Collingwood on Historical Philosophical Presuppositions

Collingwood’s position on what he called ‘presuppositions’ is similar to that of Wittgenstein’s on what he called ‘frameworks’ (in his On Certainty and elsewhere). Like Wittgenstein’s frameworks, Collingwood’s presuppositions were not foundational. They were not self-evident, or necessary, or indubitable, or incorrigible and the rest. He took them to ‘change from time to time’. They were therefore also like Foucault’s foundational ‘historical epistemes’ (or his ‘historical a priori epistemes’). More precisely, at a certain historical period a

constellation of presuppositions govern this or that form of inquiry.

This is evidently like a Foucauldian episteme, or Foucault’s Kantian-like conditional and contingent conceptual schemes. Primarily, though, Collingwood took them to be historical artefacts, as it were; whereas Wittgenstein took his frameworks to be the necessary starting-points of our epistemological enquiries and also to provide an argument base against global scepticism and the parallel quest for ultimate certainties. The conditional nature of presuppositions can be made clear by saying that the ones

of biology may be different from the presuppositions of physics.

This shows their contextual rather than historical nature. And because presuppositions are taken as conditional, contextual and historical, they can be rejected, but not

on the ground that they are false.

Like Carnap’s ‘linguistic frameworks’, they are not the kinds of thing that can be taken as either true or false. They are not, in other words, statements or even determinate expressions of any kind. They are, instead, starting-points, or frameworks, or schemes, etc.

Of course Collingwood realised that many traditional metaphysicians were also concerned with presuppositions. However, they were not taken to be historical, etc., by them, but as fundamental axiomatic starting-points. According to Collingwood, metaphysicians must

proceed historically, disentangling the presuppositions of a certain form of inquiry at a particular historic period.

Here too we see a Foucault connection, this time with Foucault’s historicist ‘archaeological’ inquiries into, for example, the self or scientific method.

Traditionalists were historicists ‘without realising it’. Their enquiries were routed to their own and other historical periods, though they saw them as uncovering the conditions of this and that, in the Kantian manner, and were therefore deemed a-historical. Collingwood offers us a few examples of tacit historicist metaphysics. Aristotle, for one,

brought to light the presuppositions of Greek science, Kant… performed the same office for Newtonian physics.

Aristotle provided us with the metaphysical foundations of Greek science. And Kant, for example, reacted strongly against the lawfully determined self or ego that was the consequence of Newtonian universalist and non-relativist physics. Even when Spinoza argued that ‘God is nature’ he was responding to ‘nature’ as it was commonly seen in the 17th century. Indeed would it even be possible, or make sense, to believe that any metaphysical enquiries could occur ex nihilo or be fully aprioristic without certain given historical presuppositions? Collingwood even took natural science to be ‘essentially historical’. More precisely, its ‘facts’ consisted in the fact that

at a certain time and in a certain place certain observations have been made.

Put in another way, Collingwood’s historicism is even more radical than Hegel’s, or more radical than many other examples of Continental historicist. He also added a psychological ingredient to his historicist account of science. For example, scientific theories

are somebody’s thinking; to understand the classical theory of gravitations is to interpret the records of Newton’s reflections.

Collingwood concludes by saying that

natural science as a form of thought exists and has always existed in the context of history, and depends upon historical thought for its existence.

This expression, again, is extremely Hegelian in nature. Even Hegel didn’t have much to say about the historical nature of the natural sciences (e.g., as the expression of the historical ‘world-soul’).

Collingwood also offers a more basic and simple example of a presupposition. For example,

every question… rests upon a presupposition, without which the question would not arise.

For instance, take the question

What does that inscription mean?

This question presupposes that it has a meaning; or that it must have a meaning. But that presupposition of that question could itself be a previous answer to another question. The presupposition, therefore, is ‘relative’ because it too ‘can be regarded as an answer to’ this question:

Has that inscription a meaning?

This too could have as its presupposition the assumption that meanings are abstract objects, or simply that meanings do in fact exist. Or, alternatively, the questioner must also presuppose that it is an inscription by the very fact that he asks whether it has a meaning. The first question presupposes meanings; the second one presupposes it is an inscription; and a further question could be about whether or not it is an actual inscription rather than, say, a picture or even just a scribble of some kind. Clearly, however, we have some kind of indefinite regress here, which, one can say, could be solved by some kind of foundationalism or, alternatively, a kind of coherentism or holism. Collingwood himself would have no doubt adopted the latter option, if only because his strong historicist tendencies must surely entail a coherentism or a holism of some kind (as it did for Hegel and many other historicist Continental philosophers).