There is no separating epistemology and pragmatics for Collingwood because thought in his work is given an ontological status. Human beings, that is to say, live in a world made of thoughts. I just did some writing on it this morning that I'm now sharing. These few pages are the analysis that is necessary to get me talking about Collingwood's conception of freedom as the freedom of thought. Speech is thus integral to his conception of freedom in a way that it isn't for Bergson.
Here it is:
In addition to Collingwood’s rejection of Bergson’s cosmological scheme, he also took issue with Bergson’s problematic relationship to abstraction, and also his inability to conceptualize philosophy as having practical implications. We now turn our attention to these two breaking points. For Collingwood’s rejection of philosophy’s dependence upon cosmology is simply the first step. The more significant moves are the assertion that human beings must treat abstraction as a genuine path to knowledge, and that this healthy engagement with abstraction is a vital element in any practical life.
According to Collingwood, Bergson is incapable of engaging with abstraction in a healthy or meaningful way. He claims that on Bergson’s scheme abstraction, and logical thinking in general, is nothing but a practical fiction of a mind that is intent on cutting up reality for its own purposes. This criticism is especially pronounced in The New Leviathan, where he claims that Bergson hopes that someday the mind will shed its cumbersome relationship to abstraction and appear unveiled to itself in its ineffability. As we noted, Bergson does at times seem to speak as if though true knowledge is ultimately ineffable, especially in the “Introduction to Metaphysics.” The definition offered in that essay, however, is worded delicately as “the science which claims to dispense with symbols.” Whether this is ever achieved with any purity, however, is doubtful. For in other places Bergson seems to admit that one never fully achieves this full-blown ineffable grasping, but is rather engaging in a dialectic between intuition and analysis, ineffability and abstraction. In Time and Free Will, for example, he claims that articulate thought can have an existence within concrete reality, “for immediate intuition and discursive thought are one in concrete reality....”Thought, in other words, doesn’t have to be a mere arresting of the flow of reality for the purposes of manipulation, and intuition doesn’t have to be a inarticulate ineffable mess, but can dwell within the flow of duration. He hints at this idea again in the “Introduction to Metaphysics.” There he argues that “intuition once grasped must find a mode of expression and applications which conformed to our habits of thought and which furnishes us, in well-defined concepts, the solid basis... we so greatly need. That is the condition of what we call strictness, precision, and indefinite extension of a general method to particular cases.” Statements like this point us to the idea that Bergson’s relationship with language is not as black and white as Collingwood would have us believe. Intuition and analysis, I believe, are not opposed to one another, as Collingwood may have us believe, but are rather in a dialectal relationship with one another. This is not what were are here to explore, however.
Collingwood also accuses Bergson of setting up an opposition between knowledge and action, with analysis naming and cutting things up to manipulate them, and intuition standing back in an ineffable sphere of impractical knowledge. This, too, I find a problematic depiction of Bergson’s thought. The whole time I’ve read Bergson I’ve been troubled by the ambiguity surrounding the relationship between intuition and action. For, as we saw above, intuition absolutely has implications for how we speak of and experience the world, so can’t but have implications for how we behave. This point, however, is never made clear, and I’m forced to search for the implications. In the introduction to The Creative Mind, for example, I find certain sentences that imply that there is indeed a relationship between intuition and action. While speaking of the experience of real time, duration, Bergson asks “How would it appear to a consciousness which desired only to see it without measuring it, which would then grasp it without stopping it, which, in short, would take itself as object, and which, spectator and actor alike, at once spontaneous and reflective, would bring ever closer together–to the point where they would coincide,–the attention which is fixed, and time which passes?” Here we find the idea that the intuitive mind, dilated to perceived the flow of real duration, does not cease to be an acting mind, but doubles itself, placing a portion of itself outside of its activity, while keeping one foot firmly planted in the world of activity. I have found similar passages in Matter and Memory that imply a similar kind of doubling. Again, I am not interested here in dwelling on whether Collingwood was correct to read Bergson this way, for I don’t believe he was. What we want to do is explore Collingwood’s thoughts on Bergson as they gave rise to his own. Let us turn to Collingwood’s relationship with language and action.
Collingwood’s work in general displays a self-consciously positive relationship to abstraction and even dogma, and always wore its practicality on its sleeve. Here I have chosen to explore the questions of Collingwood’s epistemology and pragmatics in tandem because it would be inappropriate to separate them. Language and action are deeply intertwined in his work to the point of being distinguishable only analytically. Ontologically thought, language, and action are one.
In The New Leviathan Collingwood presents us an account of the mind that only begins to exist in any meaningful sense once it begins to speak. The mind, properly speaking, emerges in Chapter 6 on ‘Language’. The Collingwood argues that al self-knowledge is acquired through an act of speech, through the practical act of naming a feeling that is being experienced. This ranges from the simplest, ejaculatory kinds of speech, like a shiver that makes one aware of being cold, to the most sophisticated forms of speech, in which one makes oneself aware of an obligation by saying ‘this is my duty’. That language is wielded in this way is just a basic fact about how human beings function in the world. It is something that we do without being conscious of the fact that we are using language, which requires an even more developed sense of self-consciousness. Language, in a sense, is the beginning of human being.
Indeed, there is a serious conflation in Collingwood’s work between language, thought, and activity. In the chapter on language he claims that a proper language is secondary to the notion of discourse, which is “the activity by which a man means anything; a language is the system adopted, the means employed, the rules followed, in this activity” (6.11, my emphasis). It is difficult to find an instance, however, in which a human being doesn’t mean something by their use of language. A shiver, as we saw, can be considered a form of language. The fact that human beings always find themselves embedded within communities that already possess a language, means that humans always find themselves already meaning something with everything they do. This fact reveals itself in the unfinished Principles of History, where we learn that action is the proper subject matter of historical study. Or, to put it differently, that mind always and only reveals itself through its activity. Human beings, he argues, are reasonable beings, in that everything they do is always done with a specific reason in mind, however irrational that particular reason may be. “The actions traditionally studied by history,” he writes, “are actions in this narrower sense of the word: actions in which reason, in a high or a low degree, reason triumphant or reason frustrated, wise thought or foolish thought, is not only at work but recognizably at work. The old belief that man is the only ‘rational animal’ may well be mistaken; not so much because it implied too much rationality in man; it never did that, for it never implied that man was more than feebly intermittently, and precariously rational; as because it implied to little in non-human animals.” The human mind then always reveals itself to be governed by reasons, however muddled and meager these reasons may be. These reasons always present themselves as thoughts, and these thoughts are always expressed by language in one form another, whether it because the ejaculatory shiver or the full fledged treatise.
Thought or language thus occupies an ontological place in Collingwood’s work, if I can be forgiven for speaking of it this way. Previously I had described language as a way of being in the world, by which I meant that the use of language is a basic constitutive fact of the human experience: we are born into a named world and we continue trying to name things as accurately as possible. Indeed, in The Principles of History Collingwood makes this idea explicit, claiming that for a human being there is no way of acting that is not at the same time a form of language and an expression of thought: "For a rational animal, in so far as he is rational (and in the case of man, I repeat, that is never very far), every action has the character of language: every action is an expression of thought. Every trace of his action left upon the world he inhabits has the character of writing: every such trace is evidence, to a person who can read it, of what his thought was. A man climbing a snow-covered mountain is putting into practice his plan for getting to the top; and if he sticks to his plan, his movements during the ascent make up a continuous piece of language, from which an understanding watcher can make out, with as much precision as if he were listening to a running commentary given by the climber in words, what the plan is. And because he leaves tracks in the snow, which as long as they remain legible preserve a tolerably complete notation of his movements, it remains possible to read his movement-language after he has ceased to utter it, and to reconstruct the history of his ascent from the evidence of his footprints." This passage possess the intertwining of thought, language, and action that I am arguing is central to the entirety of Collingwood’s philosophy. There can be no clean dualism between thought and language or between knowledge and action on this scheme, for all of these things are so deeply intertwined in our very being. We are beings that speak through every action. Consequently this means that we can only come to know ourselves through speaking, through acting. When we begin to regard every action as a piece of language and as an expression of our thoughts, we will recognize that thought is not a mere activity (though it is that) but rather is an ontological condition. Our world is a world of thoughts.
The ontological character of thought is also addressed in The Principles of Art, where Collingwood argues precisely that the world is made of thoughts, and that to change our thoughts is to change our world. Within the world of art, he argues, there is no distinction that can be made between theory and practice, between changes in one’s environment and oneself. The role of language in art is both practical and theoretical. When an artist uses language to explore his world he finds that is engaging both with himself and the world, and that they are united through language. The aesthetic experience “is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world. It is also a making of oneself and of one’s world, the self which was psyche being remade in the shape of consciousness, and the world, which was crude sensa, being remade in the shape of language, or sensa converted into imagery and charged with emotional significance.” When we find that both the human world around us and our inner worlds are both constituted by the use of language, we have no choice but to regard different uses of language as constituting differences both within and without us. Speech is a path both to how we perceive our own activity and how we perceive the meaning of the world outside of us, and thus necessarily has repercussions for how we act in the world. Indeed, a few pages prior Collingwood had argued that moral activity is identical to the aesthetic experience in this way, knowing no distinction between theoretical and practical. Morality, that is to say, involves both changes within and without. If I change myself, I change my thoughts, I change my actions, and I change my world.
