R.G. Collingwood > Quotes

“History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”
― R.G. Collingwood

“Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”
― R.G. Collingwood

“The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into a scientific symbolism, ... represents not a progressive drying-up of emotion, but its progressive articulation and specialization. ... We are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressing them.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art

“The chief business of twentieth-century philosopy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”
― R.G. Collingwood

“Thus natural science is not a way of knowing the real world; its value lies not in its truth but in its utility; by scientific thought we do not know nature, we dismember it in order to master it.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

“...philosophy does not, like exact or empirical science, bring us to know things of which we were simply ignorant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we already knew in some way; and indeed it follows from our own hypothesis; for if the species of a philosophical genus overlap, the distinction between the known and the unknown, which in a non-philosophical subject-matter involves a difference be-tween two mutually exclusive classes of truths, in a philosophical subject-matter im- plies that we may both know and not know the same thing; a paradox which disappears in the light of the notion of a scale of forms of knowledge, where coming to know means coming to know in a different and better way.”
― R. G. Collingwood

“Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.

This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art

“Societies may die a violent death, like the Inca and Aztec societies which the Spaniards destroyed with gunpowder in the sixteenth century; and it is sometimes thought by people who have been reading historical thrillers that the Roman Empire died in the same way, at the hands of barbarian invaders. That theory is amusing but untrue. It died of disease, not of violence, and the disease was a long-growing and deep-seated conviction that its own way of life was not worth preserving.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art

“A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a
master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a
beginner all his life.”
― R. G. Collingwood

“Art is the cutting edge of the mind, the perpetual out-reaching of thought into the unknown, the act in which thought eternally sets itself a fresh problem. So play, which is identical with art, is the attitude which looks at the world as an infinite and indeterminate field for activity, a perpetual adventure. All life is an adventure, and the spirit of adventure, wherever it is found, can never be out of place. It is true that life is much more than this; it is never, even its most irresponsible moments, a mere adventure; but this it is; and therefore the spirit of play, the spirit of eternal youth, is the foundation and beginning of all real life. 1”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“The world of imagination is thought implicit, the world of thought, so called, is thought explicit.”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“When the mind becomes conscious of itself as thought it simultaneously becomes conscious of itself as action. Thought and action, truth and freedom (‘ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’) are inseparable, and are in fact correlative aspects of an indivisible reality. Hence they became simultaneously explicit in the mind’s process of self-discovery.”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“The question what presuppositions underlie the 'physics' or natural science of a certain people at a certain time is a purely historical question as what kind of clothes they wear. And this is the question that metaphysicians have to answer.”
― R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography

“Mengajukan tanya yang, kau tahu, kelak tak berjawab adalah dosa mendasar dalam sains, layaknya memberi perintah yang kau pikir akan diabaikan dalam bidang politik, atau memohon sesuatu yang kau rasa tak 'kan dikabulkan Tuhan dalam agama”
― R.G. Collingwood

“For Hellenistic thought, self-consciousness is no longer, as it was for Hellenic thought, a power to conquer the world; it is a citadel providing a safe retreat from a world both hostile and intractable.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

“العبيد يميلون إلى تعلم الرغبات التي نبذها سادتهم”
― R.G. Collingwood

“Rational truth—and all truth is rational—is essentially that which can justify itself under criticism and in discussion.”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“Economics is not a true description of one kind of action but an abstract, arbitrary, and therefore erroneous description of all action; and the ‘economic man’ whom it describes is not, in these days, denied to be a fictitious entity”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“Man’s life is a becoming: and not only becoming, but self-creation. He does not grow under the direction and control of irresistible forces. The force that shapes him is his own will. All his life is an effort to attain to real human nature. But human nature, since man is at bottom spirit, is only exemplified in the absolute spirit of God. Hence man must shape himself in God’s image, or he ceases to be even human and becomes diabolical. This self-creation must also be self-knowledge; not the self-knowledge of introspection, the examination of the self that is, but the knowledge of God, the self that is to be. Knowledge of God is the beginning, the center, and end, of human life.

How is the mind to be at once in change and out of change? Only if the mind originates change in itself. For then, as the source and ground of change, it will not be subject to change; while on the other hand, as undergoing change through its own free act, it will exhibit change. This double aspect of the mind as active and passive is the very heart of philosophy [the distinction between fact and act]. The act is out of time in the sense that it creates time, just as it is supernatural in the sense that it creates nature; the fact is temporal, natural, subject to all those laws which constitute its finiteness. But between the act and the fact there is no division: the distinction is only an ideal distinction. In creating the fact, the act realized itself, and does not live apart in a heaven of its own for which it issues mandates for the creation of facts; it lives in the facts which it creates.

The life of absolute knowledge is thus the conscious self-creation of the mind, no mere discovery of what it is, but the making of itself what it is.

The infinite is not another thing which is best grasped by sweeping the finite out of the way; the infinite is nothing but the unity, or as we sometimes say, the “meaning,” of finite things in their diversity and their mutual connections. To look for the infinite by throwing away the finite would be very much like making the players stop playing in order to hear the symphony. What they are collectively playing is the symphony; and if you cannot hear it for the noise they are making, you cannot hear it at all. The notes are, so to speak, the body of which the symphony is the soul; and in that sense we might say that the finite is the body of which the infinite is the soul; though, if we say that, we must beware of the materialism which would delude us into talking of disembodies spirits, and remember that it is of the essence of spirit to embody itself.”
― Robin Collingwood

“Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

“Knowledge as a past fact, as something dead and done with—knowledge by the time it gets into encyclopaedias and text-books—does consist of assertion, and those who treat it as an affair of encyclopaedias and text-books may be forgiven for thinking that it is assertion and nothing else. But those who look upon it as an affair of discovery and exploration have never fallen into that error. People who are acquainted with knowledge at first hand have always known that assertions are only answers to questions. So Plato described true knowledge as ‘dialectic’, the interplay of question and answer in the soul’s dialogue with itself; so Bacon pointed out once for all that the scientist’s real work was to interrogate nature, to put her, if need be, to the torture as a reluctant witness; so Kant mildly remarked that the test of an intelligent man was to know what questions to ask, and the same truth has lately dawned on the astonished gaze of the pragmatists. Questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge, assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“When a student is in statu pupillari with respect to any subject whatever, he has to believe that things are settled because the textbooks and his teachers regard them as settled. When he emerges from that state and goes on studying the subject for himself he finds that nothing is settled. The dogmatism which is an invariable mark of immaturity drops away from him. He looks at so-called facts with a new eye. He says to himself: ‘My teacher and textbooks told me that such and such was true; but is it true? What reasons had they for thinking it true, and were these reasons adequate?”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

“Superstitions of all kinds break out on all hands even at this enlightened stage of the world’s history, and there is no reason to think that they will soon become extinct.”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“30. 99. War serves the cause of peace, and is therefore politically justified, when it is the only available method of discouraging a people who are individually the victims of their own emotions, and collectively a prey to the tyrannous but popular ‘rule’ of a sub-man whom they hail as a superman, from pursuing abroad an aggressively belligerent policy, the natural extension of the tyranny to which they are accustomed at home, and forcing them to realize that the only way to prosperity at home is through peace abroad.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan

“It is only when a man’s historical consciousness has reached a certain point of maturity that he realizes how very different have been the ways in which different sets of people have thought. When a man first begins looking into absolute presuppositions it is likely that he will begin by looking into those which are made in his own time by his own countrymen, or at any rate by persons belonging to some group of which he is a member. This, of course, is already an historical inquiry. But various prejudices current at various times which I will not here enumerate have tended to deceive such inquirers into thinking that the conclusions they have reached will hold good far beyond the limits of that group and that time. They may even imagine that an absolute presupposition discovered within these limits can be more or less safely ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always.”
― R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics

“We did not assume that any one form of experience could be accepted as already, in its main lines, wholly free from error. Led by this principle, we found that the real world was implied, but not asserted, in art; asserted, but not thought out, in religion; thought out, but only subject to fictitious assumptions, in science; and therefore in all these we found an ostensible object—the work of art, God, the material universe—which was confessedly a figment and not the real object. The real object is the mind itself, as we now know.”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“In each case an error as to the true nature and meaning of life reacts on that life itself and produces not indeed a reality corresponding to the error—which would in that case cease to be an error—but a reality of a one-sided kind, showing within itself various strains and symptoms of faulty equilibrium resulting from the error. It”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“Every one knows that our civilization is in difficulties, and the stupidity of the suggested remedies only indicates the gravity of the disease, for a sick society has to diagnose and cure its own complaint, and the worse the complaint, the wilder the diagnosis is likely to be But no one denies the disease.”
― R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis

“That is why all science begins from the knowledge of our own ignorance:”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

“The critic must therefore work from within. His negative position is based on his positive: his primary work is to supplement his author's partial account of some matter by adding certain aspects which the author has overlooked ; but, since the parts of a philosophical theory never stand to one another in a relation of mere juxtaposition, the omission of one part will upset the balance of the whole and distort the remaining parts; so his additions will entail some correction even of those elements which he accepts as substantially true.
20. Criticism, when these two aspects of it are considered together, may be regarded as a single operation: the bringing to completeness of a theory
which its author has left incomplete. So understood, the function of the critic is to develop and continue the thought of the writer criticized. Theoretically, the relation between the philosophy criticized and the philosophy that criticizes it is the relation between two adjacent terms in a scale of forms, the forms of a single philosophy in its historical development; and in practice, it is well known that a man's best critics are his pupils, and his best pupils the most critical.”
― R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method