Quotes: 12 May 2026
About history & more
[The] illusion that the historical fact exists in some latent state in the documents and that the historian is a parasite on the historical equation. Against this methodological illusion it has to be affirmed that the initiative in history does not belong to the document but to the question posed by the historian. This question takes logical priority in historical inquiry.
Very Collingwood!
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For even if conspiracy is a theater of madness, this madness is at work, generating events.
In describing these researches into historical method, I am taking most of my examples from archaeology (that is, history in which the sources used are ‘unwritten’ sources, or, more accurately, are not pre-existing narratives of the events into which the historian is inquiring). But this is not because my results did not equally apply to history whose sources are ‘written’. The reason I am talking so much about archaeology is that in archaeology the issue raised by the project of a Baconian revolution is unmistakable. When history is based on literary sources the difference between scissors-and-paste or pre-Baconian history, where the historian merely repeats what his ‘authorities’ tell him, and scientific or Baconian history, where he forces his ‘authorities’ to answer the questions he puts to them, is not always quite clear. . . . In archaeology. . . it is obvious. Unless the archaeologist is content merely to describe what he or some one else has found, which it is almost impossible to do without using some interpretative terms implying purpose, like ‘wall’, ‘pottery’, ‘implement’, ‘hearth’, he is practising Baconian history all the time: asking about everything he handles, ‘What was this for?’ and trying to see how it fitted into the context of a peculiar kind of life.
Collingwood maintains that all of history is the history of human thought. Or, as I might put it, it’s the history of human purposes and intentions, of human actions, set against any given set of circumstances or “events,” as Collinwood described the backdrop of Nature and other givens in human life.
The University Bookman on John Lukacs
John Lukacs, edited by Gerald Russello, Peter Edman, and Alexis Carra. Quoted review article by Thomas Bertonneau
Concerning the special “quality” of historical thinking, as Lukacs convincingly asserts, it “is neither objective nor subjective but personal and participant.” In this way it abrogates the dogmatic bifurcation into subject and object proclaimed by the long dominant Cartesian epistemology and helps repair what has been, in a real sense, a delusion. . . . [I]n the study of history because the main material of history is words, and because words are always imbued by some small ambiguity, objectifying historians declared that history was nothing but ambiguity, words without recoverable referents. As Lukacs says, this claim rendered history inaccessible, like the Kantian Ding an Sich, and denied the participatory element in historical investigation. Such a view offends against basic human experience, which is suffused by memory. Common sense is right when it reminds the dogmatist that words do indeed refer to events and things, and that these events and things were bound up with human struggles and aspirations the effects of which not only reach down to the present but constitute it. History must be “participatory.” (So must life!) The historian must enter into the dialectic of the actual and the potential contained in every critical moment of the past. Memory is the real psyche or life force and nothing is genuinely more alive than the historian’s disciplined rejoining of the past; apprehended in the right way, history becomes palpable.
History has two definitions, the novel has one. Did history exist before historians, does it exist without its recorders and narrators? It did and it does. Can a novel exist without a novelist, without its writer? It cannot. This distinction is commonsensical; but it is also incomplete. A juxtaposition of the historian and the novelist as categorical opposites is not absolute. Neither is the categorical juxtaposition of “fact” and “fiction.” “Fiction” means construction, whence there is some “fiction” in the statement (and even in the perception) of every “fact.”
Collingwood’s the Idea of History
Vico had shown that the imagination of the historian was the key to the very possibility of history itself. He had shown that to expect from history a level of certainty beyond the narratives of the past that historians construct is to expect what history cannot provide.
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How, then, is a novel about the past different from a history of it? Both are narratives in which events and circumstances combine with character and motivation to produce a compelling tale.
Essays in the Philosophy of History
Collingwood writing about the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce:
The historian’s duty is surely not to pick and choose: he must make every point of view his own, and not condemn the lost cause merely because it is lost. . . .Croce is saying that when a historian fails to maintain a properly “positive” attitude, fails, that is, to maintain that whatever happens is right, he does so because he has attached himself so blindly to a cause, a person, an institution, a truth, as to forget that every individual thing is but mortal; and when his foolish hopes are shattered and the beloved object dies in his arms, the face of the world is darkened and he can see nothing in the change but the destruction of that which he loved, and can only repeat the sad story of its death. “All histories which tell of the decay and death of peoples and institutions are false”; “elegiac history” is always partisan history. This he expands by saying that immortality is the prerogative of the spirit in general: the spirit in its determinate and particular forms always perishes and always must perish.
As Habermas and [Robert] Putnam have each in their different ways shown us, liberal political practices rest on liberal social practices—the Declaration of the Rights of Man begins with a conversation in a café, and local democracy has a better chance of triumphing in Italy when amateur opera groups sing out first.
We will lay out two kinds of heroics, calling them old and new. Growth and efficiency will be balanced out with service and maintenance. From the perspective of the old heroics, service and maintenance seem rearguard actions, cleanup operations, necessary evils.
Lost Knowledge of the Imagination
Samuel Taylor Coleridge made between fantasy and imagination, with fantasy doing collage work, and imagination creating something that is truly ‘new’.
In Principles of Psychology(1890) he [William James] calls the body a ‘sounding board’, which vibrates subtly to emotions. His meaning is more easily grasped if we think of the body as a church organ on which you can play anything from Pop goes the Weasel to a Handel sonata. But for all its subtlety, an organ is a machine. Of course, in the case of a church organ, there is an organist and a composer; but many of our physical emotions are produced by ‘the world’, external stimuli.