The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (119 page)

Be that as it may, absolute presuppositions have a regulative role that distinguishes them from scientific beliefs. Even if Collingwood were to accede to some sort of quasi-realism, he would still want to insist on this. Absolute presuppositions do not need to be justified in the way in which scientific beliefs do. They cannot be tested in the way in which scientific beliefs can. They do not
answer
to anything.

A natural question now is whether Collingwood holds any of them to be in any sense universal. Are there absolute presuppositions that human beings have always made? Or the making of which is somehow integral to their very humanity? Or even the making of which is a necessary condition of any coherent thought? The more ambitiously such questions are answered, the greater the prospects of a significant convergence between Collingwoodian metaphysics and Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics of the kind practised by Strawson himself. Collingwood leans the other way however. He writes:

When [the metaphysician] has some knowledge about several different constellations of absolute presuppositions, he can set to work comparing them. This … will convince [him] … that there are no ‘eternal’ or ‘crucial’ or ‘central’ problems in metaphysics…. [And] it will give him a hint of the way in which different sets of absolute presuppositions correspond not only with differences in the structure of what is generally called scientific thought but with differences in the entire fabric of civilization.

… The metaphysician’s business …, when he has identified several different constellations of absolute presuppositions, is not only to study their likenesses and unlikenesses but also to find out on what occasions and by what processes one of them has turned into another. (pp. 72–73)

True, nothing here strictly precludes there being absolute presuppositions that are common to all the constellations identified. But the fact is that Collingwood never acknowledges, and never shows any inclination to acknowledge, absolute presuppositions that are universal.
¹³
He views the study of what absolute presuppositions are made not as the study of any constant in human nature, but as the study of contingently changing patterns of thought in their variation from one historical context to another.
¹⁴

Very well, what governs such changing patterns? What form can they take? In particular, is it possible for a relative presupposition to become an absolute presupposition, as it shifts from one context to another? Or for the same thing to happen in reverse?
¹⁵

You might think that such a thing is not possible, on the grounds that whether something admits of truth or falsity is independent of context. It is however a familiar fact that some ways of individuating truth bearers allow for the very same thing to have a truth value in one context and to lack a truth value in another. In fact this is how Collingwood himself views propositions. He urges that the truth or falsity of a given proposition, as used in a given context, depends on what question it is intended to answer, and that the proposition is neither true nor false if the question concerned does not arise (
Autobiography
, pp. 29–31). Thus when Albert says, ‘I have stopped beating my wife,’ he may speak truly. When Barry says, ‘I have stopped beating my wife,’ he may speak falsely. And when Charles says, ‘I have stopped beating my wife,’ he may speak neither truly nor falsely. Admittedly, being neither true nor false falls short of not even admitting of truth or falsity.
Even so, it is a small step from here to the conclusion that a proposition that is true in one context and false in a second can lose its very status as a proposition in a third.

So
can
it? Can a relative presupposition become absolute, or an absolute one relative? Well, the following at least is surely possible (on Collingwood’s conception of these matters). A declarative sentence that is used to express a relative presupposition in one context comes, through natural processes of semantic evolution, to express an absolute presupposition in another. What are we to say? That one thing is expressed, and that it is a proposition in the first context but not in the second? Or that different things are expressed in the two contexts? That one presupposition is involved, and that it is relative in the first context but absolute in the second? Or that two different presuppositions are involved?
¹⁶
This seems to be one of those cases where we do well to invoke Wittgenstein’s dictum: ‘Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts’ (Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §79).
¹⁷

3. A Second (Themed) Retrospective

In this section I shall consider Collingwood in relation to some of our earlier protagonists. I shall try to show how his ideas echo theirs. I hope at the same time to cast further light on what he means by an absolute presupposition.

(a) Hume

Collingwood is the only one of our protagonists other than Hume who counts (acceptable) metaphysics as an empirical human science (cf.
Ch. 4
, §4). Despite my efforts in the previous section to demonstrate that this is not the aberration that it appears to be, it will act as an important constraint on how readily his views can be compared to those of other protagonists. Kant is an immediate case in point.

(b) Kant

Let us call a constellation of consupponible absolute presuppositions an
outlook
.
¹⁸
And let us say that, when someone makes all the presuppositions
in a given outlook, he or she
accepts
that outlook. Then accepting an outlook is
somewhat
akin to donning a pair of Kantian spectacles: it provides a structure within which to make empirical sense of things. I said the same about adopting a Carnapian linguistic framework (
Ch. 11
, §3(b)). But I also straightway noted two respects in which that analogy was limited. First, Kantian spectacles are non-negotiable conditions of all human thinking. They cannot be ‘donned’ any more than they can be removed. Second, Kantian spectacles involve intuitions. They are themselves sources of synthetic knowledge. In both these respects they likewise differ from an outlook.

It is the first of these differences that is especially pertinent to the comparison just drawn with Hume. It is precisely because Collingwood denies that any outlook is a condition of all human thinking that Collingwoodian metaphysics is like Humean metaphysics in being an empirical science. This gives the lie to Louis Mink’s claim, itself a deliberate allusion to Kant, that absolute presuppositions are
a priori
concepts (Mink (
1969
),
Ch. 5
, §5). The claim is not without justification. Absolute presuppositions certainly have something of the conceptual about them, inasmuch as they do not themselves answer truly or falsely to anything but are used in fashioning that which does. They also have something of the
a priori
about them, inasmuch as they give rise to questions concerning our experience without themselves being the answers to any questions concerning our experience. Nevertheless, as Mink himself clearly appreciates, they are not
a priori
in any fully Kantian sense.

The same point gives the lie to Collingwood’s own project in Part IIIB of the
Essay
: to do, for the arguments in Kant’s ‘Transcendental Analytic’ (
Ch. 5
, §5), what we saw him try to do for the ontological argument; that is, to show that, contrary to appearances, they are metaphysical arguments even on his own conception of a metaphysical argument as a piece of history. Kant himself would certainly recoil from this. Collingwood all but concedes as much. So much the worse, he suggests, for Kant. Here is his own summary of the situation as he sees it:

It may be objected [that] … we have only to look at the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ to see that it is not an historical essay….

A second look will, I think, convince the reader that it is one; though I do not suggest its author was aware of this.

…

The truth is that the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ is an historical study of the absolute presuppositions generally recognized by natural scientists in Kant’s own time and … for some time afterwards. I cannot add, ‘and for some time before’, because there is one of them [sc. the Causal Principle (see Ch. XXXIII of the
Essay
)] which I do not know that anybody ever accepted, in the precise form in which he states it, before himself. Some of them go back to Galileo. Some of them are to-day fallen into desuetude….

In the following four chapters I shall try to show how the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ can be read as a history of the absolute presuppositions of natural science from Galileo to Kant himself…. For Kant it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that the history of natural science from Galileo to his own time was equivalent to the history of natural science as a whole; and in that case the interpretation of the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ which I am about to offer would make it in Kant’s eyes … a comprehensive history of the entire subject. (pp. 243–246)
¹⁹

The problem for Collingwood is that what he suggests would be hardly an overstatement of what was at stake here for Kant would in fact be a radical understatement of what was at stake here for Kant. Kant simply could not see his own work in these historical terms. It is no good Collingwood saying that he has provided an interpretation of Kant to which Kant would find it hard to subscribe simply because of his parochialism. He has not provided an interpretation of Kant at all.

All of that said, the original limited analogy, between accepting an outlook and donning a pair of Kantian spectacles, survives.
²⁰

(c) Hegel (and Bergson)

In the previous section I raised the question of what governs changing patterns of thought from one historical context to another. This is just the sort of question which, on Collingwood’s view – as he explicitly says (p. 73) – it is the metaphysician’s business to address. He suggests that the question admits of a broadly Hegelian answer.

One phase changes into another because the first phase was in unstable equilibrium and had in itself the seeds of change, and indeed of that change. Its fabric was not at rest; it was always under strain. If the world of history is a world in which
tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse
, the analysis of the internal strains to which a given constellation of historical facts is subjected, and of the means by which it ‘takes up’ these strains, or prevents them from breaking it to pieces, is not the least part of an historian’s work.

… If Hegel’s influence on nineteenth-century historiography was on the whole an influence for good, it was because historical study for him was first and foremost a study of internal strains. (pp. 74–75)

How much further in a Hegelian direction Hegel’s undoubtedly large influence on Collingwood takes him is a matter of substantive exegetical debate.
²¹
The characteristic way in which tensions among absolute presuppositions can lead to their supersession by new absolute presuppositions is certainly reminiscent of Hegelian
Aufhebung
and its dialectical processes. But more than that would be required for Collingwood’s position to merit classification as a kind of Hegelianism. There is no suggestion, for instance, that such change constitutes any kind of advance in the self-understanding of a world-spirit.
²²
In fact there is no suggestion that it constitutes any kind of advance. (See further §4.) Collingwood himself insists that the only such advance that we can expect is in the actual practice of metaphysics: ‘not a process by which errors
in
our presuppositions are corrected[, but] … a process by which errors
about
our presuppositions are corrected’ (‘Function of Metaphysics’, p. 401, emphasis in original). (This of course connects with his insistence that absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false.)
²³

If anything, the essentially unpredictable processes in question, which Collingwood takes to be retrospectively but not antecedently intelligible, and which he takes to issue in a novelty whereby ‘the past lives in the present’ (
Speculum
, p. 301), are more reminiscent of Bergson than they are of Hegel. See for example the following passage:

History … is not a sheer flux of unique and disconnected events…. And, on the other hand, it is not a barren cyclical repetition of the same pattern over and over again, still less a shuffling of rearranged units like repeated throws of dice, every new event an arbitrary selection from a given number of possibilities. It is a process in which method or regularity does not exclude novelty; for every phase, while it grows out of the preceding phase, sums it up in the immediacy of its own being and thereby sums up implicitly the whole of previous history. Every such summation is a new act, and history consists of this perpetual summation of itself. (
Speculum
, p. 56)

(d) The Later Wittgenstein

There are clear similarities between Collingwood and the later Wittgenstein. I am thinking in particular of the later Wittgenstein’s work on how our
forms of life determine what makes sense to us and what questions can arise for us (
Ch. 10
, §3). The most signal point of comparison is between Collingwood’s very notion of an absolute presupposition and Wittgenstein’s notion of what has come to be called, by courtesy of the following passage from
On Certainty
,
²⁴
a ‘hinge proposition’.