Grice and Collingwood

 

 

collingwood: r. g.— Grice: “The most Italian of English Oxonians! He loved Gentile, Croce, and de Ruggiero!”Grice: “I would not count Collingwood as a philosopher, really, since his tutor was Carritt!” -- cited by H. P. Grice in “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, “The nature of metaphysics.”Like Grice, Collingwood was influenced by J. C. Wilson’s subordinate interrogation. English philosopher and historian. His father, W. G. Collingwood, John Ruskin’s friend, secretary, and biographer, at first educated him at home in Coniston and later sent him to Rugby School and then Oxford. Immediately upon graduating in 2, he was elected to a fellowship at Pembroke ; except for service with admiralty intelligence during World War I, he remained at Oxford until 1, when illness compelled him to retire. Although his Autobiography expresses strong disapproval of the lines on which, during his lifetime, philosophy at Oxford developed, he was a varsity “insider.” He was elected to the Waynflete Professorship, the first to become vacant after he had done enough work to be a serious candidate. He was also a leading archaeologist of Roman Britain. Although as a student Collingwood was deeply influenced by the “realist” teaching of John Cook Wilson, he studied not only the British idealists, but also Hegel and the contemporary  post-Hegelians. At twenty-three, he published a translation of Croce’s book on Vico’s philosophy. Religion and Philosophy 6, the first of his attempts to present orthodox Christianity as philosophically acceptable, has both idealist and Cook Wilsonian elements. Thereafter the Cook Wilsonian element steadily diminished. In Speculum Mentis4, he investigated the nature and ultimate unity of the four special ‘forms of experience’  art, religion, natural science, and history  and their relation to a fifth comprehensive form  philosophy. While all four, he contended, are necessary to a full human life now, each is a form of error that is corrected by its less erroneous successor. Philosophy is error-free but has no content of its own: “The truth is not some perfect system of philosophy: it is simply the way in which all systems, however perfect, collapse into nothingness on the discovery that they are only systems.” Some critics dismissed this enterprise as idealist a description Collingwood accepted when he wrote, but even those who favored it were disturbed by the apparent skepticism of its result. A year later, he amplified his views about art in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. Since much of what Collingwood went on to write about philosophy has never been published, and some of it has been negligently destroyed, his thought after Speculum Mentis is hard to trace. It will not be definitively established until the more than 3,000 s of his surviving unpublished manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library in 8 have been thoroughly studied. They were not available to the scholars who published studies of his philosophy as a whole up to 0. Three trends in how his philosophy developed, however, are discernible. The first is that as he continued to investigate the four special forms of experience, he came to consider each valid in its own right, and not a form of error. As early as 8, he abandoned the conception of the historical past in Speculum Mentis as simply a spectacle, alien to the historian’s mind; he now proposed a theory of it as thoughts explaining past actions that, although occurring in the past, can be rethought in the present. Not only can the identical thought “enacted” at a definite time in the past be “reenacted” any number of times after, but it can be known to be so reenacted if colligation physical evidence survives that can be shown to be incompatible with other proposed reenactments. In 334 he wrote a series of lectures posthumously published as The Idea of Nature in which he renounced his skepticism about whether the quantitative material world can be known, and inquired why the three constructive periods he recognized in European scientific thought, the Grecian, the Renaissance, and the modern, could each advance our knowledge of it as they did. Finally, in 7, returning to the philosophy of art and taking full account of Croce’s later work, he showed that imagination expresses emotion and becomes false when it counterfeits emotion that is not felt; thus he transformed his earlier theory of art as purely imaginative. His later theories of art and of history remain alive; and his theory of nature, although corrected by research since his death, was an advance when published. The second trend was that his conception of philosophy changed as his treatment of the special forms of experience became less skeptical. In his beautifully written Essay on Philosophical Method 3, he argued that philosophy has an object  the ens realissimum as the one, the true, and the good  of which the objects of the special forms of experience are appearances; but that implies what he had ceased to believe, that the special forms of experience are forms of error. In his Principles of Art 8 and New Leviathan 2 he denounced the idealist principle of Speculum Mentis that to abstract is to falsify. Then, in his Essay on Metaphysics 0, he denied that metaphysics is the science of being qua being, and identified it with the investigation of the “absolute presuppositions” of the special forms of experience at definite historical periods. A third trend, which came to dominate his thought as World War II approached, was to see serious philosophy as practical, and so as having political implications. He had been, like Ruskin, a radical Tory, opposed less to liberal or even some socialist measures than to the bourgeois ethos from which they sprang. Recognizing European fascism as the barbarism it was, and detesting anti-Semitism, he advocated an antifascist foreign policy and intervention in the  civil war in support of the republic. His last major publication, The New Leviathan, impressively defends what he called civilization against what he called barbarism; and although it was neglected by political theorists after the war was won, the collapse of Communism and the rise of Islamic states are winning it new readers.   Grice: “Collingwood thought of language importantly enough to dedicate a full seminar at Oxford to it. He entitled it “Language.” The first section is on “symbol and expression.” Language comes into existence with imagination, as a feature of experience at the conscious level. . . ‘. . . It is an imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion. Intel- lectual language is this same thing intellectualized, or modified so as to express thought.’ A symbol is established by agreement; but this agreement is established in a language that already exists. In this way, intellectualized language ‘presupposes imaginative language or language proper. . . in the traditional theory of language these relations are reversed, with disastrous results.’ Children do not learn to speak by being shown things while their names are uttered; or if they do, it is because (unlike, say, cats) they already understand the language of pointing and naming. The child may be accustomed to hearing ‘Hatty off!’ when its bonnet is removed; then the child may exclaim ‘Hattiaw!’ when it removes its own bonnet and throws it out of the perambulator. The exclamation is not a symbol, but an expression of satisfaction at removing the bonnet. The second section is on “Psychical Expression.” More primitive than linguistic expression is psychical expression: ‘the doing of involuntary and perhaps even wholly unconscious bodily acts [such as grimac- ing], related in a peculiar way to the emotions [such as pain] they are said to express.’ A single experience can be analyzed: -- sensum (as an abdominal gripe), or the field of sensation containing this; ) the emotional charge on the sensum (as visceral pain); -- the psychical expression (as the grimace). We can observe and interpret psychical expressions intellectually. But there is the possibility of emotional contagion, or sympathy, whereby expressions can also be sensa for others, with their own emotional charges. Examples are the spread of panic through a crowd, or a dog’s urge to attack the person who is afraid of it (or the cat that runs from it). Psychical emotions can be expressed only psychically. But there are emotions of consciousness (as hatred, love, anger, shame): these are the emotional charges, not on sensa, but on modes of consciousness, which can be expressed in language or psychically. Expressed psychically, they have the same analysis as psychical emotions; for example, --  ‘consciousness of our own inferiority, ) ‘shame -- ) ‘blushing.’ Shame is not the emotional charge on the sensa associated with blushing. ‘The common-sense view [that we blush because we are ashamed] is right, and the James–Lange theory is wrong.’ Emotions of consciousness can be expressed in two different ways because, more generally, a ‘higher level [of experience] differs from the lower in having a new principle of organization; this does not supersede the old, it is superimposed on it. The lower type of experience is perpetuated in the higher type’ somewhat as matter is perpetuated, even with a new form. ‘A mode of consciousness like shame is thus, formally, a mode of consciousness and nothing else; materially, it is a constellation or synthesis of psychical expe- riences.’ But consciousness is ‘an activity by which those elements are combined in this particular way.’ It is not just a new arrangement of those elements— otherwise the sensa of which shame is the emotional charge would have been obvious, and the James–Lange theory would not have needed to arise. ‘[E]ach new level [of experience] must organize itself according to its own principles before a transition can be made to the next’. Therefore, to move beyond consciousness to intellect, ‘emotions of consciousness must be formally or linguistically expressed, not only materially or psychically expressed’. The third section is on “Imaginative Expression.” Psychical expression is uncontrollable. At the level of awareness, expressions are experienced ‘as activities belonging to ourselves and controlled in the same sense as the emotions they express. ‘Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, insofar as they come under our control and are conceived by us in our awareness of controlling them, as our way of expressing these emotions, are language.’ ‘[A]ny theory of language must begin here.’ The controlled act of expression is materially the same as psychical expression; the difference is just that it is done ‘on purpose’. ‘[T]he conversion of impression into idea by the work of consciousness im- mensely multiplies the emotions that demand expression.’ ‘There are no unexpressed emotions.’ What are so called are emotions, already expressed at one level, of which somebody is trying to become conscious. 5From  http://en..org/wiki/James-Lange_theory, The theory states that within human beings, as a response to experiences in the world, the autonomic nervous system creates physiological events such as muscular tension, a rise in heart rate, perspiration, and dryness of the mouth. Emotions, then, are feelings which come about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being their cause. Corresponding to the series of sensum, emotional charge, psychical expression (as in red color, fear, start), we have, say, -- ) bonnet removal, ) feeling of triumph, -- cry of ‘Hattiaw!’ The child imitates the speech of others only when it realizes that they are speaking. The fourth section is on “Language and Languages.” Language need not be spoken by the tongue. ‘[T]here is no way of expressing the same feeling in two different media.’ However, ‘each one of us, whenever he expresses himself, is doing so with his whole body’, in the ‘original language of total bodily gesture’—this is the ‘motor side’ of the ‘total imaginative experience’ identified as art proper in Book I. The sixth section is on “Speaker and Hearer.” A child’s first utterances are not addressed to anybody. But a speaker is always -- ness does not begin as a mere self-consciousness. . . the consciousness of our own existence is also consciousness of the existence of’ other persons. These persons could be cats or trees or shadows: as a form of thought, consciousness can make mistakes [§ .]. In speaking, we do not exactly communicate an emotion to a listener. To do this would be to cause the listener to have a similar emotion; but to compare the emotions, we would need language. The single experience of expressing emotion has two parts: the emotion, and the controlled bodily action expressing it. This union of idea with expression can be considered from two points of view: -- ) we can express what we feel only because we know it; -- ) we know what we feel because we can express it. ‘The person to whom speech is addressed is already familiar with this double situation’. He ‘takes what he hears exactly as if it were speech of his own. . . and this constructs in himself the idea which those words express.’ But he attributes the idea to the speaker. This does not presuppose community of language; it is community of language. If the hearer is to understand the speaker though, he must have enough expe- rience to have the impressions from which the ideas of the speaker are derived. (Collingwood’s footnote to the section title is ‘In this section, whatever is said of speech is meant of language in general.’) conscious of himself as speaking, so he is a also a listener. The origin of self-consciousness will not be discussed. However, ‘Conscious- However, misunderstanding may be the fault of the speaker, if his consciousness is corrupt. The seventh section is on Language and Thought: Language is an activity of thought; but if thought is taken in the narrower sense of intellect, then language expresses not thought, but emotions. However, these may be the emotions of a thinker. ‘Everything which imagination presents to itself is a here, a now’. This might be the song of a thrush in May. One may imagine, alongside this, the January song of the thrush; but at the level of imagination, the two songs coalesce into one. By thinking, one may analyze the song into parts—notes; or one may relate it to things not imagined, such as the January thrush song that one remembers having heard four months ago at dawn (though one may not remember the song -- to express any kind of thought (again, in the narrower sense), language must be adapted. The eighth section is on “The Grammatical Analysis of Language.” This adaptation of language to the expression of thought is the function or business of the grammarian. ‘I do not call it purpose, because he does not propose it to himself as a conscious aim’. The grammarian analyzes, not the activity of language, but ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’, the supposed product of speech. But this product ‘is a metaphysical fiction. It is supposed to exist only because the theory of language is approached from the standpoint of the philosophy of craft. . . what the grammarian is really doing is to think, not about a product of the activity of speaking, but about the activity itself, distorted in his thoughts about it by the assumption that it is not an activity, but a product or “thing”. ‘Next, this “thing” must be scientifically studied; and this involves a double process. The first stage of this process is to cut the “thing” up into parts. Some readers will object to this phrase on the ground that I have used a verb of acting when I ought to have used a verb of thinking. . . [but] philosophical controversies are not to be settled by a sort of police-regulation governing people’s choice of words. . . I meant cut. . àBird songs are wonderful to hear; but I am not sufficiently familiar with them, or I live in the wrong place, to be able to recognize seasonal variations in them. Looking for my own examples, I can remember that, last summer, I became drenched in sweat from walking at midday in the hills above the Aegean coast, before giving a mathematics lecture; but I need not remember the feeling of the heat.) itself ). Analyzing and relating are not the only kinds of thought. The point is that. -- ‘The final process is to devise a scheme of relations between the parts thus divided. . . a) ‘Lexicography. Every word, as it actually occurs in discourse, occurs once and once only. . . Thus we get a new fiction: the recurring word’. ‘Meanings’ of words are established in words, so we get another fiction: synonymity. b) Accidence. The rules whereby a single word is modified into dominus, domine, dominum are also ‘palpable fictions; for it is notorious that excep- tions to them occur’. c) Syntax. ‘A grammarian is not a kind of scientist studying the actual structure of lan- guage; he is a kind of butcher’. Idioms are another example of how language resists the grammarian’s efforts. The ninth section is on The Logical Analysis of Language. Logical technique aims ‘to make language into a perfect vehicle for the expression of thought.’ It asssumes ‘that the grammatical transformation of language has been successfully accomplished.’ It makes three further assumptions:) the propositional assumption that some ‘sentences’ make statements; ) the principle of homolingual translation whereby one sentence can mean exactly the same as another (or group of others) in the same language;) logical preferability: one sentence may be preferred to another that has the same meaning. The criterion is not ease of understanding (this is the stylist’s concern), but ease of manipulation by the logician’s technique to suit his aims. The logician’s modification of language can to some extent be carried out; but it tries to pull language apart into two things: language proper, and symbolism. ‘No serious writer or speaker ever utters a thought unless he thinks it worth uttering...Nor does he ever utter it except with a choice of words, and in a tone of voice, that express his sense of this importance.’ The problem is that written words do not show tone of voice. One is tempted to believe that scientific discourse is what is written; what is spoken is this and something else, emotional expression. Good logic would show that the logical structure of a proposition is not clear from its written form. Good literature is written so (8Collingwood imaginatively describes Dr. Richards, who writes of Tolstoy’s view of art, ‘This is plainly untrue’, as if he were a cat shaking a drop of water from its paw. Dr. Richards is Ivor Armstrong Richards, to whose Principles of Literary Criticism Collingwood refers; ac- cording to http://en..org/wiki/I._A._Richards (accessed December , ), ‘Richards is regularly considered one of the founders of the contemporary study of literature in English’.) (In a footnote, Collingwood mentions an example of Cook Wilson: ‘That building is the Bodleian’ could mean ‘That building is the Bodleian’ or ‘That building is the Bodleian.’ that the reader cannot help but read it with the right tempo and tone. The proposition, as a form of words expressing thought and not emotion, is a fictitious entity. But ‘a second and more difficult thesis’ is that words do not express thought at all directly; they express the emotional charge on a thought, allowing the hearer to rediscover the thought ‘whose peculiar emotional tone the speaker has expressed.’The tenth section is *on “Language and Symbolism.” Symbols and technical terms are invented for unemotional scientific purposes, but they always acquire emotional expressiveness. ‘Every mathematician knows this.’ Intellectualized language, • as language, expresses emotion, • as symbolism, has meaning; it points beyond emotion to a thought. ‘The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into a scientific symbolism, thus represents not a progressive drying-up of emotion, but its progressive articulation and specializa- tion. We are not getting away from an emotional atmosphere into a dry, rational atmosphere; we are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressing them.’ Grice: “Collingwood improves on Crocefor one, he makes Croce understandable at Oxford. Collingwood wants to distinguish between emotion and expression of emotion. He also speaks of communication of emotion. The keyword is ‘expression.’ Collingwood distinguishes between uncontrolled manifestation and controlled manifestation. It is the latter that he dignifies with the term ‘expression.’ He makes an interesting point about the recipient. The recipient must be in some degree of familiarty with the emotion expressed by the utterer that the utterer is ‘communicating.’ To communicate is not really like ‘transfer.’ It is not THE SAME EMOTION that gets transferred.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Collingwood,” in “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, The nature of metaphysics. Luigi Speranza, “A commentary on the language and conversation section of Collingwood’s “The idea of language.”