Collingwood and the Disaster of Cook Wilson, Moore and Russell for British Ethics and Politics. Ian Winchester, University of Calgary

Transcription

1 Collingwood and the Disaster of Cook Wilson, Moore and Russell for British Ethics and Politics Ian Winchester, University of Calgary Abstract: Collingwood is critical of the Cook Wilson school of Oxford realists and what he takes to be a parallel school at Cambridge, the analytical philosophers, led by Russell and Moore. His critique is two pronged. On the one hand he points out the social consequences of these approaches to philosophy both of which he saw as removing philosophy from the mainstream of British thought and of offering nothing positive to the young university graduates in the realm of ethics and politics that would help them to do their necessary work in the public sphere better than without their having studied philosophy. In this paper I will discuss the spectrum of Collingwood's criticisms of these schools and will look, particularly at the work of Russell (Collingwood says very little about Moore) to see whether or not his criticism of him at least has force. I will take it for granted that we are not in a very good position to judge his critique of Cook Wilson who did not write down the doctrines to which Collingwood aludes and which Collingwood did indeed experience at first hand. Key Words; realism, idealism, Oxford realists, Cook Wilson, Russell, Moore, ethics and politics, higher education Introduction Collingwood was educated at home, at Rugby and at Oxford in the shadow of the Victorian era and only just became a university tutor at the beginning of the First World War. The impact of that war, besides requiring him to leave university teaching for war service in intelligence, was to transform his picture of British and European civilization and its ills. It also was a period on which he reflected on his educational experiences at the hands of his "realist" teachers at Oxford and soundly rejected their methods and their conclusions. Interestingly, though he tars both Moore and Russell with something like the same realist brush, he appears to have been influenced by at least two of Russell's early writings, both appearing in one of Russell's early books Mysticism and Logic. The most important of these appears to have been Russell's essay "On the Notion of Cause", Proc. Arist. Soc, reprinted in that book. He only comments on Moore in a couple of places and never mentions Principia Ethica, though it seems to be implied. The only direct reference to Moore's doctrines is Collingwood's commentary at the beginning of the fourth chapter in his autobiography to Moore's "recently published article called "The Refutation of Idealism". His view of Russell's logical achievements is mixed. On the one hand he thinks that all "propositional" logic from Aristotle onwards is founded on a mistake since logic is always a logic of "question and answer", not of propositions as such. On the other hand he mentions Russell's

2 achievements positively in more than one place and appears to admire some of his writing while thinking his influence is similar to that of the Oxford realists the influence of whom he had come to think thoroughly bad, an opinion he appears to have maintained until his untimely death. Collingwood's criticism of his philosophical contemporaries:the Oxford realists, Russell and Moore The chief criticism he offers of the work of his contemporaries at Oxford, especially Cook Wilson and Prichard as well as the Cambridge realists/analytical philosophers is that they are deeply ahistorical in the sense that they do not care whether the views they offer up for analytical critique are the actual views held by the philosophers to whom they ascribe them. But the second criticism of the realist and analytic schools of thought as he experienced them was that they due to their doctrines and their critical techniques had abandoned the really necessary and useful practical ethical and political consequences of philosophical study for the benefit of the next generation of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who would have important positions in the public sphere: the church, the bar, the civil service, the government of the day. Here is a pretty typical passage from the Autobiography that makes this point powerfully: Moral philosophy, from the days of Socrates down to our own lifetime, had been regarded as an attempt to think out more clearly the issues involved in conduct, for the sake of acting better. In 1912 Prichard announced that moral philosophy so understood was based on a mistake, and advocated a new kind of moral philosophy, purely theoretical, in which the workings of the moral consciousness could be scientifically studied as if there were movements of the planets, and no attempt made to interfere with them. And Bertrand Russell at Cambridge proposed in the same spirit, and on grounds whose difference was only superficial, the extrusion of ethics from the body of philosophy.(autobiography, p. 47) A little later on the same page in a connected passage he remarks that "young people" had previously been told by Oxford (and presumably Cambridge) philosophers "that by thinking about what they were doing or were about to do,they would become likely on the whole to do it better; and that some attempt to formulate ideals and principles, was an indispensable condition of engaging credibly in these activities themselves." ( Auto. p. 47) He follows this up immediately with his philosophical grounds for thinking ill of the "realists" of his day. Their great principle, that nothing is affected by being known, was treated by them a being true of human action as well. Moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action so it cannot make any difference to the theory of the practice of moral action. So in effect young people being prepared under the influence of the

3 Oxford realists for the Church, the Civil Service, the Bar and in Parliament left their university studies with the conviction that philosophy and in particular the philosophy they had learned at the hands of their philosophy tutors in Oxford, was an important thing and that it was no longer their vocation to put it into practice. (Auto., p. 17) In Collingwood's words the point of a philosophical education at Oxford in his time was to convince their students that "philosophy was a silly and trifling game, and to give them a lifelong contempt for the subject and a lifelong grudge against the men who had wasted their time by forcing it upon their attention" (Auto., p. 50) In his remarks on Russell's influence in his Autobiography Collingwood sees Russell as the Cambridge figure creating, along with Moore, a Cambridge school roughly parallel to the school of Cook Wilson that lead to the decline of the earlier picture, especially the school of Green, of the place of philosophy in English life through the university influence. At Cambridge this may mean the decline in the Hegelian influence and, perhaps. of Bradley's influence there as well. Russell is seen by Collingwood as having proposed the extrusion of ethics from philosophy and, perhaps more importantly, as having produced a version of logic that was entirely "propositional" that excluded what Collingwood believed to have been more properly thought of by earlier logicians at least implicitly as a logic of "question an answer"(though he saw himself as the very first to have noticed this explicitly.) This clarified and developed "propositional logic" developed by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica, explicitly excludes prior questions when considering contradiction, for example. (So for Russell, p & -p is simply a contradiction. Whereas for Collingwood each "p" may have a different prior question to which they are an answer and therefore need not necessarily contradict one another. Russell's views may also have in Collingwood's opinion "inspired a school of thought [presumably the Logical Positivists] which is continuing the good work of jettisoning whatever can be recognized as a positive doctrine by reviving the old positivist attack on metaphysics". (Auto., p. 52) (Indeed Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics has been seen as a response to A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic which is such an attack.) There is some irony in that both Collingwood and Russell came to see Oxford philosophy in their time as having abandoned its real importance for a mess of pottage. Collingwood's stalking horse was, obviously, the "Oxford realists" as well as the influence of Russell and Moore at Cambridge. Russell's, a little later, was the "Oxford ordinary language philosophers after the Second World War. And their common judgment on these two schools was the trivialization of the great tradition of philosophy and its practical impact. Russell remarked that the post-wwii Oxford philosophy, influenced by the later writings and teachings of Wittgenstein, amounted to the view that "philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worse, an idle tea-table amusement".(my Philosophical Development, p. 217). For his part Collingwood's response to the sorry state of affairs that was Oxford philosophy after the First World War was, as we have noted above, the suggestion that any student of those days introduced to philosophy by the Oxford realists would see it as merely a "silly and trifling game". There is also some further irony in that some of Collingwoods own tendencies as a philosopher may have in part lead to the development of Oxford's "ordinary language philosophy" as a movement after the Second World War, particularly when he

4 suggests the importance of looking to the ways in which words like "right" for example have been used historically as a necessary basis for further philosophizing. The next two topics derive from Collingwood's own methods. The first is whether or not his critique of his "realist" or "analytical" enemies were actually justified. The second is what Collingwood's own positive doctrines are. I shall concentrate on the first of these as the latter would require a much longer exposition that this brief paper. First let us begin with Collingwood's critique of his enemies. He, for example, criticizes Moore for suggesting that in his refutation of idealism he is offering critique of Berkeley. But as Collingwood tells us, when one looks a Berkeley and what Moore has to say about idealism it is clear that whatever he is offering a critique of it is not Berkeleian idealism. Similarly he points out that when Cook Wilson offered a critique of Bradley's doctrines it was clear, when one looked at Bradley, that Cook Wilson had never read him or had not read him with care. So as an example, let us look to see whether he is justified in his critique of Russell who, unlike Cook Wilson, left an extensive record of his thoughts in writing. I will assume that he is right about Cook Wilson. Is Collingwood's critique of Russell justified on Collingwood's own principles? Can we, for example, truly judge that Russell so trivialized philosophy that those following his lead would abandon philosophy since for Russell it was just a "silly and trifling game"? Or that Russell did not attempt to understand what, exactly, earlier philosophers were trying to say with their philosophical remarks? If Russell's influence was as Collingwood suggests then the topics of which he wrote would not be read by a wider public. Yet Russell is perhaps the most widely published and read philosophical author of the 20th century, an author of dozens of thoughtful books written for both a philosophical and a general audience. He has influenced thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama as well as enormous numbers of ordinary people who bought and read his books, including the Swedish Academy that awarded him a Nobel Prize in Literature. His books are always carefully reasoned and related to definite and precise questions, as Collingwood suggests they ought to be. And when he has finished he leaves the reader with the notion that something important has been said that has clarified much for the reader and perhaps offers something on which he might base further actions in his life. In each of his books Russell discusses earlier philosophical thought, not necessarily thought by earlier "philosophers", but certainly by important thinkers on the topic of the day. For example, the first of Russell's books that I read was "The ABC of Relativity" at the age of sixteen. This book is a popular, readable but accurate exposition of special and general relativity but it contains highly original critique of the achievements of Einstein and of the actual use in both physics and in the philosophy of nature of the developments that Einstein was responsible for. Indeed it was the book that led me to originally becoming a physicist and ultimately to philosophy. Russell's books included topics like the one on Mysticism and Logic to which Collingwood frequently refers with

5 approval. Indeed Collingwood is especially impressed by Russell's historical treatment of the notion of "cause" in contemporary physics in which he points out that the notion of cause has disappeared from physics as practiced in the 20th century. It is true that in Human Society in Ethics and Politics Russell suggests, as he does in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and LImits, that strictly speaking the kind of knowledge we have of the natural world is of a different kind from that we claim to have in, say, ethics or politics. If we take our natural knowledge as the standard of what we mean by knowledge then we do not have, in that sense, ethical knowledge. Russell is, in fact, uses in effect Plato's "justified true belief" from the Theatetus as the basis for this claim. Russell may be right or wrong in this but Collingwood uses this suggestion as grounds for assimilating him to those who, like his Oxford realists, would offer the next generation of students nothing to go on in thinking about their social and cultural actions. Collingwood writes as if he had read Russell but there is nothing that he writes that suggests that he really did once he thought of him as a "realist" or as merely a adept of "propositional logic" who had missed the importance of questions in all contexts of human thought. Russell, of course, went on to write on an enormous number of topics that Collingwood ought to have, in principle, approved. All of them were written with a view to influencing the thought and actions of human beings for the better. Here is a brief list of books published by Russell before 1932, roughly as Collingwood was becoming a professor at Oxford, excluding his more technical writings but including everything that relates to political action and ethical activity by that early date: Principles of Social Reconstruction, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Justice in War-Time, Free Thought and Official Propaganda, Marriage and Morals, On Education: Especially in Early Childhood, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, Bolshevism and the West. When he found himself stuck in the United States at the outbreak of World War Two and had lost his job at City College of New York because of his book on Marriage and Morals that offended the board of governors of that institution though his teaching assignments was restricted to mathematical logic, he took a job from a quirky American millionaire giving lectures weekly on the History of Western Philosophy in the course of which he tried mightily to understand the main doctrines of Western thought from Socrates onwards. It was published as A History of Western Philosophy and subsequent sales (especially as a Book of the Month Club choice) kept Russell and his family, as well as Allan an Unwin, going financially for the rest of his long life. At least two other authors have tried something similar since then in the English language, Father Copelston and Anthony Kenny. Both are critical of Russell's interpretations here and there. But I confess I find Russell's interpretations of the thinkers of the past fresher and clearer than theirs. And certainly more engagingly written---indeed, an inspiration to the man in the street or the university graduate wanting to begin from the best thought of the past. And we cannot forget Russell's public political actions during the madness of the First World War landed him in jail. And at the end of his life his work on nuclear disarmament and the dangers of the Cuban missile crisis were part of his continuing to offer an

6 example to others of the properly engaged philosopher who cared about human life and its quality. Collingwood, himself, went on also to try to do something about the unfortunate influence of Cook Wilson and his school by writing a number of important books himself with both a view to philosophical clarification as well as an attempt to influence general thought. My sense is that the most important of these were his Essay on Metaphysics and The New Leviathan, though The Idea of History and the Idea of Nature left to Knox to edit after his death were actually better sellers among the population at large. The New Leviathan and the Essay on Metaphysics expound for Collingwood what is most original and important in his social thought on the one hand and what is most important in his thought concerning knowledge and metaphysics on the other. Though in some sense his work as an historian as well as his work on history as a discipline and his understanding of the history of the idea of nature bridge these two earlier works published under his own hand and clarify much. To sum up, Collingwood certainly did not fall foul of his own critique of the proper role of a philosopher vis a vis the wider public and his students. But I think that, at least in the case of Russell, he did not read either the man's work nor his life as closely as he might have done. And so his own principles applied sloppily were not applied as fairly as one might have wanted for those who love Collingwood and his work.