The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (120 page)

The
questions
that we raise and our
doubts
depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which these turn.

That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are
in deed
not doubted.

But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just
can’t
investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If we want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

My
life
consist in my being content to accept many things. (§§341–344, emphasis in original)
²⁵

But how far does this comparison extend? Hinge propositions are, after all,
propositions
. At least, Wittgenstein calls them ‘propositions’. Is that not a crucial difference between what he has in mind and what Collingwood has in mind?

Well, is it? There is an issue about whether hinge propositions admit of truth or falsity. (Some sections of
On Certainty
, such as §§4 and 403, can be taken to suggest that they do; some, such as §§94, 204, and 205, can be taken to suggest that they do not.) But even if they do, we saw in the previous section how little it might take for Collingwood to resile and to concede that absolute presuppositions likewise admit of truth or falsity. One suspects that this is another of those cases in which Wittgenstein, at least, will be indifferent to what we say – provided that certain relevant features of the case have been made clear and remain clear. And central among these features is the fact that it is at any rate problematical to say that such propositions are
known
(e.g. §347). They are rather
acted on
(e.g. §§148, 196, 204, and 232). But that too is comparable to what we find in Collingwood (e.g. p. 43). In fact, in the context of everything else that Wittgenstein says about such propositions, it helps to strengthen our grip on what we find in
Collingwood. It gives us another handle on what he means by an absolute presupposition.
²⁶

There are also points of comparison between the two thinkers’ methodologies. Collingwood is prepared to say about some of his own work in metaphysics that he is not ‘trying to convince the reader of anything, but only to remind him of what he already knows perfectly well’ (p. 23; cf.
The Idea of Nature
, pp. 59–60). He also dissociates metaphysics from the propounding of ‘doctrines’ (p. 68) and expresses approval of Samuel Alexander’s conviction that ‘a metaphysician’s business is not to argue but to recognize facts[, facts which] … are not recondite or remote … but simple and familiar’ (p. 172). In all of this there are echoes of §§124–129 of Part I of Wittgenstein’s
Investigations
.
²⁷

There is one respect in which Collingwood is perhaps more secure in his metaphysical practice than Wittgenstein. Nothing in that practice constitutes any kind of inducement to embrace transcendental idealism. Any ‘we’ that appears in Collingwood’s texts and whose absolute presuppositions are under investigation is a historically rooted ‘we’: that is precisely the point of the exercise. The reader is not tempted to construe any such ‘we’ as the source of all possible sense-making, still less to think that it provides some kind of boundary around the domain of all possible sense-making. (See
Ch. 10
, §4.)
²⁸

(e) Carnap and the Logical Positivists

The obvious comparison between Collingwood and Carnap was alluded to in §3(b). Insofar as accepting what I have called an outlook and adopting a Carnapian linguistic framework are each akin to donning a pair of Kantian spectacles, each is akin to the other. Each, as I put it earlier, provides a structure within which to make empirical sense of things. There are countless differences between them however. The most important of these is that adopting a linguistic framework is something that one typically does by making a conscious choice from a range of options. Accepting an outlook, by contrast, is something that one typically does by assimilating one’s ‘cultural equipment’: one’s ‘outfit of social and political habits,
… religion, … education, and so forth’ (p. 60). In the former case one can elect to stop doing it, perhaps in favour of another of the options. In the latter case one might not be able to stop doing it while maintaining a sane grip on reality. And certainly one will not be able to stop doing it by simply selecting an alternative outlook of which one happens to be aware and accepting that instead. Even the most empathetic twentieth-century historian cannot just
take on
the outlook of a medieval monk, say.

There is another point of comparison between Collingwood and Carnap, in a type of illusion that they both recognize. Both think that a sentence can appear to be being used straightforwardly, to discuss its regular subject matter, when really it is being used obliquely, to discuss one of its own functions or a function of one of the expressions in it, with the result that a quite legitimate intellectual exercise assumes the guise of a piece of improper metaphysics, or of what Collingwood would call ‘pseudo-metaphysics’. A Carnapian example would be this: Smith, using the sentence ‘There are positive integers,’ appears to be defending the view that there are positive integers, but is really defending the view that there are advantages in adopting a linguistic framework that allows us to use the expression ‘positive integer’ in certain ways (cf.
Ch. 11
, §5(a)). A Collingwoodian example would be the very example we saw him give in the previous section: Anselm, using the sentence ‘God exists,’ appears to be arguing for the existence of God, but is really arguing that this sentence expresses an absolute presupposition to which he and his audience are committed. Both Smith and Anselm, on Carnap’s and Collingwood’s respective views, appear to be attempting the impossible. Both appear to be trying to verify that which admits of neither verification nor falsification because it is neither true nor false. In fact each is involved in an unexceptionable exploration of some structure within which to make empirical sense of things.

Collingwood thinks that, had logical positivists more generally had a better sense of this type of illusion, they would not have had the antipathy towards proper metaphysics that they had. Precisely their error, he argues, was to mistake proper metaphysics, the attempt to identify absolute presuppositions, for pseudo-metaphysics, the attempt to verify absolute presuppositions. They did not realize that, when they argued that the latter was a forlorn endeavour and that the relevant sentences (those expressing the absolute presuppositions in question) were literally meaningless, in the sense that they did not express anything either true or false, this was, or at least it should have been, music to their opponents’ ears. (See
Essay
,
Ch. XVI
.
²⁹
)

The final irony, to which I do not think Collingwood ever draws attention, is this. To the question which is often taken to present a damning objection
to logical positivism, namely, ‘What is the status of the principle of verification itself?’ (see
Ch. 11
, §6), logical positivists can turn to Collingwood for an attractive answer: it is an absolute presupposition.

(f) The Phenomenologists

A couple of points, lastly, in connection with the phenomenologists.
³⁰

First, Collingwood is interestingly poised with respect to the phenomenologists’ anti-naturalism. Like them, he is concerned to make sense of how we make sense of things. Moreover, he is no more inclined than they are to believe that this can be done using the methods and principles of the natural sciences. But, unlike them, he does believe that it can be done (and must be done) using the methods and principles of the social sciences, of which he takes metaphysics to be one. There is not a
hint
here of any phenomenological reduction.

This brings us to the second point. Collingwood may show no inclination to pursue any such reduction. But, just as he has the resources to furnish logical positivists with an attractive answer to the question of what the status of their principle of verification is, so too, I contend, he has the resources to furnish phenomenologists with an attractive account of what their phenomenological reduction consists in: it is the suspension of a set of absolute presuppositions, or of what I have been calling an outlook. When Husserl discusses his pre-phenomenological commitment to ‘the general thesis of the natural standpoint’, in other words the thesis that the spatio-temporal world ‘has its being out there’ (Husserl (
1962
), §30) – which is of course the most basic of his convictions to be suspended in his reduction – he makes that thesis,
qua
object of that pre-phenomenological commitment, sound very much like an absolute presupposition. Without it, there are various questions that do not so much as arise. But it is not itself in any
straightforward sense the answer to any question.
³¹

(g) Coda

Finally, though it may still not be clear what exactly an absolute presupposition is, I think this section has at least left us with the following schematic idea:

an absolute presupposition is a non-propositional way of making propositional sense of things
.

That idea is enough to carry us forward to the next
section.

4. Collingwood’s Conservatism. The Possibilities Afforded by Non-Propositional Sense-Making

On Collingwood’s conception of metaphysics, it is the metaphysician’s business to study absolute presuppositions that are made; no more, no less; in particular, no more. That makes the conception a profoundly conservative one. To the Novelty Question which I posed in §6 of the Introduction Collingwood has a clear answer: there is no scope for metaphysicians to make sense of things in ways that are radically new. True, a metaphysician studying the absolute presuppositions of a remote and unfamiliar people will have to make sense of things in ways that are correspondingly remote and unfamiliar.
³²
For, as we saw in §2, the study of those presuppositions will be successful only to the extent that it is empathetic. But the remote and the unfamiliar here are the remote and the unfamiliar merely from the standpoint of the metaphysician’s own community. The metaphysician is not entering sense-making territory that no one has ever previously entered; precisely not.

Why this restricted conception of metaphysics? Why should a metaphysician not investigate absolute presuppositions that
may be
made, even though they never have been, and, where appropriate, promote them, by pointing out the advantages that may accrue from making them? Admittedly, for reasons that I gave in §3(e), merely pointing out the advantages that may accrue from making new absolute presuppositions cannot by itself achieve
much: call this
low-grade
promotion. For a community to accept a new outlook, the outlook must actually be put to work within the community in such a way that those for whom it is initially alien can, by absorbing the effects of accepting it, gradually come to accept it themselves: call this
high-grade
promotion. But why should metaphysicians not be involved in high-grade promotion too? This is what scientists are involved in, however unwittingly, whenever scientific practice changes a community’s outlook. Why should metaphysical practice not likewise change a community’s outlook?

Collingwood, as we have seen, has his own quasi-Hegelian story to tell about how one outlook, or at least one set of absolute presuppositions,
³³
yields to another (§3(c)). He may defend his conservatism by saying that the ‘internal strains’ that govern such a process cannot be in any way controlled, nor the process itself in any way directed. But remember, even Hegel had his ‘world-historical individuals’ who helped to instigate whatever advances in our fundamental sense-making reason’s growth in self-understanding demanded (
Ch. 7
, §5).
³⁴

A second thing that Collingwood may say, in fact does say, this time putting himself at a greater distance from Hegel, is that no set of absolute presuppositions is superior to another. The metaphysician can observe how one set yields to another, but has no business
making
one set yield to another, having no basis on which to do so. This is a dominant theme of ‘Function of Metaphysics’, in which Collingwood states his position as starkly as anywhere.

[It] will be asked … whether it is in
no
sense the business of the metaphysician to criticize or suggest improvements in the … presuppositions which he discovers by analysis to be implied in the thought of his community. ‘What is his business,’ it will be asked, ‘if he finds out that among these presuppositions there are some that are altogether silly …? Is he to refrain from saying what he thinks of them, and may he not suggest improvements, granted that he can think of improvements? Or again, what if he discovers some that are to the best of his belief untrue? Is he not to denounce them and propose their replacements by true ones? In a word has he no kind of
critical
rights or duties with regard to these presuppositions?’

The answer to these questions is in my opinion a simple
no
. (‘Function of Metaphysics’, pp. 394–395, emphasis in original)