1
From Contemplation to Transformation: Myth, History,
and the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood.
James Kent B.A. (Hons).
C. G. Kratzenstein-Stub, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, 1806. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Reproduced
Wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kratzenstein_orpheus.jpg), accessed 13/4/15.
A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts at Monash University in 2015
Department of Philosophy, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies
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Copyright notice
© James Kent (2015). Except as provided in the Copyright Act 1968, this thesis may
not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.
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Abstract
The relationship between history and myth suffers from an ambiguity from which a
philosophical topos, and thus philosophical project, emerges. This thesis deals with the
philosophical potential of this ambiguity. If, as I argue, the ambivalence of this ambiguous relation
is both necessary and in some sense inescapable to be philosophically illuminating, the goal is, then,
not to reconcile these two concepts (and indeed to highlight the impossibility of doing so), but to
articulate the possibilities that emerge from the exploration of that very ambivalence. This will be
done through an exploration of the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), whose
philosophy (at times difficult to locate within a school or tradition) will be triangulated via thinkers
who have wrestled with the problem of history and myth, namely Herodotus, Giambattista Vico and
Siegfried Kracauer. Behind these explicit comparisons, I will also rely on the philosophy of Hans
Blumenberg (his theory of myth will buttress a large part of the conceptual grounding of the
project) and Walter Benjamin, whose ideas regarding history and myth constitute important, if
momentary, illuminations. These confrontations not only allow Collingwood to emerge as a
genuine and original philosopher of history and myth in his own right, but also embody a new
insight into the philosophical interest of history and its relation to myth.
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Declaration
This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or
diploma at any university or equivalent institution and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief,
this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due
reference is made in the text of the thesis. This thesis does not exceed 50 000 words, as approved by
the Monash University Institute of Graduate Research (MIGR).
Signature: Date:
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Acknowledgements
I thankfully acknowledge the dedicated assistance and guidance of my supervisor Professor
Andrew Benjamin. I learnt an enormous amount during our conversations, from which this thesis
benefitted immeasurably. I also wish to thank my associate supervisor Dr. Alexei Procyshyn for
very detailed feedback, both structural and thematic, that helped a great deal in the final months.
I am eternally grateful to my friend James Mitchell who, through his inspiring conversations,
gradually introduced me to this world. This thesis rests on a foundation built by those discussions.
Further thanks must go to my mum, Carolyn James and my friend Jessica O’Leary, for
helpful editing and conversation.
General thanks must go to Dr. Mark Kelly for advice and friendship. Thanks also to my
friends in the philosophy program, for support and critical feedback: Gene Flenady, Sam Cuff
Snow, Ben Hjorth, Emma McNicol, Max Sipowicz and Alex Pearl Cain.
Final and eternal thanks go to my girlfriend Charlotte Callander, who not only rescued my
prose from disaster, but whose love, devotion, and affection ensured they were written in the first
place.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter Two: Herodotus and the Reception of History: The
Contemplative Gaze.
Chapter Three: Vico and the Remembering of History: The
Legitimacy of the Contemplative Gaze.
Chapter Four: The Interruption of History and the Present’s
Historical Task: Kracauer as Reader of Collingwood and the
Transformative Gaze.
Conclusion
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Introduction.
The relationship between history and myth suffers from an ambiguity from which a
philosophical project emerges. This thesis deals with the philosophical potential of this ambiguity.
Homer, who in some important sense represents, if not the beginning, then a beginning, casts a
shadow under which the West continues to labour. If this is the case, then Herodotus, the ‘father of
history’, embodies a peculiar moment in that legacy. Herodotus’ reception and illumination of the
myths of the Mediterranean, for which he was largely ridiculed for the better half of two millennia
(a ridicule that emerged largely out of the rise of philosophical consciousness) has made the
problem of the relation between history and myth exceedingly difficult to grasp. If, however, as I
argue, the ambivalence of this relation is both necessary and in some sense inescapable so as to be
philosophically illuminating, the goal is, then, not to reconcile these two concepts (and indeed to
highlight the impossibility of doing so), but to articulate the possibilities that emerge from the
exploration of that very ambivalence. This will be done through an exploration of the philosophy of
R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), whose philosophy (at times difficult to locate within a school or
tradition) will be triangulated via thinkers who have wrestled with the problem of history and myth,
namely Herodotus, Giambattista Vico and Siegfried Kracauer. These confrontations not only allow
Collingwood to emerge as a genuine and original philosopher of history in his own right, but also
embody a unique insight into the philosophical interest in history and myth itself.
The first problems emerge when dealing with myth. What precisely is myth? Although this
thesis will largely ground its conception of myth in Hans Blumenberg’s work, it also relies on a
myriad of other theories that are potentially irreconcilable. While such irreconcilability must be
taken into account, and negotiated with, it is critical for the wider project of this thesis that myth
remains a ‘contested site’. The tension within these differing theories of myth – the very fact of
them remaining problematic – is a source of orientation. With such a perspective, the common
Enlightenment narrative of the movement from mythos to logos appears overly rigid and misleading
and indeed, as Blumenberg suggests, as part of a broader absolute metaphor that is in itself mythic.1
If the idea of myth as absolute metaphor illuminates certain ideas (like the transition from mythos to
logos) as merely the current insights in a much longer history of an ever retuning dilemma, then a
reception history of this ‘contested site’ promises to deliver a certain philosophical charge.
The second problem is the difference between history and historiography. Although
1 See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985).
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Collingwood’s work has been read a great deal within the context of historiographical methodology,
it will not be the focus here. Rather, it will be on his philosophy of history that, although from
which a historiography could no doubt be drawn, teases out implications for an understanding of
both myth and philosophy itself. From the broader observation that Collingwood, in some sense,
took history seriously, comes the more specific observation that he also saw the historical
legitimacy and importance of myth as constitutive of historical work. Such a recognition was
conducive to the recognition of the strangeness of myth, but also to the unresolved tensions between
history and myth that mark the history of their reception. That is to say, the philosophy of history is
clarified, perhaps through it becoming more obscure, through the attempt to understand myth’s
relation to history.
Collingwood’s philosophy, like many philosophers who wrote during the violence and
fragmentation of the interwar years, is difficult to articulate within a defined, coherent whole, and as
such is susceptible to caricature. While on the one hand this thesis aims at some form of
‘rehabilitation’ of Collingwood’s work, it is done in the hope that the impossibility of such a task
becomes clear. Like many thinkers of ‘modernity’ (which I believe Collingwood emerges as) he
sees the deeper ambiguities at the heart of philosophical reflection as a critical part of the activity.
Collingwood’s project, then, emerges in ways that are similar to that of Walter Benjamin, as
described by Jürgen Habermas:
Benjamin belongs to those authors on whom it is not possible to gain a purchase, whose
work is destined for disparate effective histories; we encounter these authors only in the
sudden flash of ‘relevance’ with which a thought achieves dominance for brief seconds of
history.2
These moments of relevance emerge, I suspect, in confrontation with thinkers who have similarly
struggled with the philosophical problems of history and myth. As such the triangulation of
Collingwood’s thought via the work of others offers a site of work in which to articulate the
irreconcilability of myth’s fragmentary relation to history as constituting an important philosophical
project in and of itself.
The relationship between history and myth has its own history, one from which these
confrontations are derived. Such a history is marked (for better or worse) by points of seemingly no
2 Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness – Raising or Rescuing Critique,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and
Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 92.
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return. The life of Socrates locates an important division in ancient thought. By the same token the
modern understanding and reception of history and myth is marked by the Enlightenment.3 Any
insight gleaned from the following confrontations must be coherent in terms of, and under, what
Walter Benjamin called the “constellation of the Enlightenment”.4 In this thesis, I will treat the
historical actuality of the Enlightenment, in spite of its many failures, as a locus of possibility. The
difficulty in articulating the essence of the historical Enlightenment – its failure, its incompletion –
cannot even begin to be addressed by this thesis. If indeed, as has been claimed time and time again,
that the project of enlightenment is unfinished, what would it mean to contribute to such an
unfinished tradition?5 Insofar as this project, as much as any other, belongs to a history of the
wrestling with the problem of history and myth, what small answers it might provide are
inextricably tied to a concept of human life that emerged after the Enlightenment. I do not refer to
the caricature of enlightenment as the banishment of superstition (although that was certainly a
genuine hope of the eighteenth century for material, historically immanent reasons) but, rather, the
attempt to answer anew the problem of human autonomy and responsibility. In spite of the obvious
victories of rationalism, the past centuries show the continual presence, and in some cases
resurgence of, mythic forces. The modern notion of historical progress, via the naturalisation of
chronological time, inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the most important example of
the Enlightenment’s falling back into mythic forms of thought in the name of their destruction.
Benjamin’s correlation of myth with fate shows the extent to which the modern historical life is still
inundated in mythic forms. The passage from mythos to logos, from barbarism to enlightenment,
from superstition to reason, is the modality of historical time under which the West emerged, and
largely continues to exist. It is precisely this phenomenon that marks the enlightenment project as
unfinished. If it embodies any beginning at all, it lies in the Kantian idea that, once the question of
enlightenment (that is, human freedom) has been posed, regardless of subsequent descents back into
barbarism, it cannot be forgotten. That is, the question of human autonomy, exists as a necessary
possibility.
As Louis Dupré points out in “Kant's Theory of History and Progress”, Kant insists that the
success of the Enlightenment relegates the question as to “whether the human race (is) universally
progressing as lying beyond responsible conjecture.”6 However, towards the end of his essay An
Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Kant writes : “Men will of their own accord 3 When capitalised, ‘Enlightenment’ refers to the historical event, and the philosophical project that emerged from that
historical legacy. When a lower case is used, I am referring to the philosophical ideal, or locus of possibility. 4 Walter Benjamin, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” in Selected Writings: Volume One, 1913-1926, ed.
Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 101. 5 Immnauel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'', in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 59. 6 Louis Dupré, "Kant's Theory of History and Progress," The Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 4 (1998): 819.
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gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately
adopted to keep them in it.”7 The problem of the re-visitation of barbaric violence — that is
violence grounded in humanity’s natural beginnings — within the Enlightenment's perception of
historical time is clearly one that exists in the background of Kant’s thought. His insistence that the
history of humanity must, by necessity, be a narrative of progress, what Dupré calls “the emergence
of the human race from an animal state to one of genuine humanity,” is dogged by the idea that
these modalities of thinking about historical time might be harmful in and of themselves in
achieving that end. Kant’s refusal to posit a more explicit philosophy of history, is testament both to
his awareness of the danger of falling back into religious categories of thought, and his commitment
to the Enlightenment project, as a unique moment (historically) of insight into the incompletion of
the potentialities for human life. Kant, perhaps more than any other, understood that the tragedy of
historical time lay in the inability to extricate human experience entirely from it. The underlying
basis of this thesis, then, is coherent only via a particular interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of
enlightenment, and the implicit philosophy of history within. Namely that the notion of historical
progress, and hope for the victory of reason, that emerged following the Enlightenment, was in fact
representative of the failure to acknowledge these forms of dogma as revisitations of the particular
modalities of thinking that the Enlightenment had hoped to outrun. That man can probably never
entirely outrun these forms of thought is fundamental to Kant’s notion of human finitude and
critical to his understanding of enlightenment. Adorno alludes to the immense difficulty in stepping
out of the prism of progress, as equivalent to the courage required of the shaman in stepping out of
the magic circle. The magic circle, which makes the inhospitable and alien forces of nature
manageable to early man, nevertheless binds us to a location that the gods demand. To step out of
its divine power, is not only to leave behind the comforts of divine rule, but also to challenge fate,
and thus points to a form of human life that (albeit briefly) offers different shapes and modes of
existence. The question of progress, then, relies on the complete abandonment (that is, its occurring,
or not) of any notions of progress. This understanding is entirely Kantian.8
The intellectual basis of this thesis, thus, relies on particular, precise uses of terminology that
might otherwise be construed (rightly) as ambiguous. Although their meaning will clarify as they
7 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'', 59. 8 Adorno makes the claim that genuine progress means “to step put of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress
that is itself nature…”. This is, of course, the claim that the notion of progress in history has a mythic quality. However it is also, more fundamentally, the claim that any notion of progress (occurring or not) is a manifestation of that mythic quality in history. That is, a negative instance of progress constitutes the same logic of fate as its binary opposite. Progress qua progress can only occur when its machinations in time have ceased to be meaningful. With thanks to A. Benjamin for a fruitful Skype discussion on this point. See Adorno’s essay “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 150.
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emerge, nonetheless a brief explanation as to the nature of how they will be utilised in this project is
necessary. The understanding of ‘myth’ in this thesis is multi-faceted. Although my understanding
of the relation between mythos and logos (and indeed the problems associated with that very divide)
is informed by Blumenberg, I also rely on Walter Benjamin’s correlation of myth with fate. These
two theories do not seem immediately compatible. Blumenberg understands myth (broadly
anthropological, but also aesthetic in nature) as a reflection of humanity’s struggling with the
overwhelming nature of reality. Confronted with the terrible ambivalence of the world, early
human life created the basic metaphors from which later forms of reflection sprang. On the other
hand, Benjamin’s understanding of myth as synonymous with fate was the basis for his seeing myth
as embodying forces or authorities other than humanity’s own that prevent certain possibilities of
human life. This understanding of myth is critical to the subsequent notion of mythic forces (that is
forces of necessity, rather than contingency) that exist in history. This theoretical understanding of
myth is complimented by the work of Blumenberg (indeed a subsidiary outcome of this thesis is the
hope of a humble reconciliation between the two thinkers from certain perspectives). Benjamin’s
theory of myth, while wary of the dangers of mythic forces in history, is also aware, like
Blumenberg, of the necessity of myth in the emergence of critical human institutions (like the law)
in removing human life from the purely animal realm. The presence of fate, to use Benjamin’s
terms, despite it representing a terrible force in modernity, was also an important point in early
human life. Similarly, despite Blumenberg being more conservative in the question of the ‘end of
myth’, he does not rule out its possibility. However, a history marked by myth’s presence, he
claims, must come to confront that presence, before the question of enlightenment can truly be
posed.9 Such a reading suggests that, despite modern Enlightenment hopes of another account of
human life, free of myth, the fateful necessity of myth, as it emerged in pre-historic humanity,
marks the earliest form of aesthetic reflection of the attempt to distance itself from the terrible
ambivalence of reality. Myth, then, while representing terrible remnants from pre-historical life,
also represents an important and necessary form of human self reflection; thereby complicating the
traditional idea of reason’s defeat of myth.
‘Myth’, or mûthos, represents in this thesis a complex and necessarily ambivalent idea: on the
one hand, an anthropological concept encapsulating the aesthetic reflections of earliest, primeval
humanity, and on the other, a fateful presence in history that both allowed for the conditions of
human life’s extrication from nature, and continually prevents it from uncovering other possibilities.
When referring to logos I am referring to the explanatory speech act, which would come to define
the Greek philosophical project in particular and its association with theoria. The distinction
9 Blumenberg, “To Bring Myth to An End”, Work on Myth, 263.
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between mûthos and logos is not suggestive of the traditional progress of human rationality, but an
insight into differing modalities of human self reflection, each possessing qualities of the other, that
mark the dialectical nature of thinking. Thus while this thesis does not present mûthos and logos as
mutually distinct, neither does it suggest they are simply different forms of distancing from the
terrible ambivalence of the world, what Blumenberg calls the ‘Absolutism of Reality’.10 They are
distinct forms of self-reflection. What that distinction entails is certainly beyond the scope of this
thesis, and perhaps gets to the heart of the problem it wrestles with.
This partly anthropological understanding informs the basis of what I refer to as a
‘philosophical anthropology.’ Jerome Carroll is right to suggest that the term is problematic, insofar
as it does not designate any particular tradition, but a myriad of different ones.11 The philosophical
anthropology under which this thesis works, although historically related to Vico’s understanding,
follows Blumenberg’s notion that human life’s continual struggle with, and distancing from, an
anxiety brought about by the ambivalence of the immanence of reality, is not an essence of human
life, but merely a constant presence – a result of external forces.12 It is not so much a question, as
Carroll clarifies, of what man ‘is’, but what he ‘does’, “in response to the problem of existence.”13
The term does not, then, refer to an unchanging mode of understanding human life in spite of
history’s movement and ruptures but, rather, the philosophical potentialities that emerge in the
recognition that human self-refection is made possible, and is still marked by, older, more
ambiguous mythic (and metaphorical) forms of thought.
Finally, when referring to ‘the present’ I refer, on the one hand, to the banality of the
Benjaminian (and, less explicitly, Collingwoodian) notion of now-time that exists within the
naturalisation of progress in history. This is a time of living in which the other possibilities of
human life and self-reflection are crushed by the eschatological, fateful weight of history. On the
other, as will become particularly clear in the final chapter, this notion of the present, as the only
possible location in which philosophy can be undertaken, offers up untold possibilities, to those
who would seek to reconstruct the lost relics of the past. As such, the term ‘the time of writing’,
refers to the interruptive potential of the actual act of doing philosophy, and how it might
interrogate and disrupt the forms of mythic authority that still linger in the present.14
10 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 3. 11 Jerome Carroll, “‘Indirect’ or ‘Engaged’: A Comparison of Hans Blumenberg’s and Charles Taylor’s Debt and
Contribution to Philosophical Anthropology,” History of European Ideas 39: 6 (2013): 860. 12 See Blumenberg, Work on Myth. 13 Carroll, “‘Indirect’ or ‘Engaged,’” 873. 14 This notion, which informs an important part of this thesis, is inspired by Andrew Benjamin’s work on ‘the time of
writing’ as philosophically important. See Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (Oxon: Routledge, 1997), 26-27.
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The outcomes of this thesis are, thus, distinct but interrelated. This arises out of the thesis
itself being, firstly, a general confrontation with ideas surrounding myth, history and philosophy via
the exploration of different thinkers within the history of western thought and, secondly, a sustained
critique of the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood informed by his confrontation with Herodotus,
Vico and Kracauer. The triangulation of Collingwood’s philosophy via the thought of these three
thinkers, framed by certain notions of myth and its relation to reason, in turn has implications for
conceptions of history and temporality. The outcomes will thus be twofold: the emergence of a
viable and new understanding of Collingwood, which nonetheless avoids a rehabilitation, and an
engagement with a philosophically oriented reception history of the ambiguous relationship
between history and myth. Despite maintaining an essential peculiarity to Collingwood’s thought,
this thesis does present, however, an alternative reading of Collingwood, against the most common
reading of him; as articulated for example in David Boucher’s introduction to Collingwood’s New
Leviathan, in which he conflates the Collingwoodian notion that philosophy was a ‘historical
science’, with the Crocean idealism that claims, “philosophy…had been ‘liquidated’ and absorbed
by history.”15 On the contrary this thesis attempts to illuminate Collingwood’s radical (although
perhaps unfinished) ‘interruptive’ notions surrounding the role of philosophy. The illumination of
Collingwood’s distinctly modern ideas surrounding the relation between philosophy, myth and
history, does away with the common narrative of him being an intellectual outcast, who clung on to
peculiar modalities of Italian and British idealism; and instead locates him as simply one of many
philosophers of the early twentieth century who sought out a philosophical articulation of the crisis
of modernity, as the Fascist shadow crept over Europe.
Both outcomes (the reception history, and triangulation of Collingwood’s philosophy) arise
out of the engagement and confrontation with the other. Ambivalence will remain, however. As will
emerge by the end, the lack of concrete ‘methodology’, in favour of a more discrete meandering
through both the reception history and philosophical triangulation of Collingwood (an idea
modelled on Kracauer’s notion of ‘Orphean history’ – discussed at length in Chapter Three) is the
means by which genuine insights may be stumbled upon. An account of myth, in being in some
sense, if not opposite to, then distinct from, instrumental reason, resists methodology. The Oprhean
model therefore, while rejecting outright methodology in its reflective excavation, also presents a
powerful account of the legitimacy of ambivalence as conducive to the fostering of philosophical
reflection.
15 Robin George Collingwood, The New Leviathan (New York: Clarendon Press, 1992), xxii.
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The thesis begins with Herodotus. Collingwood does not deal with Herodotus in detail, other
than within the context of a brief discussion of Greek historiography and its limitations in The Idea
of History.16 Despite this, the poetic resonances of a confrontation between the two will be fruitful
within the context of a wider exploration of the complex relationship between history and myth. In
this chapter, I will challenge the commonly held view that, while Herodotus embodies some form of
figurehead for the beginning of historiography, Thucydides represents the beginning of ‘legitimate’
history. On the contrary, Herodotus’ traditional legacy as a weaver of untrue stories is challenged
when understood within the older context in which he was writing; namely the Homeric, and pre-
Homeric Greek historical legacies. Herodotus’ anxieties concerning the survival of the oral
traditions on which the civil institutions of his people were based, and the means by which he hoped
to save them, show the extent to which he was both engaged in both the oldest and newest Greek
traditions. The similar origins of both history (that is a concept of human life’s relation to the
passage of time), and tragedy, (a growing awareness of the role of human life before fate) will show
the extent to which historiography as it emerged with Herodotus, deals fundamentally with the
workings of fate, and its overcoming; through a distancing from it. The notion of distance, in
relation to the emergence of the Greek concept of theory, will occupy a strong undercurrent within
this chapter and wider thesis. The nature of Herodotus’ engagement with mûthos, contrary to what
Aristotle claimed, marks him as a thinker of logos, insofar as history (like tragedy) engages with
myth in a radically new way, as a basis for new forms of self-reflection. Thus, I will argue that,
although Aristotle leaves room for philosophical reflection on poetry, his dismissal of history in the
Poetics ignores the cathartic potential in the recitation of history. The brief overcoming of fate
through the recognition of its constant presence in human life is the commonality between history
and tragedy. This marks tragedy and history as moved by necessity, rather than contingency. The
overcoming of that necessity (however briefly) marks the philosophical interest in both.
What, though, is the advantage of a critique of Herodotus through Collingwood? An interest
in Herodotus, indeed the salvation of his legacy, to the extent to which it can be ‘useful’, must
always be understood in regards to modernity’s unique historical situation. Implicit within the work
of both Herodotus and Collingwood is the understanding of the necessity of ‘historical life’ as being
critical to political, and thus civil life. The respective crises of Herodotus and Collingwood’s day
obviously bear no relation to each other. And yet, their respective understandings of the critical
need for the collective (that is, society’s) engagement with the past as forming the basis for a
illuminative understanding of what it meant to be a human being warrants a discussion.
Collingwood, who watched Europe lurch toward war twice in his lifetime as if according to fate,
16 Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 17-31.
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with all the historical actors unable to extricate themselves from the necessity of the forces they
struggled with, saw a particular notion of historical, and thus human life, as key to breaking these
modern forces of fate. Within both thinkers, history emerges as a uniquely human phenomenon that,
should it be forgotten or ignored, threatened to dissolve the peculiar forms of life that defined
‘human’ life.
The second chapter deals with Giambattista Vico. While the influence of Italian, particularly
Neapolitan philosophy on Collingwood’s thought is well documented, it is usually in the context of
his contemporary Benedetto Croce. While the influence of Croce is undeniable, particularly in
Collingwood’s Principles of Art, the second chapter will demonstrate, through a critique of the two
thinkers’ (that is Vico and Collingwood’s) approach to myth and history (and the subsequent effect
of that relationship onto philosophy) that the essence of Collingwood’s work has its grounding in a
Vichean form of materialist historicsm, through which a similar philosophical anthropology
emerges (one that recognises human life as essentially frail, struggling against the ambivalence of
nature).17 Vico is said to have been before his time. Insofar as this can be true, and allowing for the
potential for genuine insights in such phrases, Vico’s unique understanding of the historical
importance of myth cannot be overstated. For Vico, the ancient Greek understanding of myth being
an insight into long lost events of the past is the reason for the historical legitimacy of myth, indeed
of its unique insights into times, in which other material relics have been lost. The recognition of
the myths as legitimate historical relics, beyond the historical positivist concern of whether mythical
events ‘actually occurred’, allows for a study of ‘resonance’; wherein the myths that resonated (and
thus survived) in the personal lives of past generations become illuminating historical sources.
For Vico, however, this was not merely a historical insight, but a critical philosophical once.
As Isaiah Berlin writes, the notion of the importance of the reconstructive imagination in the
historical practise, (what Vico himself called fantasia), was distinct from a priori or a posteriori
categories of knowledge.18 This third category can be understood as the searching for an alternative
grounding to the humanist discipline, that Vico feared (in the aftermath of the Cartesian revolution)
had come to see mathematics as the grounds upon which philosophy should progress. This is Vico’s
particular attempt to grasp what will be referred to as the ‘materiality’ of history (as distinguished
from histories that rely on an idealist or empiricist philosophy) that, through an imaginative
engagement with the monuments of past civil institutions, seeks to come to terms with the
17 It should be noted that any reference to the word ‘historicism’ is meant in its true sense, wherein historical events are
largely contextualised within the historical period in which they occurred; rather than the notion of universal history that Karl Popper equated it with.
18 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), xix.
16
ambiguities of past human life. I will argue that this Vichean notion of ‘materiality’ informs the
basis of Collingwood’s philosophical hopes. That is, Collingwood’s position informed by the
Herodotean notion of historical life as being critical to human life, is complimented by Vico’s idea
that this past, this history, still maintains a material presence in the present. This is as much a
philosophical insight as a historical one, as it informs Vico’s philosophical anthropology that views
human life as fragile and regressive. However, Vico also differentiates, importantly as Karl Löwith
argues, between fate and divine providence in its relation to history.19 While this notion of
providence works entirely under the logic of Christian eschatology, it contains for the first time a
logic of human agency as being critical to an unfolding of history. Despite the regressive, barbaric
tendencies of humanity, a divinely ordained historical agency, imbues human life with a potentiality
that is quite its own. This historical autonomy is made possible only through the philosophically
oriented reception of that very history, wherein the regressive dangers of human life form the basis
for the hope of something better. Collingwood saw the re-emergence of regressive barbarism in his
own time, and as such his philosophy of history is best understood as the attempt to rally the
humanist potentialities that might prevent them.
With Siegfried Kracauer, and the third chapter, I come to one of Collingwood’s
contemporaries. Vico’s understanding, historically speaking, of the importance of myth, allowed for
the extent to which modern thinkers, in particular the critics of modernity of the first half of the
twentieth century, could illuminate the mythic shapes of our own present, due in no unsubstantial
part to the Enlightenment’s failure to understand the function and role of myth and magic in human
life. Kracauer invokes the journey of Orpheus into the underworld, for the sake of rescue, as the
fundamental metaphor for the historian’s task. A rescue of the past, for the sake of the present (the
ambiguous relationship of which Kracauer fails to entirely reconcile), that labours under the unseen
weight of myth, due to the supposed success of the secular rejection of past superstitions, is the
locus of hope for the philosopher-historian. For Kracauer this is a philosophical hope, insofar as the
rescuing of ‘lost’ histories, or the uncovering of a past that did not function within the mythic
projection and synonymity of human progress and chronological time, is entirely for the sake of the
fostering of a particular idea of ‘humanity’. A concern for the ‘vocation’ of human beings in the
present, and thus the future, marks Kracauer’s criticisms of Collingwood’s work in his
posthumously published History: The Last Thing Before the Last, as both a gross misunderstanding,
but also the grounds upon which a study of both the intellectual and poetic similarities of these two
men’s work, and hopes becomes possible. This final confrontation, not only situates Collingwood
along with some of his German contemporaries, as a critic of modernity, whose philosophy has an
19 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), 124.
17
anthropological basis (in which myth and magic is a continual presence in the warding off of
anxieties), but also illuminates our current insight (as moderns) into the relationship between history
and myth. Such an insight allows, I argue, for the brief cessation of what Habermas considered the
long history of the violent breakdown of human dialogue, so that the question of human life, can at
least be asked in a new light.20
The conclusion will seek to sketch out a position, in light of these three confrontations.
Collingwood is not, it must be said, a prominent name in contemporary philosophy. This thesis is
not an attempt to convince of Collingwood’s unique insight, or philosophical might. However, in
regards to the history of the relationship between myth and history, and that relationship’s relation
to philosophy, Collingwood was, and remains, an interesting voice. The insights of thinkers like
Collingwood, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Blumenberg in the latter half of the twentieth
century are the grounds upon which it becomes possible to investigate how humanity’s grappling
with history and myth informs our philosophical traditions. Such an insight into the history of
philosophy’s relationship to history and myth locates philosophy, and the present in which it is
undertaken, as a locus of hope.
20 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972), 315.
18
Chapter One:
Herodotus and the Reception of History: The Contemplative
Gaze. The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less
frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale
properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around
when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something
that seems inalienable to us, the securest among out possessions,
were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.21
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’.
When discussing Herodotus, to speak of beginnings is, perhaps, the first in a long line of
errors. And yet history has a beginning. Traditionally our, that is the West's, beginning is marked by
the emergence of writing. Homer, regardless of whether he was one or many people, casts a shadow
over a body of writing that connects his time to today. To speak of Homer as the beginning,
however, is to beg the question: of what? That the act of writing down, of finalisation, of the vast
array of oral traditions scattered throughout the Mediterranean, marks a beginning goes without
saying. And yet, as Hans Blumenberg writes, any beginning also marks the end of something else.
The finalisation of an ancient inheritance, the history of which is almost entirely lost to us, marks
Homer as occupying a place at the end, rather than the start. “I imagine (Homer)”, Blumenberg
writes,
...as a person who was full of anxiety about the continuance of the world in which he lived,
and who perceived himself as the preserver of what was best in it from destruction. Even if
that should be an exaggeration, in any case it illustrates the way our temporal perspective is
corrected by the realisation that what is earliest for us was already, in its immanent history,
something late.22
With such a perspective, Herodotus marks both a beginning and an end. Working some four
hundred years after Homer (by his own estimation23) Herodotus’ historical narratives, which were
intended to be delivered by means of oral recitation, represent an engagement with both ancient and
new modes of discourse. The extent to which Herodotus’ work marks a beginning – if not the
21 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings: Volume Three, 1935-1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
(Massachusetts: Harvard University press, 2005), 143. 22 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985),152. 23 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (London: Penguin Books, 1954), Book 2, 53.
19
beginning of history, then the beginning of historiography – must also allow for his representing,
much like Homer, a certain finality, or finalisation, of an older legacy. History as it is implicitly
understood emerges, both in its beginning with Homer and its reception with Herodotus, as a
grappling with that legacy.
Beginnings are perhaps, then, in some sense inescapable. Insofar as this is true, in what way
can Herodotus be said to embody the start of something? The Italian historiographer Arnaldo
Momigliano writes with puzzlement of Collingwood’s opinion of the ‘Greek mind’ as anti-
historical, a position Collingwood puts forward at the beginning of his The Idea of History.24 And
indeed Collingwood does make a strange, perfunctory remark regarding the absence of a historical
imagination in Greek antiquity. However, later passages regarding the specific work of Herodotus,
coupled with later, posthumously published essays, show the extent to which Momigliano is not
entirely fair in his criticisms of Collingwood. Rather, as I will argue, Collingwood is keenly aware
that a certain idea of human life central to history has its beginnings with Herodotus. The project of
this chapter aims to locate Herodotus, via a confrontation with R. G. Collingwood, within the
history of a grappling with history’s ambivalent relation to myth. The sudden scholarly interest in
Herodotus toward the end of the nineteenth century, following two millennia of Aristotelian
dismissal — where Herodotus wandered the pages of history as a mythmaker and liar — while
reflective of genuine historical insights into ancient Greek historical practises, is better understood
as entirely indicative of the hopes of a modern philosophically oriented historiography.25 The
twentieth century’s serious interest in Herodotus’ project locates his work as a locus of hope, both
poetic and material, for modernity’s understanding of history and thus, by definition, an
understanding of itself. Collingwood, who saw in the historical constellation of the twentieth
century a coming catastrophe (along with other intellectuals and critics of modernity), saw in
Herodotus’ struggling with the forces of fate, a struggle that he (and they too) tried to overcome,
albeit differently. Within ancient Greek thought, the commonality between the almost synonymous
historical materialisation of the Herodotean concept of history, and tragedy, is a grappling with the
fatalistic authority of myth. The great insight of the critics of modernity was the extent to which
their own forms of life were still consumed by mythic authorities as well. Although it is wrong,
both intellectually and poetically, to see in Herodotus a modern project (for indeed how could that
be so?), it remains the case that Herodotus’ concerns maintain a claim on the concerns of
modernity. Indeed, Aristotle's famous distancing from Herodotus’ work (and the subsequent legacy 24 See the beginning of Momigliano’s, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” in The Classical Foundations
of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29. See also, Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946.
25 The dialectical nature of Herodotus’ reception throughout history is covered in detail by Momigliano. See Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition.”
20
of Herodotean alienation, from which Herodotus has recovered only in the past few generations)
will come to embody the mistake which Herodotus’ larger project was an attempt to subvert. The
project of this chapter is then, firstly, to uncover the historicity of Herodotus’ own historical hopes
and, secondly, to show the extent to which Collingwood’s recognition in Herodotus’ project of a
contemplative reception of the past as being the key to historical (and thus human) life, opens up a
space in which Herodotus’ thought might still lay a claim on the present. If Collingwood was not
conscious of his debt to Herodotus, it remains the case that his work retains a Herodotean character.
That is, Collingwood’s dismissal of Greek myth in the first pages of The Idea of History sits at odds
with what is clearly a far more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of older, differing forms of
logos, as shown in his other work. In that sense alone he shows himself to be working in an
intellectual tradition begun by Herodotus that sees history embodying a reflective, contemplative
gaze upon all facets of past human life, as a way of forging potentially unknown forms of human
understanding. The insight of history, in itself an illumination of the historicity of humanity’s
grappling with fate, not only underscores the historical relation between history and myth; but
locates the relationship in the locus of the philosophical.
The collective understanding and reception of Herodotus is still, to this day, delineated and
informed to a large degree by Aristotle. The historical legacy of the division between mythos and
logos is a result of Aristotle’s attempt to differentiate his work from that of his predecessors. Norma
Thompson argues that Aristotle’s conception of his project and its enemies is made coherent, at
times, through an opposition to Herodotus, largely only alluded to.26 Theoria, being the highest
form of intellectual activity, must, by definition according to Aristotle, deliver “more pleasure than
all our knowledge of the world in which we live.”27 It is not always clear that Aristotle has
Herodotus in mind as his adversary. However, the reader can see in the former’s desire for universal
and rigorous theory, an opponent in Herodotus, in whom he sees a threatening openness to the
contingencies of what Aristotle considers pre-theoria facets of human life. Aristotle’s hostility does
not derive directly from Herodotus’ mythological project, however. In the Poetics, Aristotle writes
at length, and admiringly, about both tragedy and epic poetry. “Poetry”, he writes, “…is something
more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of
universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”28 It could well be argued, then, that Aristotle’s
opposition with Herodotus’ work does not lie in its mythical quality, but in its historical quality,
that sought to render coherent what he considered its contingent ambiguities of human life, rather 26 Norma Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996),
8. 27 Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), “Parts of Animals,” 644b. 32-35. All
references to Aristotle henceforth come from this edition. 28 Aristotle, “Poetics”, 1464a, 5-10.
21
than its universal properties. And yet an unresolved tension lies in the Poetics. Tragedy, when
properly done, writes Aristotle, concerns “…incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to
accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”29 For Aristotle, it is the quality of necessity in tragedy
that is instructive, whereas the contingency of historical events cannot illuminate universal,
philosophical ideas. While Aristotle clearly understands the philosophical interest of tragedy, as
well as the forms of truth that might emerge from it, he is not able to see the cathartic potential of
history that emerges from recognising its fateful, tragic quality. Herodotus saw fate’s hand not just
on the tragic stage, but in the historical material realties of Greek life. His hope for history and its
oral recitation, I will argue, lay in the similarity of the cathartic potential of history and tragedy.
Aristotle’s opposition to Herodotus rests, thus, on two, entwined but unresolved tensions:
Herodotus’ work not constituting theoria (which despite Aristotle’s admiration for poetry still
occupies the noblest pursuit), and Aristotle’s own unresolved understanding of history’s poetic (and
thus philosophical) potential.30
Thompson begins her book Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community with the
claim that the legacy of Plato, and especially Aristotle, cannot be properly understood without the
recognition that “...they stood on our side of what has become the greatest divide in intellectual
history: the pre-Socratics, and those who came after them.”31 Within this history, Herodotus must
be understood as on the opposing side of what Thompson calls “the Aristotelian moment in which
‘The Philosopher’ orients his thought against pre-Socratic thinking.”32 The modern idea of myth,
conceptualised as that which is contrary to truth, did not take solid shape in ancient Greece, at least
until the time of Aristotle, where mûthos began to assume negative connotations, as that which was
non rigorous and contrary to theoria. Kathryn Morgan articulates it succinctly when she writes:
“The distinction between mûthos and logos is a function of the rise of philosophical self-
consciousness.”33 Thus the criticisms levelled at Herodotus (that is, post Aristotle) were not,
historically speaking, coherent in his own time.34 Mûthos, as it emerges in Homeric Greece,
designates a form of what Morgan calls a “...semantically restricted term for an authoritative
29 Aristotle, “Poetics”, 1450a, 25-30. 30 The full implications of Aristotle’s attack on Herodotus — in particular the relation between the particular and the universal — requires a much fuller investigation not allowed for by space considerations. Nevertheless a point of departure exists in Elliot Bartky, “Aristotle and the Politics of Herodotus’s ‘History,’” The Review of Politics Vol. 64, No. 3 (Summer, 2002). 31 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 7. 32 Ibid. 33 Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 23. 34 The extent to which these criticisms of Aristotle are entirely fair, or indeed simply caricatures in themselves, is of
course worthy of attention. In essence this chapter, however, intends only to show the similarities of the projects of Herodotus, and the post-Socratic philosophical tradition that would emerge shortly after his own time.
22
speech-act”, that is the distinguished relation of epos, meaning simply ‘word’ or ‘utterance’.35 The
concept of authority is the critical point here. Logos, on the other hand, could denote something like
‘story’, ‘narrative’ or ‘explanation’.36 Morgan argues that philosophy would later attempt to
appropriate the meaning of mûthos “for its own creative intellectual project this aura of authority
and effectiveness.”37 Logos, then, took on mûthos’ traits. It is unlikely then, in the case of
Herodotus, and impossible in the case of Homer, that these early Greek thinkers had any collective
concept of mythology, as the post-Socratics understood it; its opposite had not yet been
conceptualised. Morgan concludes: “...until the rise of philosophy, there was no ‘mythology.’38
This did not mean, of course, that life prior to philosophy was devoid of rationality. If the
reception of Herodotus, even today, is based around the legacy of the ‘Aristotelian move’ — a case
of philosophy’s dogged (yet successful) attempt to rob the poets, early philosophers and historians
of their authority — it seems critical to understand Herodotus from the contingency of his own
historical position, insofar as that is possible. The Herodotus that emerges from such a critique is,
far from being the misleading orator, or the wandering bard of tradition, engaged in the same wider
project as Aristotle. If indeed the divide between mûthos and logos represents, at least in some
respect (ignoring the largely ‘mythologised’ transition from the former to the latter), a genuine
problem that humanity grapples with by nature of its existence; it must be understood, following
Blumenberg’s advice, as a relatively recent insight into a much older problem. The problem is that
of fate and what it means to be free of its dictates. Although it is perhaps later than is ordinarily
understood in the conventional temporal perspective, it is perhaps earlier too in regards to this
particular problem. A temporary fix to our temporal short-sightedness shows the historical legacy of
the divide between mûthos and logos as providing an insight into humanity’s attempt to come to
terms with older crises, to which Herodotus belongs as much as Aristotle. Insofar as what
Thompson calls the ‘Aristotelian move’ embodies a mistake from which the intellectual history of
the West never fully recovered – that is, the idea that the powers of mythology had largely been
vanquished in the face of a newer, hardier form of human thinking – Herodotus’ work represents an
alternative history. The recognition of the critical importance of stories in the formation of human
dialogue and discourse, an idea that both Herodotus and Collingwood shared despite their temporal
distance, is critically related to the historical immanence of different modalities of rationality. The
point at which the insight into the critical relevance of myth in human life becomes historical (that
is, myth’s ability to illuminate legitimate historical realities is recognised, rather than mythologised
35 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 17. 36 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 20. 37 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 18. 38 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 21.
23
within a historical past) is the point at which the question of the overcoming of myth can be posed.
Herodotus’ historical position as a thinker who deals in myth rather than history proper, stems
from his accounts of Greek and barbarian (meaning simply non-Greek) stories, regardless of their
objective truth. Both Herodotus and his critics agree that a particular story’s objective status as fact
is not of particular interest to him. This is the critical differentiation between the historiography of
Herodotus and Thucydides. As opposed to what would later be considered ‘proper history’, namely
a chronological political catalogue of human action, Herodotus wishes to deliver an account of what
the respective people before his time believed to be true.39 His reputation since his own time,
marked by the criticisms of Thucydides and Aristotle (to name but two) has occupied an ambivalent
space; his authority as hístōr undermined by later thinkers, who label his work mythical.40 That is,
untrue. Herodotus is relegated to a bard who spins stories. This in and of itself is not entirely
inaccurate. Stories are critical to Herodotus’ historical epistemology and ontology. However, the
explicit rejection of Herodotus’ work as historical, is an implicit rejection of his rendition of what
constitutes history. What is history? Thucydides’ attempt to uncover the unchanging rules of human
life through his study of the Peloponnesian war constitutes a theoretical rigour that seems to exist
on the Aristotelian side of the ‘Aristotelian move’. It sits comfortably as a work of logos. Its aim
was an uncovering of the deeper unchanging truths of human nature.41 While acknowledging
Thucydides’ contribution to Greek thought, Collingwood ultimately cites his wider project as
mistaken in its attempt to reduce the actions of the past to a set of laws by which human life could
be understood.42
Herodotus’ account of human life, the idea of which I will return to in detail, does not,
according to his critics, seek out an unchanging essence of human life from which a logos might
emerge — that is an authoritative, explanatory, narrative.43 The extent to which this is mistaken and
misleading, however, is illuminated by Blumenberg’s reminder that the West’s beginnings are by 39 See, for example, his recounting of the story of Thales diverting the water of a river in such a way that Croesus and
his army could cross, despite Herodotus himself professing the belief that a bridge already existed. Regardless of whether Thales was involved in the river crossing, that it remains “a common Greek story” speaks a great deal as to the nature of the Greek sentiments regarding Croesus’ campaign. See Herodotus, The Histories. Book One, 75.
40 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin, 1954), see Chapter One, 13. The Greek etymology of hístōr means ‘enquiry’ or ‘investigation’, but also maintains connotations with ‘wise man’ or ‘judge,’ which is as old as Homer and Hesiod. See John Gould, Herodotus (London, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1989), 9.
41 It is worth noting that Momigliano agrees with Collingwood on this point. He claims that the major differentiation between Herodotus and Thucydides is the latter’s interest purely on a political history, which was largely concerned with the present, and would venture into the past only as far as firm sources would allow. At its heart, Momigliano argues, Thucydides’ notion of history postulated the permanency of human nature. See “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” 41-44.
42 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 30. 43 See Herodotus, The Histories, Book Four, 195: “…again, I merely record the current story, without guaranteeing it.”
Aristotle sees in the free running prose, a lack of control: “This style is unsatisfactory just because it goes on indefinitely.” ‘Rhetoric’, 1409a3if, as quoted in Thompson.
24
definition the ends of something else. Even allowing for the criticism that Herodotus only deals
with the ‘banality’ of the contingency of the everyday, it stems from a recognition of the role a
conception of fate plays in driving all human interactions. Deeper than the essentially meaningless
transition from irrationality and superstition to rationality, is the claim that even in the time before
Homer, human life was marked by the attempt to conceptualise itself, which must be understood in
some sense as an engagement with history. It is not so much life, but historical life, that Herodotus
suggests is uniquely human. Any notion of history necessitates a notion of historical time, and the
place of human life within that temporality. The context of human life, for the ancients, must be
understood through what Benjamin called “the guilt-complex of the living”, namely that of fate.44
The force of mythic authority (upon which Benjamin based a critique of the law) “…condemns not
to punishment but to guilt.”45 Of course, the twentieth-century differentiation between a history of
ideas and a history of the demons in our thought (that is, a history of the questions and anxieties that
have marked the human condition since the beginning) is not an insight that can be attributed to
Herodotus, or indeed any of the ancients.46 However, the understanding of guilt as the uniquely
human relation to divine authority is the historical context in which both the Greek historians (and
tragedians) are working. Human life (an existence formed by confrontations with demons; that is,
authorities other than our own, that prevent us living autonomous, free lives) is marked by a
wrestling with fate. History, in its attempt to recount and celebrate human life, represents one of the
first conscious attempts to subvert guilt, and thus, fate.47 It is precisely this idea that Thompson has
in mind when she writes: “History is all we have. To try and make sense of history is to attempt an
explanation of the human situation itself.”48 If Thompson is right that Herodotean history represents
at least some conscious reception of the human situation, it must allow for the insights of
Horkheimer and Adorno, who in their insistence that any work of mûthos must by necessity be a
work of logos, acknowledge that all forms of myth represent some form of formalisation and
44 Walter Benjamin, "Fate and Character," in Selected Writings: Volume One, 1913-1926, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol.
1 (Massachusetts: Harvard University press, 2005), 204 45 Ibid. 46 Blumenberg and Cassirer deal with this explicitly. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans.
Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1983). See especially the first chapters, in which Blumenberg mounts a devastating critique of the very conception of secularised eschatology as an incoherent bi-product of the wider hysteria surrounding the perceived illegitimacy of modernity. On the contrary, the modern conception of progress, argues Blumenberg, is a reoccupation (that is historically legitimate) of the Judeo-Christian space that demands to know humanity’s origins and ending which, following the success of the sciences and humanity’s in early modern times, had been made redundant. In other words the modern notion of progress was a modern answer to an ancient question it no longer had any business engaging with. See also Cassirer in Ernst Cassirer, "Language and Myth," The Warburg Years (1919-1933), trans. S. G. Lofts & A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale Universtiy Press, 2013), 130.
47 Less conscious challenges to fate, of course, are encapsulated in both the arrogance of Prometheus and Niobe. While both suffer at the hands of fate, neither are entirely destroyed by the authority of the gods. Their living, in spite of their punishment, represents a historically material example of the emerging challenge to the authorities the Greeks lived under.
48 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, ix.
25
finalisation of earlier, more primitive legacies. The obvious fact that Homer’s The Odyssey (for
example) represents the ordering of countless ancient oral traditions, scattered around the
Mediterranean, shows new forms of self-reflection, and the presence of logos in mûthos, but also
that the attempt to come to terms with fate goes back much further than Plato, or even the pre-
Socratics, or indeed even Homer.49 Any attempt at explanatory distancing from the authority of
mûthos, as Herodotus’ work was, constitutes some modality of logos. A coming to terms with fate,
however it manifested in human life (from the very earliest primeval cave paintings, to the high
point of Greek tragedy) must also be understood as the attempt to undermine, or at least live with,
its authority.50 Essentially, the aesthetic reflections of fate that myth constitutes are attempts to
locate a space in which a human life can be lived.51 History, as it emerges with Herodotus, is an
offshoot of an older legacy. In this sense, and to reiterate, Herodotus must be understood as dealing
with an idea of history, and historical time, made possible by the pre-Homeric oral traditions that he
inherited.52 The Histories were simply one moment in the history of a collective coming to terms
with fate. However, Herodotus is distinct from Homer in the manner of the reception of past
legacies. Insofar as the transition from mûthos to logos does embody a real shift (that is to the extent
that the thinkers themselves considered it to be real), Herodotus must be understood as a conscious
thinker of logos. The degree to which this is in itself misleading will be shown later.
The Tears of Remembrance
To speak of history is to speak of an implicit conception of historical time. Hannah Arendt
argues, in Between Past and Future, that history as a category emerged not with Herodotus, but in
49 Theodor W. Adorno Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum,
1944). See in particular ‘Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, 43. 50 Nietzsche, in particular, was keenly aware of the extraordinary form of terror that marked Greek pagan life, to which
Greek religion, and later tragedy, was a response. “How else could life have been borne by a race so sensitive, so impetuous in its desires, so uniquely capable of suffering, if it had not been revealed to them, haloed in a higher glory, in their gods?” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London, Penguin Books, 1993), 23.
51 The necessity of mythic authority in the emergence of human life has been shown by Benjamin in Critique of Violence; what I refer to as a ‘grappling with fate’ is not intended to suggest a conscious battling of human life against divine authorities but, rather, material legacies (what Benjamin might have called monads) in our history that showcase a developing expression of human autonomy – that is, self governance (from the Greek autónomos, to live under one’s own law. See Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Selected Writings: Volume One, 1913-1926, 236.
52 The extent to which Herodotus relied on Homer’s work as well is discussed in detail by Jonas Grethlein. Grethlein argues that Herodotus forges a new conception of historical meaning by using Homer, and the heroic past, as a point of reference and departure, so that a Homeric authority would infuse his own work. The discovering of historical meaning in “the underlying assumption of regular patterns” between the Trojan War and the Persian Wars, “was a means to overcome the arbitrariness of chance, which was perceived as a threatening force.” In this case, the terror of chance, should be interpreted as the terror of that which is outside the realm of human control – that is fate. See Jonas Grethlein, “The Manifold Uses of the Epic past: The Embassy Scene in Herodotus 7.153-63,” The American Journal of Philology 127, no. 4 (2006): 502.
26
Odysseus’ stay with the Phaeacians in book eight of The Odyssey.53 His journey nearly at an end,
during a feast, Odysseus asks the bard Demodocus to recite the story of Troy.54 “What had been
sheer occurrence”, writes Arendt, “now became history”. Odysseus, by the very virtue of his being
present to hear the rendition of his trials and those of his companions, hears “...the story of his life,
now (as) a thing outside himself, and “…object” for all to see and to hear.”55 The unique
configuration – that is, the presence of a man who had taken part in the tales themselves – renders
the events having ‘actually happened’ as proven. The reliability of a tale, which up until this point
had relied purely on the truthfulness of the bard, overseen by the authority of the Muse, suddenly
enters the human realm as immanently verifiable.56 When Odysseus subsequently identifies himself
as the man from the legend, Arendt sees the beginning of history, where human life’s relation to
historical time suddenly becomes part of immanent human consciousness. It is necessary to go one
step further, however, and see in his identification (and the subsequent request for him to recount
his tale in full) the beginning of a modality of historical time which is made coherent by the deeds
of humanity, rather than the gods. Time, and its passing, becomes entirely a concern for man.
Beyond this, however, Arendt sees the beginnings of history as evolved from poetry, a legacy it has
never entirely shaken. She writes:
The scene where Ulysses listens to the story of his own life is paradigmatic for both history
and poetry; the 'reconciliation with reality’, the catharsis, which, according to Aristotle, was
the essence of tragedy, and, according to Hegel, was the ultimate purpose of history, came
about through the tears of remembrance.”57
Poetry and history, then, have a collective origin in the attempt to subvert the authority of fate. A
further illumination of this comes from Benjamin. His argument that one of the first instances of
sublimity lies with the historical emergence of Greek tragedy, whereby humanity’s demonisation by
fate is celebrated through the aesthetic distance of the Chorus – a case of the collective celebration
of man’s lot before fate by an attentive audience – sits in agreement with his admiration for
Herodotus.58 In his essay The Storyteller, Benjamin admires Herodotus’ account of Psammetichus’
53 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 45. 54 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), Book VIII, 70. 55 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 45. 56 François Hartog, "The Invention of History: The Pre-History of a Concept from Homer to Herodotus," History and
Theory 39, no. 3 (2000): 389. 57 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 45. 58 Blumenberg agrees and claims, further, that the concept of conceptual distance as being critical for theory is
quintessentially Greek. “The mental schema of distance still rules the Greek’s concept of theory as the position and attitude of the untroubled observer. In its purest embodiment, in the attitude of the spectator of Greek tragedy, this schema paves the way for the conceptual history of ‘theory’. See Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 117. Blumenberg elaborates on this further in Shipwreck with Spectator, through a critical analysis of the shipwreck metaphor
27
attempt to discover the origins of language, noting that his entirely dry rendition, in which he offers
no explanation or interpretation of the events he writes about, allows the story to “provoke
astonishment and reflection” even thousands of years later.59 It is through Herodotus’ ‘dryness’ that
the feats of man come to enjoy an authority that was once the domain of the Muse. The celebration
of humanity before a collective fate is, as Benjamin was right to argue, a historical moment in
which man’s freedom emerged as an idea to be dealt with; a moment where “pagan man becomes
aware that he is better than his god.”60 Tragedy, although a celebration of fate, and thus necessity,
promises a potentiality for contingency in human life. History shares such a potentiality.
Arendt’s critical point, of course, is that this awareness began much earlier than is
traditionally understood. In the days before Homer, in which Odysseus presumably lived in the
countless ancient stories kept alive by means of oral recitation, there is already a concern for the
remembrance of human exploits. That countless oral traditions surely were lost to posterity in the
thousands of years before Homer emphasises the extent to which the stories that did survive, did so
by means of their resonance in ancient communities.61 The continuation of an oral tradition (that is
the collective remembrance of it) is the most radical testament to its resonance in the emotional
landscape of pre-historical human life. From this temporal perspective, Homer represents a mere
epilogue, from which everything that came after can be understood as having originated from. The
pre-Homeric myths, having been honed over countless oral generations, needed only to be finalised
in the act of writing. Insofar as any of this is true, it must be acknowledged that a concern for
human exploits, and of the nature of human life, predates the dateable. The beginning of a historical
consciousness embodies the emergence of the only thing that truly differentiates us from nature: a
history of ourselves.62 Rather than being the beginning of anything, Herodotus emerges within the
throughout the history of the western tradition. In particular the role of the spectator of the shipwreck, like the philosopher in the poetry of Lucretius’, offers up an expression of a deeper reflection of the essence of the ontology of Western theory. See Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 26.
59 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 148. 60 Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” 203. 61 This is what Blumenberg calls the ‘Darwinism of Words’. “The age of oral communication was a phase of continual
and direct feedback regarding the success of literary means” and “…the entire stock of mythical materials and models that has been handed down to us has passed through the agency of reception, has been ‘optimised’ by its mechanism of selection.” See Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 152/168. See also, Irad Malkin as quoted in Joseph Mali’s Mythistory who writes: “…the entire ethnography of the Mediterranean could be explained as originating from the Big Bang of the Trojan War and the consequent Nostos diffusion.” Mali goes on, “The nostoi myths proved so effective among all the Mediterranean nations because they were universally admired, not only for their special poetical superiority, but also, and primarily, for their historical authority: for many centuries they served as the standard measure of communication and mediation in ‘international’ affairs. They would probably not have lasted if they did not contain at least some truths that could not have been otherwise known.” See Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography (Chicago: The Universtiy of Chicago Press, 2003), 5.
62 This is why Arendt considered history an interruption of nature. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 43. This is almost certainly derived from Kant who saw in the emergence of humanity the beginning of contingency (that is that which would be otherwise) in the necessary world of Nature (that is that which cannot be otherwise). Contingency,
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older context of wrestling with authorities other than our own. Such an acknowledgement not only
corrects our tradition’s warped chronological sense, as Blumenberg argues, but also underscores the
inadequacies of an account of human life that fails to account for the dialectical modalities of
human thought in which mûthos engages with logos. Although aesthetic explorations of human
submission before fate, the myths that were collectively remembered (to the point where even
modernity is still moved by them) represented a culmination of a struggle that was much older and
arguably more urgent: namely the articulation of a space that is uniquely human, wherein the
anxieties of the primeval world’s totality could be rendered manageable.
In witnessing the recitation of his own human actions, Odysseus’ tears represent the
emergence of a particular notion of historical time which is necessarily ambiguous. Whether
Herodotus represents an occupation of a historical consciousness that opened long before his time,
or a beginning, can almost certainly never be answered. However, as Collingwood argues,
humanity’s grappling with its relation to the passing of time certainly becomes less ambiguous in
Herodotus’ project. “The events inquired into”, he writes, “are not events in a dateless past, at the
beginning of things: they are events in a dated past.”63 Herodotus hopes that the collective
recollection of past human feats will ensure they are not forgotten by posterity. Collingwood’s view
is, by revealing “man as a rational agent...Herodotus does not confine his attention to bare events;
he considers these events in a thoroughly humanistic manner as actions of human beings who has
reasons for acting as they did.”64 In his paper ‘Myth, Memory and History,’ Finley concludes that
Herodotus’ establishment of a chronology directly linked to his own time as “...perhaps the greatest
of his achievements.”65 The beginning of a chronological system that connected Herodotus to a
datable past, rather than a dateless mythic past, posits man as the central logic in the passage of
time. Historical time is a time marked by human life. Collingwood concludes that Herodotus hoped,
in reciting the past actions of great men, that there existed a means of challenging fate. He writes:
The fate that broods over human life is, from the Greek point of view, a destructive power
only because man is blind to its workings. Granted that he cannot understand these
workings, he can yet have right opinions about them, and in so far as he acquires such
in Kantian terms, is the necessary possibility of our moral character. There is a fragility because nothing is entailed necessarily. Our fragility, that is humanity’s negotiation between animality (necessity) and humanity (contingency) is a necessary contingency for our human character. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), section 45, ‘Beautiful Art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature’.
63 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 18. 64 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 19. 65 M. I. Finley, "Myth, Memory, and History," History and Theory 4, no. 3 (1965): 287.
29
opinions he becomes able to put himself in a position where the blows of fate will miss him.66
The affinity and similarity with the Aristotelian account of the nature of political life is
striking here, albeit unrecognised by Aristotle himself. For although he remarks in the Metaphysics,
“But into the subtleties of the mythologists it is not worth our while to inquire seriously”, Aristotle
himself is aware of the power of stories.67 In the first book of the Politics he recounts the anecdote
of Thales' “...financial device, which involves a principle of universal application, but is attributed
to him on account of his reputation for wisdom.” Aristotle recounts that Thales went on to make a
good deal of money through the establishment of a monopoly.68 The story is the same as Thales’
(in)famous incident with the well. Whether it actually happened is irrelevant in the face of what
Thales’ legacy, as well as the laughter of the Thracian maid, embodies for those who hear the tale
later as representative of a particular human feat. It is telling that Aristotle begins a philosophical
account of politics with an engagement with stories of the past. Collingwood’s suggestion that
Herodotus’ history attempts to illuminate the workings of fate recalls Thompson’s claim that
Herodotus’ understood the emergence of the Greek polis as a critical outcome of a concerted
attempt to make sense of the past. Aristotle’s misunderstanding of Herodotus in that sense could not
have run deeper. The ‘forgetting’ of the historical question was precisely what Herodotus feared.
Indeed The Histories were dismissed as a collection of mere tales that were not reflective of human
achievement. Such a dismissal entailed the forgetting of the conditions under which they resonated
and were believed, meaning those historical conditions ceased to be past material realities from
which dialogue (namely dialogue upon which the praxis of human concerns would be understood in
political terms) could emerge.
Collingwood’s respect for Herodotus is encapsulated in his ranking him as important as
Socrates. The continuation of Socrates’ legacy was ensured by his students’ critique of the
philosophical problem of human life. Herodotus, who had no such students, and his posing of the
historical problem was soon forgotten. And yet, Collingwood considers these two men the
intellectual figures of the fifth century.69 If there is a commonality between Collingwood and
Herodotus it exists in their respective anxieties concerning the worlds in which they lived. The
forgotten element in the historical question as posed by Herodotus was, for Collingwood, the
centrality of human life. Collingwood worried about the complicity of his present in the forgetting
66 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 24. 67 Aristotle, ‘Metaphysics’, 1000a18. 68 Aristotle, ‘Politics’,1259a7. 69 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 28.
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of the past, a lesson that Herodotus himself had tried to teach.70 This is not to claim that Herodotus
and Collingwood struggled with the same problems, but rather, to suggest that Herodotus embodied
for Collingwood the beginning of the framing of the problem of humanity’s relation to historical
time, and the modalities of thinking that constituted history. It was this central problem of history as
concerning human freedom that Collingwood himself sought to investigate in his own day, as the
spectre of fascism emerged across Europe. 71 In Collingwood’s eyes, Herodotus successfully
uncovered the critical junction between, and relation of, historical and human life. The salvation of
their respective presents could never be conceived as being comparable, and yet an anxiety
surrounding the present’s reception of the past, for the sake of the future, is at the very heart of the
historical problem; their unique worries occupy the opposing poles in the chronology of history’s
problematic relation to human life. Its beginning in Homer’s tears saw its reception in Herodotus’
delivery of The Histories. Of course, the contemplative gaze at the heart of Herodotus’ conception
of historical life (that is, the relation to the present) did not have the interruptive, transformative
guise it would take on in Collingwood and other critics of contemporary modernity (a discussion I
will return to in detail in Chapter Two, but Chapter Three in particular). Despite these later
formulations, the idea of human dialogue and solidarity having its basis in a collective
contemplation and reception of the past (of historical life being critical to human life) is entirely
Herodotean.
The Commonality of History
This conception of a collective commonality warrants some discussion. The struggle to make
sense of the past, to render it meaningful for the present, is the critical task of The Histories.
Herodotus’ repeated use of the first person plural, argues Chamberlain, beyond being a mere
inclusive grammar (a case of a more straightforward poetic performance where the singer includes
his audience) is a reflection of his establishing a critical “interpretive distance between himself as a
knower and what he knows…in order to imbue his voice with a particular kind of authority.”72
Although Chamberlain concedes the general possibility of the former, more straightforward position
of the first person plural, he suggests, instead, that “…the use of the first person plural consistently
collapses into a singular referent – the researching and narrating histor.”73 The Greek historiê, of
course, designates much more than the modern ‘history’, the former is often associated with
70 Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings: Volume Four, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W.
Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), Paragraph 11, 390. 71 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Penguin Books, 1939), chapter XII, ‘Theory and Practice’, 98. 72 David Chamberlain, "'We the Others': Interpretive Community and Plural Voice in Herodotus," Classical Antiquity
20, no. 1 (2001): 21. 73 Chamberlain, “We the Others,” 29. Regarding Histor, see footnote 16.
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Heraclitus and other sixth century Ionians who sought a methodical, critical approach to knowledge
as distinct from poetry and myth.74 Chamberlain writes that historiê “(was) the process of
interpretive research and…the publication, monumentalisation or performance of that process.”75 It
is this space in which such a monumentalisation occurs. It is almost certainly true that an
establishment of an historical voice in the wake of a much older historical consciousness remains
Herodotus’ primary legacy. And yet, Chamberlain overlooks the commonality inherent in
Herodotus’ use of ‘we’, forgetting, perhaps, the deeper meaning of the material space in which
Herodotus would have recited to his audience. The historical voice is a distinctly human one, and
thus Herodotus’ establishment of a particular voice of authority in which the past reflections of
human life could be rescued through its recitation before an attentive audience, is inherently a
plurality of community. Essentially, Herodotus’ authority is only acknowledged and legitimised by
the listeners whom he includes in his historical voice. The Greek etymological root of histor lies in
a proclamation of knowledge that differentiates itself from other, older forms. However, knowledge
in and of itself does not constitute power; a realisation that Chamberlain argues goes back to
Homer.76 He insists that it is the fact that “…one must be in the position of the knower” that
differentiates Herodotus’ use of the first person plural. The formulation of the voice is of itself an
act of authority. Despite this, Chamberlain’s concluding passage, a quote from The Histories,
amplifies the ambivalence of his position. The tears of the Persian at the banquet display the
inherent necessity of a commonality in the struggling with authoritarian voices. “Sir”, says the
Persian, during a banquet in the ninth book, “…that which a god wills to send no man can turn
aside…What I have said is known to many of us Persians, but we follow, in the bonds of necessity.
It is the most hateful thing for a person to have much knowledge and no power.”77 As will become
clear, such an authoritarian voice as the beginning of historiography, takes on a much deeper power,
and even sublimity, as a reflection and expression of a common humanity in the face of fate’s
authority; a case of man’s knowledge transforming the terrors of chance, of fate, into a celebratory
source of power and autonomy.
The Histories begin with Herodotus’ assertion that what follows is written in the hope that
“...human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some
displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show
why the two people fought with each other ” (my italics).78 He offers no further explanation, but
74 Herbert Granger, “Heraclitus' Quarrel with Polymathy and "Historiê," Transactions of the American Philological
Association (1974-) Vol. 134, No. 2 (Autumn 2004): 235. 75 Chamberlain, “We the Others,” 6. 76 Chamberlain, “We the Others,” 30. 77 Herodotus, The Histories, Book 9, 559-560. 78 Herodotus, The Histories, Book One, 1.
32
concludes Book Nine of The Histories by quoting Cyrus who asserts that “...soft countries breed
soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.”79 Aside
from brief extrapolations such as these, Herodotus offers little justification for the re-telling of the
stories of both his own people, and those who would have had them undone, beyond the wish that
such exploits should not be forgotten. The lesson, however, is contained entirely in his opening
sentence, and the moral is encapsulated by Cyrus’ warning. What, then, was the lesson Herodotus
hoped to convey to his Athenian contemporaries? Norma Thompson writes: “...Herodotus stresses
less about what we can know about human events than what we can use in our various
remembrances to think meaningfully about the human condition.”80 This is what Thompson means,
by her assertion that “history is all we have.”81 It is in light of these claims that she argues that
Herodotus, rather than being the opponent of Aristotle – a historical legacy that would see the early
historian transformed into the mythologised figure – was in fact operating under the same
assumptions as Aristotle pertaining to notions of man as a political animal.82 Thompson argues that
Herodotus, in making a point of not differentiating between stories that were verifiable and those
that were not, was making a critical historiographical point.83 The stories recounted in The
Histories, may not have factually obtained (for example Psammetichus’ hiding away of children in
order to discover the origins of language84) however, they resonated (a word for ‘believed’ which
avoids the associated clumsy positivism) with the vast majority of the society from which they
emerged. It was this resonance, in the cultural myths of the respective societies of the Greek islands
that Herodotus understood to be the basis for the foundations of culture itself. A recitation of the
systems of belief of the Greeks and their enemies was an analysis of the foundations of political,
and thus civil, life.85 Rosaria Vignolo Munson agrees, writing that although Herodotus’ work
concerns “...different cultures,” it nevertheless concerns “all men”.86 An understanding of the
foundations of civil institutions and political life was critical to Herodotus’ work. The lessons
contained within the stories of the past offered a memorial to its great tragedies and hardships.
Herodotus’ re-telling of the collection of stories that were said to have contributed to the Persian
79 Herodotus, The Histories, Book Nine, 122. 80 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 87. 81 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, ix. 82 Ibid. The political animal, of course, ceases to be marked by their original animality. This, it seems, is the distinction
between zoe, bare life, and bios, a qualified, human life. 83 Joseph Mali quotes John Gould at length, who makes a similar claim regarding Herodotus’ historiography. He writes:
“Thucydidean narrative, in the very rhythms and texture of its language, claims and enacts authority. Herodotean narrative, by the same criteria, is a very different thing: it retains the rhythms and forms of oral tradition, familiar to us in folk talks and märchen, but at the same time incorporates into the text as folk narrative never does, its own authorial commentary on the sources and truth-value of the narrative.” See Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography, 3-4.
84 Herodotus, The Histories, Book Two, 2. 85 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 167. 86 Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Massachusetts: Center
for Hellenic Studies, 2005), 8.
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Wars is based around the fostering of social memory, critical to the preservation of cultural
institutions. “(Myths) become significant” writes Joseph Mali, “precisely in moments when
common traditional meanings of life and history have become indeterminate, as in wars or
revolutions, and their social utility is to sustain the structural tradition of society by some dramatic
reactivation of its original motivations.”87 One of the critical lessons of The Histories comes at its
end, on the final page of Book Nine: “soft countries breed soft men”. This is not the moral of The
Histories so much as the recollection of a distant collective memory.88
However, that Herodotus sought to recollect the ‘lessons of the past’ for an attentive audience,
while true, is not the most important facet of his work. Rather, it is the means by which he hoped
these lessons would be learned; through vignettes of refracted memory and stories that resonated
with the emotional lives of the past. The fostering of community came about through the communal
recognition of the importance of these stories in imparting something particular about the human
condition. In this sense at least, there is a hope for the present, and by definition the future, in
Herodotus’ work. This is what Momigliano meant when he wrote that Herodotus’ critics were
unable to grasp the “depth of his humanity.”89
Thompson sees a poetic resemblance in Herodotus’ hope for the future in Arion’s famous
leap.90 Leaping into the water to escape Corinthian pirates, Arion is rescued by dolphins, and
brought to safety, embodying a Promethean-like challenge, in this bold act, to the fate that awaited
him. Thompson concludes that Herodotus’ project required a similar courage. She writes:
The task then is to fulfil the human vocation, to create history through art and to form
community by means of that perception. To be human is to engage history, for history is all
we have. What we make of it will shape a common destiny. If shaped well, the community
may thrive; if not, it may crumble when out of its element or confronted with crisis. Arion's
87 Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography, 5. 88 For more on collective, or ‘cultural memory’, see Jan Assman, John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural
Identity,” New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring – Summer, 1995). This brief paper seeks to outline a conception of ‘cultural memory’ in which the meaning of various cultural traditions or institutions, when formed by the crystallisation of collective experience, “…when touched upon, may suddenly become accessible across millennia,” 129.
89 Momigliano makes an even more fundamental point previous to this, almost in passing. He points out that even those who admired Herodotus the most, such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Lucian, “…praised his style, rather than his reliability.” The fundamental humility of Herodotus’ conception of historical life comes out of a sense (no doubt derived from Homer) that the way in which a story is told dictates the extent to which it will resonate. If history is to truly resonate, to become the foundation of historical life, it must allow for the means by which, as Momigliano himself puts it, “…mankind – or its greater part (is allowed to) reflect itself undisturbed in his mirror.” See Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” 39-40.
90 Herodotus, The Histories, Book One, 24.
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story stirs us toward courage, creativity, and a readiness to leap into an unknown future.91
That Herodotus saw his project as critical to an unknown future speaks for the increasingly difficult
relation that his Greek contemporaries had to fate. History’s concern for human agency leaves the
role of the gods ambiguous. Herodotus’ attempt to rescue the past traditions and beliefs of those that
preceded him – to make something of, in Thompson’s words – is entirely for the sake of his
people’s present and thus, by definition, their future. A people who misunderstand their own
history, and misunderstands the historical contingencies of human autonomy and agency, risk
disaster and a fate that otherwise might still be outrun. The contemporaneity of history (that is,
Herodotus’ work) with the emergence of tragedy should not be forgotten in this instance as both are
works of interruption. This acknowledgement of human life before the authority of fate, Arendt
argues, was a making of history through an interruption of that which could not have been
otherwise. Arendt understands this more deeply as the interruption of nature; as representing yet
another step in humanity’s attempt to distance itself from its origins.92 Although the presence of
divine fate, presumably in the earliest primeval antiquity, allowed for the means by which humanity
shook off earlier forms of ‘bare life’, history (as well as tragedy) embodies a willing self-conscious
celebration of human action in the face of the authorities that dogged it.93 History, in being the
celebration of the means through which humanity escaped ‘bare life’, becomes the means through
which the basis for a dialogue of the polis emerges.
Barbarism and Historical Life
Collingwood’s own understanding of the relation between historical and civil, political life,
was not purely intellectual. Like Herodotus, it was derived from his fear of the regression into
barbaric, more violent forms of life. In Collingwood’s case he feared the new barbarism embodied
by the rise of Fascism and National Socialism. Writing in the early half of the twentieth century,
Collingwood was to some extent a man not of his time, largely surrounded by what was then called
the ‘British Realist’ school, centred in Oxford and Cambridge. This tradition would go on to outline
the methodological blueprint of what would become known as the analytic school of philosophy.
The main point of contention between himself and the realists was the latter’s largely ahistorical
91 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community,167. 92 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 43. 93 The term ‘bare life’ is used by Giorgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovreign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998) which in itself is the adoption of Benjamin’s ‘mere life,’ discussed in Critique of Violence, 250. The means by which the early forms of divine authority allowed for the conditions out of animal, bare life, will be discussed again in Chapter Three in my discussion of Vico, specifically in his discussion of the Cyclops.
35
approach to philosophy. A failure to account for history in the philosophical dialectic, Collingwood
argued, went deeper than the failure to account for the historical contingency of particular
philosophies. Rather, it threatened the very act of rational thinking at its foundation.94 The a priori
detachment upon which the movement was based, Collingwood wrote, was the blueprint “for a
coming fascism”.95 This was not a claim about an inherently conservative politics of analytic
philosophy, nor a comment about his colleagues and contemporaries (although it was
understandably taken as one). It was, rather, a claim about that particular wider intellectual
tradition’s position in the history of the reception of the legacy of the Enlightenment, and rationalist
philosophy since Descartes. It was not simply the fate of political Europe that was at stake
according to Collingwood, but the entire legacy of Western thought, the liberation from which the
rationalist Enlightenment thinkers hoped for in the name of reason and renewal (which
Collingwood suspected might result in the descent into its opposite). His emphasis on the historical
in philosophy was quasi-formalised in a dialectical logic he called ‘the logic of question and
answer.’96 In direct opposition to the British Realist’s analysis of propositions only, the logic of
question and answer sought to analyse a proposition as true or false only in relation to the question
in which it was intended as an answer. Whilst this is often, and correctly, understood as a form of
historical ‘methodology’, it must also be understood as a way in which Collingwood sought to
understand, and more importantly uncover, the materiality of the struggles of the human condition
in the past.97 In some sense, it was an anti-methodology in its attempt to distance itself from a
stringency not suited to history, or the inherent ambivalence of human experience. An uncovering,
or unearthing of the past (and it is no coincidence that Collingwood conceptualised his logic of
question and answer partly during his archaeological work) was, Collingwood considered, a finding
of that which was still ‘live’ from the past, perhaps latent in the present’s very foundation.98
94 Jeff Malpas locates Fascism, in a similar way to Collingwood, not simply as a reflection of a lingering pre-modern
barbarism, but a distinctly modern phenomenon, in which Romantic ideals become blended with modern, rationalized technology. Auschwitz thus embodies “a terror at the heart of modern culture itself.” See Jeff Malpas, “Retrieving Truth: Modernism, Post-Modernism and the Problem of Truth,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 75, No. 2/3 (Summer/Fall 1992): 291.
95 Collingwood, An Autobiography, 112. 96 Collingwood, An Autobiography, see Chapter V, 'Question and Answer', 24. 97 The concept of ‘materiality’ will be critical in Chapter Two. 98 To note the resemblances in Benjamin and Collingwood’s respective works is not to make, necessarily, a claim about
the similarity of their projects, although this may be true in some respects. However the extent to which they are working under the same, what Benjamin might have called, constellation, presents itself in a moment of relevance, through the ways in which they both talk about archaeology. An expert in Roman Britain, Collingwood writes of the changing culture in archaeological circles, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: ...long practise in excavation had taught me that one condition – indeed the most important condition – of success was that the person responsible for any piece of digging, however small and however large, should know exactly why he was doing it. He must first of all decide what he wants to find out, and then decide what kind of digging will show it to him. This was the central principle of my 'logic of question and answer' as applied to archaeology. See Collingwood, An Autobiography, Chapter XI, ‘Roma Britain’, 81. It is interesting to note that, in a small piece of writing named Excavation and Memory, Benjamin uses similar terms when, in explicating his conception of memory, writes:
36
A pivotal part, worthy of historical attention, was the effect of what Collingwood calls
‘magic’ on past emotional lives.99 Magic, he insists, was not a pre-scientific representation of
reality, but the manifestation of reality itself, functioning within a different (or perhaps earlier) logic
entirely. Magic represented the historical insight into the emotional landscape of human life, long
ago. It was this misunderstanding of the past in particular that Collingwood thought his present
laboured under; not in itself a Romantic opposition to Enlightenment, but rather a dismissal of how
the Enlightenment, and its subsequent traditions, had historically materialised compared to its
original promises. The historical reality of the Enlightenment (as opposed to the historical
constellation of hope under which it first emerged), as Blumenberg writes, is in many ways the
coming to terms with the continued relevance of the old myths, despite the increased exposure and
success of the secular response.100 The inability to understand myth as in some sense rational
embodies the revisitation of instrumental reason’s fear of its origins. The failure to understand the
historical realities of humanity’s collective subjugation before authorities other than their own,
through the presence of stories, myths and magic, embodied for both Herodotus and Collingwood
the potential downfall of their civilisations. In the case of Herodotus, as Munson argues, the pivotal
assumption under which the Greeks were operating under was the explicit superiority to other
people and civilisations.101 The Histories became, then, a way in which to reconcile the Greek
worldview with those of others, with the intention of dissolving a cultural arrogance that might,
Herodotus feared, be the eventual downfall of his people. Collingwood, on the other hand, feared
the mythic, and thus fateful realities of his own day, namely in its conception of historical time – the
idea of and faith in progress – which emerged out of the Enlightenment’s reception of the past (this
will be discussed in detail in Chapter Four). When Collingwood controversially charged his Oxford
colleagues with being, if not directly responsible for, then at least party to, the fascist shadow, it
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging....In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part Two, 1931-1934., ed. Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 576. Visualised as such, Benjamin's wandering through the Parisian arcades, and Collingwood's archaeological digging, suddenly render this accessing of 'memory space' as a grasping for a certain kind of ‘materiality’ of the past. I will return to this theme in Chapter Two. See in particular Ian Richmond, R. G. Collingwood, The Archaeology of Roman Britain (London: Methuen & Co 1930). Also, see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Kevin McLaughlin Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002).
99 Collingwood does not talk about ‘myth’ in the same way many of the Germans did, such as Cassirer, Benjamin or Blumenberg. And indeed all these thinkers meant different things by the term ‘myth’. However, as can be seen in his essay ‘Magic’, in which he outlines the critical importance of a history of magic, as reflections of other manifestations of human life outside of rational thinking, ‘magic’ is roughly synonymous with what the Germans collectively mean by myth, disparate as those definitions themselves are. See R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), Chapter, ‘Magic’, 195.
100 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 101
Munson, Black Doves Speak, see Chapter 1 and 2, 7-30.
37
was not a claim regarding the inherent conservatism of British realism.102 It was a criticism, rather,
of a wider disregard, and forgetting of, a particular Herodotean tradition (of which the largely
ahistorical analytic philosophy was really a symptom, rather than a cause) that saw a critical role of
historical life in the forging and maintenance of political life. Political, in this sense, must be
understood in relation to its Greek origins of polis, in which those who belong to the polis are
differentiated from those that do not belong to it. The state of nature is necessarily the antithesis to
political life. Historical life, in that sense, lies in opposition to natural, fateful life. The potentially
new forms of dialogue that emerged out of a collective historical consciousness offered the hope for
such a life.
Collingwood was not alone in suspecting that the lack of serious interest in myth, or ‘magic’
as he called it, stemmed from an inherited Enlightenment tradition, that considered myth a
superstitious remnant of savage society, not simply irrelevant, but potentially dangerous in a
rational age. Collingwood outlines in detail in The Philosophy of Enchantment why it is illogical
(that is, a betrayal of genuine enlightenment hopes) to treat past cultures as backward when,
historically and anthropologically speaking, we have evidence for their evident rational
sophistication.103 The belief in myth was not a sign of the unenlightened but, rather, a way to
resolve emotional conflicts; to adjust a people to the practical life for which these conflicts rendered
it unfit. 104 The conventional Enlightenment narrative functions in this case as a gargantuan
misinterpretation of a past people’s inner lives. Collingwood was certain this lay in the
misunderstanding of the treatment of myth. He writes in The Philosophy of Enchantment:
This...is the general function of those almost infinitely various magics which serve, in one
way or another, to human beings against the ghosts that haunt them...if some charms, such
as the sign of the cross, are more effective, this is because the cross symbolises a complete
relief from our sense of guilt, standing as it does for the belief that God himself has borne
the burden of our sins.105
102 That Collingwood saw in the “minute philosophers of [his] youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific
detachment from practical affairs, “...the propagandists of a coming Fascism”, is not surprising considering that, what he in fact saw, was the surrendering of the past's potential to interrupt the fateful condition of the present. Like Benjamin, Collingwood saw the coming fascism as the material proof of an intellectual climate (which had in turn influenced day-to-day civic discourse) that had failed to recognise, not only the immense importance of its own history, but also the fact that an understanding of it outside of the realm in which it was currently understood (that is, only with reference to the projection of a future progress), might inform a new way of thinking which might, in turn, inform a human dialogue in which fascism was impossible.
103 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 181. 104 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 208. 105 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment 205.
38
Collingwood believed that the civilised man contained within him what he ironically called “the
savage”; that is, the remnants of primeval guilt, which emerged at our early subjugation before
divine authority (what Blumenberg knows as the inherited primeval fears that marks human life).
Collingwood sought out a philosophical and historical tradition that dealt with our own tradition’s
past myth and magic as historically-contingent material reflections of reality — as reflections of the
fears to which past humanity had been subjugated — rather than as existing in a binary relation, on
the opposite end of the same spectrum as Enlightened rationalism.106 The ahistorical drives of
Cartesian, and later Enlightenment philosophy, promised a particular way out of irrationalism and
barbarism. The Herodotean project that Collingwood inherited saw promise in the reception, rather
than its rejection, of humanity’s past. In so doing, Collingwood hoped to have a better
understanding of the myths of ‘the savage’ that continued to afflict us as modern people, rather than
allowing for them to linger in contemporary discourse unseen. Benjamin referred to this idea as the
naturalisation of myth.107
The Arionian Challenge
The extent, therefore, to which Herodotus’ work and wider project, should be understood in
106 This, it must be said, is the critical problem of Cassirer’s understanding of myth. Despite acknowledging the inherent
logic (that is, the earlier rationality of myth) Cassirer insists that such a logic is subsumed by later rationality, in particular the post Enlightenment tradition in which he operates. See in particular his essays ‘The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking’ and ‘Language and Myth’ in Cassirer, The Warburg Years (1919-1933). Blumenberg argues that Cassirer is wrong to focus on the origins of myth. He writes, “…it is not as a result of the fact that a certain content is ‘thrust back into the temporal distance’ and ‘situated in the depths of the past’ that it gets its mythical quality, but rather as a result of its stability through time,” 160. His mistake, argues Blumenberg, in “…demanding a theory of the origin of myth” is his forgetting that “…the circumstances that the entire stock of mythical materials and models that has been handed down to us has passed through the agency of reception, has been ‘optimised’ by its mechanism of selection,”168. In an earlier passage, he reminds us, “Even the earliest items of myth that are accessible to us are already products of work on myth. In part, this pre-literary phase of work has passed into the compound myths, so that the process of reception has itself become a presentation of its manner of functioning,” 118. The dangers of Cassirer’s understanding of early myth, which is linked to his theory of early symbolic form, a primitive ‘tethering’ of the world, is its implicit understanding of that beginning being a point of departure from which later, more modern forms of rationality become coherent through a notion of intellectual progress. Of course, as Blumenberg argues, myth, in both its beginning and current existence, should not be understood as “‘symbolic form’ but above all a ‘form as such’, by which to define the undefined,”168. In other words, mythology, which has its origins in early symbol and metaphor, is not a ‘primitive’ expression of human thinking, but the basis upon which all thinking is possible. This is an anthropological, rather than epistemological claim, wherein, “understood in terms of its origin, ‘form’ is a means of self preservation’; that is to render intelligible, and thus meaningful, an alien world. Cassirer’s failure, then, is his inability to understand the full repercussions of an early rationality in mythic thinking. Rather than an earlier, primitive form of something that has been perfected throughout history, it is the form and means by which we are able to think at all. This is the theory behind Blumenberg’s notion of the ‘absolute metaphors’ that are buried deep in our discourse, unrecognized, 168. All references to Blumenberg are to be found in his Work on Myth.
107 In the case of Benjamin and Collingwood, the most insidious and far reaching example of the naturalisation of myth in modernity was the naturalisation of human progress, wherein historical time, chronological time and the upward movement of (largely technological) human development are entirely synonymous. This was the form of fate in modern life. See Walter Benjamin, “Theories of a German Fascism” in Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part One, 1927-1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 312. See also Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 180.
39
the historical context of an older collective grappling with the forces of fate, cannot be overstated. It
is precisely this project that sees his confrontation with Collingwood as viable, because
Collingwood’s work can also be understood within the context of trying to highlight his culture's
inundation in its own conception of fatality, as well as the necessity of historical life to civil life.
What is it to live according to fate? Benjamin, as previously mentioned, likened the presence of
myth to the presence of fate. However, Blumenberg’s understanding of myth — which is usually
understood in opposition to Benjamin’s conception — can also be helpful in this discussion.108
Myth’s emergence at humanity’s beginning as a response to the utterly alienating features of the
world (that is, as Alison Ross puts it, to make that which is totally strange, only humanly
strange109), necessitates a recognition of its particular rationality, and also an acknowledgement of a
historically-grounded understanding of the changing modalities of rational thought. Human thought,
which is much older than the rigid rationalism the West inherited from Greek philosophy, has
always functioned around a logos (a narrative explanatory form), although unrecognised by the
post-Socratic champions of logos, who legitimised their own work through the tarnishing of older
forms of logos as being equivalent to myth. The desire for renewal and distancing from older
thinking is itself a critical component, both of the history of logos, and its futile attempt to entirely
outrun the authoritarian speech acts it emerged dialectically from. Rather than the progress of myth
to rationality along a binary relation (which throughout history has also become synonymous with
the empty flow of chronological time), human life must be understood within the context of an
older inheritance — never entirely escaped — of the fear that arises by virtue of our living.
Although the exact circumstances of the evolution from animal to primitive man are by definition
lost to the pre-historical past, the necessity of a moment in which the world, suddenly terrible and
ambiguous and thinkable in ways unknown before, needed to be controlled and kept at bay seems
undeniable. The most primitive metaphor, which would have almost certainly evolved into
primitive myth, does not paint a world of pre-rational concepts, but a world in which the foundation
of conceptual thought is possible in the first place. The warding off of primeval anxieties, a facing
of demons that haunt us by virtue of our living, is the means by which, not pre-rational thought, but
thought itself, emerges.110 All works of myth, Blumenberg reminds us, are works on myth. It is
from this perspective that the question of whether Herodotus was a storyteller or a historian
dissolves. His storytelling links him to Homer, and the earliest reflections of Greek like, and his
historical delivery represents a new form of self reflection on an old subject. Myth and history
108 Although Benjamin and Blumenberg are, as has been discussed in a previous footnote, often seen at odds in their
theory of myth, it is clear (especially in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’) that both parties saw the necessity of mythic authority (on which the rule of law is based) in allowing humanity to emerge from the purely natural sphere.
109 Alison Ross, “Moral Metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg: Toward an Analysis of the Aesthetic Settings of Morality,” Thesis Eleven 140, no. 1 (2011): 44.
110 Blumenberg, Work on Myth. See Chapter One, ‘After the Absolutism of Reality’, 3-33.
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reflect difference forms of human reflection on the oldest most obvious anxieties of existence. It is
this recognition of human thought’s radical quality, regardless of the particular modality in which it
finds expression such as that of the mage, or the philosopher, that necessitates a remembrance of the
futility of the traditional Enlightenment narrative of the need to override older ‘superstitions’. Nor,
however, does it entail a Romantic respect for earlier magic ritual. If modern humanity is better
placed than ever to shrug off the external authorities by which it has lived, it is only by virtue of the
historical recognition and acknowledgement of those early forms of thought, that rendered modern
rational thought possible. Blumenberg points to the continual relevance and resonance of myths, in
spite of the rise of the sciences, but also the inversion of their original lessons (such as in Camus’
Sisyphus111). He argues this accounts for the fact that despite the rise of science, the world remains
often impenetrable and ambiguous, the constant return and renewal of myth evidence of the fact
human life is still beset with the anxieties that appear in the early stories; for example in
confrontations between parent and child, or individuals and higher authorities.112 Indeed, it is
myth’s continued existence and relevance in spite of its constantly shifting nature, and in spite of
modern modalities of rationality, that suggests its necessity in delineating the form of consciousness
rather than its content. The primary existential confrontations that mark the human condition, in
other words, are not satiated by, for example, the modern answers of natural science, and instead are
only subdued by the aesthetic quality of myth that are made manifest before an attentive audience in
the immediacy of an historical moment.113
Within this perspective, Herodotus’ work appears even after all these years, as Benjamin
noted, still able to amaze.114 Herodotus’ work, which it must be remembered was intended for oral
recitation was, as Arendt argues, a form of remembrance, and thus celebration of the great deeds of
man and the stories by which he lived. This celebration goes deeper than a mere retelling of stories
that may or may not have occurred. Rather, as Arendt suggests, the Greek understanding of the
world, and nature, as permanent and eternal, came in stark differentiation of its understanding of
man as small, and fleeting. Histories such as those of Herodotus sought to immortalise particular
human action and thus, in so doing, interrupt nature. “The subject matter of history”, Arendt writes,
“is these interruptions – the extraordinary in other words.”115 Nature, in its eternity, could not be
otherwise and was in that sense fateful. Just as tragedy did, history sought an interruption (if only
momentarily!) of fate’s authority over human life. Such an interruption might emerge in the
collective celebration of human deeds. Through such a Promethean or Arionian challenge, a purely 111 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brian (London: Penguin, 1955). 112 Blumenberg, Work on Myth. See Part II, Chapter Four, ‘To Bring Myth to an End,’ 263. 113 With thanks to my friend James Mitchell for this point. 114 Benjamin,“The Storyteller”, see footnote 34. 115 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 43.
41
human – and thus political sphere might emerge. Collingwood’s fear at the breakdown of political
dialogue in 1938-39 was, in essence, a fear of the naturalisation of a state of nature that threatened
the very essence of the polis. Through such an understanding, history cannot be understood as
necessarily beginning with Herodotus, but as yet another form of humanity’s wider, and much
longer, collective struggles against fate. Such a struggle, however, does not necessarily come
through fate’s direct denunciation, but rather in its historical celebration. Such a celebration
represents a deeper understanding of the human condition and the means by which it might become
manageable; that is, liveable.
This makes Thompson's claim that “history is all we have” perhaps even more solemn than
can be immediately appreciated. One particular moment in Herodotus’ Histories reinforces this. His
admiration for Hegesistratus the Elean, who escapes captivity by cutting off part of his foot — a
deed Herodotus considers “the bravest action of all those we know” — reminds the modern reader
that in his work, as Thompson puts it, “...the most admirable characters seem to be those who
manage to assert their freedom and self-sufficiency in the face of overpowering necessity”.116 This
is precisely what Thompson is alluding to when she insists history can be the only true legacy of
humanity. History cannot merely be the retelling of human feats, but the articulation of a space in
which they can be remembered meaningfully, wherein human kind can challenge the necessity of
nature, and thus by definition, fate. Odysseus’ tears of remembrance embody such a space, and it is
why Arendt sees the beginning of a historical consciousness in that moment. This was the essence
of Collingwood’s dilemma, and construal of the crisis of modernity. Where could such a space be
articulated? What claim for civil life could be made in a world in which the political machinations
of fascism had not only emerged, but also emerged victorious?
Mûthos: The Fear of the Sirens Returns.
Arendt’s claim that the West's historical consciousness was born with Odysseus’ tears of
remembrance on hearing his own exploits – a case of man's remembering, and thus recognising, the
tragic forces at play in his life – marks Herodotus as both a radically new thinker in his time, and as
part of the oldest traditions. On the one hand, Herodotus’ work represents a particular historical
sensibility in his attempt to locate and render meaningful human actions for the sake of a political
community. On the other, however, it becomes evident the extent to which the problems in which
Herodotus was ensnared, can be seen as stretching back further to a past largely lost. Horkheimer
116 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 111. See also Herodotus, The Histories, Book
Nine, 37.
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and Adorno recognised the extent to which Western culture was still embroiled in Odysseus’
journey home from Troy.117 The fear of the Sirens, which sees Odysseus lash himself to the mast of
his ship, as well as the fear of the Cyclops’ revenge, continues to resonate in our cultural memory.
The fear of myth within the history of philosophy, shown by Thucydides and Aristotle to the
present day, and its response, namely the confined bounds of ‘rationality’, shows both that the fear
of a primeval past goes back much further than the emergence of philosophy in Greece, and the
extent to which humanity is still ensnared by fears and anxieties that dogged its earliest ancestors.
Plato, and then Aristotle’s, warning of the powers of mythic authority over human life, in remaining
ensnared, if not by the Siren’s song, then the fear of it, ensured the continual authority of powers
other than humanity’s own.118 The dialectic of thought, between mûthos and logos, necessitates that
both are modalities of the other. The divide between the two that becomes coherent only after the
rise of philosophy and its stripping mûthos of its original authority, is a late event, comparatively
speaking. Mûthos and logos, in being different modalities of human thought, can be understood as a
unified response at the collective terror of that which beckoned from what Benjamin called “…the
primeval forest.”119 Early grappling with these terrors, mûthos, took on the form of an authoritative
speech act originating in the will of divine forces. Although later on in our existence, philosophy,
and its rigid formulation of what constituted rationality, overcame myth’s role (in terms of
legitimacy), it did not entail myth’s collective disappearance. Just as early primeval myth, and
metaphor, would have held at bay ancient, animal fears, so too did philosophy hold at bay the fear
of the Sirens’ call, which seemed to beckon us back into a past that humanity would rather forget.
Thucydides, in demanding of history the rigour that could ensure the banishment of stories that had
not in fact occurred, displays the terror of Odysseus’ fear of shipwreck upon the Siren’s rocks, and
betrays the unchanging worries that beset rational human life. The fear of Herodotus’ stories is, in
effect, the one and the same fear as that of the Sirens. The residual fear of that which would leave us
wrecked marks Herodotus’ legacy throughout history, and any re-conceptualisation of him
(however humble) must take into account such fear of shipwreck. Such a disaster, the fears
suggests, would entail the loss of the conceptual basis that marks human life. As discussed,
ironically, Herodotus himself (and indeed Homer) were marked by the same fears.
If indeed Herodotus does embody the beginning of history, it is a legacy that was only
recently rescued. David Chamberlain’s reminder of the word under which Herodotus worked – that
117 Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment”, 43-80. 118 Joseph Mali writes that Thucydides knew “…that the charm of the Homeric myths, like those of the Sirens, were too
great to resist; he therefore chose, much like the hero of the Odyssey himself, to tie his fellow travellers, his ‘readers’, to stricter disciplines, to make sure that they would not submit to the mythological temptation.” Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography, 2.
119 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N, (On the theory of knowledge, Theory of Progress), 456.
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is historiê – meant much more than our equivalent word. It was, firstly, a process of interpretation,
but also the subsequent “...monumentalization or performance (apodexis) of that process.”120 The
Sirens that Odysseus dealt with, are never directly mentioned by Herodotus, but the celebration of
the same ambiguous power of stories is his point of departure. A history that ignored the stories that
formed the basis of civil cohesion, both in Greek people and foreigners, cannot be a true history. If
there is even some commonality in origins of tragedy and history it lies insofar as both sought to
overcome (if only momentarily) the forces of fate (and thus myth) through their celebration.
Tragedy’s chorus is not entirely dissimilar to what Chamberlain calls Herodotus’
monumentalisation. Blumenberg insists that the primal reaction to reality, of which myth was the
response, is not something that has (yet) been overcome, and that any claim to have done so must
belong to that very same anxiety. And yet the act of history, in witnessing this, allows for the
conditions that dissolve the fears of human life. As Benjamin argued with tragedy, there are
moments in our history that open up as places of hope, in which the question of human life free of
authorities other than our own, can at least be asked through the collective recognition of human life
as being marked (in different ways throughout our history) by those very authorities. Herodotus’
work must be understood as such as a work of logos; a work that recognises both the origins of
logos, and its limitations. Such a reading is located within the modern reception of Herodotus who
for many, in this case Collingwood, embodies an alternative history to the reception of the past and
the constitution of history. The understanding of Herodotus, which is coloured to such an extent by
the Aristotelian move, has recovered perhaps only in the twentieth century insight of the critical
dialectical nature of myth. Herodotus’ notion of historical life being critically related to an idea of
civil, human life is a tradition that was largely ‘forgotten’ for more than a millennium. The
‘remembering’ of the contemplative gaze, of a notion of historical life being critical to a
philosophical anthropology of human life, (that is, questions regarding man’s essential nature) does
not exist in one historical moment. And yet, the emphasis of this Herodotean tradition in this
chapter requires an exploration of its recollection in early modern Europe.
120 Chamberlain, ""We the Others," 6.
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Chapter Two:
Vico and the Remembering of History: The Legitimacy of the
Contemplative Gaze.
If historical life began with the tears of Odysseus, and its reception with Herodotus, what
then? If, within The Histories there lies, as with tragedy, grounds upon which challenges to fate can
foster forms of human solidarity in an articulation of the nature of human life, it exists in the hidden
interstices of history. If that was Herodotus’ legacy, it was lost in the almost immediate immanence
of philosophy’s interjection against older, more obscure forms of logos. Philosophy’s forgetting of
historical life in the sense that Herodotus intended — that led Collingwood to declare him a thinker
with as much standing as Socrates — began its remembrance in the work of Giambattista Vico.121 If
Herodotus embodies the beginning of some conception of historical life, then Vico’s important
differentiation between fate and divine providence in history, represents divinity in history as a
material presence. Based around this possibility, this chapter will argue that Vico’s philosophy of
history deals explicitly with a conception of ‘materiality’ that is distinct from idealism or
empiricism.
Vico’s relatively quiet life must be remembered in relation to his home city Naples, a city in
which, Walter Benjamin once wrote, “…Catholicism strove to reassert itself in every situation.”
That the later Hegelian school of Naples (despite being the “...fruits of importation” as Giovanni
Papini argues122) must have been, necessarily, shaped by the historical presence of a devout
Catholicism, seems beyond doubt.123 Guido de Ruggiero, in 1936, outlines in a yearly survey of
Italian philosophy, how Benedetto Croce dealt with the controversy caused by his secular reading of
Giambattista Vico via a thorough respect for, and mastery of Catholicism. 124 The obvious
influences of Hegelian philosophy on Italian thought dominate a more hidden Vichean one. The
extent to which the work of Vico, in his differentiation between fate and divine providence
121 This should not be taken as a strictly historical assertion. As Momigliano outlines, the salvation of Herodotus came
slowly, beginning in the Renaissance, and solidifying in the eighteenth century. My specific claim refers to a rescuing of a particular tradition of history that was largely lost. Although Herodotus’ reputation was improving by the late fifteenth century, I argue that the philosophical insights contained within Herodotus’ understanding of history, came to be fully realised via the insights of Vico. Vico would almost certainly have rejected the assertion; and yet there is a sense in which he is uncovering a philosophical potentiality within historiography that had almost entirely vanished. See Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” 29.
122 Giovanni Papini, "Philosophy in Italy." The Monist 13, no. 4 (1903): 555 123 For a good overview of the history of Italian thought see Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: The Origins and
Actuality of Italian Philosophy, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012) and Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
124 Guido de Ruggiero, Constance M. Allen, "Philosophy in Italy," Philosophy 11, no. 44 (1936): 478.
45
anticipates the later teleology’s of the universal histories, is beyond the scope of this chapter, and
has been discussed by others.125 Such a discussion, in addition, further betrays Vico’s legacy, in the
equation of his project with a form of proto-idealism. A perhaps surprising discussion between
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, uncovers the divide between the philosophies of history of Croce
and Vico. Both writers praise Vico’s understanding of history – indeed Joyce’s Ulysses and
especially Finnegan’s Wake were influenced by Vico’s work – but it is Beckett who directly warns
against, not only Croce’s idealism as being the antithesis of Vico’s project, but also Croce’s reading
of Vico, which had become available to the English speaking public when it was translated by
Collingwood in 1913.126
The project of this chapter can be divided in two parts. The first part seeks to rescue Vico’s
peculiar form of philosophical materialism from the later idealist universal histories that would
subsume him, and its subsequent influence on the philosophy of Collingwood. To make this more
explicit I will do this by first outlining the extent to which the normal equation of Crocean idealism
with Collingwood’s own philosophy is misguided. The major philosophical differentiation between
Croce’s philosophy of ‘history as liberty’ (which despite Croce’s claims never seems to fully outrun
Hegel) and Collingwood’s project, is the fact the latter does not see his own time as culminating in
a liberal freedom, but as standing before a precipice. Although Collingwood undoubtedly retained
idealist ideas, derived from both Hegel and Croce, his fear of historical disasters stems, I argue,
from a Vichean notion of ‘materiality’. This notion is neither idealist, nor empiricist, and allows for
the possibility of historical regression. This is derived from Vico’s idea that primitive expressions
of human life continue to linger under the surface of material present day institutions, which
threaten to engulf them through not being recognised. When used, then, ‘materiality’ refers to a
difficult Vichean conception of the relics of the past, historical legacies, and their presence in the
present. Through this conception, Vico not only recognised the lingering presence of myth in his
own day as a historical discovery, but that historical legacies existed not just in the mind of the
historian, but also in the material presence of society. Vico considered the failure to recognise the
remnants of ‘primitive’ human life in the present as representative of the possibility of culture’s
regression into that very state. The logic of divine providence is all that protected human life from
these barbaric forces. The second part of this chapter explores Vico’s idea of divine providence, in
particular his clear differentiation between it and fate. Divine providence drives his conception of
historical time, and its fundamental divorce from fate shows a keen awareness of the potential of a
125 See in particular Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976) and Karl Löwith, Meaning in History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 126 H. S. Harris, “What is Mr. Ear Vico Supposed to be ‘Earing?,” in Vico and Joyce ed. Donald Verene (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1987), 68.
46
philosophical account of history’s relation to divinity and, thus, human life. The second part of the
chapter will outline the extent to which Vico’s notion of divine providence, and its relation to
historical life and human freedom, was hugely influential to the thinkers of a particular tradition of
twentieth century thought (of whom Collingwood is one) who sought a salvation from the
illegitimacy and crisis of modernity. These twentieth century thinkers considered the context of
crisis that beset modernity symptomatic of a ‘misremembering’ of history, and the mythic (and thus
fateful) forces that came entwined in that history. It is Vico who correlates the historical
imagination (fantasia) with a form of remembering.127 Finally, this chapter will show the extent to
which Vico’s uncovering of the legitimacy of the contemplative historical gaze would only find its
full repercussions long afterwards in the understanding that such a gaze could become a
transformative one.
Croce’s Philosophy of History
Rik Peters writes that Collingwood’s treatment of Croce in The Idea of History –
Collingwood's most famous work – is also his most generous.128 Indeed, a periphery concern of the
first part of this chapter is to show explicitly the extent to which Collingwood owes the concept of
‘the living past’ — that is, the dialectical relationship between the past and the historian who
attempts to access it in the present — to Croce. However, in an earlier essay, “Croce's Philosophy
of History,” written in 1920, Collingwood is far more critical of what he considers an incoherent
thesis that oscillates between a naturalism of “...a curious eighteenth-century flavour” and
idealism.129 Croce understands history, in being a logic of process toward liberty, as incapable of an
evil that is not necessary for the further progress of humanity. Collingwood writes of Croce’s
understanding of history:
Croce's contention is that I am forbidden to pass any but an exclusively favourable
judgement...Thus the idealistic principle that there is a positive side in every historical fact
is combined with the naturalistic assumption that the positive side excludes a negative side;
the principle that nothing is merely bad is misunderstood as implying that everything is
wholly good130
The abstract logic at the heart of this vision of historical time, described by Collingwood as
127 Vico’s Platonic dues here are particularly stark. 128 Rik Peters, “Croce, Gentile and Collingwood on the Relation between History and Philosophy,” Philosophy, History
and Civilization : interdisciplinary perspectives on R.G. Collingwood, ed. David Boucher, James Connely, Tariq Modood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 160-161.
129 R. G. Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History (New Delhi: Isha Books, 2013), 9. 130 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 10-11.
47
allowing the historian “...[to] only write down what he finds written on the pages of History”, is
perhaps what led Croce to continue to support the fascist regime under Mussolini well into the
1920’s.131 Although he eventually renounced Mussolini unambiguously, Croce’s understanding of
history briefly clouded his political thought. A fierce advocate of the Italian nation state, Croce
dismissed any possibility that humanity’s fate might not rest on an internal, rational logic, manifest
in the passage of external history. “All histories”, he writes, “which tell of the decay and death of
peoples and institutions are false...‘elegiac history’ is always partisan history.”132 His oscillation
between what Collingwood considers naturalism and idealism originates in Croce’s understanding
of the role of philosophy. The idealist strain which, along with thinkers like Giovanni Gentile,
locates philosophy and history as being separate but critically related tasks, clashes with the
naturalist strain that considers philosophy a component and manifestation of an internal movement
of Nature.133 As Denis Smith outlines, Croce was first and foremost a nationalist, who saw the
historico-political struggle as showcasing a logic that culminated in the Italian nation state.134 In so
being Croce marks himself as a thinker whose hopes are based entirely within the unificatory and
nationalist movements that swept through parts of Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Croce’s early support for Mussolini and the Fascist party, one that perhaps lingered too
long, was, always, per Italia. In that sense, the relatively recent cultural memory of Italy’s
Risorgimento remained the historical and political centre, not only of both his own, and Italy’s life,
but the locus of its historical life, and thus, crucially for Croce, its future. It is perhaps worth noting,
too, that while Croce’s understanding of liberty was synonymous with the beginning of the nation
state, Vico’s own work took place during the transition of power in Naples from Spain to Austria.
The logic of fragmentation under which Vico worked, resonates with Collingwood’s witnessing of
political and social fragmentation in the late 1930’s.135
Collingwood criticises Croce's vision of progress as having, “...assert[ed] the existence of a
criterion outside the historian’s mind by which the points of view which arise within that mind are
justified and condemned.”136 The culmination of this is, Collingwood writes, “…the shifting of
Croce's own centre of interest from philosophy to history”, wherein “...philosophy is the
‘methodological moment of history.’”137 History could not influence the critical task of the present's
131 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 10. See also and Denis Mack Smith, "Benedetto Croce: History and
Politics," Journal of Contemporary History 8, no. 1 (1973). 132 Croce, as quoted in Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 12. 133 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 14. 134 Mack Smith, "Benedetto Croce: History and Politics,” 42-46. 135 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Vico’s Scienza nuova: Roman ‘Bestoni’ and Roman ‘Eroi,’” History and Theory Vol. 5, no.
1 (1966): 5. 136 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 12. 137 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 15.
48
philosophical direction (indeed, the critical nature of philosophy is entirely lost) because the entirety
of the philosophical dialectic was contained within a larger world historical one. Croce’s attempt to
escape the Hegelian immanence of Spirit within history, that is, the equation of the movement of
history with Spirit, according to Collingwood, merely sees historical progress naturalised. Within
this naturalisation Spirit, while not the motor of history, emerges in particular ‘moments,’ a case of
the universal emerging from the particular.138 Croce’s understanding of the philosophy of Spirit
comes to be synonymous with history, because the immanence of any historical moment is the only
reality in which Spirit emerges. Philosophy’s position within the naturalised movement of history
reduces philosophy merely to the manifestation of the progress of history toward liberty. This was
Collingwood’s critical concern: in becoming a manifestation of history, philosophy’s interruptive
potential, where philosophy is capable of articulating other potentialities outside of historical
possibilities, is lost.
Croce always thought of himself as having moved beyond Hegel’s universal history. Hegel's
Spirit, which Croce presents as, “the manner in which the spirit of a philosophy of servitude to
Nature, or to the transcendental God, has elevated itself to the consciousness of liberty,” marks a
point of differentiation between the two thinkers, at least for Croce himself.139 However, Croce
writes: “To negate universal history does not mean to negate the universal in history.”140 Although
history did not embody the motion of Spirit, Croce argues that within the historical process,
moments of the universal emerge; that is, Spirit emerges in historical moments, a case of
consciousness’ reiteration of its forming part of nature. This is part of Croce's belief that, just as
history, when properly understood, relieves us of universal history, so too does philosophy,
“...immanent and identical with history,” destroy the notion of an universal philosophy (what Croce
calls a closed system).141 Croce concludes:
Thus history becoming actual history and philosophy becoming historical philosophy have
freed themselves, the one from the anxiety of not being able to know that which is not known,
only because it was, or will be known, and the other for never being able to attain to definite
truth – that is to say, both are freed from the phantom of ‘the thing in itself.142
138 Benedetto Croce, Teoria e Storia della Storiografia (Bari: Gius. Leterza & Figli, 1943), 46-47. 139 “(il) modo in cui lo spirito da una filosofia, di asservimento alla natura o al Dio trascendente si è innalzato alla
conscienza della libertà.” Croce, Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, 47. 140 ”...negare la storia universale non significa negare la conoscenze dell'universale nella storia. Croce. Teoria e Storia
della Storiografia, 49. It should also be noted that Croce’s position is stated within a language of negation that betrays the continuing influence of the shapes of Hegelian thought.
141 “immanente e identica con la storia” Croce, Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, 51. 142 E la storia, fascendosi attuale, come la filosofia fascendosi filosofia storia, si sone liberate l'una dell'ansia di non
poter conoscere ciò che non si conosce solo perché fu o sarà conosciuto, e l'altra dalla disperazione di non raggiungere mai la verità definitiva: cioè entrambe si sone liberate dal fantasma della 'cosa in sé. Croce, Teoria E
49
This was the crux of Croce's project surrounding the notion of history as ‘present thought’:
philosophy and history reduced to the same project of the dialectical recognition of the concreteness
of lived experience as being the particular manifestation of universal Spirit. Thought that, as
Collingwood put it, “knew itself as so living,” allowed the problem of historical time’s relation to
the present to become irrelevant. Human, and thus historical life, in other words, was made manifest
by the reception of that very history. Collingwood writes of Croce's final view of the autonomy of
history:
History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the
historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being
historically known is that they should 'vibrate in the historian's mind...For history is not
contained in books or documents; it lives only, as a present interest and pursuit.143
The vibrancy of the past – of the historian's freedom to enter the contingency of material reality
long since departed – in its manifestation, renders immanent both the present in which it is thought,
and the very history to which it belongs. History is the process of the dialectical recognition of past
Spirit – of humanity's move toward liberty – that lives as being so recognised in the present.144 The
philosophical project of the present was defined and came to know itself through the recognition of
past projects. History itself, then, becomes the philosophical project – it is the project of
rationality’s self-recognition.
The notion that philosophical reflection must come to terms with past thought within the
present is the basis for Croce’s assertion that there could only be ‘present history’. The
understanding of these historical moments as only able to resonate within the present of the
historian, influenced Collingwood a great deal.145 However, it cannot be understood as the work of
a disciple. This is not an attempt, it must be stressed, to make a case for Collingwood’s ingenuity.
Rather, the influence of Croce’s notion of the critical importance of the present in the past’s
resurrection (and it must be remembered that Croce understood this notion within an idealistic logic
Storia Della Storiografia, 52.
143 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 202. 144 Croce, Teoria E Storia Della Storiografia, 13. See also Benedetto Croce, “La Storia Come Pensiero and Come
Azione,” La Critica: Revista di Letteratura, Storia and Filosofia diretta da B. Croce, Vol. 35, no. 1 (1937): “La Storiografia come Liberazione della Storia”, 21.
145 These early quotes (taken from Croce’s Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, written during the Great War) represent an anti Hegelian, or anti-universalist stance, that faded later in his life; the dialectical culmination of history through a nationalist liberty, becoming more critical to his philosophy, wherein his entire ontology centres around a form of ‘historical present’, that sees the forces of history culminate in human freedom as manifest through the State.
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of historico-eschatological culmination) entered Collingwood’s own philosophy of history almost
exclusively as a reaction and rejection of the then blossoming British Realism. To Collingwood, the
realists embodied (perversely, given their hopes of reducing the world to its rational properties) the
final victory of irrationalism. This was the great intellectual irony that Collingwood laboured under:
that the champions of enlightened, rational and logical thought, had in fact succumbed to the forces
they sought to overthrow. Crocean concerns aside, the ultimate hopes for Collingwood make a great
deal more sense when read in conjunction with those of Vico – to which the second half of this
chapter is dedicated – than the universal history of Croce, for whom positivism and empiricism
were the enemy of genuine historical insight. This in itself is an interesting point to examine the
fundamental ambivalence within the philosophy of Collingwood, since he was equally suspicious of
the positivist tendencies of his colleagues, and yet harboured obvious approval of the empiricist
nature of archaeology; the spirit of which inflects much of his more straightforward understandings
of history and its relation to philosophy. Collingwood was not an empiricist. And yet, there is in his
philosophy (and it is at this point, it can be argued, that Vico’s influence is most coherent) an
attempt to render coherent a philosophically-viable concern with a form of materialism that
balanced a notion of empirical realities that did not forget the Kantian categories for such
empiricism to be possible.146 In other words, as can be seen in his obvious correlation of
archaeological concerns with philosophical ones, Collingwood is trying to make sense of a material
sense of the past that avoids the abstraction of Hegel and the naturalised progress of Croce, and
instead renders a thinking of the materiality of the past a critical concern for the present (his
essentially Hegelian differentiation between inward and outward expressions of human action in
history, in allowing for an account of history as constituting the dialectical movement of human
thought (and its subsequent outward expression), does not discount the philosophical importance of
an account of that exterior materiality as constitutive of the inner lives of past men and women).
Croce and Collingwood’s shared project – of the critical relation between philosophy and history –
beyond a superficial collective rejection of realist empiricism (what Croce called an ersatz
philosophy, by which he meant a banal philosophy147) in fact only emphasises the different ends
envisioned by the two philosophers. Where the spectre of Hegel never entirely leaves Croce’s own
philosophy, his attempt to subvert him not enough to escape the eschatological forms of progress
that mark the post Kantian universal histories, Collingwood is best understood as intending to find a
philosophical account of the inherent ‘reality’ of the past’s relation to the present. In other words,
not an account of liberty, or progress, but how the recognition of history as marked by violent
ruptures might inform a present that sought to interrupt such ruptures. That is to say, to strike upon 146 R. G. Collingwood, “The Science of Absolute Presuppositions,” in An Essay On Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1940), 34-48 147 G. R. G. Mure, “Croce and Oxford,” The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 4, no. 17 (Oct. 1954): 328.
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a philosophical account of human life that escapes (via its confrontation) a historical legacy that had
silenced other potentialities.
David Bates, in “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History (In and Out of Context)”,
argues that Collingwood’s notion of re-enactment as forming the basis of his philosophy “...opens
up a complex connection in Collingwood's thought between ethical action, historical time and our
relationship with divine reality...that leads to a re-evaluation of his own historical context.”148
Rather than being an eccentric idealist Bates argues that Collingwood must be read within the
history of philosophy that emerges in Europe between the wars as a response to what was
considered a crisis of culture, an illegitimacy of modernity – a movement that “...was trying to
mediate transcendent reality and concrete historicity in a situation of crisis and fragmentation.”149
Where Croce’s philosophy is marked by an optimism that functions as a category in terms of which
historical time is judged logical and coherent, Collingwood’s project involves the suspicion that the
eschatological character of historical time – its linearity and its subjugation to the naturalisation of
chronology – marks the illegitimacy of the present's relation to its history. Croce, working under the
historical constellation of the Risorgimento, considered he had “vinto l'astratteza dell', hegelismo”
(“ defeated the abstraction of Hegelianism”) and thus fell into the Hegelian category of the
development of Spirit.150 Croce’s understanding of historical time, which sought to render coherent
the naturalist dialectic of the philosophical project (and thus the history of humanity's relation to the
present) must be understood separately from the urgency of Collingwood’s project. This latter
project sought out, as Bates writes, rather than a coherent logic of history, a “...a violent
intervention.”151 The root of the distinction between Croce and Collingwood is grounded entirely in
the extent to which they differ in their understanding of the urgency of the philosophical project’s
relation to the present. The present for Collingwood, in representing the only possible time of
writing, embodies a unique space for the philosophical. The philosophically-driven intervention into
our historical subjugation (in the sense meant by Benjamin, that is the constant repetition and return
of violent forces in history), offers up the only hope to alter the collective historical legacy; that is, a
collective sense of human life that is distorted by a historical forces. Collingwood, who would have
agreed with Adorno that progress began only when the notion of progress had finally been
terminated, wrote with the tradition of understanding the present as in a state of crisis.152 Bates
148 David Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History (In and Out of Context),” History and Theory Vol. 35,
no. 1 (Feb. 1996): 29. There was, it must be noted, a genuine excitement on reading Bates’ paper. It was the only academic paper I found during my research that shared my own understanding of Collingwood’s wider philosophical project as being distinctly modern, rather than old fashioned, or simply peculiar.
149 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History,” 29. 150 Croce, Teoria and storia, 288. 151 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History, 50. 152 Recall that this point made by Adorno, was not a point regarding the illegitimacy of progress qua progress but,
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writes:
Collingwood always emphasised that historical work is not so much an attempt to observe
passively the spectacle of past events of humanity, as it is an admittedly violent intervention
into the past in order to perform a task in the present.153
Croce’s notion of philosophy as a product of the dialectical passage of a broader historical ontology
reduces philosophy to an unchanging, methodological category. This cannot be reconciled with
Collingwood’s notion that philosophy, although necessarily a task performed in the present, also
represents a powerful, interruptive force in which the present itself is formed.154 The relation of the
present to historical time exists in the philosophically charged gaze backwards into the past as being
critical to some possibly new articulation of what it is to be human. This, in some essential sense,
constitutes the philosophical task for Collingwood. A reception history of the linearity of historical
time as it is usually envisaged, promises a critical re-thinking of human life in the present and thus,
in so doing, offers a hope for the future. This form of hope, unlike Croce’s that was logically
ensured, anticipated certain emancipatory forms of life had not yet emerged as ‘thought’, and thus
lay hidden as a potentiality within already existing forms of historical life. Although Collingwood,
like Hegel, cannot allow any notion of the future to enter historical discourse, his ideas surrounding
the philosophical task (explicitly linked to historical time) are unambiguously linked to an ontology
of hope; that is, a philosophical articulation of another possibility.
Vico and the Cartesian Move
To undermine Croce’s traditional position as Collingwood’s primary influence is not to
suggest that Vico is a more appropriate one. Although the more general influence of Italian,
specifically Neapolitan philosophy, on Collingwood’s work must at least be noted, the genuine
insights gained from a critique of Collingwood’s relation to Vico stems from, on the one hand,
an elaboration of the latent philosophical tradition that Vico inspired (particularly in the late
nineteenth, early twentieth century), and on the other, the different understanding of
rather, any concept of progress or its negation. In other words, any notion of historical time framed around questions of progress or regression was by definition problematic. Collingwood makes an almost identical claim in his essay “The Present Need for Philosophy”, in Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),169.
153 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History, 50. In Chapter Three I will explore the extent of Collingwood’s understanding of the present’s historical task via a reading of his and the work of Kracauer.
154 Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (Oxon,: Routledge, 1997), 26-27. This is an idea articulated explicitly by Andrew Benjamin, and yet it is a notion to which Collingwood would have been strongly sympathetic. The present’s forming the philosophical task necessitating the philosophical task’s influence on the present occupies an important space in Chapter Three.
53
Collingwood’s project that emerges when understood in relation to that tradition. Vico and
Collingwood worked similarly against the prevailing winds of the establishment philosophy of
their respective times, perhaps explaining their common dismissal as ambiguous, as well as the
common misappropriation of their work. Born in 1668, Vico lived and worked under the shadow
of Cartesian philosophy, and died in 1744 aged seventy-five, a relatively unknown and obscure
professor at the University of Naples.155 Collingwood writes that Vico was a man “…too far
ahead of his time to have very much immediate influence.”156 As Max Horkheimer outlines in
his essay Vico and Mythology, Vico’s vision and larger project was, in being located in
opposition to a then utterly dominant Cartesian rationalism, a reconsideration of the very
foundations of humanity’s relation to rationality, and indeed of the foundations of internal logics
of rationality itself. That is, humanity’s understanding of reason, lay not in the a priori probing
of its machinations, but in a historical study of our relation to its conceptual emergence.157
Almost necessarily, given the historical contingencies and forces at work during Vico’s life, his
work was doomed to obscurity. It was not until much later that his legacy was truly understood
and built upon. Indeed, Isaiah Berlin suggests that Vico’s work is continually forgotten and
rediscovered.158 And yet, as Löwith outlines, his work anticipates many later philosophical
projects.159 It is Horkheimer, however, who explicitly names Vico as the source of a great deal of
inspiration for many of the early twentieth-century German thinkers.160 The Vichean notion that
a sound historical study and critique of the origins of our civil institutions was critical to a
contemporary understanding of them, turned into the twentieth century project (historically
related but separate to Vico’s original hopes) of seeking out a redemption for the malaise of
modernity through a reception of history. It was the modern hope that through this reception
brief interruptions of historical time were possible.
In the fifth paragraph of the Scienza Nuova’s ‘Establishing Principles’, Vico writes: “If
philosophy is to benefit humankind, it must raise and support us as frail and fallen beings, rather
155 The extent to which Vico was an intellectual outcast, however, is addressed in Joseph M. Levine’s “Giambattista
Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1991): 62-63.
156 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 71. 157 Collingwood, “Metaphysics an Historical Science,” in An Essay on Metaphysics, 49-57. 158 Berlin, Vico and Herder, 3-5. 159 Löwith, Meaning in History, 115. 160 Joseph Maier, in “Vico and Critical Theory” is right to suggest, however, that Horkheimer’s broader claims, namely
that Vico was the first to gain insight into the nature of ‘the primitive mind’, were misleading. Not only was the theory that contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures were reflective of early human lives, as well as the notion that the minds of children mirrored these cultures, arguably the ideas of Lévy Bruhl, but they were also anthropologically and ethnologically false. Horkheimer’s interest in Vico remains critical, however, because, as Maier insists, his interest was ideological, insofar as he wanted to see if Vico “…offered anything in the way of ‘useful means’ in the present struggle for ‘the establishment of a just order of life.” See Joseph Maier, “Vico and Critical Theory,” Social Research 43, no. 4, Vico and Contemporary Thought -2 (Winter 1976): 848.
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than strip us of our nature or abandon us in our corruption.”161 Vico’s so-called ‘new science’
was indeed a philosophy that, contra Descartes, departed from a form of humanism, rather than a
strict rationalism. In one of the more famous passages of the science, he writes:
Still, in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal
and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly
the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must
be discovered within the modifications of the human mind. (…che questo mondo civile egli
certamente è stato fatto dagli uomini, onde se ne possono, perché se ne dobbono, ritruovare i
princìpi dentro le modificazione della nosta medesima mente umane). If we reflect on this we
can only wonder why all the philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world
of nature, which only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of
nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know because they created it (…di meditare
su questo mondo della nazioni, o sia mondo civile, del quale, perché l’avevano fatto gli
uomini, ne potevano conseguire la scienza gli uomini).162
This is a critical passage because it shows the grounds upon which Vico presents his alternative
philosophy. The broad philosophical questions concerning human life are to be derived from
principles concerning its history, rather than those that attempt to uncover the principles of nature.
Horkheimer argues that Vico’s philosophy should primarily be understood as a rejection of
Cartesian metaphysics. 163 To do so meant “…a confrontation with the question whether
mathematical thought is the true manifestation of the essence of man.”164 The Cartesian position,
Horkheimer writes, can be traced through thinkers like Leibniz and Kant, eventually becoming the
groundwork of the founding principles of modern philosophy. History (with the exception of Hegel)
is consigned to “…a descriptive account of happenings…entirely irrelevant to the decisive forms of
161 “La filosofia, per giovar al gener umano, dee sollevar d reggere l’uomo caduto e debole, non convellergi la natura
né abbandonarlo nella sua corrozione.” Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova (Milano: Bur Rizzoli, 1977), 163. English translations to the text are taken from The New Science, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 77.
162 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 220/New Science,120. 163 Horheimer, however, perhaps overstates Vico’s opposition to Cartesian philosophy. Joseph Levine outlines the
extent to which Vico greatly admired modern philosophical criticism, “…which starts with the certainty of clear and simple ideas and builds knowledge by means of abstract reasoning.” However, Vico also did not want to entirely dismiss the ancient art of rhetoric, “…which preferred concrete sense perceptions and arrived at a knowledge of things only probable by means of imagination and memory.” See Levine, “Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns”, 65. In other words, Vico saw a necessity in balancing the insights of the ancients with those of his modern contemporaries. This was a historico-philosophical position, that saw the advantage (indeed the necessity) of modern forms of thought remaining in dialectic with older modalities of thinking.
164 Max Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” New Vico Studies Vol. 5 (1987): 64.
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theoretical knowledge.”165 Berlin writes, keenly aware of the ambivalence of Vico’s legacy, that
Vico must in some sense represent an alternative grounding for the human sciences; namely the
historical imagination (fantasia), constituting a form of recollection of collective societal memory,
as distinct from a priori and aposteriori categories of knowledge.166 It is important to note that
Vico’s primary differentiation from Cartesian philosophy was the grounding of his founding
principles in historically-grounded anthropological principles, furnished by a divine law, rather than
mathematical or naturalistic ones. In this sense, given the Cartesian tradition arguably represents the
beginnings of the concerns of modern philosophy, Vico embodies an alternative history of western
intellectual history, another potentiality.167
The particular element of his historical critique that led Collingwood and others to declare
Vico ahead of his time was the amount of time spent on myth as constituting a serious historical
category. Vico’s guiding principle that all civil institutions are the result of human action,
necessitates the admission that, given the vast majority of the history of human life has been lost,
almost all of the histories of the origins of those institutions are also lost. He thus goes on to
claim that the myths that have survived offer reflections of true historical realities that have
otherwise been lost to the murkiness of prehistory. This was not a claim about the actual
obtaining of the fall of Troy, or the wanderings of Odysseus, but rather a desire to return to
myth’s original meaning of vera narratio, and the subsequent implications of that return. Vico’s
major recognition is the historical meaning, and importance of stories that, despite the ambiguity
of their origins, necessarily (that is by virtue of their survival) played a major part in illuminating
ancient worlds. These were not simply stories that told of those worlds, but that actually forged
those worlds. This is not merely the idea that myths constituted the ‘first histories’, but that they
offered up the histories of the emotional, inner lives of early human life. Modern terms like
‘cultural memory’ go some way toward capturing this Vichean idea, and yet are not quite
adequate. The role of ‘myth’ in historical study was not only the description of the inner lives of
past men and women, but a study of the grounds upon the very possibility of an inner life in the
first place. The uniqueness of Vico’s insight, given his historical circumstances, was that myth
(stories that did not describe life, but constituted a form of it), in constituting not mere
165 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 65. 166 Berlin, Vico and Herder, xix. 167 Of course, the extent to which Descartes does represent the beginnings of philosophy’s concern with the individual,
and subjective experience is contentious. As Cassirer notes, there is an alternative history of the development of the concept of the subject, emerging in Italy during the Renaissance. See Ernest Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy trans. Mario Domandi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1963). Vico of course would have been keenly aware of this tradition and as such his own understanding of the basis for philosophical enquiry must be understood within the context of this much wider (and indeed ambiguous) debate. Indeed, recent work argues that Vico was consciously operating within a reception of this ‘other’ possibility of the humanities. See Rubini’s The Other Renaissance.
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descriptions of past human life, but the grounds upon which life became distinctly human,
represented an important human legacy. Myth not only embodied older, different and legitimate
modalities of logos, but also that these modalities were reachable, even tangible, in the civic
institutions of Vico’s own day. These insights necessitated the serious critical analysis of the
myths that had come down to modernity as constituting a genuine and important historical
category in themselves.168
A critical and original facet of Vico’s historical study of myth lay in the idea that the modern
mind was utterly alien to that of the ancient way of thinking, and that to study myth was to be
exposed to an alien world view, that would require a great deal of time and effort to understand.
Collingwood’s insistence (almost certainly influenced by Vico) that metaphysics was a historical
science caused him to claim that the backward gaze into the past was an inherently metaphysical
(and thus inherently difficult) act.169 Vico’s devout Catholicism required him to regard humanity as
a fallen being, who began its existence in utter barbarism and primeval fear. The journey was
fraught: “For I have to descend from today’s civilised human nature to the savage and monstrous
nature of these early people, which we can by no means imagine and can conceive only with great
effort.”170 That early human life managed to constrain this terror of the world was evidence,
according to Vico, of the emergence of poetry and singing before prose and the spoken word. For it
was the rhapsodical nature of early human communication that was able to tame the strangeness of
the natural world. The point at which poetry becomes sublime exists in its function: early poetry’s
forging of a form of human solidarity, an early aesthetic expression of our fallibility before terrible
and strange forces. Vico argues that early pagan civilisation’s terror at the first case of lightning one
hundred years after the Great Flood caused it to look up in fear at the sky and see it as a living being
(calling it Jupiter) and in conjuring this deity, succumbed to the fear of Nature. In Vico’s work the
subjugation before fate is the subjugation before nature; a life that is mediated by the thinnest
threads of early theology, the origins of human institutions, but also a force of terrible
ambivalence.171 Vico’s understanding of early pagan life is one of inner conflict: marked by animal
(that is, creaturely) lust, but unwilling to display this before Jupiter, the first men dragged the first
women into their caves, the subsequent rape and forced cohabitation marking the beginning of the
168 As Joseph Mali writes, Vico hoped that his science of mythology would re-instate their original meaning as vera
narratio (true narration), “…not stories that merely tell how the first humans institutions were made, but stories that actually made them, and still kept them intact, by the sheer power of their poetry.” Scholars of Vico are at pains to make clear that Vico’s idea of myth was not romantic but anthropological in its origins. The early poetry was contextualised in purely practical terms: it was a song, a “ritualistic incantation, that served to impose the ‘magical formalism’ of the word onto the world.” See Mali, Mythistory, 73-74.
169 Collingwood, ‘Religion and Natural Science in Primitive Society’, An Essay on Metaphysics, 191. 170 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 227/New Science, 125. 171 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 251-252/New Science, 146.
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matrimonial and patriarchal structures of early pagan civilisation. The later emergence of agrarian
law necessitated a fear and loathing of earlier, pastoral and nomadic forms of life. This particular
confrontation is embodied, according to Vico, in Odysseus’ confrontation with the Cyclops. The
fear of earlier, more primeval forms of life cement a differentiation between natural and civil life,
constituted around notions of guilt. Guilt, in this context, rises up out of early man’s predisposition
to fall back into forms of mere life, and his unwillingness to show this before the deities that make
manifest his immediate world. Guilt is thus a manifestation of myth’s authority on life. The Jews,
living entirely unknown to the pagans, fared better, their negotiation with the horrors of nature were
mitigated by the institutions forged by their law.172
The Magic Formalism of the Cyclops
Vico’s understanding of early human life touches upon one of the critical junctures of his
philosophy: that poetic, rhapsodic forms of life (despite what he would have considered their
‘primitiveness’) were necessary beginnings for later forms of rationality. The meeting of lawless
man (that is, ‘without law’) with those who lived under law, finds its absolute metaphor in
Homer’s Odyssey in the confrontation between Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus. Vico
sees in this confrontation a representation of humanity’s struggle with its barbarous origins.
Polyphemus, the lawless monster, is defeated by Odysseus through rational cunning. As Lewis
notes, “…when Homer calls the Cyclops a ‘lawless minded monster’ this does not mean merely
that in his mind he does not respect the laws of civilisation, but also that his mind itself, his
thinking, is lawless, unsystematic, and rhapsodical.”173 Vico’s notion of the poetic nature of
barbarism is something he both reviles as savage, yet admires as a form of ‘magic formalism’,
and constitutive of human beginnings.174 Homer, who predates the distinction between mûthos
and logos through the establishment of Greek philosophy by hundreds of years, probably
understood the lawless, poetic nature of the Cyclops as pre-anthropological, insofar as they did
not figure within an anthropology. To figure outside of an ánthrōpos (the absence of the law) was
to exist outside of the human realm. In other words, the absence of an ánthrōpos was the
presence of the creaturely. 175 Vico’s insights into the historical potency of myth, which
172 This is a possible influence on Benjamin in Critique of Violence, in recognizing the necessity of the law (myth) to
extricate ourselves from an earlier, more savage existence. Benjamin’s awareness of the ambivalence at the heart of the law, the rotten mythic core, does not also mean he wasn’t aware of the origins of the law being the grounds upon which early human life emerged from an older ‘mere’ life.
173 Pericles Lewis, “The ‘True’ Homer: Myth and Enlightenment in Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno,” New Vico Studies Vol. 10 (1992): 28.
174 Eric Auerbach, Scenes From the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 193. 175 The etymology of anthropology, which although it can be traced back to the Greek word ánthrōpos, is traceable
further backwards to Indo-European words meaning, roughly, ‘of the earth’, although the latter is disputed. See
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subsequently formed the basis of the modern twentieth-century critiques of culture, illuminated
the narratives and metaphors of ancient myth, not only as aesthetically important, but historically
and culturally central to the legacy of Western intellectual history. Horkheimer and Adorno’s
argument, (which itself derives at least in part from Vico) that the survival of certain myths
necessitates a logic of cultural resonance with their people (that is their survival depends on their
resonating with its audience) sets up Odysseus’s confrontation with Polyphemus. This
confrontation represents not only a good story, but as an insight into the anxieties of the people
living around the Greek peninsula in the centuries (and millennia) before Christ.176 The law’s
confrontation with the lawless (or, as Vico would put it, the poetic) illuminates the preoccupation
with animal beginnings and the triumph of reason over it, and finds its clearest expression in
Odysseus’ adventures in the cave, proven by its clear resonance throughout the ancient
Mediterranean. Odysseus’ confrontation with the Cyclops embodies one of the earliest remnants
of the collective grappling with lives befitting rational beings, expressed through the contempt
and disgust as Polyphemus’ animality and Odysseus’s cunning, and eventual return to Ithaca, the
return itself a foundational metaphor in Western discourse. Not only does the myth grant an
insight into the existential struggles that resonated in Homeric life, it also opens a window into
the deeper past, suggesting what the Homeric Greeks thought of their own ancestors. This
ancient past was considered by Homer and his contemporaries as a Golden Age of poetic, heroic
life. Although the Cyclops is eventually defeated by cunning Odysseus, it is not without some
degree of nostalgia for a form of life long gone in which the chasm between ourselves and the
divine seemed less wide.
The danger of Enlightenment thought, the first Cartesian glimmerings through which Vico
lived, and set about confronting, again found its metaphor in the culmination of Odysseus’
meeting with the Cyclops, where the creature is blinded by a sharpened stake. Although Vico
welcomes the victory of rationality over barbarism, there is an uncertainty with which he
receives the news. Auerbach’s argument that Vico in fact had deep, if qualified, admiration for
the magic formalism of early life, stemmed from his suspicion that Vico longed for the
overwhelming, immanent nature of reality as it must have appeared to the early poets. Myth and
the ‘primitive’ imagination did not represent a freedom reminiscent of the freedom of nature, but
rather an establishment of fixed, manageable limits on a world that was utterly foreign and
Robert Beeks, Etymological Dictionary of Greek: Volume One (Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 106. Homer’s revulsion at the Cyclops was a revulsion and fear of older, murkier modalities of human life. Life, perhaps, that did not constitute human life at all.
176 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 547/New Science, 367.
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terrifying.177 Vico’s notion that ‘barbarism’ was not so much lawless, as before the law, led him
to see the beginnings of human life in poetry, not philosophy — in the immediacy of ‘reality’,
rather than its mediation in abstraction. It was not that Vico admired the rhapsodical over the
abstract, but rather he was concerned by the ahistorical “conceit of scholars” that met the past on
the present’s terms. This ahistoricism, driven by the assumption of the unchanging human mind,
misunderstood older forms of thought as merely ‘savage’.178 This ambivalence was later further
articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno who were troubled, in the champions of the
Enlightenment’s joy at the subduing of the beast, how the Cyclops would take its revenge. Vico,
who like many other thinkers of his day, surely felt that he stood on the cusp of a great leap in
human achievement, could not have foreseen that the later generations of thinkers would
increasingly come to think of their own modern era as a time of crisis and illegitimacy.179 And
yet, despite this, Vico seems sure that in the celebrations over the Cyclops defeat, the creature
itself, and the magic by which it lived, should not under any circumstances be forgotten by those
who benefitted from that defeat.
Vico considered the preservation of Homeric myth in Greek society, even in the face of the
rise of philosophy and the tragic plays, as one of the greatest achievements of pagan man.180 He
followed the Greeks in his division of historical time between gods, heroes and men, and
considered the continued resonance, on behalf of the Greeks, of the poetic stage of human life, as
being an intrinsic connection to the time of heroes and, still farther back, of the gods themselves.
The resonance of Homeric stories, even after the time of Aristotle, who so famously dismissed
these forms of logos, (by hardening the divide between mûthos and logos as a way of
establishing the philosophical project) created a sense in which the Greeks remained in touch
with their earlier selves. Indeed, they forged a historical linearity between themselves and the
177 Auerbach, Scenes From the Drama of European Literature, 194. 178 See Levine, “Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” 74. See also La Scienza
Nuova: “…And the conceit of scholars, who claim that what they know was clearly understood at the beginning of the world, makes us despair of discovering these principles in the philosophers,” 119. The Italian reveals a possibly more ambivalent tone: “…altronde la boria de’ dotti…” (an ambivalent term for scholar which maintains a notion of pedantry) “…i quali vogliono ciò ch’essi sanno essere stato eminentemente inteso fin dal principio del mondo, ci dispera ri ritruovargli da’ filosofi…”, 219.
179 In his The Principles of Art Collingwood outlines the necessity of the presence of magic in healthy society. The role and function of magic (of which story telling, and tragedy constitute a particular modality) is inextricably linked to the negotiation of the emotional sphere and material realities of human life. “…is a representation where the emotion evoked is an emotion valued on account of its function in practical life, evoked in order that it may discharge that function, and fed by the generative of focusing magical activity into the practical life that needs it.” A society that fails to understand the logic of magic – that is fails to rationalize the multi faceted modalities of rationality itself – cannot expect longevity. Collingwood goes on to outline the unrecognised modern manifestations of ritualized magic, for example the traditions surrounding the upper class male, the fox hunt and even the wearing of shoes. He concludes: “A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that is has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.” See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 68-69.
180 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 170-171/New Science, 82.
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actions of past heroes as well as monsters. For Vico, this was an example of fantasia: the
historical imagination’s ability to draw meaningful lessons from the collective cultural memory
of times long before Homer, and thus a glimpse of the age of heroes. A notion of the past’s
connection to the present through the sheer aesthetic power of these stories, so thought Vico,
ensured the continuation and legacy of Greek culture. The Romans, he argued on the other hand,
lost track of the original history of their Gods, and thus were unable to draw any deep aesthetic
or ethical meaning from their earlier traditions, thus explaining the eventual disintegration of
Roman culture.181 The dubious nature of the concrete historicity of particular claims by Vico,
and the extent to which his model of corsi e ricorsi (that is, the cyclical nature of history) fails to
reflect genuine history, while notable, does not detract from the philosophical potency of his
work. What is critical in Vico’s science is the acknowledgement of myth’s critical relation to
notions of historical time, and the role of philosophy to that relation.
Historical critiques of myth became not merely windows into the past but illuminations of
the constitution of the very pillars and foundations of civil institutions. These illuminations then
played a role in the acknowledgement of what a thinking of the past played in a thinking of the
present. The insights gained by the ‘cultural memory’ of myth become a topic of philosophical
interest and its point of departure; thus, the ambivalence of the cheer of Odysseus’ crew at the
blinding of Polyphemus.182 The victory of rationality over poetic thought, of the distancing of
abstraction over the immanence of magic, must always be remembered in terms of the necessity
of poetry’s coming before, in order to subdue even earlier primeval creatureliness. Instrumental
reason’s further distancing of the world compared with the relative immediacy of incantation,
does not negate the fact that incantation still constituted a distancing from the terror and anxiety
of a formless world. History, and historical time, must relate in some sense to humanity’s
reception of that very struggle; this is what might be called ‘historical life’. It is almost certain
that Vico did not see all of this. And yet, he seems aware the dangers of Cartesian ahistorical
naturalism threatened to alienate philosophy from the very grounds of philosophy’s own
emergence.
The Materiality of the Past
Horkheimer correctly recognises in Vico a form of materialism which sought out, not an 181 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 170-171/New Science, 82. 182 The term ‘cultural memory’ is again derived from Jan Assman and John Czaplicka’s “Collective Memory and
Cultural Identity.” It is a modern term that would not have been familiar to Vico. Arguably, though, the grounding notion in this modern idea that the past can be ‘recollected’ collectively relies on the Vichean insight that the infinite legacies of the past exist in the present’s socio-cultural institutions.
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abstraction of the divine, but a study of the remnants of the past’s material realties. Myth, as the
direct response to a fear of what Horkheimer calls “the overwhelming forces of nature,”
represents the earliest reflections of human life available to the backward gaze, thus constituting
‘history’.183 The early fear pagan man had for his deities forced a certain civil order into what
was at first only chaotic and arbitrary.184 Myth, as reflection and response to material crises in
early human life, rather than free creations of the mind, offers up philosophically-driven
historical insights, that, while aesthetic in themselves, are also anthropologically grounded.185 To
this end, Horkheimer concludes that it is to this end that Vico’s work embodies a genuine,
philosophically driven, understanding of human origins that also offers ways of understanding
(philosophically) what it would mean to uncover these remnants of early human life in his own
day’s society. To Horkheimer however, the pivotal discovery of Vico’s science is the continued
negotiation with earlier modalities of thinking that remain in modern institutions and ideology.
This cyclical vision of historical time does much more than anticipate Hegel; it acknowledges
the very real possibility of modern European culture’s descent back into barbaric forms of life.
This is not so much a claim about the past, or indeed the future, but rather the ontological status
of the present as materially constitutive of the past legacies that gave rise to it, and how that idea
relates to philosophy. If Cassirer was right regarding the fact that the Renaissance, while being a
historically material result of its philosophy, must also have been a key material influence on that
very philosophy’s emergence, Vico constitutes an important figure in the reception of that
legacy.186 To the extent to which the Renaissance can be considered a legitimate historical
constellation (leaving to one side the obvious and real historiographical debates surrounding that
idea), it represents a historical locus of a certain conception of the present as the time in which
philosophy is done; not an “abstract shadow” as Cassirer called it, but an “active” and
determinative force in the formation of that present.187 If indeed, as Horkheimer claims, Vico
was one of the first to see the present as existing in a state in which there were “...tensions of a
kind which may well result in frightening relapses” of barbaric forms of life, then his science
demands a philosophy that can negotiate those forces. It must be recalled that notions of
barbarism, encapsulated by the Cyclops, are inextricably linked to notions of ‘the creaturely’,
and nature (that is, mere, or bare life) and thus fate. His notion of divine providence, which will
183 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 69. 184 Ibid. 185 A distinction must be made between an aesthetic understanding of myth and an anthropological one. It is clear that
Vico’s understanding of myth was a hybrid of both. On the once hand, he clearly recognizes early rhapsodical myth as an aesthetic response to tame the ambivalence of nature, and on the other, he understands this aesthetic response within a wider (philosophical) anthropology: namely that despite historical ruptures, there is a certain constancy in the fallen nature of human life.
186 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 6. 187 ibid
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be discussed shortly, embodies not only the logic of history, but offers up a reflection of how
actual human life (as a manifestation of divinity) can actively work its way outside of fate’s
logic. This particular element of Vico’s philosophy also goes some way towards explaining
certain aspects of Collingwood’s work that are not immediately reconcilable within the context
of either the Crocean or Hegelian idealism in which he is conventionally understood. Vico’s
science, which of course is not strictly empirical in the way it is normally understood, does,
however, as Horkheimer insists, rely on a certain understanding of the philosophical importance
of material realities of the past, as opposed to the pure idealism of the thinkers that would follow
him. This particular concern for the materiality of the past, which at its core was a concern for
different forms of human thinking, simply did not neglect the philosophical importance of what
it meant to think meaningfully about the lives of the past.188 The inherent metaphysical nature of
the attempt to capture the past, necessitated the recognition that any metaphysics must be an
inherently historical exercise.
Collingwood’s notion of ‘historical re-enactment’, the dialectical engagement of the
present thinker with the past thinker, is the establishment of a rigorous philosophical concern for
metaphysical questions (questions of knowledge, ethical action, and a certain relation to a divine
reality) within the act of history.189 The re-enactment of past thought in the present (which Bates
argues has a quasi-spiritual dimension that must be read within the context of Collingwood’s
attempt to rescue an account of philosophy and modern theology) can be understood in terms of
the Benjaminian ideas surrounding the ‘blasting’ of the historical ‘monad’ from the past into the
present.190 The materiality of the past, or the materiality of the past that emerges in the
immanence of the present via the contemplative gaze backwards, seeks out an interruptive,
othering force within the present. In other words, a form of reflection on the thinking of what
human life might otherwise be like, beyond the history that had (so far) obtained. The sudden
emergence of a material past within the present, removed any abstraction from a thinking of it,
and made the past an immanent philosophical problem of the present. The issue of the
philosophical problem of materiality, and its role in the contemplative, transformative gaze, will
be returned to.
Karl Löwith makes the critical differentiation between fate and divine providence in 188 The extent to which a past met on its own terms still stood to affect the present is the basis for discussion in Chapter
Three. 189 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Penguin Books, 1939), 24-34. 190 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History,” 42. The ‘blasting of the monad’ is, of course, a reference to
the passage in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” thesis XVII. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in Selected Writings: Volume Four, 1938-1940. Ed. Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 396.
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Meaning in History.191 Providence, as Löwith remarks, is used by Vico as the ‘method’ of the
New Science, in which the lawful happenings of history are made manifest. “What distinguishes
the belief in providence from that in fate or chance,” writes Löwith, “…is that divine providence
uses for the attainment of its universal ends the free, though corrupted, will of man. The doctrine
of fate ignores the dialectic between providential necessity and the freedom of will…”.192,193
This must not, Löwith swiftly reminds the reader, allow us to read in Vico (as Croce does), “..the
absolutely un-Vician conclusion that man is the god of history, creating his world by his free
activity.”194 Divine providence, on the contrary, is a manifestation of the human vocation to
move beyond ‘bare life’ despite a common tendency to fall back into sin and bestial customs.195
Vico writes:
In providing for this property (our social nature) God has so ordained and disposed human
affairs that man, having fallen from complete justice by original sin, and while intending
almost always to do something quite different and contrary – so that for private utility they
would live alone like wild beasts – have been led by this same utility and along the aforesaid
different and contrary paths to live like men in justice and to keep themselves in society and
191 Löwith, Meaning in History. 192 Löwith, Meaning in History, 124. 193 There exists a correlation between fate and nature in Kant, and then Hegel. Kant, in the Third Critique understands
Nature as necessarily absent of contingency. Nature is that which could not be otherwise. Humanity, that is our negotiation with nature, and our vocation to be something other than natural beings, is marked by contingency. The Kantian moral kingdom – and thus our vocation as moral beings – exists within a state of negotiation between animal necessity and that which could be otherwise. The inner workings of fate in Greek myth, as necessarily that which unavoidably befalls human life, exposes the function of fate as a manifestation of a natural order that can never be fully outrun, in spite of challenges to it by humanity. The challenge to fate, embodied in the Promethean story, constitutes a challenge to necessity, and thus the natural origins of human life. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), section 45, ‘Beautiful Art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature’. Hegel’s preliminary discussions of knowledge in his Encyclopaedia Logic acknowledges the critical importance of the relation between knowledge and the Fall. Hegel recognises that humanity’s vocation as manifestations of divinity was only made possible through the primary disobeying of God’s demand that Adam and Eve should not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The flourishing of divinity within humanity was only possible through the challenge to the necessary state of its conditions. To live within the forces of fate is to live without the realisation of that which makes us uniquely human, rather than mere creatures. To some extent, Vico’s notion of divine providence anticipates these later, more sophisticated philosophical ontologies, that see the critical essence of human life as being built around a negotiation with that which could not be otherwise (representing our natural origins) and our vocation as autonomous beings. Is this case autonomy is marked by the entrance of contingency in the realm of necessity. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, CA: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 63-65.
194 Löwith, Meaning in History, 124-125. 195 Where fate implies a subjugation, providence implies an uncovering or discovery. Horkheimer argues that that
notion of providence etymologically has its root in divinari, that is to uncover what is hidden. See Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 66. The drive behind Vico's implementation of a science of history lies in his desire to uncover the workings of divine providence, namely God's will, that materialises and manifests itself in the world of men. The logic of fate, then, is stripped of its inherent subjugation, in favour of a man's destiny, in which humanity’s free will, though operating within providence, is free of the terrible ambiguity of fate or chance. What differentiates Vico from the historical constellation under which he worked was his insistence on the insights that could be gained from understanding the past and its relics as critical to that development.
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thus to observe their social nature.196
It is a further manifestation of divine providence, Vico writes later, that logos overcomes mûthos.
Logos, which Vico traces through the Latin word fabula (fable), and subsequent favella (old
Italian for ‘speech’), is opposed to mûthos, from which Latin derived mutus (mute).197 Vico’s
idea of providence, the grounding logic of his science, also clarifies Benjamin’s hope for a
theological understanding of historical time as rendering vocal what once had been mute. It is
worth reiterating a key question: what might the articulation of a long silent possibility offer for
the present?
Joseph Mali writes, taking as his point of departure Horkheimer’s argument that Vico’s
idea of providence was thoroughly modern: “...even though Vico certainly believed in the
providential agency in the world, he perceived and described its actions in immanent, rather than
transcendental terms, working, as it were, not so much on men as through men”.198 This is not
Croce’s secular reading of Vico, from which Löwith rightly warns us away. Rather, it is Vico’s
acknowledgement that it was human life, and human institutions (mediated through the higher
powers of God) that would eventually come to confront the mythic (and thus fateful) origins of
human life. Logos (speech) to Vico was the ultimate manifestation of God’s will on Earth.
Speech sought a confrontation with the mute terror at Jupiter’s wrath in which human life began,
in order to realise humanity’s autonomy – a reflection of divinity. It is precisely our negotiation
with the necessity of nature that marks the entrance of the realm of contingency as the human
realm (that is, it being possible to be otherwise), that defines collective notions of civil
humanity.199 Collingwood touches on this when he writes, “Man occupies an ambiguous
position. He stands with one foot in nature and one in history.”200 The implication is, of course,
that historical life, in being the uniquely human reception of their own lives, is the primary
(perhaps only) differentiation between that, and the necessity of nature.
Cicero’s Servant Girl 196 Löwith, Meaning in History, 126 (his translation). Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 75/New Science, 2. 197 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 268/New Science, 157. The connection between the subjugation before fate (that is the
authority of myth) and silence would later be explored by Benjamin. See Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”. Benjamin’s discussion of the mute Niobe will be returned to in the conclusion of this thesis.
198 Joesph Mali, “Retrospective Prophets: Vico, Benjamin, and other German Mythologists,” Clio Vol. 26, no. 4 (1997): 439.
199 These are explicitly Kantian positions, especially the notion that the moral law (that which marks our humanity) is marked by contingency. It is in our vocation to act morally (that nevertheless does not ensure our morality) that encapsulates our frailty, and fallibility as creatures negotiating both our origins, and what we might be. Where fate embodies the necessity of nature, free human life is marked by there being the possibility of it being otherwise. Our striving to be moral, constitutes the centre of human morality. See footnote 193.
200 W. Jan van der Dussen, "Collingwood and the Idea of Progress," History and Theory 29, no. 4 (1990): 27
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A fundamental differentiation that must be made, of course, is the difference between
Vico’s philosophy, and its subsequent reception. The extent to which the Marxist influence on
many of Germany’s early twentieth-century thinkers was tempered by a Vichean materialism is
explicitly outlined by Horkheimer. Although recognising the popular proto-Hegelian vision of
Vico’s work, he differentiates the two thinkers by noting a fundamental divergence in their
respective points of departure. Vico's work, he writes, “..is much more empirical and less
speculative than the constructions of the great idealists thinkers whose aim it was to demonstrate
the presence of the divine in this world.”201 Further, Joseph Mali sees critical relation between
Vico and the later work of Benjamin, especially in the critical relation between theology and
historical time. Benjamin's hope for enlightenment departed from the Vichean idea that the past
contained hidden, unrealised moments of human life, the successful rescuing of which, offered
up certain hopes and potentialities for the present.202 Mali is right to accentuate Benjamin's
fondness for Friedrich Schlegal’s definition of the historian as the ‘retrospective prophet’.203 It is
the radicalisation of this image of prophecy that imbues Benjamin’s Angel of History. The
historian writes Mali, quoting Benjamin:
“...turns his back on his own time,” away from the utopian visions of the future back into the
mythical revisions of the past, so as to light up “at the sight of the mountain tops of earlier
human races receding ever more deeply into the past” whose sites of memory, like Paradise,
where human beings, “people we could have talked to, women who could have given
themselves to us,” had once sought amelioration and eventual redemption of the human
predicament. And though their hopes and dreams have been falsified by the terrible events
of history, they must still be pursued: “our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with
the image of redemption...Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed
with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.204
A true understanding of the other potentialities of the present necessitates the recognition of the
forces at play in the past of historical time, not merely in the annals of history familiar to us, but
also in the older, murkier parts of human life, that represent both humanity's beginnings and
foundations. Vico’s claim that “...all the histories of the gentiles have their beginnings in fables,
which were the first histories of the nations...” locates what Horkheimer considered his great
201 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 67. 202 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 440. 203 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 447. 204 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 448.
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‘discovery’.205 Myth, rather than operating as a conscious deception controlled by the priestly
classes, as the thinkers of the Enlightenment would claim, functions in Vico’s history as all too
human reflections of a social reality that, although long since gone, continue to linger in the
hallows of human history and, thus, human thought.206 He writes:
Truth is sifted from falsehood in everything that has been preserved for us through long
centuries by those vulgar traditions which, since they have been preserved for so long a time
and by entire peoples, must have had a public ground of truth. The great fragments of
antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered, shed
great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored.207
The extent to which Vico’s work is caught up in the manifestation of his legacy is not
immediately clear. Yet, the differentiation must be made. The anthropological, material basis of
Vico’s logic of providence, mingled with Marxist-Hegelian dialectics, clearly made a large
impact on certain thinkers of the twentieth century who sought to save modernity from a state of
crisis. The affinity with Vico’s project in Collingwood’s work locates him as one such thinker (a
group he is not often affiliated with). However, the similarities of Collingwood’s wider concerns
of philosophy with some of the critics of modernity, mark the (nearly) hidden influences of
Vichean philosophy in modern intellectual history. Insofar as this is true, a rescuing of Vico’s
legacy is in itself a rescuing of a tradition of the humanities which might, had things been
different, have hugely changed the history of the philosophy of history in the last three hundred
years. Even allowing for Descartes’ oft cited criticism that anyone concerned with the past can
expect to know as much as Cicero’s servant girl, Vico was ultimately concerned with what might
come about should the servant girl, after all, have something to say.208
The ambivalence of Collingwood’s position is simplified to some extent by his legacy to a
large extent being built up from The Idea of History, a posthumous publication instigated by his
executors.209 It is this text, as well as his Principles of Art, which are in large part responsible for
205 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 71. 206 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 434 -438 207 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 235-236/New Science, 131. 208 Berlin, Vico and Herder, 18. 209 It is telling that, following the death of T. M. Knox – the man entrusted with Collingwood’s legacy – a great deal of
Collingwood’s writing emerged that did not immediately fit comfortably with works such as The Idea of History. W. Jan van der Dussen describes how some of Collingwood’s sub titles within The Idea of History went from, “Re-enactment of past experience the essence of history”, and “Progress”, to “History as re-enactment of past experience”, and “Progress as created by historical thinking.” van der Dussen, “Collingwood and the Idea of Progress,” 23.
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his reading as an Idealist in the vein of Croce and, perhaps, Hegel.210 That Collingwood shared
particular facets of these thinkers’ arguments is incontestable. His notions surrounding the
reproducibility of past thought in the present – which he explicitly calls Spirit in The Idea of
History – should be read in conjunction with Hegel’s Idea in particular. However, the collection
of his essays published after the death of T. Knox, the primary caretaker of Collingwood’s
legacy, reveals a far more nuanced, indeed ambiguous, philosophy. It reveals hidden elements in
his famous dialectical logic of history; the so-called ‘logic of question and answer’, whereby a
proposition can only be judged as true not based on semantic/logical principles but through a
form of dialectical historical reception, in which a statement is judged according to the question
it was deemed to be an answer to. Commonly understood as a methodology of his peculiar brand
of ‘British Idealism’ (as his detractors would have called it), a manifestation of Spirit’s self
recognition and unwinding, the logic of question and answer, read in conjunction with
Collingwood’s work on fairy tales in particular, reveals a philosophical anthropology also at play
in his work. This reveals the critical connection between Collingwood’s dual careers in
philosophy and archaeology as fundamentally connected to his wider project. Such an
anthropology considered the anthropological constant not in terms of a human essence, but as a
result of external forces and ruptures. In his essay ‘Fairy Tales’, Collingwood addresses the
conditions under which historical evidence can be sought out and understood. “For a long time”,
he writes,
…it seemed impossible to use anything effectively as historical evidence, except written
documents attesting the occurrence of certain events. During the nineteenth century,
archaeologists learnt to use very ancient implements as evidence for periods of history
which have left no written memorials.211
An anthropology that understood human life as grasping at pre-conceptual fears that emerged,
not as a result of, but synonymously with human life, was the basis for Collingwood’s
understanding of the legitimacy of older magic and ritual as merely older responses to that same
ambiguity of nature.212
Collingwood sees a certain similarity in the study of fairy tales — by which he means, 210 See Collingwood’s The Idea of History but also The Principles of Art. This is also discussed by van der Dussen in
“Collingwood and the Idea of Progress.” 211 R. G. Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” in The Philosophy of Enchantment, ed. David Boucher, Wendy James, Philip
Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005),115. 212 This is explicitly Blumenberg’s anthropology and, while perhaps not entirely fair to locate Collingwood’s in the
same place, the spirit of their work has a commonality in Vico’s notion of the ‘fallen being’, perhaps a secularised rendition of an ultimately theological understanding of human life.
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“...subject matter consist(ing) in a general way of elements arising out of the idea of magic” —
insofar as their ancient origins, lack of defined authorship and oral transmission, make for
difficult but telling sources.213 He goes on,
The methods to be used in this kind of excavation will resemble those used by the
archaeologists, differing only in that they are here applied, not to the relics of what is called
material civilisation, such as pots and knives, but to the relics of custom and belief.214
The rescue of the past’s voices through the serious study of fairy tales and myths — in other
words the rescue of older forms of logos (logos itself representing an authoritative, but
explanatory, speech act that sought to subdue earlier anxieties) — offers up insights reflecting
older forms of the human relation to reality compared to those who live in the present. The
ancient laws of enchantment, Collingwood argues, were taken no less seriously than modern man
takes the laws of natural science.215 By realising this, the historian who dares to journey deep
into the utter blackness of pre-history or the murkiness of the so-called ‘dark ages’, uncovers
magic as it existed when its laws were respected and obeyed, and in so doing uncovers an
entirely alien relation between man and world.216 Magic, Collingwood claims, did not ‘describe
the world’ in lacking for a rational description, as Enlightenment narratives insist, but was
intrinsic to the world’s manifestation; the making thinkable what was chaotically unthinkable. To
dismiss the actions of the shaman and the laws of the magic circle, as Adorno reminds us, is the
equivalent of dismissing the scientist and his work. It is not that the world without the security of
heliocentrism is unrecognisable, it is that it is unfathomable, unreachable — in short,
unthinkable. To understand the modalities of thought that function within magic, or myth, is to
understand the materiality of past realities as they emerged in their respective and unique
expressions of joys, hopes, fears and terrors — in Benjaminian terms, to acknowledge the past’s
‘claim’ on the present.217 Such a claim makes clear the extent to which the past’s ghosts still
haunt modernity; the hidden elements of past magics made manifest in the present through such
a historical study. These myths and enchantments are familiar to us, as Collingwood writes, 213 Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” 115. 214 Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” 116. 215 In this context, Collingwood’s idea should be taken again in conjunction with Blumenberg’s notion that the
theological and later secular manifestations of life constituted different answers to the same, ancient, pressing questions. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
216 Collingwood dismisses the absurdity of rationality’s hope of extinguishing magic with appeal to experience by appealing to the idea that magic ritual did not ‘explain’ the world in some rudimentary way, for lack of science, but was the manifestation of reality itself. “To suggest that ‘experience’ might teach my hypothetical savages that some events are not due to magic is like suggesting that experience might teach a civilized people that there are not twelve inches in a foot and thus cause them to adopt the metric system.” Collingwood, “Religion and Natural Science in Primitive Society,” An Essay on Metaphysics, 194.
217 The ‘claim’ on the present by the past comes from Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” thesis II, 390.
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“...something which we habitually do, something which plays a part in our social and personal
life, not as a mere survival of savagery, but as an essential feature of civilisation.” 218
Collingwood’s philosophy (which articulates a sensitivity to humanity’s ‘savage beginnings’, but
also those forms of savagery that reside still within modern life; dangerous only because they go
unrecognised under the guise of historical progress) should be understood in terms of Vico’s
notion of poetic beginnings as being lawless in terms of before the law. Collingwood’s notion of
‘savagery’, in other words, names a rhapsodical, poetic state of human life, where the rule of
magic rather than the law, dictated human life. The rhapsodical beginnings of human life — its
lawlessness — suggest a shared belief by Collingwood and Vico in the inherent frailty of human
life, and that the role of philosophy was to “raise and support us as frail and fallen beings”.219
The understanding of human life as frail, when philosophically driven, seeks out an alleviation of
that frailty by means of the search for another understanding of human life.
Both Vico and Collingwood are, of course, creatures of different times, and different
historical forces. To see a similar spirit of endeavour in the philosophy of the two is not to make
the ahistorical claim (and indeed the banal one) that their projects are the same. And yet,
Collingwood’s affinity with the materialist core of Vico’s work, the past constituting a
recognition of a certain constancy to human life’s struggle in spite of its particular historicity,
marks him as belonging to a particular tradition within his own time. The notion of a philosophy
of the past as being critical to a task to be performed in the present does not derive from Vico
directly, and yet it is Vichean. The vast difference between this and Croce’s logic of
eschatological liberation is particularly clear here. The concern for the present as a moment of
crisis and illegitimacy, for Collingwood, but also for thinkers like Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno
etc., stems from a fear of what resides unseen in any notion of completion of fulfilment in
enlightenment. These are not Romantic dismissals of enlightenment – a case of the Sirens’
victory over Odysseus – but a fear of what Horkheimer and Adorno saw as the unseen dialectics
of enlightenment, which threatened to overcome the original hopes and dreams of Enlightenment
thinking (perhaps best articulated in Kant) through the uncritical acceptance of, not only a
218 Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” 129 219 Here the affinity between Vico and Collingwood is very clear. Maier claims that, unlike Horkheimer, who saw in
reason older modalities of irrationality, for Vico, “…it was precisely the non-rational character of myth that enabled it to perform an essential function for the society…and the personality. It would never be entirely overcome.” See Maier, “Vico and Critical Theory,” 854. These are precisely Collingwood’s opinions; see footnote 42 regarding his ideas surrounding the necessity of magic in ritual in any healthy society. It was not that magic was irrational, but operated outside rationality’s realm. This was a rescuing of the original ideas surrounding logos, the spoken word, and the warding off of the ambivalence of nature. It must be noted briefly, the extent to which this categorization of Horkheimer is a fair one is another matter entirely. There is a strong case to be made in the claim the Horkheimer and indeed Adorno put forward a very similar argument in their notions surrounding the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ in the book of the same name.
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naturalised chronology of historical ‘progress’, but also the acceptance of the dogma that past
superstitions had been defeated. Collingwood too was especially cautious of any pervading sense
of completeness or finality in accounts of enlightenment which for him, by definition, must
remain unfinished works.220 This marks Collingwood as a particular kind of anti-revolutionary.
Bates writes that Collingwood considered that “…rejecting outright whatever inspired the old
orders, and inventing a new one altogether, would continue this repression, leading to disastrous,
even violent results.” This was symptomatic of Collingwood’s dialectical logic, best expressed in
his An Essay on Philosophical Method, which hoped new forms of thought would “cut through
contradiction while preserving previous attempts to confront the crisis.” 221 The endless
confrontation, marked by a preservation of previous confrontations with the striving for human
life that befit the human vocation, was not a matter of upheaval and enlightened renewal, but a
case of the philosophical recognition of the inherent necessity of that very negotiation. This in
itself, for Collingwood, was the continuance of the genuine enlightenment tradition.222
The Revisitation of the Sirens
Rather than myth and rationality being accounted for in contradistinctive terms, they
emerge as historically-grounded complementary forms of consciousness that signify humanity’s
history of its grappling with the problem of primeval anxieties or, as Mali writes, “...in which the
human consciousness accounts for its experience in different degrees of self awareness.”223 A
sensitivity to the elements within modern thought susceptible to the Sirens’ songs (that is, the
lure of natural, mere life) is not merely to recognise the remnant of our creatureliness, ‘the
savage within us’ as Collingwood would have ironically put it, but also to recognise the extent to
which our modern world still relies on some of these ancient structures of thinking. To lose sight
of the mythic shapes and drives of our beginnings, so argued Joyce, is to lose any possibility of
220 See in particular his essays “The Present Need of a Philosophy”, and “Fascism and Nazism”, as well as the final
chapter of his autobiography, where he outlines the political dangers that arise out of breakdowns in philosophical discourse. See Essays in Political Philosophy, 166-170 and 187-196, and Autobiography, 100-112.
221 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History,” 50. See also Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. See in particular “The Scale of Forms,” 54-61.
222 The endless negotiation with older forms of human thought (and thus life) as a Vichean idea finds its surprising illumination in James Joyce's characters Stephen and Bloom who, in Joyce's Ulysses, recognise the image of the sirens as 'enemies of reason' as a historically contingent prejudice, and indeed a form of superstition in itself. The extent to which Joyce, a scholar of Vico, attempted to integrate a Vichean ‘science’ within his fiction is hotly contested. His attempt within Ulysses, a modern rendition of the journeys of Odysseus, to uncover lost perspectives in ancient myths, is in fact the attempt to discover the extent to which a modern rendition of the ancient tale would uncover the elements still embedded (through metaphor, allegory and stories) in the institutions of his own time. Stephen and Bloom’s recognition that Odysseus' struggle with the sirens is a historical reflection of primeval logos' terror of its mythic origins (rather than a transcendental account of logos overcoming mythos) is Vichean in its origin. See James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 618.
223 Joseph Mali, “Mythology and Counter History: The New Critical Art of Vico and Joyce,” in Vico and Joyce, 41.
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grounding or understanding ourselves in the present. This is the critical point: the deeper
meaning and symbolism in myth — that which resonates in the broadest human terms — still
exists in modern consciousness and cultural systems, however, it goes unrecognised given the
rhetoric of philosophical enlightenment and historical progress. This is precisely why
Collingwood (and indeed Vico) cannot be understood as Romantic in their rejection of
enlightenment as a project, or indeed as a historical location. Neither recognise myth as
uncovering ancient truth, or timelessly relevant to human interests. On the contrary, Vico’s, and
subsequently Collingwood’s, point of departure is unambiguously on the side of the Aristotelian
project, and yet, unlike Aristotle, they recognised mûthos and logos as historically contingent
modalities of thinking – and thus distancing – from earlier ambiguous terrors. If philosophy’s
task, in the broadest possible sense, is the critical penetration of forces that detract from what
Kant would consider our vocation to be autonomous, moral beings, than the philosophical task
must be sensitive to those very forces which still exist within the subterranean foundations of our
present. A historico-philosophical reception of myth — that is, the history of our collective
evolving consciousness — allows for the basis upon which the philosophical task can proceed.
The philosopher-historian, like Odysseus, listens to the songs of the Sirens, and in so doing
recognises their allure as calling to something that remains deep inside him, long forgotten.224
However, unlike Odysseus, the philosopher need not be threatened. A true, post-
Enlightenment account of logos must understand the mythic origins of itself and, in so doing,
recognise the critical importance of past accounts of logos in historical life, and consequently in
conceptions of the present. Vico considered the task of the historian to “...save the logos of
ancient myth and make it significant for the modern mind.”225 Ulysses’ Stephen and Bloom’s
insights into the history of our fear of the Sirens is neither a longing for the ancient truths of their
song, nor a dismissal of the possibilities of ever outrunning them, but merely an
acknowledgement that the logic of the metaphor exposes the origins of logos in mûthos (and
indeed the fact that human history has at all times been marked by a negotiation with that
fear).226 Joyce sees such a historical acknowledgement of fate as articulating a space in which its
224 The implications of the need for the crew to stuff their ears with wax adds a further ambivalence. In the critique of
Horkheimer and Adorno, this is generally understood as a criticism of the means by which modern, industrial life emerged – namely in the repression and control of the working class. However another reading of this argument suggests that Horkheimer and Adorno are fully aware of the historical necessity of the rise of the bourgeoisie, for the possibilities of enlightenment to emerge. Without the wax, Odysseus and his men would have been broken on the rocks, and yet the danger emerges at the satisfaction at this state of affairs. It is not, in that sense, a criticism of enlightenment but, rather, a warning of the forms of barbarism that can re-emerge within the alienation of modern, industrialised life. That is, the barbarism that emerges in the satisfaction of completion, or the failure to recognise enlightenment as an unfinished project.
225 Joseph Mali, “Mythology and Counter History,” 35. 226 Joyce, Ulysses, 618.
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blows cannot fall. To fear the sirens is to still fear the creaturely beginnings of that which could
not be otherwise, and thus to live according to fate. Any project of enlightenment that functions
with such a fear internal to it cannot by definition be enlightened. Philosophy’s grasping at a
thinking about thinking must acknowledge the different modalities of thought that emerged as
responses to the first ambiguous terrors that marked human life.
The materiality of Vico’s philosophy not only renders the association with Collingwood in
a clearer light, but also shows the extent to which conceptions of materiality affected the
philosophers of the twentieth century, in their criticisms of modernity. Vico’s philosophical
project, in being neither idealist nor empirical, resides on difficult ground. The philosophical
task, in its necessary correlation to a thinking of how human life is to be thought in relation to
the present in which it exists, deals with the material presence of thought in any given moment.
Pure empiricism, which would reduce the concerns of philosophy merely to the sensuous, cannot
account for the conditions that provide the grounds for the intuitability of the world. One of the
foundations of the Vichean/Collingwoodian concern for materiality is that behind the ‘empirical’
manifestations of human thinking lies the countless inner lives of every human being. It is the
ambivalence between the relation of the material relics of human institutions, and the inner lives
that gave rise to them (coupled with their historical distance) that provides a groundwork for
philosophical inquiry. Idealism, on the other hand, despite its insights into the manner in which
the world is made manifest and intuitable through human thought, cannot give a philosophical
account (beyond the passage and movement of Spirit) of the voices of the past. In particular,
idealism cannot account for the claim the voices of the past continue to have on the present and
the subsequent philosophical task that takes place within that present. A thinking of the
philosophical importance of materiality, and indeed of the materiality of philosophy, marks
Vico’s project.
A differentiation, at this point, must be made. Vico’s insights into the philosophical
importance of the revealed material realities of past lives within the myths that survived must be
placed within their own historical context. Vico’s project, though widely ignored during his life,
legitimised the voices of the past. History became a concern, not merely of a dead past, but the
present in which it is thought. Hence, the subsequent inextricable connection between history
and philosophy. Those who worked under Vico’s legacy – perhaps hidden amongst the more
spectacular projects of Hegel and Marx – though, fully embarked on the philosophical
implications of the legitimacy of the past. Collingwood’s idealism, which is tempered via his
serious philosophical concerns for material relics of the past, is once such voice. As unlikely as a
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correlation between thinkers as diverse as Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer and Collingwood
might be (the affinity of the latter two will take up the fourth chapter) all of them unambiguously
relate the role of the historical task (and its relation to the philosophical) to a rescuing of the past
on its own terms (that is, divorced from the naturalisation of chronological time embedded in the
historical notion of progress) for the sake of the present. This is the critical difference between
the reception of his legacy, that is, philosophical works inspired by Vico, and the work of Vico
himself. Vico saw the serious (that is philosophical) implications for the study of myth when
understood as genuine, historical reflections of material human life, that is otherwise entirely
lost. In being lost, they were unthinkable. Vico’s defence of the study of myth as historically
oriented made the deep past thinkable. Those who worked within his legacy, on the other hand,
grappled with what making the material realities of past humanity thinkable once again meant
for the present in which it was thought.
Vico was perhaps one of the first to see an element of nostalgia within the Homeric telling
of the blinding of the Cyclops. He ridicules the Homeric romanticism for a long-gone heroic age.
And yet his mockery (that is, laughing at the past’s ghosts), the action of which belongs to its
own history, uncovers a materiality of the past that had been entirely forgotten. What might a
collective remembering of the past look like, wondered Collingwood et al. Such a remembering
– a remembering that gave force to the philosophical task that sought a new articulation of
human life – did not seek to ‘bring back’ the past (for indeed, how could that be done?), but to
reconceptualise the remnants that remained within the material institutions of the present. Such a
reconceptualisation, in reviving the pasts which still ‘had a stake’ in the present, involved the
endless negotiation with them. The reception of and negotiation with past material voices within
the present marks the negotiation with certain moral notions pertaining to what other forms of
human life might look like.227 Insofar as this was the philosophical task, which takes place
infinitely within a present which, by definition, never ends, the materialism of history (Vico’s
major insight) made an enormous claim on what the role of the philosophical task was to be in
the modern era. Furthermore, the logic of divine providence allowed history to become manifest
through autonomous human action which, although modulated by God, became historical
precisely in its recognition as uniquely human. Historical life, in other words, became a
genuinely philosophical topos. The discovery of the contemplative gaze in Herodotus, and its
rediscovery or rescuing by Vico, allowed for the question of the transition of the contemplative
gaze on our past to become a transformative one. The philosophical question of the past became 227 Kant’s work is once again relevant here. As he writes in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, it is with the sublime
that humanity becomes aware of its vocation as moral beings. The negotiation with that which may not be moral marks our task as humans.
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a critical question for the present, and what it might otherwise be like. The opening up of the
question of the extent of Vico’s influence on a certain tradition of twentieth-century philosophy,
as this chapter did, necessitates a closer critique of that very tradition. Via a confrontation
between Collingwood and Siegfried Kracauer, the next chapter will show how the historico-
philosophical reception of the past ultimately hoped for an entirely new way of understanding
the relation of human life to historical time.
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Chapter Three:
The Interruption of History and the Present’s Historical Task:
Kracauer as Reader of Collingwood and the Transformative
Gaze.228
Like ghosts they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. In their simple and passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes to say and we can never guess.229
Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
How is the present, in its relation to historical time, to be understood? This is a philosophical
topos in itself. The existence of the present as the culmination of a flowing, naturalised
chronological time strips it of meaning. The question is, then, what does it mean to write
philosophically about the present, given that, as Andrew Benjamin writes, the fact that the present
will define the nature of the philosophical task must imply that the philosophical task, will define
“the construal of the present”?230 This chapter will outline the extent to which the historico-
philosophical criticisms of modernity that emerged in the early years of the twentieth century, in
this case as articulated by Siegfried Kracauer and Collingwood, relied on the philosophical
possibilities that were opened up by thinkers like Vico and Herodotus, wherein history (the
reception of human affairs) is indistinguishable from historical (that is distinctly human) life. The
Herodotean notion of history being critical to the success of the polis, a case of the engagement, and
confrontation with fate, in the name of the articulation of another potentiality, was an important idea
for the critics of modernity. Coupled with the Vichean insistence that the natural world cannot
illuminate the laws of divine providence, which although the work of God, ultimately allows human
life a domain which is distinctly theirs (and from which all human institutions emerge) locates the
modern criticisms of the present as simply the latest perspective in a long, difficult, history.
228 This chapter will appear slightly amended in Critical Horizons, forthcoming 2016. 229 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (London: Penguin, 1954), 773. 230 Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Present Hope: Philosophy,
Architecture, Judaism (Oxon: Routledge, 1997), 26-27.
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Kracauer’s reading of the work of Collingwood illuminates the crisis point in the relationship
between philosophy, history, and conceptions of the present; that is, how it (the present) is thought.
His attempt to broach a new philosophy of historical time, with Proust and Burckhardt elevated to
his historiographical champions, took the philosophical desire radically to re-imagine the present as
its point of departure; one in which it is possible and appropriate both to attempt a new articulation
of human life, and to have a philosophy in which to reshape the present in which it is articulated.
The use of the Orphean metaphor to dismiss what Kracauer considers Collingwood’s vulgar
present-centric philosophy of history is instructive insofar as the changing interpretations of the
Orphean myth, throughout its historical reception, mirrors that of the ambiguity in the historical
relationship between history and the philosophical conception of the present. The transition of
Orpheus’s journey from tragedy to the banality of the lieto fine — the happy ending imposed on the
myth during the Baroque period, in which Orpheus would succeed in recovering Eurydice from the
underworld — highlights (through its obscurification) the ambiguity of the historical project’s
relation to its philosophical counterpart. This history or Orphean metaphor illuminates a crisis: the
question of whether history’s philosophical importance lies in history’s tragedy — that is, its
ultimate futility — or, in the banality of its possibilities, is never entirely reconciled by Kracauer.
The impossibility of Orpheus remaining in the realm of the dead illuminates the crisis point in the
historical task. Just as Eurydice can never return to the land of the living, the past can never be
entirely rescued, necessitating a logic of tragedy within history itself. As the previous chapters have
explored, the potentiality of this modern insight is grounded upon the conditions of possibility in
which Vico wrote.
The Orphean futility of the historical project, however, does not leave the present with
nothing. Rather, it creates an urgent need to re-conceptualise the historical ruins that we succeed in
recovering. The space that opens, after such a re-conceptualisation, allows for a place in which a
form of historically-driven philosophical anthropology allows for a thinking of human life.231 This
chapter will argue that Collingwood shared Kracauer’s hopes of rescue, and grounded his project
within a similar philosophical project of ‘humanity’. He relates the historical task unambiguously to
the role of the present, but also writes with an understanding of the underlying tragedy of history as
being crucial to the formulation of the philosophical task in the present, and the subsequent implied
necessity, of the present’s forces shaping of the role of the philosophical task. One of the central
aims of this chapter is to show that Kracauer’s reading of Collingwood resonates with a surprising
urgency, not simply because it is mistaken, but also because Orpheus’ journey, which Kracauer 231 Such an anthropology is not, as previously stated, an ‘essence’ of human life, but a characteristic of historical life
which, in all its infinite variations, ultimately appears to be the manifestation of the drive to respond to questions that defy answering.
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intended to use to render Collingwood’s position unimportant, illuminates precisely why
Collingwood shared Kracauer’s historico-philosophical hopes, indeed perhaps understood the stakes
better. It also locates Collingwood within the tradition that sought a salvation for modernity (in the
face of the crisis of fascism) through a philosophico-historical reception of the past. There is a sense
in which Collingwood would seem more attuned to the Orphean myth, as well as its history: happy
ending or tragedy, with or without Eurydice, Orpheus cannot remain in the underworld. Kracauer’s
insistence that the past must not be approached on the present’s terms, forgets that history by
definition must take place in a present in which the past is contemplated. For Collingwood and
Kracauer, the historical task, in being linked with the philosophical, must embody some hope for
the present, but also understands the present as a locus of hope. Collingwood, however, seems to
understand the ambivalence at the heart of the relationship between the past and the present in
which history is done. The Orphean journey, fate dictates, demands a return.
The Oprhean Journey
“Orpheus descended into Tartarus to fetch back the beloved who had died from the bite of a
serpent. His plaintive music, as Ovid writes, ‘so far soothed the savage heart of Hades that he won
leave to restore Eurydice to the upper world.’”232 The soothing nature of Orpheus’s music is
perhaps the best model by which Kracauer’s idea of historical inquiry can be explained. The
uncovering of the past requires both a soft tread, and a gentle disposition; a wandering through the
past, with no other object other than to see what one might find. Orpheus is granted entry to the
underworld to rescue his beloved, on the strict condition that he will not look back at Eurydice until
they are both under sunlight once again. Orpheus, overcome by the oppressive silence, is unable to
resist a furtive glance back, and so loses his love forever. Kracauer elaborates: “Like Orpheus, the
historian must descend into the nether world to bring the dead back to life. How far will they follow
his allurements and evocations?... And what happens to the Pied Piper himself on his way down and
up? Consider that his journey is not a return trip.”233
As Alan Itkin points out, despite his use of the Orphean analogy for the historical task,
Kracauer says “...very little about how historians ought to actually write their histories.”234 Of
course Kracauer did not intend History to be a historian’s guide – he writes at one point that the
historian’s task is simply to render material as impartially as possible – but an attempt to render
232 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Thing before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 79. 233 Kracauer, History, 79. 234 Alan Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer’s Underworlds of
History.” The Germanic Review 87, 2 (2012): 175-202 (176).
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comprehensible a form of historical reflection that might foster a new form of humanity. “There is”,
he writes, “a way of thinking and living which, if we could only follow it, would permit us to burn
through the causes and thus to dispose of them – a way which, for lack of a better word, or a word
at all, may be called humane.”235 This line, written in the introduction, is perhaps a little unclear. He
tries again on the final page, entitled, ‘In Lieu of Epilogue’. “Focus on the ‘genuine’ hidden in the
interstices between dogmatized beliefs of the world, thus establishing tradition of lost causes;
giving names to the hitherto unnamed.”236 It must not be forgotten that the crisis of dogma that
marked modernity was accompanied by the rise of fascism.
The influence of, and affinity with, Walter Benjamin’s attempt to outline a new philosophy of
historical time is clear here: Kracauer’s tradition of lost causes and what Benjamin would describe
as the entrance of the Messiah, both relating to a philosophical system that attempts to imbue the
present through a historical study with a genuine meaning.237 That the historian’s universe is, as
Kracauer writes, “of much the same stuff as our everyday world”, does not consign the historical
task to the mundane.238 Indeed, it points to the transcendent possibilities sketched out in his
introduction. The historian’s journey, if properly undertaken, has the radical potential to redefine
the collective notion of the present and what it is to think in now-time: how our present (that is, we
of the present) considers what it is to reflect upon the present and, in turn, how that changes what it
is to live in the present. The attempt to rescue the moments of genuine thought in the past, on their
own terms, before they are swept up in the canon of dogmatised belief is, for Kracauer, not only
possible but crucial for the present’s humanity. The Orphean journey seeks out the emancipation of
the present from the myth of progress, that which Benjamin calls the “filling up of empty,
homogenous time.”239 Indeed, it is the reconciling of both chronological time and historical time
that defines much of Kracauer’s philosophico-historical task. The recognition of chronological time,
both its necessity and its banality, is crucial to the understanding of the historical task as a form of
remembering.240 Kracauer envisions, following the Orphean metaphor, a sort of anteroom, and what
Itkin appropriately calls a form of “historical memory space.”241 In wandering through the historical
underworld, the historical traveller must not demand questions of it but, rather, respectfully listen to
what she might be told to allow the voices of the past to speak for themselves.242 Proust is here
elevated to the historical champion who, in disregarding chronological time as the prism from
235 Kracauer, History, 8 236 Ibid. 237 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389-399. 238 Kracauer, History, 46. 239 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 396. 240 Kracauer, History, 151-52. 241 Kracauer, History, 195 and Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus”, 181. 242 Kracauer, History. 84-85.
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which to explore a life lived, attempts to recall his life from the perspective of the genuine
intersections of his life and, in so doing, occasionally stumbles upon moments of the sublime.243
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu shows, for Kracauer, that the past only gives itself up to
those who work hard and that, when it does emerge, the historian must give himself up to it, as it
emerges out of the depths of memory.244 The moment of the past’s emergence on its own terms is
when it can be explored, which, in itself, allows for a disconnection of the present from a notion of
progress. In the recognition of the countless pasts as preserving the genuine voice of humanity from
a tangible, material moment in historical time, the historical traveller’s conception of the present,
and her task in it is transformed. Although Kracauer’s understanding of the historical meeting of the
past on its own terms is suggestive of a form of historicism, his philosophical interest and debt to
the present, (and his explicit comparisons with Benjamin’s work) cannot be forgotten. He writes
with reference to Benjamin that “historical ideas”, “…quiver with connotations and meanings not
found in the material occasioning them.”245 Shadows can be seen of the latter’s conception of
‘messianic light’ that emerges in a ‘moment of danger’; Kracauer’s conception of the genuine,
hidden between the interstices of dogmatised historical narrative, is also clarified, and yet his
understanding of the historical return to the present remains ambiguous. 246 The historian’s
‘descent’, of course, resonates within the legacy of Vico’s conception of fantasia, wherein the
‘historical imagination’ seeks out the quivering potentialities of past legacies.
The post-Kantian hope to uncover the rational in history is sharply de-emphasised in the
tradition in which Kracauer is working, in the attempt to see history, as the constant attempt to
overcome the “traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue,” as Habermas put it.247
This response to the universal histories operates within the Kantian tradition which, despite its
recognition of history as process of nature, insists that the ontological question regarding other
possibilities of human life, resides outside any reduction of history to a process of nature — the
historical narrative becomes one of humanity’s struggle to overcome its animal origins. The Kantian
naturalisation of progress stands as the point of departure for Horkheimer and Adorno’s assumption
that the Enlightenment project failed from the beginning, in its failure to recognise the mythic
structures of its desire to consume myth.248 The eschatological framework of history, which reduces
243 See, for example Benjamin’s insistence that, “Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection,” in Walter Benjamin,
“On the Image of Proust,” Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part One, 1927-1930, ed. by Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 244.
244 See, for example, the passage at the railway station in Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, 694. 245 Kracauer, History, 98. 246 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391. 247 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 315. 248 Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum,
1944). See in particular Chapter One, ‘On the Concept of Enlightenment,’ 3-42.
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the chronology of naturalised rationality to a form of fatalistic subjugation must, by definition, look
to the past from the perspective of the present. Like Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’, it is an
unfolding disaster that renders the present coherent by embodying the logical culmination of human
disasters until that point. However, the present is not just the point of departure, but also the only
position from which the past can be understood. Although Orpheus too succumbs to the tragedy of
fatalistic subjugation, it is not before he challenges the very authority of the gods. In his attempt to
rescue the dead on their own ground, he challenges the notion that their voices are lost to us forever.
Two chapters in History, ‘Present Interest’ and ‘The Historian’s Journey’, set out to undo the
notions that historical enquiry must begin from the present’s perspective and that it must in some
sense, render the present coherent.
Kracauer is critical of Croce’s understanding of history as synonymous with the movement
toward liberty. Liberty was the subject of history, rather than its end — “the eternal creator of
history, and itself the subject of every history.”249 History, in being contemporary, was the present’s
consideration of its past self, which knows itself, as Collingwood wrote, “as so living.”250 Croce’s
desire to overthrow Hegelian universal history is hampered by his unwillingness to abandon the
Enlightenment project entirely, his notion of history as the dialectical recognition of liberty as the
precondition for historical insight, unable to exist free of a Hegelian eschatology. The concept of
‘live thought’ (past thought’s resonance in the present) was, as Kracauer argues, “...a sheer playing
with words in view of Croce’s idealistic desire to equate the total historical process with a
progressive movement, a movement toward ‘liberty’”. 251 In the outlining of the presentist
opposition, Croce and Collingwood are represented as though they were from the same school of
thought. As the previous chapter suggested, however, Collingwood’s approach and hopes are
distinctly more Vichean and, indeed, that fact alone goes someway to suggesting an affinity
between him and Kracauer that the latter certainly did not recognise. The reiteration of the
ambivalent relation between Collingwood’s philosophy and Croce’s idealism acts as a point of
departure to explore why Kracauer’s criticisms of Collingwood open a space in which the
similarities of their philosophies, as well as their shared hopes, become evident.
Orpheus’ playing, so soothing that Hades’ usual mistrust of the living entering the land of the
dead disappears (indeed, he “moved the bloodless spirits to tears”), reflects the gentle approach of
249 Benedetto Croce. History as the Story of Liberty. Trans. Sylvia Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949),
59. 250 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 227. 251 Kracauer, History, 159.
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Kracauer’s historian.252 A soft tread through the past is required so as not to startle the voices of the
past into retreat.253 Not so the ‘present interest’ historians who, so writes Kracauer, demand of the
past questions brought about by “...a deep concern for [the present’s] problems, sorrow and
objectives.”254 This is an explicit rejection of ‘methodology’ that Kracauer feared would allow the
tendencies of the natural sciences to creep into the humanist discipline. Kracauer opposes any study
of the past that is undertaken for any other reason than for its own sake. By way of explanation —
for what indeed could a study of the past for its own sake mean? — he emphasises the importance
of nineteenth-century historian Burckhardt and his use of the word nun, the German word for
‘now’.255 Kracauer argues that this word allows Burckhardt historical “loopholes” by which he can
“escape the tyranny of the chronological order of things into more timeless regions where he is free
to indulge in phenomenological descriptions...to shift the emphasis from the possible causes of past
events to their consequences for posterity, their effects on the wellbeing of the contemporaries.”256
The introduction of the concept of nun into the historical equation allows for the conditions through
which the historian comes to understand the implications of the historical contingencies as they
arose (or arise). Historical time is thus prevented from entering the prism of chronology, by which
later events – beyond nun, that is, the interests of the present – might arise to render that particular
event coherent to us. Burckhardt de-emphasises chronological periods in favour of what Kracauer
calls “a gentle pricking up of the ears, coupled with steady industry.”257 Not so Collingwood,
however, whose ideal historian, according to Kracauer, “...were he ever to prick up his ears, would
not hear anything, because all that comes to him from the past is drowned in the din of
contemporary noise.”258 Kracauer’s point of objection in this case is what he calls Collingwood’s
Baconian method of ‘question and answer’, an approach to historical enquiry that, as previously
discussed, sets out the questions that are to be asked of the past, before the journey begins. The past
cannot be put to the rack for its answers, Kracauer claims, without first quietly listening to what it
might have to say. “Need I repeat,” Kracauer demands, “...that [the historian’s] findings may
obstruct his original research designs and therefore determine him to alter the course of his
investigations?”259
Orpheus travels to the underworld for the sake of rescue. When he loses Eurydice for a second
time, he tries to cross the river Styx once again, but “...his pleas were in vain and the ferryman
252 Ovid, Metamorphoses. Trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 384. 253 Kracauer, History, 69. 254 Kracauer, History, 69. 255 Kracauer, History, 186. 256 Ibid. 257 Kracauer, History, 86. 258 Ibid. 259 Kracauer, History, 91.
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pushed him away from the bank”.260 Forlorn, Orpheus weeps bitterly on the riverbank, the loss
magnified by the proximity of the return home. The present-interest historian, moved by
contemporary factors, seeks out the past to render comprehensible his own historical perspective.
What, though, of the return to the present? “Consider that his journey is not simply a return trip,”
writes Kracauer. Orpheus is, through the tragedy of his journey, profoundly changed. Does the
historian also risk undergoing a transformation as a result of his hearing the voices of the dead?
Kracauer quotes Leo Strauss in his paper on Collingwood’s philosophy of history: “He embarks on
a journey whose end is hidden from him. He is not likely to return to the shores of his time as
exactly the same man who departed from them.”261 What, indeed, is the traveller to do if she returns
to the present not entirely belonging to it anymore? These are real dangers according to Kracauer,
dangers to which writers like Proust were sensitive, in his recognition that memories of the past can
surface at any time, and forever change the understanding of the correlation between the present –
the nun in which life is lived – and the chronological past to which it is necessarily connected.
Kracauer seeks to satiate the fears of the would-be traveller: “[The historian] is the son of at least
two times — his own and the time he is investigating. His mind is in a measure unlocalisable; it
perambulates without a fixed abode.”262 There is, then, much more at stake in the historical journey
for Kracauer. The present, to teeter on the verge of the banal, must be present, must encounter
Burckhardt’s nun. The Orphean rescue of the past, should it succeed, seeks to relieve the present of
the weight of the chronological past and the unending potential of the future. It can then find solace,
perhaps, in but one moment of time, which was in itself a ‘present’ at some point, as mutual
reflections of human life. Recall Proust, for whom, “history is no process at all but a hodge-podge
of kaleidoscopic changes — something like clouds that gather and disperse at random.”263
In his criticism of Collingwood, Kracauer explicitly takes as his point of departure the 1952
paper by Leo Strauss, entitled, ‘On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History.’264 Strauss is highly
critical of Collingwood’s conception of historical inquiry, which he considers a form of neo-
Idealism, the particular historical modalities of which are encumbered with the present’s reflections
and demands.265 Recall Strauss’ concern that the historian’s return may not be as straightforward as
260 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 385. 261 Leo Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History.” The Review of Metaphysics 5.4 (1952): 583. 262 Kracauer, History, 93. 263 Kracauer, History, 160. 264 Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History”. 265 For a discussion of Strauss’ reading of Collingwood, see Alessandra Fussi, “Leo Strauss on Collingwood:
Historicism, and the Greeks,” Idealistic Studies, Vol. 1 (2015), forthcoming. In this paper Fussi outlines Strauss’ contention that Collingwood is prevented from taking the past seriously because if his belief in historical progress. That Collingwood had such a faith, I counter, is an understandable mistake (given the nature of Collingwood’s project, and the goals of his literary executors), and yet it remains interesting that those who have most in common with his project – in particular the notion of taking the past seriously (and in spite of obvious differences and
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he suspects thinkers like Collingwood to believe. The price the historian pays, in meeting the past
on its own terms, is the ambiguity of the nature of her return. “[The historian’s] criticism.” he
writes, “...may very well amount to a criticism of present day thought from the point of view of the
thought of the past”.266 This criticism, however, is the cost. This is precisely what Collingwood
does not do according to Strauss. In his ‘presentist’ style, Collingwood leaves no room for the
past’s own concerns, failing to realise that “...the historian must provisionally subordinate his own
questions to the questions which the authors of his sources meant to answer.”267 In relation to his
study of Plato, Strauss charges Collingwood with demanding to know whether what Plato says is
true, rather than trying to establish what Plato might be saying and, then, which question it might
have been considered an answer to. He correctly points out that any study of Plato and its relation to
truth cannot possibly come before a systematic understanding of Plato in his historical position
which, as he says any historian must know, is a naturally incomplete process.268 These are as much
Kracauer’s criticisms as Strauss’. Kracauer hoped that a new, philosophical conception of historical
time might at the very least allow for the interruption in the modern collective dream state to
conceive of a different present in which to live. This is the core hope of the spirit of Orphean rescue
that Kracauer alludes to: the project that seeks to comprehend the past outside of an eschatological
conception of progress promises to rescue it from the shackles of chronology.
The Reception of Orpheus
The rescue is not straightforward, however. The ambiguity within the history of the Orphean
myth’s reception throughout time is revealing, insofar as Kracauer’s failure to mention it
illuminates the ambivalence at the heart of his own project. Orpheus’ journey, in relation to the
Baroque period, occupies a unique space. Jacobo Peri, in his opera in celebration of the marriage of
Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France, changed the ending of the well-known tragedy (to mark
the joyous occasion) to a happy ending, the lieto fine, with Orpheus successfully leading Eurydice
back to the world of the living where they are finally married. Performed on the 5th of October
1600, Peri’s opera Euradice was partly inspired by Poliziano’s Orfeo (1480). As Jeffrey Buller
points out, “...Poliziano drew precisely...[on the images of]...the pastoral tradition and then
incorporated them into the literary form of an ancient tragedy.”269 Peri’s Euradice, moves further
toward the joyousness of the banal, beginning with a prologue in which the personification of
allegiances) – seem most determined to misrepresent him.
266 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 583. 267 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 582. 268 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 583. 269 Jeffrey L. Buller, “Looking Backwards: Baroque Opera and the Ending of the Orpheus Myth.” International Journal
of the Classical Tradition 1. 3 (1995): 62.
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Tragedy informs the audience (who would have been familiar with the traditional story):
Tal per voi torno, e con sereno aspetto
Ne’ Reali Imenei m’adoro anch’io,
E su corde più liete il canto mio
tempo, al nobile cor dolce diletto.270
The opera culminates with Eurydice celebrating her love’s courage: “Tolsemi Orfeo dal tenebroso
regno” — “Orpheus tore me away from the realm of darkness”. It was not until after the death of
Mozart in 1791, that the traditional tragic ending reinstated itself with Joseph Haydn’s opera
L’anima del filosofo.271 An insight into the Baroque’s reception of the Orphean myth, in this case,
illuminates the ambivalence within the history of the myth itself. This mirrors the history of the
relationship between the conception of historical time and the philosophical task.
The difficulty of the historical project, and its relation to its philosophical counterpart, is
under-developed in Kracauer’s own argument. If history is to be understood as reflected in the
Orphean metaphor, does its success as a project (that is the return of the dead to the land of the
living and the present) entail its banality? Or is history to be forever consigned to the tragic realm,
with the impossibility of the return both its eternal lesson and salvation? History is saved, insofar as
it retains important philosophical meaning for the sake of the present, through the impossibility of
the return. Far from rendering history meaningless, its tragic character only forces us to re-
conceptualise its relics, in the light of the present. If there is a tragic lesson to be taken from
Orpheus’ journey, it must be in the ambiguity found in the history of its reception. Orpheus’
transition through time from tragic hero to idealised shepherd of Neo-Platonic Christianity and
back, functions as metaphor (beyond the poetic potential intended by Kracauer), by also
illuminating the ambiguity of the historical task and thus the necessary close relation to its
philosophical counterpart. Kracauer’s dismissal of the present’s interest in the historical journey
(along with the philosophers he considers guilty of this project) betrays a failure to anticipate, not
only his own debts to the present, but also the full repercussions of employing a tragedy whose
ending has, historically at least, always been unresolved. Kracauer’s use of the Orphean metaphor
to highlight the critical importance of the historian’s journey into the past to meet it on its own
terms, problematises the historical project: the return, according to the traditional myth, is steeped
in tragic forces — Orpheus returns empty handed and forlorn. Kracauer’s seemingly unresolved 270 Buller, “Looking Backwards”, 66. . “.. Thus changed, I return; serenely, I, too/ Adorn myself for the Royal wedding/
And temper my song with happier notes/ Sweet delight to the noble ear.” 271 Buller, “Looking Backwards”, 79.
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opinion of the present’s relation to the task of history forever consigns it to a relationship of
problematic ambivalence with the philosophical project — the philosophical task must, by
definition, take as its point of departure the present in which it is conceived. Although Kracauer
depicts Collingwood’s present as a form of modus operandi toward the historical task — a place in
which history is done — it is better understood as a philosophical category. Despite agreeing with
Kracauer that the past must be met on its own terms, as but one refraction of human life,
Collingwood recognises history as the act of coming to terms with the failure to return from the past
with anything other than fragments (which must be reconstructed carefully in order to understand
them). It is the very nature of the return to the present with these fragments of past material realities
that focuses and makes urgent the philosophical question. Collingwood’s philosophical project
demands a historical project (a perspective) that renders possible the philosophical task of the
present. The recognition of the philosophical importance of the time of writing underscores
Collingwood’s work, in which the demand that a philosophy must be a product of the time of its
writing emerges from a more foundational bedrock; namely the recognition that the philosophical
task will shape the present in which it is written.272
The Interruption of Historical Time and the Transformative Gaze
In light of the philosophical importance of the time of writing as being generative of how the
present is thought, it is critical to read Collingwood’s ideas relating to history, as they illustrate his
philosophical hopes. Like Kracauer, he is searching for a different modality of history.
Collingwood’s insistence that the reflections of the past must be, according to his own terms, re-
thought by us in the present, is not evidence for Kracauer’s feared presentism. In his small
autobiography (a book not consulted by either Kracauer or Strauss) Collingwood criticised many of
his contemporaries who belonged to the so-called British realist school, preferring in his study of
Aristotle, for example, “to concentrate on the question, ‘What is Aristotle saying and what does he
mean by it?’ and to forgo, however alluring it might be, the further question ‘Is it true?’”273
In the Idea of History, Collingwood writes, “We shall never know how the flowers smelt in
the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the
mountains...but the evidence of what these men thought is in our hands; and in re-creating these
thoughts in our own minds...we can know, so far as there is any knowledge, that the thoughts we
272 The ‘time of writing’ is used once again in the sense meant by Andrew Benjamin in “Time and Task.” That is, the
idea that the time in which philosophy is done occupies an important space of that very philosophy. 273 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography. (London: Penguin Books, 1939), 23.
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create were theirs.”274 This passage is instructive, as it registers Collingwood’s fervent belief in the
legitimacy of the past’s voices. The reverence with which he treats the thoughts of past lives (what
Benjamin would have called its monadic nature) is the grounds upon which a new modality of time
opens up; one in which Collingwood as well as Kracauer would have been more or less
comfortable. Their collective discomfort over the myth of progress that had entrenched itself within
cultural and intellectual discourse, demanded a historical insight that allowed for the voices of the
past to truly speak outside of a naturalised chronology. A further investigation into his studies on
magic (which admittedly Kracauer did not have the benefit of reading) highlights the extent to
which Collingwood was sympathetic to the dangers of the Orphean journey, and what was at stake
for the present.
Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’ is implied in his philosophy of history, but it is
only explicitly discussed as a quasi-formal logic in his autobiography.275 For the discipline of
philosophy, this meant a historically-charged investigation into the material realities in which a
given philosophical text was written.276 Strauss says much the same, prefaced with his concern for
Collingwood’s methods: “If it is necessary to understand Plato’s thought, it is necessary to
understand it as Plato himself understood it...It is to be feared that Collingwood underestimated the
difficulty of finding out ‘What Plato meant by his statement’ or ‘Whether what he thought is
true’”.277 Kracauer voices similar doubts when he calls into question Collingwood’s confidence that
the past will give up its secrets in the name of the “allegedly superior constructions of present
thought.”278 It is difficult to imagine a less sympathetic interpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy
of history. The construction of the ‘logic of question and answer’ itself occupies a unique historical
moment — it embodies Collingwood’s response to the Logical Positivists, who hoped to reduce
philosophy both to the process of verification of empirical propositions, and science’s handmaiden.
The Socratic dialogue between historian and historical relic was, for Collingwood, a mode of
thinking that allowed for the present’s particular din (as Kracauer would have called it) to
subside.279 It checks the rhetoric of progress (increasingly naturalised by philosophy’s positivism)
in order for the past, in being ‘re-thought’, to enter an immediacy (Burckhardt’s nun) that allowed
for a modality of historical time (the present’s relation to the past) to emerge. The locus point was
not chronology, but rather human autonomy. As such, Collingwood was aware, more than most, of
the utmost importance of meeting the past on its own terms. In his view, there was a very real
274 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 296. 275 Collingwood, An Autobiography. 24-33. 276 Collingwood, An Autobiography. 31. 277 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 585. 278 Kracauer, History, 76. 279 Kracauer, History, 86.
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possibility that the present might in many respects be ‘inferior’ to the past. In other words, the
present might still be confronted with the dangers of the descent into barbarism, a potentiality that
Kracauer (and Strauss) both allude to in their respective works.280
Kracauer’s criticisms of Collingwood stem from his having misunderstood the latter’s notion
of progress, outlined by Collingwood toward the end of The Idea of History. This is not only the
fault of Kracauer, but Collingwood too, who is, at times, too fleeting in his explanations.
Collingwood makes it quite clear, however, that he does not give any philosophical weight to any
notion of progress in the chronological structure of historical time.281 His conception of progress
exists solely within the Kantian category. Kant understood progress as not directly related to
historical progress, but within the domain of human thought which can develop and grow, through a
historico-humanist philosophical tradition. The collective criticism, and reception of history,
constituted a form of human progress. Collingwood’s debt to Kant is especially obvious here,
especially in relation to the latter’s conception of the logical necessary possibility of progress, of
which the Enlightenment represented the historically contingent locus.282This simply meant that the
question of enlightenment could not be forgotten once it was voiced. Collingwood was opposed to
the traditional Enlightenment project as it historically obtained, (that is the general disregard for the
past as a source of knowledge or wisdom), rather than how it might have. Progress was not
historical, but philosophical. It what sense, then, was this differentiated from historical progress? It
allowed the light of a new form of philosophico-historical insight (which could readily be called, as
Kracauer had hoped, ‘humane’) to emerge.283 This idea required reconciling some of the historical
problems of the past, not as pre-cursory data to a perfect present, but rather as tangible dramas that
represent the dreams and struggles of a material time in history. The modern understanding of what
it is to live in the present is thus redefined because progress qua progress, in terms of a naturalistic
unravelling of human potential or spirit, is nowhere to be found.284 In the final chapter of his
autobiography, ‘Theory and Practice’, Collingwood suggests that the nineteenth- century 280 “Studying the thinkers of the past becomes essential for men living in an age of intellectual decline because it is the
only practicable way in which they can recover a proper understanding of the fundamental problems. Given such conditions, history has the further task of explaining why the proper understanding of the fundamental problems has become lost in such a manner that the loss presents itself at the outset as progress.” Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History”, 585-586.
281 Collingwood, The Idea of History. 321. 282 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment”, Political Writings. Trans. H. B. Nisbet.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 3-8. 283 It was this idea that was the basis for Collingwood's conviction and exploration of the idea of the savage remaining
in modern man. 284 There are interesting Kantian shadows here, as well as parallels to be drawn with Benjamin's historical project. The
acknowledgement of the naturalisation of progress, and its affiliation with chronology, as rooted in mythic authority from pre-historical times, allows for a deeper insight, and a new coming to terms with what it might mean to live a meaningful life through historical time. In other words, the recognition that myth, rather than existing in a binary relationship in opposition to Enlightenment, is always present in the shapes of our historical lives, allows for a new mytho-historical ontology to be posed. On these themes, see Joseph Mali, Mythistory.
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confidence in the scientific project, and the expanding influence of positivism in intellectual
discourse, was symptomatic of a growing disregard for history — not history in and of itself, but a
history that calls into question the location in time from which the historical question is asked. The
sense of cultural optimism that pervaded during much of the century was a reflection that the
doctrines of the Enlightenment regarding the growing rationality and achievement of humanity were
finally being realised. The existence of mythic forces (the remnant of an eschatological logic)
within the collective socio-cultural discourse of the nineteenth century, remained under the guise of
myth’s destruction in the face of unstoppable scientific progress. It was this consideration of the
past as inferior (in terms of its ability to inform the present) that led, so thought Collingwood, to the
breakdown of intellectual, and thus civic, discourse that bore the responsibility for the encroaching
spectre of fascism.285 He puts it even more explicitly in his final paragraph of The Idea of History:
“If we want to abolish capitalism or war, and in doing so not only to destroy them but to bring into
existence something better, we must begin by understanding them...And we ought by now to realise
that no kindly law of nature will save us from the fruits of our ignorance.”286 This political rally cry
stemmed from a recognition of the immense difficulty of meeting the past on its own terms. The
logic of question and answer, although outlined schematically, and directed toward the school he
despised, implies a dialectical excavation of the fragments of the past and, poetically at least, allows
for the same struggles Orpheus underwent. It is not simply historical accuracy, or largely
misleading questions pertaining to truth that was at stake but rather the entire conditions for our
conception, and reception, of the present. The philosophical force of the question related to how this
historical form of enquiry could assist in emancipating us (albeit briefly) from what Habermas
called a historical narrative of violence.287 This is the fundamental point of Collingwood’s wider
project. The emancipation from a violence that prevents genuine means of dialogue — a way of
thinking that recognises humanity’s grasping for autonomy from that which would keep us
subservient — promises to reframe the question of how the present is to be thought as relying
entirely on how the past is approached.
In a posthumously published essay entitled ‘Magic’, Collingwood outlines the importance,
philosophically and historically speaking, of magic. In a preceding essay called ‘The Historical
Method’, Collingwood outlines the necessity of perceiving the continual existence of ‘the savage’ in
modern humanity. The savage, rather than being an object of collective cultural shame, must be
recognised, Collingwood argues, as the catalyst for the grounds upon which the struggles of the
human condition are founded. In terms very similar to those of Hans Blumenberg in Work on Myth, 285 Collingwood, An Autobiography. 100-112. 286 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 334. 287 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest. 315.
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Collingwood sees the acknowledgement of ‘the savage within us’ as the recognition of the
ambiguous fears that have marked human existence since pre-historical darkness.288 A study of
myth or magic offers glimpses of the past that have, in many cases, been otherwise lost.289 Through
such a study, Collingwood argues, the historical traveller must come to recognise that, in spite of
the existence of magic (proof for modernity that the past consisted of barbaric rituals, and savage
customs), many of these societies had otherwise very sophisticated ways of life, such as complex
agriculture, artistic work and highly complex forms of ritual: evidence, in other words, of the
rational. Rallying against the Enlightenment narrative, Collingwood points out that the existence of
magic alongside an otherwise rational culture, was proof that magic answered to a different calling,
and emerged in humanity not as a pre-cursor to science but “...to protect human beings against the
ghosts that haunt them.”290 This is, in effect, a reference to ‘demons in our thought’ to which this
thesis submits as a uniquely modern insight, as well as the basis for the anthropology that emerges
from it. This spelt the end of any notion of progress for Collingwood. Not only did myth remain in
spite of the success of science, as the champions of the Enlightenment had noted with puzzlement,
(proof that rational thought did not entirely subsume whatever human urge or anxiety that myth
satiated), but rational man had always existed, in various forms, with no correlation to mythic
authority. This formed a very complex dialectic between mythos and logos.
This idea of the study of magic as a gateway into material history, or a reflection of humanity
in a given time, is a crucial insight into Collingwood’s position — not only in the philosophy of
history, but in his dealing with how the present should be conceived. A study of the history of
magic, in this case, allows for a historical insight into the collective human grappling with the
concept that stretches well past the Enlightenment. The Faustian presence behind the myth of
progress (which itself contains the lurking shadow of Prometheus) becomes illuminated through a
historical study, as a reflection of humanity’s constant struggle to rationalise the uncontrollable.
Rational progress is consumed by the mythic it cannot outrun.291 Collingwood understood the
Enlightenment’s fear of pagan or religious man’s fears more than most and, as such, understood
where the Enlightenment tradition had failed to conceptualise the mythic structure of its desires and
larger project. Collingwood put no intellectual weight in naturalised historical progress, and would
have agreed with Benjamin’s argument that historical progress was the filling of “empty,
homogenous time.”292 The image of humanity that Collingwood conjures is one of the constant
288 R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 180. 289 Collingwood’s position here is largely influenced by the work of Vico. See Chapter Two. 290 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 205. 291 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), 263-295. 292 “The conception of a 'law of progress', by which the course of history is so governed by the successive forms of
human activity exhibit each an improvement on the last, is thus a mere confusion of thought, bred of an unnatural
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battling of man to come to terms with the radically ambivalent nature of his reality. The historical
insight of humanity as dogged by constant attempts at “...a complete relief from our sense of guilt”,
allows for both expiation of the myth of progress which ensnares us, as well as the re-bordering of
the present. The latter emerges as but one moment of historical time, a reflection of humanity’s
hopes and fears, no different in many ways from the past, but in no sense, necessarily, improved.293
It is darkly ironic, as Benjamin points out in “Theories of a German Fascism” that the naturalisation
of the myth of progress allowed for the conditions for fascism to arise in the first place.294 The
conception of the civility of the present that reached fever pitch in the nineteenth century, allowed
for the conditions for barbarism to appear, grounded in a form of unconscious faith in the necessity
of naturalised progress. The Enlightenment hope had, in some sense, entered society’s collective
dreams to such an extent that it became blind. The new modality of history and implied form of
historical insight, as outlined by Kracauer and, I argue, Collingwood, allow for the interrupting
conditions that might arouse the present from its collective, ‘presentist’ dream state, in which the
present hovers meaninglessly between two chronological points. Collingwood’s acknowledgement
that those who live exist in a state of continual distancing from primeval anxiety, concedes the
possibility that we may all suffer the same fate as Orpheus. Moreover, it recognises the benefit of a
historical model that is sensitive to humanity’s fallibility before fate. In so doing, Collingwood
touches upon the key similarity between his and Kracauer’s idea of history— namely, the idea of
gentle solidarity. The opportunity that opens in that moment of historical insight, or solidarity,
allows for (at the very least) the framing of the question that asks whether there is another way to
conceive of human life in the only prism which is liveable: nun.
Following Blumenberg explicitly, Kracauer argues towards the end of History that the
modern idea of progress exists as a re-occupation of older, humbler ideas, which were coherent only
in relation to early modern scholarly work, rather than the secularised manifestation of an
eschatological vision. These related to the humanist aesthetic and the natural sciences, which were a
response to a weakened theology that no longer sat as comfortably within its eschatological
category.295 Kracauer argues that the way to pierce the myth of progress that had consumed
unison between man's belief in his own superiority to nature and his belief that he is nothing more than a part of nature.” Collingwood, The Idea of History, 323.
293 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment. 205. 294 Walter Benjamin,‘Theories of German Fascism’ in Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part One, 1927-1930. Ed.
Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 319. 295 Kracauer, History. 185, 202. “...secular conception[s]...ha[d] been burdened with the obligations to cater to the very
human needs which once found their outlet in messianic prophecies.” 185. Blumenberg argues that the modern concept of progress emerges from the development of astronomy that, increasingly throughout its history, became aware it would take longer than the span of a human life, to unlock the secrets of the universe – that is, “...the consciousness that a great deal of time would still be needed to do no more than put astronomy...in possession of its problems.” Hans Blumenberg and E. B. Ashton." On a Lineage of the Idea of Progress.” Social Research 41. 1
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intellectual and civic discourse was to radically de-emphasise chronology, in favour of “...the
meaningful patterns of events,” as Burckhardt does.296 He suggests this drives a “...compassionate
urge to uncover lost causes in history.”297 The case for compassion is extended in Kracauer’s
likening of Burckhardt as a Sancho Panza to Nietzsche’s Don Quixote. Although Burckhardt
“watched, where he dare not follow, how surely Nietzsche treaded on ‘dizzying cliffs,’ he (and here
he quotes Kafka) “philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of
responsibility...”298 The implication for the metaphor is that, while Nietzsche was tilting at
windmills, Burckart’s thought had “a utopian character....(that sought out) a terra incognita in the
hollows between the lands we know.”299 Burckhardt’s (as with Proust’s) emphasis on the movement
of ideas, rather than chronological time, is compassionate in its treatment of the past as unique in
and of itself, rather than as a piece of data with which to explain the present. Within it, as well, lies
Kracauer’s hopes for a present that acknowledges the humanity he had hoped for in his introductory
sketch.300 Phillip Smallwood argues, in his introductory paper in Collingwood’s Philosophy of
Enchantment, that Collingwood’s work could be seen “...along the axis of the cultural,” increasingly
as he aged.301 One need only look to his plea for the study of old magic and myth “to comprehend
the relations between the surface of life and its depths” as reflective of a humanity that, as the form
of National Socialism solidified over Europe, appeared to have disappeared with the disappearance
of folk tales, or their relegation to children’s stories302. The utopian image to which Kracauer refers
is one that Collingwood would be sympathetic to. This could be understood as a compassionate
study of the past, in which the root of the original word, the Latin cum, denotes the philosophical
importance of a communal solidarity – a commonality. The compassionate study of the past and the
recognition of past lives as unique reflections of human life, sees the fostering of a philosophical
sense of a common humanity in which, perhaps, new forms of dialogue might see the present in a
light other than in which it had been seen. The historian is a traveller who has explored the hidden
interstices of history and found moments that, albeit briefly (remember of course Kracauer’s
recognition of the impossibility of dissolving chronology altogether) dispatch the notion of
progress. A destruction of the notion of progress by a historical compassion, that is a commonality
that recognised historical time as a tragedy from which humanity cannot entirely escape, inundates
the present with philosophical urgency. Far from being a point in an upward progression toward
(1974). Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy as well as Rubini’s The Other Renaissance also support this thesis.
296 Kracauer, History, 209. 297 Kracauer, History, 209. 298 Kracauer, History, 217 299 Ibid. 300 Kracauer, History, 3. 301 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, liv. 302 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, l.
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utopia, the present exists as the only moment in which humanity can come to terms with its attempt
to re-think the ambivalence of its historical conditions.
In his essay ‘Man Goes Mad’, Collingwood writes, as Benjamin does, of the perversity of a
notion of progress, following the horror of the Great War:
To the generation that has passed through that experience, those old forecasts of man’s
future, and the whole system of ideas on which they rested, seem strangely perverse. For
they all assumed that the road which nineteenth century man was treading led uphill to
infinity: whereas we have now seen that it led to the brink of a precipice.303
It is what is at stake in the historical quest, where Collingwood’s thought most intersects with
Kracauer’s (as well as Strauss’ and Benjamin’s). The recognition of the past in general intellectual
discourse is entirely tied up not just in the present, but in the dangers of the present’s descent into
savage violence. Collingwood and Benjamin both saw this absurdity in the aftermath of the Great
War, but Kracauer sees it more starkly still, with the uncovering of the Holocaust. Kracauer’s
‘hidden genuine’, Benjamin’s ‘messianic light’ and Collingwood’s notion of progress in
philosophy, all seek out in their respective Orphean travels through history. These are genuine
reflections of the past that renders the present as fitting, in some sense, into a largely meaningless
chronology, but also as the point of departure in the historico-philosophical reception and
recognition of history as a violent narrative. This narrative tells of the repeated attempts of human
life to escape its origins: in Kantian terms, “pure animality”.304 The attempt to outrun, often reduces
human life to that very regression. History becomes the negotiation of humanity’s capacity for
barbarism that must be overcome. The insight that comes out of that, recognises a humanity that
struggles, as we have always struggled, with the obscure fears that mark us as human beings. As
Blumenberg suggests, in so doing the mythic authority that marks the human condition is pierced
briefly to catch a glimpse of what it might be like to live outside that condition.305 Such autonomy
does not lie in what Blumenberg considers the ambiguous promise of the ‘end of myth’ (the
possibility of which he leaves, largely, aside). Rather, through the recognition of the extent to which
the history of thought is marked by these mythic qualities, there is the insight that any serious
consideration of thought is impossible without taking into account the fact that thought’s ‘shape’ is
largely grounded on these unseen myths and metaphors. Any confrontation with ‘thought’ or
303 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 305. See also Benjamin's “Theories of German Fascism”, 312-321. 304 Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology. Trans. George Di Giovanni and Allen W. Wood. (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1996), 74. 305 Blumenberg, Work on Myth.
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‘history’ is impossible without returning to these forms of thought. This does not discount the
possibility of another utopian side of thought – unseen and un-thought – but its emergence (the
transformative quality it promises) relies on the confrontation with human history; a history that is
marked by a grappling with the grounding myths that lie at the heart of human discourse and
institutions. The transformative quality of the Orphean gaze requires, first, the contemplative gaze
backwards on the violent and tragic forces of history.
Examples of the transformative gaze exist throughout history, wherein the human gaze upon
the collective lot of human life constitutes a form of celebration, which in itself marks the
recognition by humanity of other possibilities of human life. These are the hidden, lost causes
within human traditions that Kracauer hoped would be uncovered in his philosophical history.
Along with the rest of Greek tragedy, the tragedy of Orpheus constitutes a historical instance of the
sublime — of a moment in historical time where in the celebration and recognition of humanity’s
collective fate through the aesthetic distance of the Chorus, human beings overcame the authority
that dogged them.306 The story of Orpheus can only be understood this way through its being treated
in the revelatory terms in which it emerged. However, it must also be understood as Kracauer saw
it: as a story of rescue. Kracauer, as discussed, was not one to suggest that historical enquiry
required the present’s context in which to embark on its journey. He suspects that Collingwood
does. In fact, neither do, but Kracauer understates his own debts to the present. The past, like
Orpheus’ journey, must be tackled on its own terms. What, though, of the return? As Kracauer
himself says, the historian must, “return to the upper world and put his booty to good use.”307 What,
then, of the present? From where else can the traveller through historical time depart? As Strauss
and Kracauer argue, the traveller may not return the same, perhaps marked by tragedy as Orpheus
was, her fate demands that she ascend back to the land of the living. The realm of the past is not for
the traveller – she must make her life in the present. This admission does not require the
‘presentism’ that Kracauer attributes to Collingwood, as both his own historical model, as well as
his criticisms of Collingwood shows. It does, however, require some thought as to the nature of the
present, the historical traveller’s return to it, and what it constitutes, philosophically speaking.
The danger of the myth of progress, lay not so much in rendering the past banal (that is,
rendering it inoperable for a thinking of the future), but rather in the self-satisfaction of the ideas
surrounding the present, which manifested themselves as fitting into a particular historical narrative
of quasi-Hegelian completion. As Itkin points out, the notion of progress, for Kracauer, was
306 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 263-252. 307 Kracauer, History, 88.
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discredited beyond doubt with the Holocaust. His image of history as travel through memory space
“...in the absence of the ordering principle provided by the linear notion of time, produces montages
of images of the past that signal their own provisionality and incompletion.”308 An understanding of
the past as fragment uncovers the contingency of the historical conditions upon which it arose. The
implication within the philosophical necessity of progress, as with mythic fate, is that the past could
not have obtained in any other way. The fragmentation of the past robs it of its mythic narrative,
forcing the historian to allow for the many past presents to arise as they may have emerged. Within
this structure, the possibility that the past’s relation to the present lies only in the most banal
structure of chronological time, is allowed, leaving the radical contingency of the present revealed.
With such an exposure, the collective gaze might be able to look back through the ages, as
Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew does, and witness the end of history.309 In what sense can history
end? Certainly not in the Hegelian sense but, rather, in the sense that Habermas alludes to when he
writes that history is nothing but the narrative of our own inability to overcome our natural
condition — of the breaking down of every attempt at genuine human discourse — a history, in
other words, of violence.310 Framed as such, the present, as Benjamin hoped, embodies a place of
infinite possibility, where any moment might contain a divine moment of expiation.311 The present,
in other words, presents itself as being the grounds upon which humanity might realise its
autonomy; not from the dispatch of progress — recall that Blumenberg argues that the conjuring of
the end of myth is itself mythic — but, rather, through the establishment of a mere moment of
insight that recognises human life as dogged by the primeval anxieties that marked humanity’s
struggle with the immediacy and terrible ambivalence of the world. It is through this historico-
philosophical insight that mythic authority is pierced, to show the genuine humanity within it.
Within that moment, fleeting as it may be, the ontological question emerges: is there another way to
imagine human life? This question cannot be answered directly, but its Kantian form hopes to
colour and inform the reception of our own history from therein; a recognition of our living in a
moment of genuine human thought and autonomy over itself. The historical journey, and especially
the return to the land of the living, promises much.
To realise a historical “tradition of lost causes” as Kracauer wanted, is to challenge the
particular conception of the present’s relation to historical time (namely that of the progress, and the
supposed meaning in a naturalised chronology), necessitating, therefore, a change to the conception
308 Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus”, 201. 309 Kracauer, History, 157. 310 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest. 314-315. 311 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 397. Benjamin also considers this in the “Critique of Violence” – whereby
the notion of expiation (the atonement of guilt) embodies the rupturing of fate and, therefore, the history of mythic authority to which humanity is subjugated.
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of the philosophical project. Kracauer’s categorising of Collingwood’s philosophy with that of
Croce’s idealism (which Croce himself would deny) stems from the suspicion that Collingwood’s
ideas surrounding the historian’s ‘re-living’ of past thought, is a barely concealed account of
Hegelian Spirit, wherein the present is seen as both the inescapable place of study, as well as the
culmination of the subject of the study itself.312 This ‘present interest’ history cannot, he argues,
ever meet the past on even grounds, so caught up is the historian in the noise and din of the present.
The Orphean quality of genuine historical enquiry offers greater insight, but also much greater risk.
Recall Kracauer’s hope that a new historical vision will render the present more “humane”. This
humanity, Habermas suggests, stems from an acknowledgement of our historical lives as the story
of the constant struggling with primeval fears. If Blumenberg is correct to suggest these anxieties
arose synonymously with humanity’s emergence, then any hope for enlightenment must take into
account the conditions of possibility that allowed for thought in the first place. The Enlightenment’s
terror of what Benjamin called the “horrors that beckon deep in the primeval forest” give rise to the
conditions through which we lose the unique moments of the past as distinctly human, and the myth
of progress forges on.313 Collingwood’s own Orphean tendencies are never more explicit than in his
study of magic. He writes:
[the historian] has to face the fact that the distinction between savage and civilised man is a
fiction designed to flatter his vanity...If his study of it is effective, he reconstructs it within
his own mind and it becomes a prized possession. What he began by thinking peculiar to
savages, and now finds inside himself must therefore be regarded not with hatred and
contempt as irrational...but as something worth having, something of which the recognition
increases instead of impairing his self-respect...”.314
This is a critical insight. The enlightenment hopes that Collingwood entertains are ultimately shaped
by the inherent ambivalence of human life, and the necessity of the negotiation with that
ambivalence as a critical insight in a sense of humanity that seeks out other potentialities for human
life.
Collingwood’s hope, in engaging seriously with primeval myth, was to gain an insight into
the elusive, and often profound, realities of a past otherwise lost. Such a historical journey allowed
for a sensitivity to the relics that are recovered; that is, the elements of ancient mythology that
continued to mark modern humanity. The recognition of the present as a place beset with primeval 312 Kracauer, History, 64. 313 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456. 314 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 194.
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anxieties clarifies the task of the philosophical within that present: the salvation of the present as a
locus of hope. By doing so, the insidious incoherence of a progress that marches on, despite crises
like the rise of National Socialism, not only becomes incoherent, but succumbs to the mythic
authority to which it was still, unknowingly, enslaved. This fragmentation of historical time (recall
that certain moments will resist less to their excavation) is entirely Orphean in its desire for rescue.
Kracauer’s criticism of Collingwood, which calls on Orpheus for the task of dispatch, illuminates
the similarity of their philosophical hopes. In so doing, however, he also uncovers the philosophical
ambivalence within his own project. The tragedy of history — the impossibility of its unambiguous
rescue — is under-estimated by Kracauer, who utilises the myth of Orpheus without acknowledging
the historical ambivalence of such an action. An entirely successful history in which its relics are
entirely rebuilt, cannot be imbued with a sense of human loss, entailing its being forgotten,
preventing it from shaping the present through a communal recognition of the humility that emerges
at the loss of the past. Kracauer, who fails to see the affinity between his and Collingwood’s
projects, never entirely reconciles the repercussions of the Orphean myth, and in so doing
accentuates Collingwood’s having unconsciously done so. The impossibility of the return, as
dictated by fate, ensures the lasting meaning of history, and its relation to the philosophical task of
the present insofar as the reconceptualisation of history’s ruins necessitates the re-thinking of
human life. The space that opens in the wake of this allows for Collingwood to be read as but one of
the thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century who sought a salvation for the crisis of
modernity through a philosophy that examined the critical conjunction between historical time and
the present.
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Conclusion
The relation between history, myth and philosophy is ambivalent. One of the more periphery
intentions of this thesis was to locate a philosophically viable and legitimate understanding of
ambivalence. What, philosophically speaking, emerges in the confrontation of these thinkers? One
of the major arguments – perhaps the major argument of this thesis – is the claim that it is the very
articulation of the form of ambivalence that emerges in a philosophical study of myth’s relation to
history, that offers up a genuine space in which something new about the thinking of the thinking of
human life might emerge. I have presented the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood as framed within
the search for such an articulation.
Although it would be expected (and indeed easier) to present a ‘rehabilitated’ Collingwood as
an important thinker who has until now perhaps been misunderstood or ignored, so that he might be
‘used’ in future philosophical debates, this thesis defends the impossibility of this hope. It might be
conceded that, like many thinkers of his time, Collingwood’s philosophy retains a certain
incompletion from which an ambiguity festers, as a result of the horrific, totalising historical
ruptures he lived through. I have argued, however, that the ambiguity of Collingwood’s project,
which inspires the uncertainty with which he is dealt, is the result of his ultimately difficult and
subtle conception of myth and magic, and its relation to the historico-philosophical task. As such,
while it is true, I argue, that Collingwood’s ideas have been largely misconstrued so that they can be
deployed in the name of other intellectual agendas, this thesis has merely presented another way in
which his philosophy might emerge in a ‘flash’ of relevance within the broader, and infinitely
complex history, of the wrestling with the problem of history and myth.
Via the confrontation with Herodotus, I have shown the extent to which a conception of
‘historical life’ was critical to Collingwood’s philosophy. What precisely Herodotus’ understanding
of ‘historical life’ was remains problematic. However, if, as I have argued, Herodotus’ idea of
history shares a commonality with tragedy as dealing inherently with the Greek understanding of
human life as marked by a fateful necessity, then the question of ‘historical life’ emerges in the
possibilities of contingency that emerge in the recognition of that necessity. That is, other
possibilities of human life (of solidarity, of discourse) emerge in the recognition of human life as
inherently susceptible to tragic forces. Historical life, then, embodies in some critical sense, a space
in which human life can flourish in the face of the inescapable ambiguities that mark the human
condition. What differentiates Herodotus from Thucydides (and insofar as these two thinkers
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embody two different potentialities for history), is the former’s desire to study all facets of human
life, and in particular those stories that formed what modern academia might call ‘webs of
meaning’. Where Thucydides marks his project, and differentiates himself explicitly from
Herodotus, by looking at the concrete political events of the past, Herodotus seeks to uncover the
important historical place of myths that ground meaning amongst communities. It was this
fundamental understanding of meaning, and its historical celebration that Herodotus considered the
critical locus of political dialogue, and thus the key to the continuation of the civilisation in which
he lived. Although I have presented Collingwood’s Herodotean interest in defending the historical
legitimacy of myth and magic, it is the stronger, but more difficult claim of Collingwood’s on
which I have focused, namely his belief of the correlation of historical with political life. His
explicit claim at the end of his autobiography that equates the breakdown of political dialogue, and
the victory of Fascism and National Socialism in Europe with the forgetting of a form of collective
historical reception, is Collingwood’s attempt to articulate the peculiar nature of ‘historical life’.
For Collingwood, the historical circumstances of his own time continued to be marked by
peculiar, seemingly unexplainable forms of fate that seemed to drag Europe to the brink of
destruction on more than one occasion during his life. Such ignorance of these fateful, violent
forces in history on behalf of the British politicians of the 1930s, and their inability to anticipate the
horrors that threatened to erupt from Germany, was down to a failure to understand, not only the
continued presence of myth in modern life, but how this failure was essentially a failure of historic,
and thus political thinking. This was not simply the recognition that a historical study would
illuminate the presence of myth in human life (although this may also have been true), but the
extent to which myth, and thus fate, inhabited (unrecognised) the historical ruptures of
Collingwood’s time in spite of the apparent victory of rationalism over superstition. Of course, as
this thesis has shown, Collingwood was a qualified champion of the Enlightenment. His defence of
instrumental reason is measured by his ardent (if guarded) admiration for magic, the danger of
which only existed in humanity’s collective failure to recognise its presence. Collingwood’s notion
of historical life, then, embodied a deep and critical thinking about the susceptibility of human life
to regress into barbaric forms, and what a reception of that very regressive tendency might offer in
terms of new, other possibilities.
The second chapter dealt with Collingwood’s notion of what I called the ‘materiality’ of
history via a confrontation with Giambattista Vico. Where the Herodotean legacy in Collingwood’s
thought attempted to articulate the peculiarity of ‘historical life’ as constituting something uniquely
human, the influence of Vico related to that form of life as representing not just a material ‘reality’
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of the past, but an immanent reality in the present. This is the essential quality of Collingwood’s
philosophy of history that differentiates him from the forms of Hegelian cum Crocean idealism with
which he is normally associated. Vico’s great discovery was not simply the historical interest of
myth, but the extent to which these myths, with their origins in the earliest cultic and ritualistic
incantations, were reflective of material ‘realities’ which humanity found itself confronted with
long ago. Myth was not a reflection of human essence, or spirit, but rather the expression of the
human desire to tame a strange and ultimately hostile world. For Vico, this anxiety, and the mythic
formulations that followed, were not only a legacy of ‘primitive’ life, but also of his own time,
where mythic forms of life could be uncovered hiding beneath the surface of the supposed victory
of Cartesian rationalism. The ‘materiality of history’ in other words refers to both the fact that
historical ‘forces’ are not in and of themselves a driving force, as with the Hegelian ‘cunning of
reason’, but reflections of historical realities (of which myth constitutes an important part of making
that human reality manifest), as well as the notion that these historical legacies continue to reside in
the present as worthy of philosophical attention. The affinity of Collingwood’s with Vico’s project,
then, lies in the former’s attempt to unearth, through a historico-philosophical project, the
unrecognised mythic forces that threatened to engulf Europe. Vico’s understanding of the
possibilities of human regression into barbarism were the source, I argue, of Collingwood’s
rejection of the faith in historical progress, and his recognition of it as inherently mythic. Its danger
as myth lay in its being unrecognised. That is, humanity’s susceptibility to its forces, in the name of
its opposite: the victory of instrumental reason over earlier superstitions. The understanding of myth
as reflections of material historical conditions, rather than eternal psychological states, lay the
ground for Collingwood’s more modern insights regarding how the return of these myths in
historical time, (in this case the naturalisation of progress, the logic of which did not anticipate
Fascism), could be interrupted and illuminated for what they were.
This modern project of Collingwood’s, I have argued, is perfectly illuminated in the
confrontation with Siegfried Kracauer. Kracauer’s reading of Collingwood as a Crocean idealist is
typical of many interpretations of the his work. Citing the Orphean tragedy, Kracauer goes to great
lengths to illuminate the futility of what he considers Collingwood’s project: the rescuing of the
past for the sake of a defence of the present. Kracauer’s deployment of Orpheus is a response to
what he considers Collingwood’s vulgar and simplistic understanding of history and his failure to
understand the philosophical relation to it. I have argued, however, that, not only does Kracauer
misinterpret Collingwood, and mistakenly correlate his project with Croce’s, but also that the
Orphean metaphor highlights the full ambivalence of history; an ambivalence that even Kracauer
himself seems unable to reconcile. Collingwood is not committed to the idea of a full
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‘rehabilitation’ of the past; a past that emerges fully formed as a result of the historian’s
interrogations, as Kracauer claims. Beneath the seemingly explicit methodology of his ‘logic of
question and answer’, Collingwood’s remains sensitive, like Kracauer, to the susceptibility of the
past being scared into retreat at the philosopher-historian’s demands. It is this very fragility of the
past that marks the commonality of these two thinkers. And yet ambivalence remains. Kracauer,
who insists the past must be met on its own terms, away from the din of the present, never fully
reconciles how the inevitable Orphean return to the surface will emerge. Collingwood’s insistence,
that historical insight must begin and end from the present and its concerns, anticpates the Orphean
journey, and illuminates his understanding of the ultimately tragic nature of history. Vico’s legacy
is critical on this point. The historical understanding of the mythic foundations of contemporary
social and cultural institutions allows for the modern understanding of the present as a site of
philosophical work. History’s repeated succumbing to tragic, fateful forces necessitates a
reconstruction of the mere fragments that emerge from the past. Collingwood’s project, as the
Fascist shadow crept over Europe, entails a reconstruction, and re-articulation of the potentialities
that emerge from those fragments. This, I have argued, is the same as the ‘humanity’ that Kracauer
hoped would emerge from the “hidden interstices” of history. The commonality of these two
projects was not intended to suggest the projects are the same. Rather, the confrontation of these
two thinkers, allows for a moment of insight into that distinctly modern idea. History is not in and
of itself tragic (that is, driven by necessity) but a reflection of material conditions that show the
extent to which human life is susceptible to the regressive forces of the barbaric forms of life
(forces of necessity) that emerge when living according to fate. The modern insight, then, that
human life as marked by historical conditions, many of which are dogged by mythic forms of
consciousness to render them manageable, allows for a moment in which this susceptibility
becomes a potentiality for another form of life.
Despite my attempt in this thesis to rescue Collingwood’s project from other philosophical
agendas to which he does not entirely belong, while at the same time avoiding a definitive
articulation of what his project might in fact be, I have risked doing just that. My hope in avoiding a
concrete methodology, in favour of a discrete wandering through the philosophical space, risks the
obvious danger that Collingwood himself would not recognise his project as I have presented it.
Indeed, I think there is a strong argument to be made that the primary reason for Collingwood’s
being understood, for the most part, as an obscure idealist, was due to his own unresolved
intellectual dues. Any notion of historical materiality that emanates from his Vichean influence sits
uneasily with his obvious Hegelian commitments, his inability to relinquish some notion of ‘spirit’
the most obvious example. Despite this, Collingwood’s other work, and particularly that which has
101
emerged in recent years, lies in stark contrast to the common caricature. This does not render his
idealist tendencies redundant, but merely highlights the difficulty in articulating Collingwood’s
ultimate philosophical hopes. Located within the historical conditions in which he lived, he emerges
as a thinker who grappled relentlessly with what he considered the sinister subterranean forces that
lurked beneath the victory of philosophical realism: the victory of irrationalism in the guise of its
opposite. Despite the ambiguity of his philosophy, the main commonality that emerges in the
disparate fragmentations of his work is the rescuing of a notion of genuine enlightenment.
Ultimately, Collingwood’s concern seems to deal with the inherently magic reality of the world – of
the inescapability of magic formalism and incantation – and the need for the genuine enlightenment
project to recognise this as an inescapable part of the rationalist project, rather than its enemy. The
myth of historical progress, for example, posed a problem only insofar as it went unrecognised, and
therefore free of philosophical scrutiny and penetration. Collingwood, then, accepts the presence of
some form of fate within human life as a remnant from the most primitive expressions of life that
nonetheless continue to mark modernity. The project of enlightenment emerges as the critical
historico-philosophical negotiation with older forms of thought, in the name of potentially new,
unrecognised ones.
Niobe Speaks
The ambivalence with which this thesis grapples is a historical outcome of the ways in which
myth and history have been thought about since Homer. In other words, the distinction between
mûthos and logos, is a differentiation that has its historical immanence in humanity’s reception of,
and grappling with, myth. If myth represents fatalistic subjugation, as Benjamin thought, and
history the self-conscious self-assertion of human rather than divine life; then historical life
uncovers our own self-conscious negotiation with older authorities. It falls to philosophy to render a
space in which something can be said in light of that reception.
In an appendix to his Knowledge and Human Interest, a passage alluded to throughout the
text, Jürgen Habermas writes:
Only when philosophy discovers in the dialectical course of history the traces of violence
that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to
unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise
102
legitimates: mankind's evolution toward autonomy and responsibility.315
Habermas suspects that history itself is the record of constant violence – both physical and
metaphysical — that deforms and perverts our constant attempts at genuine dialogue. This dialogue
aims at a solidarity that emerges from fears of obscure terrors that mark the human condition.316
What differentiates humanity, in other words, from its own purely biological past (that is, a
historical life) both allowed for the differentiation in the first place, but also prevents us from living
a life proper to the promise of the human vocation.317 This is one of the great paradoxes of human
life: the urge to articulate and find solace over our metaphysical anxiety on leaving what Benjamin
called the “primeval forest” allowed for the conditions for myth to emerge. The act of speech, or
perhaps even pre-lingual metaphors, such as drawings, represents the staking of a claim on the
world that is distinctly human — that distances and keeps at bay the earlier, more terrifying
ambiguities of nature. On the other hand, the emergence of speech also, paradoxically, allowed for
the presence of mythic authority to enter human life, which cut off our hopes for genuine discourse,
literally, before it had begun.318 The means by which nature was silenced, at least momentarily, to
allow early human life space in which to breathe (“so that human lungs could have air”, as Kafka
once wrote319) was also the means by which everything, in becoming thinkable, became tethered to
particular modalities of thought. The constant revisitation of violence in history alluded to by
Habermas is, on the one hand a reference to the more banal nature of physical violence, but also to
its root cause; namely, the forms of thought that consistently shut down potentially new ways of
understanding and thinking about human life. The violent nature of this story is what makes up the
majority of human history or, to put it another way, human history is the narrative by which we fail
to become fully human. Historical life, thus far, has failed to conjure a life befitting its promise.
The extent of the ambivalence, however, becomes clearer in the extent to which this thesis is
not an analysis and critique of mythic thinking. Benjamin and Habermas articulate it best in their
acknowledgement of the necessity of myth and its manifestations (in this case, via the law) to the
beginnings of human life. The same claim can be seen in Kafka’s acknowledgement that myth 315 Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interest, 315. 316 This notion of genuine dialogue, from which truth might emerge, is dependent on a form of trust that our speaking
partner speaks truly, and experiences the world in similar ways to us. Thus, as Malpas is right to point out, the notion of truth emerging out of dialogue relies not simply on a solidarity for the human capacity for suffering, but on the recognition of that capacity on behalf of others, and the subsequent engagement that comes out of that primary recognition. This is the ultimate foundation for the unique human qualities of love and hope. Malpas, “Retrieving Truth,” 299-300.
317 See chapter III of 'Theory and Practise', specifically, 89 in Kant, Political Writings. Kant considers what appears to be modern vice as the growing awareness of what constitutes a moral life, and our subsequent abhorrence at action which does not adhere to such a life.
318 Hans Blumenberg, Work On Myth, first chapter, 'After the Absolutism of Reality', 3-32. 319 Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920, as quoted in Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 3.
103
allowed for the thriving of early humanity, so that the terrors of the ambiguities of nature could be
distanced. Vico, too, despite his fear of ‘primitive’ life, sees the grounds of civil life as existing in
the customs of early pagan man which, although bestial and savage, kept at bay the terrors of the
night sky and the thunder which erupted from it. Its being kept at bay necessitated it being named.
What was “…utterly strange, became only humanly strange,” to recall Ross’ prescient
formulation.320 Nor, however, is this thesis (or the anthropology from which it departs) rooted in
Romantic defences of the myth as being attached in some sense to an eternal, unchanging human
spirit. Blumenberg, towards the end of his extraordinary chapter “To Bring Myth to and End”,
makes an obscure reference to the nature of myth’s presence in history.321 He writes:
Anyone who considers these forms of a ‘final myth’ to be obsolete rubbish will be mistaken;
the oppressiveness of contingency, which lies behind myth, does not cease. Ernst Bloch
returns, in 1977, to a discussion of death and immortality conducted in Königstein on the
day of Adorno’s death in 1969, and desires, on the day of the murder of Jürgen Ponto, that
it be published in the final volume of his ‘Gesammelte Schriften’. That interval that is
encompassed by these dates is perhaps itself an aspect of the subject.
Blumenberg does not refer to the ceaseless return of myth, nor indeed does he exclude the
possibility of there being a form of human life that excludes myth. There is perhaps a place where
myth is brought to an end. And yet, he is quick to counter, as can be witnessed in the murder of the
banker Ponto by the radical Marxist revolutionaries, that history is dogged by violent forms of life,
in particular during times of supposed renewal, enlightenment, or revolution. The ancient myths and
metaphors that form the basis of the possibility of thought — that is, reflection — in the first place,
also construe the modalities of thinking to this day. History, in being shaped by these forms of
thought, is dogged by them. The genuine philosophical task, Blumenberg argues, and the genuine
hopes of enlightenment, must be recognised as belonging to that legacy, rather than seeking to
overthrow it. It is only through a philosophically-oriented reception of that history, that the
possibilities for othering human thought emerges. These moments of reflection that alleviate human
life, momentarily, from the means/ends forms of thought, allows for insights into the other infinite
possibilities of human life. The uncovering of the “hidden interstices” in history as Kracauer calls
them (the best example of which is Benjamin’s account of Greek tragedy, wherein human
autonomy and solidarity emerges via a celebration of fate through the aesthetic distance of the
320 Alison Ross, “Moral Metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg,” 44. 321 For an excellent summary of Blumenberg’s negotiation with both Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism, see
Robert Segal, “Hans Blumenberg as Theorist of Myth,” Theorizing about Myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 143.
104
chorus) are the grounds upon which Habermas hoped for the emergence of conditions of genuine
dialogue. Such a dialogue, or insight, which perhaps last but a moment, is the genuine interruption
of historical time (as opposed to the revolutionary one). Questions regarding truth, beauty and
justice – that which human life could aspire toward – emerge in such a moment as questions worthy
of the philosophical task.
The transformative nature of the contemplative historical gaze, which is interruptive in its
intent (that is, it seeks to interrupt the nature in which history has, thus far, destroyed all attempts at
new forms of life) does not discount utopian possibilities, but merely recognises human life thus far
as unmarked by them. There may be another (and here the concept of other is the foundational idea)
form of human life possible, but the framing of such a question (inherently the question of
philosophy) only emerges in the confrontation with our history, and its mythic shapes. The
reception of the inherent ambivalence of human life marks a way in which new philosophies might
offer new forms of life. The opening of new forms of dialogue from such insights promises the true
promise of enlightenment: perhaps, as Blumenberg suggests, there is something new to say after
all.322
In the classical myth, Niobe is punished for her pride. Her muteness becomes a manifestation
of fate in the earthly realm. And yet, as with the reception of Orpheus, the legacy of Niobe in
history is less straightforward. Throughout her reception, she has struggled, and spoken against it,
overcoming her fate — Niobe suddenly speaks!323 Such an articulation represents and extraordinary
moment in history. If mûthos and logos differentiate between particular kinds of speech act — one
authoritative, one explanatory — it is unambiguous that Niobe’s primary tragedy is a result of fate’s
terrible authority. The question is, then, in the renditions of the myth where she speaks against fate,
what kind of speech act does she thrust upon an unsuspecting world? If the Orphean gaze seeks
another articulation of human life in the face of history’s terrible ambivalence, perhaps Niobe, as
she is received throughout that history, embodies a particular hope for human life.
322 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 636. 323 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1926), 433.
105
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