Finished about a third of the book, a truly fascinating read! Collingwood really untangles a lot of the crazy-making philosophical problems an puts them in the proper context. I almost get the impression that the history of philosophy could be read as a war between those who refuse to see (or simply cannot see) the deeper reality behind this world, i.e. the realm of thought/ideas/spirit which runs through/interacts with our material reality, and those who understand this and struggle to make sense of it.
Among the many interesting things, so far Collingwood's discussion of the enlightenment stood out - powerful and insightful as the enlightenment thinkers might have been, they also based their view on some very wrong assumptions with which we still struggle today. Putting this in its proper historical context, as Collingwood does, is extremely fruitful - from today's perspective, we can see where the enlightenment went wrong and why, and of course what they got right. This is much more helpful than putting the enlightenment philosophy on a pedestral like, I guess, many of those "new enlightenment warriors" such as Dawkins & Co do. This seems rather backwards, actually.
Another thought I had regarding "critical history": Collingwood masterfully points out the errors in the critical approach to history (like textual analysis of historical documents and such), not because the method doesn't work, but because these people work under a positivist assumption: that history can and should be carried out like the natural sciences, i.e. "only the facts count". But this simply cannot be done, because a historian is not a scientists doing replicable experiments in a lab. The historian always has to choose which facts he studies for a reason; he has to interpret thoughts and motivations of historical actors; he has to judge historical developments and come up with logical and coherent theories etc. In other words, he needs to consider the sphere of thoughts/ideas and the associated patterns that lie behind history.
This is interesting in light of postmodernism and all that it entails: postmodernism seems to work, weirdly enough, under a positivist assumption as well - that all there is is external facts, i.e. empiricism/materialism. (That the postmodernists are mainly marxists seems rather fitting, because Marx was a materialist as well.) But then it embraces a scepticist view in addition to that: namely, that we cannot know reality, that we don't have direct access to reality because our senses screw it up. If you combine these two - empiricism/materialism and scepticism - you end up in a philosophical cul-de-sac, because you a) deny that there is a non-material realm of thought/ideas/spirit that transcends material reality and b) deny that you can know anything about material reality. This essentially turns human beings into subjective islands with no purpose and no connection to reality. All that's left is your whims and your narcissism - exactly what we see in today's postmodern nihilism.
Don't know if I got this right - but Collingwood is a stimulating read for sure!
Is there a huge difference between the two editions? Which edition are most you reading from?
