The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (121 page)

As Collingwood goes on to defend this answer, much of his effort is devoted to establishing what is for us by now a familiar point, namely that such presuppositions are neither true nor false. But that is not the sum of his argument. He makes clear that he sees no other rationale for preferring one set to another either.

Collingwood has various ways of defending his conservatism then. It seems to me, however, that a significant factor in his recoil from the possibility of metaphysicians promoting new absolute presuppositions is a tacit (relative) presupposition of his own: that any sense which it is the prerogative of metaphysicians to make must be propositional sense. Call this the Propositional Assumption. Note that, even if the Propositional Assumption is true, it is not decisive in this matter. For it is not clear why either the low-grade promotion of new absolute presuppositions, through talking about them, or the high-grade promotion of new absolute presuppositions, through actually making them, should involve doing anything other than justifying and asserting propositions; should involve, in other words, making anything other than propositional sense. Even so, how much greater will the scope of metaphysicians for promoting new absolute presuppositions be if the Propositional Assumption is false?

I am not just making the simple point that metaphysicians can then avail themselves of non-propositional means of expressing the presuppositions in question – which, on Collingwood’s own view, will include declarative sentences. (Mind you, the simple point does deserve to be made, especially when we find Collingwood seemingly taking for granted that a metaphysician’s use of the sentence ‘God exists’ can
only
be of the oblique kind considered in §3(e), to express the proposition that God’s existence is an absolute presupposition made by certain people. (See e.g.
Essay
,
Ch. XVIII
; and cf. ‘Function of Metaphysics’, pp. 404–405.)) There is a broader point. If metaphysicians are not subject to the shackles of propositional sense-making – if they need not always be trying to utter truths – then who knows what imagination they may show, or what means they may devise, perhaps of an essentially artistic nature, to impart, instil, and generally promote new absolute presuppositions?
³⁵
This broader point is itself an instance of what
has come to be a recurring theme in this enquiry. Insofar as there are possibilities afforded by non-propositional sense-making which are not afforded by propositional sense-making, the prospects for the most general attempt to make sense of things, and the prospects, more specifically, for radical innovation in the most general attempt to make sense of things, will be that much greater if the attempt does not
have to be an exercise in sense-making of the latter (propositional) kind.
³⁶

1
The third of our protagonists to be born in 1889 (counting Wittgenstein only once).

2
Throughout this chapter I use the following abbreviations for Collingwood’s works:
Autobiography
for Collingwood (
1944
);
Essay
for Collingwood (
1998a
); ‘Function of Metaphysics’ for Collingwood (
1998b
);
Philosophical Method
for Collingwood (
2005
); ‘Philosophy of History’ for Collingwood (
1967
);
Speculum
for Collingwood (
1924
);
The Idea of History
for Collingwood (
1994
); and
The Idea of Nature
for Collingwood (
1945
). All unaccompanied page references are to the
Essay
.

3
For Collingwood’s discussion of this example, see
Essay
,
Ch. V
.

4
To the best of my knowledge he nowhere argues that there
cannot
be such a regress – either one that contains infinitely many propositions or one that contains an infinitely recurring loop.

5
But did not Kant argue for it? Collingwood thinks not. See §3(b).

6
That one’s own thinking belongs to the past, as of course does the thinking of those with whom one has immediate commerce, helps to explain Collingwood’s belief in the ineluctability of history. ‘The question,’ he writes, ‘is not “Shall I be an historian or not?” but “How good an historian shall I be?”’ (‘Philosophy of History’, p. 3).

7
Michael Krausz alleges that ‘Collingwood holds that one cannot be aware of one’s own absolute presuppositions’ (Krausz (
1972
), p. 227). This rests on what seems to me a bizarre reading of one passage in the
Essay
, at p. 96, which Krausz takes out of context. For a corrective, see p. 43 of the
Essay
.

8
This is rather different from the version due to Descartes to which I referred in
Ch. 1
, n. 29.

9
Anyone who thinks,
contra
Collingwood, that the standard ways of presenting the argument are
not
misleading might marvel at the precision with which Collingwood’s construal of the argument misses the point!

10
Sometimes, interestingly, pseudo-metaphysics has not just taken the place of the real thing in Collingwood’s view. It has arisen in reaction to the real thing. That is, it has been a kind of anti-metaphysics. Thus pseudo-metaphysicians, uncomfortable at having their own absolute presuppositions unearthed by genuine metaphysicians, have reacted by trying to adopt new absolute presuppositions (or absolute presuppositions that are new for them – in fact they are taken from yore) for which they have tried, pseudo-metaphysically, to argue (pp. 90ff.).

11
We have encountered such quasi-realism in a number of contexts:
Ch. 1
, §3;
Ch. 4
, §3, esp. n. 32; and
Ch. 11
, n. 50.

12
Cf. Mink (
1969
), pp. 144–145.

13
Not even when he writes as follows? ‘In part, the problems of philosophy are unchanging; in part, they vary from age to age, according to the special characteristics of human life and thought at the time; and in the best philosophers of every age these two parts are so interwoven that the permanent problems appear
sub specie sæculi
, and the special problems of the age
sub specie
æternitatis
’ (
The Idea of History
, pp. 231–232). Well, Collingwood is here talking about philosophy and philosophers rather than about metaphysics and metaphysicians. This is significant, because in another work,
Philosophical Method
, he defends a view of philosophy that is quite different from the view of metaphysics with which we are concerned in this chapter. In fact he goes as far as explicitly to distinguish it from history (ibid.,
Ch. X
, §3). It is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter to consider in any detail what Collingwood says about philosophy.

14
In
Ch. II
of the
Essay
Collingwood registers his agreement with Aristotle, or at least what he takes to be his agreement with Aristotle, that ‘metaphysics … deals with the presuppositions underlying … science’ (p. 11). Why my qualification? Well, the quoted sentence can be heard in two ways. Heard in one way it implies that there are some presuppositions that all scientists make. Heard in the other way it implies only that all scientists make some presuppositions or other. Given what I have said in the main text, Collingwood must intend it in the latter, weaker sense. But this is not the sense that one would naturally associate with Aristotle.

15
Cf. Krausz (
1972
), p. 223.

16
These questions are reminiscent of questions that we have confronted before. Cf. the discussion in
Ch. 10
, §3, of whether necessities can cease to have that status. Cf. also
Ch. 17
, §7: are we to say that the game of chess came into existence when the pawn was first allowed to move forward two squares, or are we to say that the game had already existed for a long time and merely underwent a change then?

17
For helpful discussion of the material considered in this section, see Mink (
1969
),
Ch. 5
and
Ch. 8
, §3; and Williams (
2006j
), esp. pp. 351–355.

18
Cf. pp. 66–67.

19
I have taken the liberty of replacing Collingwood’s references to ‘the Transcendental Analytics’ by references to ‘the “Transcendental Analytic”’ in conformity with my own earlier usage.

20
There is a related but much more powerful analogy, which I anticipated in
Ch. 7
, n. 20, between Collingwood and Foucault. See again Foucault’s characterization of the ‘historical
a priori
’ which I quoted in that note.

21
Louis Mink is particularly keen to emphasize the Hegelianism in Collingwood’s thinking. See Mink (
1969
), Pt I passim, and
Ch. 5
, §6; and Mink (
1972
), esp. §III. The works on which Mink especially draws in defence of his view are
Speculum
and
Philosophical Method
, both of which are earlier than the
Essay
.

22
On the contrary: see
Speculum
, p. 298.

23
The advance in question does count as part of ‘a self-knowing process’ (
Speculum
, p. 301). But again it is a matter of substantive exegetical debate in quite how Hegelian a way Collingwood intends this, or can reasonably intend it: see
Speculum
,
Ch. VII
, passim.

24
Wittgenstein (
1974b
): all unaccompanied section references in this sub-section are to this book.

25
There is much in Collingwood that is reminiscent of this (or rather, of which this is reminiscent – Collingwood’s work predates
On Certainty
). Cf. esp. p. 173, where he writes, ‘We do not acquire absolute presuppositions by arguing; on the contrary, unless we have them already arguing is impossible to us. Nor can we change them by arguing; unless they remained constant all our arguments would fall to pieces.’

Note: it was to hinge propositions that I was referring in
Ch. 10
, n. 27.

26
It is worth noting also, in view of our earlier discussion about whether a presupposition can change its status as absolute from one context to another, that Wittgenstein does allow for a proposition to change its status as a hinge proposition from one context to another: see e.g. §§94–98, 349, and 622.

27
But Collingwood had better allow
some
room for the remote and unfamiliar in metaphysics. The absolute presuppositions under investigation may be those of a remote and unfamiliar people.

28
Cf. Williams (
2006j
), pp. 355–358.

29
And for further criticism of logical positivism, see ibid., Chs XIV and XVIII.

30
And an incidental third point. Collingwood opposes Heidegger by arguing that the very idea of an enquiry into pure being is incoherent: see
Essay
, Chs II and III. But Heidegger anticipates Collingwood’s arguments: see Heidegger (
1962a
), pp. 22–23/p. 3 in the original German.

31
See e.g. Husserl (
1981b
), §7. (As with the later Wittgenstein, there is an issue about whether Collingwood’s insistence that absolute presuppositions are neither true nor false, and in particular not true, is enough to scupper this comparison. But, again as with the later Wittgenstein, this issue may not be as significant as it appears.) Cf. Collingwood’s discussion of the absolute presupposition ‘that there is such a thing as “nature”[, i.e.] … that there are things that happen quite irrespectively of anything [anyone does]’ (p. 192). Beware, however, that Collingwood has in mind a quite particular contrast between ‘nature’ and ‘art’ and is talking about an absolute presupposition that not everyone has made. Husserl, though he thinks he can cease to adopt the natural standpoint, never doubts that to do so is, precisely, unnatural; that he is talking about convictions that are common to everyone (see e.g. Husserl (
1962
), §27).

There is a further comparison attendant on this one. We saw in
Ch. 17
, §4, how Husserl thought that beliefs bracketed in the phenomenological reduction could be regained by other means. Collingwood likewise thinks that a proposition that is a potential answer to one question may also be, nay will also be, a potential answer to some other question (
Autobiography
, pp. 29–30).