'The true creative mind': R. G. Collingwood's critical humanism

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 293-311

  Smallwood, Philip ^a  

^a BIRMINGHAM CITY UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 63149150672     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/41.3.293     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. As Collingwood himself described Karl Marx. See Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 152.
2. Wayne C. Booth, in his introduction to R. S. Crane's The Idea of the Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), vol. I, p. xvii, adapts Collingwood's thought on history to specifically literary-historical purposes when he writes that 'one of the critic's tasks is to reconstruct the problem - in this case how to achieve the work itself - as it might have been faced by the author'.
3. Latterly, though exceptionally, Jerome McGann has defended Collingwoodian historical concepts as a basis for textual scholarship: see The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 81,
4. while Donald S. Taylor, in Thomas Chatterton's Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1978), has analysed Chatterton according to Collingwood's notions of history and aesthetics.
5. See H. R. Jauss, 'Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory', Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 3-45;
6. H.-G. Gadamer, 'Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness', Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989), pp. 341-379;
7. P. Ricoeur, 'The Reality of the Past', Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), vol. III, pp. 142-156.
8. Fish's concept of 'Literature in the Reader' and Iser's 're-creative dialectics' are also reminiscent of Collingwood. See, respectively, Is Time a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1980),
9. and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1978).
10. And, perhaps, structuralist. In his introduction to Reconstructing Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 5, Laurence Lerner quotes Collingwood's Speculum Mentis as among views which 'sound very similar to what [George] Steiner and [Anthony] Easthope see as central to structuralism'.
11. On the other hand, Ian Robinson, The New Grammarians' Funeral: A Critique of Noam Chomsky's Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1975), had been able to make liberal use of Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics, and had brought together Collingwood's, Leavis's, and Wittgenstein's views on language in order to attack Chomsky, 'the surviving structuralists', and 'the whole corpus of established linguistics' (p. 184).
12. See, for example, the discussion of this formula in Leavis's essay on 'Thought, Language and Objectivity' as reprinted in The Living Principle: 'English' as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), p. 35. Hereafter LP.
13. The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (1942), rev. edn by David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 181: 'What Plato calls eristic discussion is one in which each party tries to prove that he was right and the other wrong.... In a dialectical discussion you aim at showing that your own view is one with which your opponent really agrees....'
14. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), p. 320n.
15. Chapter II, 'The Overlap of Classes', An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), pp. 26-53. Hereafter PM.
16. Understandably perhaps, discussion of Leavis's philosophical affinities has tended to focus on Wittgenstein. Only Ian McKillop's biography, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London and New York: Allen Lane, 1995), p. 392,
17. and one of the major studies of Leavis as critic - R. P. Bilan's The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1979) - refer to Leavis's interest in Collingwood (in The Living Principle). But Bilan's work does not, it seems to me, suggest the specifically Collingwoodian qualities that might have drawn Leavis to him. Studies by Hayman (1976), Bell (1988), Samson (1992), and Day (1996) make no mention of Collingwood.
18. See 'Translator's Preface' to De Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1927): 'Liberalism, as Professor De Ruggiero understands it, begins with the recognition that men, do what we will, are free; that a man's acts are his own, spring from his own personality, and cannot be coerced. But this freedom is not possessed at birth; it is acquired by degrees as a man enters into the self-conscious possession of his personality through a life of discipline and moral progress. The aim of Liberalism is to assist the individual to discipline himself and achieve his own moral progress; renouncing the two opposite errors of forcing upon him a development for which he is inwardly unprepared, and leaving him alone, depriving him of that aid to progress which a political system, wisely designed and wisely administered, can give.'
19. See Alan Donagan (ed.), Essays in the Philosophy of Art by R. G. Collingwood (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1964), p. 196.
20. and Bernard Bergonzi seems right to suggest that Collingwood's conception of bad art as a form of corrupt consciousness 'has a Leavisite fervour' (Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], p. 92).
21. Christopher Ricks, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1996),
22. notes Robert Crawford's comment in The Savage and the City, p. 103: 'On 29 October 1914, [Eliot] heard Collingwood, lecturing on Aristotle's de Anima, talk of how the soul might be supposed to leave the body and return to it later'. The text of De Anima used during Collingwood's lectures - and containing Eliot's marginal notes - is in the John Haywood collection of King's College Library, Cambridge.
23. See International Journal of Ethics, vol. 27 (July 1917), p. 543.
24. Guido Vanheeswijck draws a parallel, remarking that 'Both Collingwood and Eliot moved from "liberal" religious backgrounds into somewhat "catholic" Anglicanism', and that in their search for the truth of Christian religion 'both the philosopher Collingwood and the poet Eliot have granted an analogous role to tradition'. See 'R. G. Collingwood, T. S. Eliot, and the Romantic Tradition', Collingwood Studies, III: Letters from Iceland and Other Essays, ed. David Boucher and Bruce Haddock (University of Wales, Swansea: R. G. Collingwood Society, 1996), pp. 83, 85.
25. The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 156. Hereafter IN. Leavis omits Collingwood's 'resolutely' in his quotation.
26. Leavis again quotes a passage from Collingwood's Idea of Nature on the 'idea of rhythmical pattern as a link between quantity and quality... in the modern theory of nature' (IN, p. 146).
27. F. R. Leavis, The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays and Papers by F. R. Leavis, ed. G. Singh (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), p. 193.
28. See 'Literary Criticism and Philosophy', the riposte to Wellek's criticisms of Revaluation printed in Scrutiny for March 1937.
29. Leavis's essay appears in The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), pp. 211-222. In it Leavis seeks to 'vindicate literary criticism as a distinct and separate discipline' (p. 212).
30. Leavis had returned to the issue of the philosopher's literary-critical role in his essay 'Valuation in Criticism' (1966) in Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays by F. R. Leavis, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1986), where he was 'preoccupied with insisting that there is an approach to the problem of valuation, "standards" and criteria that is proper to the literary critic as such - that you don't need to be a philosopher to make it' (p. 276).
31. Nathan Rotenstreich, 'History and Time: A Critical Examination of R. G. Collingwood's Doctrine', offprint from Studies in Philosophy: Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Publications of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1960), pp. 70-71.
32. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 189.
33. 'Some Perplexities about Time: with an Attempted Solution', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 26 (1925-26), pp. 146; 150. The manuscript 'first draft' of this paper is in the Bodleian Library, dep. Collingwood 18/1.
34. See T. S. Eliot, 'Metaphysical Poetry' (1921), Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 287.
35. 'Criticism does not begin', Collingwood wrote in his Essay on Philosophical Method, 'until the reader.. has submitted to the discipline of following the author's thought and reconstructing in himself the point of view from which it proceeds' (pp. 218-219).
36. See A.C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), pp. 3-34.
37. Peter Jones, 'A Critical Outline of Collingwood's Philosophy of Art', in Michael Krausz (ed.), Critical Essays on the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), writes of Collingwood's 'Early Views': 'Although Collingwood seems to be close to some of the earlier pronouncements of Croce at this stage, he closely follows A. C. Bradley in urging that the meaningfulness which is a characteristic of all art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, or stated in any other terms' (pp. 45-46).
38. But as Jones, 'A Critical Outline', writes, Richards, 'in Principles of Literary Criticism, anticipated Collingwood in holding that emotions are "felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness", and in the view that we "imaginatively construct" works of art,
39. For Collingwood's affinities with Mason see my essay 'Historical Re-enactment, Literary Transmission and the Value of R. G. Collingwood', Translation and Literature, vol. 9, part 1 (2000), pp. 3-24.
40. William M. Johnston, The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), p. 62 and Appendix II, pp. 150-151.
41. th, 1919 (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1922), p. 12.
42. The main body of the 'folktale' MS (a short, unpublished book) can be found at dep. Collingwood 21/4 in the Bodleian Library Collingwood archive. For the relationship of the thought of this MS to some twentieth-century theories of literary translation, see Smallwood, 'The Value of R. G. Collingwood'.
43. In the introduction to his The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Present: A Reader (London and New York: Longman, 1988), Raman Selden links Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Collingwood, and Coleridge as having 'reacted against the common-sense tradition of empiricism' (p. 11).
44. George Watson, The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), has drawn attention to similarities between Coleridge's and Collingwood's distinctions between 'art' and 'craft' (p. 115).
45. Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 12.
46. Collingwood discusses Hamlet again in his manuscript notes on Shakespeare and Kyd. See 'Hieronimo and Hamlet' (no date), dep. Collingwood 17/16.
47. Wendy James, 'Tales of Enchantment: Collingwood, Anthropology and the "Fairy Tales" Manuscripts', Collingwood Studies, IV: Variations: Themes from the Manuscripts (1998), p. 142, has noted that Collingwood 'is enquiring into the folk arts not simply for their own sake, but because of the continuity with high civilization', and she lists references to Yeats, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Homer, Eliot, Marlowe, Spenser, Herrick, Gray, Landor, and Scott in the MS.
48. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1992), accuses both Leavis and Eliot of snobbish superiority to the press: 'Surveying the cultural scene in the Criterion in 1938, T. S. Eliot maintained that the effect of daily or Sunday newspapers on their readers was to "affirm them as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass".' Carey remarks that 'The cultural arbiter F. R. Leavis carried on an extended campaign against newspapers, and the linked evil of advertising, in the pages of Scrutiny' (p. 7).
49. See dep. Collingwood 17/2 and 17/3. I discuss these lectures in my 'From Illusion to Reality: R. G. Collingwood and the Fictional Art of Jane Austen', Collingwood Studies, IV: Variations: Themes from the Manuscripts (1998), pp. 71-100.
50. The London Review of Books, 20 January 2000, p. 10.
51. James Patrick, 'Fighting in the Daylight: the Penultimate Collingwood', Collingwood Studies, II: Perspectives (1995), p. 73.
52. Peter Johnson, 'Intention and Meaning in R. G. Collingwood's Autobiography', Collingwood Studies, II: Perspectives (1995), p. 38. Johnson had written of the Autobiography as 'a literary text appearing in the public world as a political act' (p. 13), and quoted Gadamer's remark from the introduction to the German translation of the work that it 'has something of the narrative power of fiction; it is a novel about the passion for thinking, about the inter-penetration of thought and living' (p. 18).
53. On the literary status of autobiography, see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Verene places Collingwood's Autobiography in a line which includes works by Vico, Rousseau, Hume, Nietzsche, and others, drawing attention to the 'hallmarks of autobiography as a philosophical idea' consonant with Dilthey's claim 'that self-reflection "makes historical insight possible"' and that 'autobiography is philosophically important because it is the transformation into literary form of the process of self-reflection that is present as a process natural to any individual' (pp. 48, 77).
54. Speculum Mentis or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 68.
55. 'John Galsworthy', Scrutinies (1928), Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1956), pp. 118-119.
56. As Raman Selden has remarked, quoting the development of Collingwood's idea of history in his Autobiography, 'Collingwood's defence of an independent historical methodology against the realists' scientism has implications... for criticism as a form of knowledge.' See Criticism and Objectivity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 24.
57. See 'On Translating Homer' (1862), in Christopher Ricks (ed.), Selected Criticism of Matthew Arnold (London: New English Library, 1972), p. 262: 'The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be indeed the "ondoyant et divers," the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne.'