Collingwood and the Crisis of Western Civilisation by Richard Murphy

Author:Richard Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collingwood, philosophy, western civilisation, western civilization, crisis, romanticism, historicism, Ortega y Gasset, Nietzsche, Weber, history, art, craft, consciousness, truth, community, logic, metaphysics, progress, dialectic, politics, phenomenology, capitalism, bureaucracy
ISBN: 9781845404062
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

According to Collingwood, the ‘materialism’ of nineteenth- century anti-metaphysical thinkers was ‘anthropomorphic at the core’ (EM, 336). He argues that while physicists were escaping from the Kantian confusion by the

... heroic measure of reconstructing their own science in such a way that the idea of causation no longer figures in it at all, philosophers, especially those of the reactionary and obscurantist schools which put forward the programmes of ‘realism’ and ‘logical positivism’, show their desire to perpetuate whatever confusions there were in nineteenth- century science by reiterating the contradiction that vitiated the nineteenth -century idea of causation (EM, 336-7).

Superficially, this might seem simply to be an account of one set of absolute presuppositions being replaced by a ‘better’, or more coherent, set. But, with regard to causation, the primary task of the metaphysician, for Collingwood, was accurately to reveal the absolute presuppositions that would ground modern science, in contrast with the reactionary anti-metaphysics of the ‘realists’ and the logical positivists, who embraced contradictory absolute presuppositions as their ‘doctrine’.

Collingwood’s view that absolute presuppositions are not progressive and that the task of the metaphysician is simply to reveal what the absolute presuppositions of a given practice are is also discussed in ‘The Function of Metaphysics in Civilization’ (published in the revised edition of An Essay on Metaphysics ). According to Collingwood, ‘The presence of a given item in a metaphysical system is a question of fact, not a question of logic’ (EM, 384). The metaphysician has to settle the question of what relations there are between the items of a metaphysical system ‘... not on any abstract logical or dialectical methods of his own devising, but by studying the actual way in which the people whose thought he is analysing treat their presuppositions’ (EM, 384). For Collingwood,

... the only kind of system that the metaphysician expounds is the kind of system which he finds to exist in the minds of the people whose thought he is studying; and hence, if he studies a pluralistic science like that of the ancient Greeks he will necessarily produce a pluralistic metaphysics, whereas if he studies a monistic science like that of the Renaissance and modern times he will necessarily produce a monistic one. (EM, 389)

In response to the question as to whether a monistic metaphysical system may not be better than a pluralistic one or vice versa, Collingwood asks:

If modern metaphysics is so much better than ancient, the improvement in natural science which is cited in evidence of this ought to be reinforced by a parallel improvement in all other branches of theoretical and practical thinking: e.g. in morals, in law, in politics, in economics, in religion, in art, etc. Can this be maintained, or can it not rather be argued that in modern times we have specialized in certain directions and have progressed there at the price of retrogression elsewhere? This is often said, and I do not know how to refute it. (EM, 391)

Hence, we may have to qualify the statement that modern

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