. Experience and Its Modes. 141.

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  55. Dilthey. Selected Writings, 226.

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  56. Collingwood. The Idea of History, 293.

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  57. Ibid., 219; Dilthey. Selected Writings, 176.

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  58. R. G. Collingwood. ‘Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles’ in Essays in the Philosophy of Historyed. William Debbins (Austin. University of California Press. 1965 ), 71.

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  59. Vico, The New Science, pars. 338 and 375.

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  60. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 65

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  61. Johan Huuinga, Men and Ideas, 55; Dilthey, Selected Writings, 196.

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  62. E. H. Carr, What Is History, 64; W. H. Walsh. An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London. Hutchinson. 1969). 53. Walsh goes on to defend Collingwood. Also sec William H. Dray, ‘Collingwood’s Historical Individualism’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, X (1980), 1–20.

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  63. Collingwood. The Idea of History, 269 and 42.

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  64. R. G. Collingwood. An Autobiography ( Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1970 ), 67.

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  65. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 240–244; Collingwood, Speculum Mentis. 299.

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  66. It would appear that the task of the “historian” cannot properly be described as that of recalling or of re-enacting the past; that in an important sense, an “historical” event is something that never happened and an “historical” action is something never performed; that an “historical” character is one that never lived. The idiom of happening is always that of practice, and the record of happening is usually in the idiom of practice, and “practice” and “history” are two logically distinct universes of discourse.The task of “the historian” is, thus, to create by a process of translation; to understand past conduct and happening in a manner in which they were never understood at the time; to translate action and event from their practical idiom into an historical idiom’. Oakeshott. Rationalism in Politics, 164.

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  67. M. Oakeshott, ‘History and the Social Sciences’ in The Institute of Sociology. The Social Sciences ( London, Le Play House Press, 1936 ), 73.

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  68. M. Oakeshott. On History and Other Essays ( Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1983 ). 27.

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  69. Ibid., 62. For further discussion of Oakeshott’s conception of history see my ‘The Creation of the Past: British Idealism and Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History’, History and Theory, XXIII (1984), 193–214.

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  70. Oakeshott, On History, 80.

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  71. Ibid., 64. Cf. 65 and especially 93 where he says ‘And further, it should perhaps be repeated that since an historical event is not an assignable action, the antecedents in terms of which its character may come to be understood cannot be an agent’s reasons, intentions, motives or deliberate calculations’.

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  72. Ibid., 167; M. Oakeshott, ‘Mr. Carr’s First Volume’, The Cambridge Journal, IV (1950–1951). 347; Oakeshott, ‘History and the Social Sciences’. 75; Oakeshott. Experience and Its Modes. 107, respectively.

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  74. Ibid.. 269–70.

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  75. Ibid., 248.

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  76. Croce, Logic, 208.

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  77. Collingwood, An Autobiography, chapt. V.

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  81. Ibid.. 23–32.

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  82. Ibid., 31 and 44.

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  83. Ibid., 163.

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  84. Ibid., 48. Cf. 45. 74 and 76.

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  87. Ibid.. 77 and 48 respectivley.

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  89. Ibid., 196 and 93.

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  98. Quoted by William Kluback. Withetm Dilihey’s Philosophy of History ( New York. Columbia University Press. 1956 ), 27.

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© 1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht

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Boucher, D. (1985). British Idealism and the Philosophy of History: Sources of Sustenance. In: Texts in Context. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5075-7_2

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