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From Contemplation to Transformation: Myth, History,

and the Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood.

James Kent B.A. (Hons).

C. G. Kratzenstein-Stub, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, 1806. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Reproduced

Wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kratzenstein_orpheus.jpg), accessed 13/4/15.

A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts at Monash University in 2015

Department of Philosophy, School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies

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Copyright notice

© James Kent (2015). Except as provided in the Copyright Act 1968, this thesis may

not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.

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Abstract

The relationship between history and myth suffers from an ambiguity from which a

philosophical topos, and thus philosophical project, emerges. This thesis deals with the

philosophical potential of this ambiguity. If, as I argue, the ambivalence of this ambiguous relation

is both necessary and in some sense inescapable to be philosophically illuminating, the goal is, then,

not to reconcile these two concepts (and indeed to highlight the impossibility of doing so), but to

articulate the possibilities that emerge from the exploration of that very ambivalence. This will be

done through an exploration of the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), whose

philosophy (at times difficult to locate within a school or tradition) will be triangulated via thinkers

who have wrestled with the problem of history and myth, namely Herodotus, Giambattista Vico and

Siegfried Kracauer. Behind these explicit comparisons, I will also rely on the philosophy of Hans

Blumenberg (his theory of myth will buttress a large part of the conceptual grounding of the

project) and Walter Benjamin, whose ideas regarding history and myth constitute important, if

momentary, illuminations. These confrontations not only allow Collingwood to emerge as a

genuine and original philosopher of history and myth in his own right, but also embody a new

insight into the philosophical interest of history and its relation to myth.

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Declaration

This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or

diploma at any university or equivalent institution and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief,

this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due

reference is made in the text of the thesis. This thesis does not exceed 50 000 words, as approved by

the Monash University Institute of Graduate Research (MIGR).

Signature: Date:

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Acknowledgements

I thankfully acknowledge the dedicated assistance and guidance of my supervisor Professor

Andrew Benjamin. I learnt an enormous amount during our conversations, from which this thesis

benefitted immeasurably. I also wish to thank my associate supervisor Dr. Alexei Procyshyn for

very detailed feedback, both structural and thematic, that helped a great deal in the final months.

I am eternally grateful to my friend James Mitchell who, through his inspiring conversations,

gradually introduced me to this world. This thesis rests on a foundation built by those discussions.

Further thanks must go to my mum, Carolyn James and my friend Jessica O’Leary, for

helpful editing and conversation.

General thanks must go to Dr. Mark Kelly for advice and friendship. Thanks also to my

friends in the philosophy program, for support and critical feedback: Gene Flenady, Sam Cuff

Snow, Ben Hjorth, Emma McNicol, Max Sipowicz and Alex Pearl Cain.

Final and eternal thanks go to my girlfriend Charlotte Callander, who not only rescued my

prose from disaster, but whose love, devotion, and affection ensured they were written in the first

place.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter Two: Herodotus and the Reception of History: The

Contemplative Gaze.

Chapter Three: Vico and the Remembering of History: The

Legitimacy of the Contemplative Gaze.

Chapter Four: The Interruption of History and the Present’s

Historical Task: Kracauer as Reader of Collingwood and the

Transformative Gaze.

Conclusion

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Introduction.

The relationship between history and myth suffers from an ambiguity from which a

philosophical project emerges. This thesis deals with the philosophical potential of this ambiguity.

Homer, who in some important sense represents, if not the beginning, then a beginning, casts a

shadow under which the West continues to labour. If this is the case, then Herodotus, the ‘father of

history’, embodies a peculiar moment in that legacy. Herodotus’ reception and illumination of the

myths of the Mediterranean, for which he was largely ridiculed for the better half of two millennia

(a ridicule that emerged largely out of the rise of philosophical consciousness) has made the

problem of the relation between history and myth exceedingly difficult to grasp. If, however, as I

argue, the ambivalence of this relation is both necessary and in some sense inescapable so as to be

philosophically illuminating, the goal is, then, not to reconcile these two concepts (and indeed to

highlight the impossibility of doing so), but to articulate the possibilities that emerge from the

exploration of that very ambivalence. This will be done through an exploration of the philosophy of

R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), whose philosophy (at times difficult to locate within a school or

tradition) will be triangulated via thinkers who have wrestled with the problem of history and myth,

namely Herodotus, Giambattista Vico and Siegfried Kracauer. These confrontations not only allow

Collingwood to emerge as a genuine and original philosopher of history in his own right, but also

embody a unique insight into the philosophical interest in history and myth itself.

The first problems emerge when dealing with myth. What precisely is myth? Although this

thesis will largely ground its conception of myth in Hans Blumenberg’s work, it also relies on a

myriad of other theories that are potentially irreconcilable. While such irreconcilability must be

taken into account, and negotiated with, it is critical for the wider project of this thesis that myth

remains a ‘contested site’. The tension within these differing theories of myth – the very fact of

them remaining problematic – is a source of orientation. With such a perspective, the common

Enlightenment narrative of the movement from mythos to logos appears overly rigid and misleading

and indeed, as Blumenberg suggests, as part of a broader absolute metaphor that is in itself mythic.1

If the idea of myth as absolute metaphor illuminates certain ideas (like the transition from mythos to

logos) as merely the current insights in a much longer history of an ever retuning dilemma, then a

reception history of this ‘contested site’ promises to deliver a certain philosophical charge.

The second problem is the difference between history and historiography. Although

1 See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985).

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Collingwood’s work has been read a great deal within the context of historiographical methodology,

it will not be the focus here. Rather, it will be on his philosophy of history that, although from

which a historiography could no doubt be drawn, teases out implications for an understanding of

both myth and philosophy itself. From the broader observation that Collingwood, in some sense,

took history seriously, comes the more specific observation that he also saw the historical

legitimacy and importance of myth as constitutive of historical work. Such a recognition was

conducive to the recognition of the strangeness of myth, but also to the unresolved tensions between

history and myth that mark the history of their reception. That is to say, the philosophy of history is

clarified, perhaps through it becoming more obscure, through the attempt to understand myth’s

relation to history.

Collingwood’s philosophy, like many philosophers who wrote during the violence and

fragmentation of the interwar years, is difficult to articulate within a defined, coherent whole, and as

such is susceptible to caricature. While on the one hand this thesis aims at some form of

‘rehabilitation’ of Collingwood’s work, it is done in the hope that the impossibility of such a task

becomes clear. Like many thinkers of ‘modernity’ (which I believe Collingwood emerges as) he

sees the deeper ambiguities at the heart of philosophical reflection as a critical part of the activity.

Collingwood’s project, then, emerges in ways that are similar to that of Walter Benjamin, as

described by Jürgen Habermas:

Benjamin belongs to those authors on whom it is not possible to gain a purchase, whose

work is destined for disparate effective histories; we encounter these authors only in the

sudden flash of ‘relevance’ with which a thought achieves dominance for brief seconds of

history.2

These moments of relevance emerge, I suspect, in confrontation with thinkers who have similarly

struggled with the philosophical problems of history and myth. As such the triangulation of

Collingwood’s thought via the work of others offers a site of work in which to articulate the

irreconcilability of myth’s fragmentary relation to history as constituting an important philosophical

project in and of itself.

The relationship between history and myth has its own history, one from which these

confrontations are derived. Such a history is marked (for better or worse) by points of seemingly no

2 Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness – Raising or Rescuing Critique,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and

Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 92.

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return. The life of Socrates locates an important division in ancient thought. By the same token the

modern understanding and reception of history and myth is marked by the Enlightenment.3 Any

insight gleaned from the following confrontations must be coherent in terms of, and under, what

Walter Benjamin called the “constellation of the Enlightenment”.4 In this thesis, I will treat the

historical actuality of the Enlightenment, in spite of its many failures, as a locus of possibility. The

difficulty in articulating the essence of the historical Enlightenment – its failure, its incompletion –

cannot even begin to be addressed by this thesis. If indeed, as has been claimed time and time again,

that the project of enlightenment is unfinished, what would it mean to contribute to such an

unfinished tradition?5 Insofar as this project, as much as any other, belongs to a history of the

wrestling with the problem of history and myth, what small answers it might provide are

inextricably tied to a concept of human life that emerged after the Enlightenment. I do not refer to

the caricature of enlightenment as the banishment of superstition (although that was certainly a

genuine hope of the eighteenth century for material, historically immanent reasons) but, rather, the

attempt to answer anew the problem of human autonomy and responsibility. In spite of the obvious

victories of rationalism, the past centuries show the continual presence, and in some cases

resurgence of, mythic forces. The modern notion of historical progress, via the naturalisation of

chronological time, inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the most important example of

the Enlightenment’s falling back into mythic forms of thought in the name of their destruction.

Benjamin’s correlation of myth with fate shows the extent to which the modern historical life is still

inundated in mythic forms. The passage from mythos to logos, from barbarism to enlightenment,

from superstition to reason, is the modality of historical time under which the West emerged, and

largely continues to exist. It is precisely this phenomenon that marks the enlightenment project as

unfinished. If it embodies any beginning at all, it lies in the Kantian idea that, once the question of

enlightenment (that is, human freedom) has been posed, regardless of subsequent descents back into

barbarism, it cannot be forgotten. That is, the question of human autonomy, exists as a necessary

possibility.

As Louis Dupré points out in “Kant's Theory of History and Progress”, Kant insists that the

success of the Enlightenment relegates the question as to “whether the human race (is) universally

progressing as lying beyond responsible conjecture.”6 However, towards the end of his essay An

Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Kant writes : “Men will of their own accord 3 When capitalised, ‘Enlightenment’ refers to the historical event, and the philosophical project that emerged from that

historical legacy. When a lower case is used, I am referring to the philosophical ideal, or locus of possibility. 4 Walter Benjamin, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” in Selected Writings: Volume One, 1913-1926, ed.

Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 101. 5 Immnauel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'', in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 59. 6 Louis Dupré, "Kant's Theory of History and Progress," The Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 4 (1998): 819.

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gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately

adopted to keep them in it.”7 The problem of the re-visitation of barbaric violence — that is

violence grounded in humanity’s natural beginnings — within the Enlightenment's perception of

historical time is clearly one that exists in the background of Kant’s thought. His insistence that the

history of humanity must, by necessity, be a narrative of progress, what Dupré calls “the emergence

of the human race from an animal state to one of genuine humanity,” is dogged by the idea that

these modalities of thinking about historical time might be harmful in and of themselves in

achieving that end. Kant’s refusal to posit a more explicit philosophy of history, is testament both to

his awareness of the danger of falling back into religious categories of thought, and his commitment

to the Enlightenment project, as a unique moment (historically) of insight into the incompletion of

the potentialities for human life. Kant, perhaps more than any other, understood that the tragedy of

historical time lay in the inability to extricate human experience entirely from it. The underlying

basis of this thesis, then, is coherent only via a particular interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of

enlightenment, and the implicit philosophy of history within. Namely that the notion of historical

progress, and hope for the victory of reason, that emerged following the Enlightenment, was in fact

representative of the failure to acknowledge these forms of dogma as revisitations of the particular

modalities of thinking that the Enlightenment had hoped to outrun. That man can probably never

entirely outrun these forms of thought is fundamental to Kant’s notion of human finitude and

critical to his understanding of enlightenment. Adorno alludes to the immense difficulty in stepping

out of the prism of progress, as equivalent to the courage required of the shaman in stepping out of

the magic circle. The magic circle, which makes the inhospitable and alien forces of nature

manageable to early man, nevertheless binds us to a location that the gods demand. To step out of

its divine power, is not only to leave behind the comforts of divine rule, but also to challenge fate,

and thus points to a form of human life that (albeit briefly) offers different shapes and modes of

existence. The question of progress, then, relies on the complete abandonment (that is, its occurring,

or not) of any notions of progress. This understanding is entirely Kantian.8

The intellectual basis of this thesis, thus, relies on particular, precise uses of terminology that

might otherwise be construed (rightly) as ambiguous. Although their meaning will clarify as they

7 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'', 59. 8 Adorno makes the claim that genuine progress means “to step put of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress

that is itself nature…”. This is, of course, the claim that the notion of progress in history has a mythic quality. However it is also, more fundamentally, the claim that any notion of progress (occurring or not) is a manifestation of that mythic quality in history. That is, a negative instance of progress constitutes the same logic of fate as its binary opposite. Progress qua progress can only occur when its machinations in time have ceased to be meaningful. With thanks to A. Benjamin for a fruitful Skype discussion on this point. See Adorno’s essay “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 150.

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emerge, nonetheless a brief explanation as to the nature of how they will be utilised in this project is

necessary. The understanding of ‘myth’ in this thesis is multi-faceted. Although my understanding

of the relation between mythos and logos (and indeed the problems associated with that very divide)

is informed by Blumenberg, I also rely on Walter Benjamin’s correlation of myth with fate. These

two theories do not seem immediately compatible. Blumenberg understands myth (broadly

anthropological, but also aesthetic in nature) as a reflection of humanity’s struggling with the

overwhelming nature of reality. Confronted with the terrible ambivalence of the world, early

human life created the basic metaphors from which later forms of reflection sprang. On the other

hand, Benjamin’s understanding of myth as synonymous with fate was the basis for his seeing myth

as embodying forces or authorities other than humanity’s own that prevent certain possibilities of

human life. This understanding of myth is critical to the subsequent notion of mythic forces (that is

forces of necessity, rather than contingency) that exist in history. This theoretical understanding of

myth is complimented by the work of Blumenberg (indeed a subsidiary outcome of this thesis is the

hope of a humble reconciliation between the two thinkers from certain perspectives). Benjamin’s

theory of myth, while wary of the dangers of mythic forces in history, is also aware, like

Blumenberg, of the necessity of myth in the emergence of critical human institutions (like the law)

in removing human life from the purely animal realm. The presence of fate, to use Benjamin’s

terms, despite it representing a terrible force in modernity, was also an important point in early

human life. Similarly, despite Blumenberg being more conservative in the question of the ‘end of

myth’, he does not rule out its possibility. However, a history marked by myth’s presence, he

claims, must come to confront that presence, before the question of enlightenment can truly be

posed.9 Such a reading suggests that, despite modern Enlightenment hopes of another account of

human life, free of myth, the fateful necessity of myth, as it emerged in pre-historic humanity,

marks the earliest form of aesthetic reflection of the attempt to distance itself from the terrible

ambivalence of reality. Myth, then, while representing terrible remnants from pre-historical life,

also represents an important and necessary form of human self reflection; thereby complicating the

traditional idea of reason’s defeat of myth.

‘Myth’, or mûthos, represents in this thesis a complex and necessarily ambivalent idea: on the

one hand, an anthropological concept encapsulating the aesthetic reflections of earliest, primeval

humanity, and on the other, a fateful presence in history that both allowed for the conditions of

human life’s extrication from nature, and continually prevents it from uncovering other possibilities.

When referring to logos I am referring to the explanatory speech act, which would come to define

the Greek philosophical project in particular and its association with theoria. The distinction

9 Blumenberg, “To Bring Myth to An End”, Work on Myth, 263.

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between mûthos and logos is not suggestive of the traditional progress of human rationality, but an

insight into differing modalities of human self reflection, each possessing qualities of the other, that

mark the dialectical nature of thinking. Thus while this thesis does not present mûthos and logos as

mutually distinct, neither does it suggest they are simply different forms of distancing from the

terrible ambivalence of the world, what Blumenberg calls the ‘Absolutism of Reality’.10 They are

distinct forms of self-reflection. What that distinction entails is certainly beyond the scope of this

thesis, and perhaps gets to the heart of the problem it wrestles with.

This partly anthropological understanding informs the basis of what I refer to as a

‘philosophical anthropology.’ Jerome Carroll is right to suggest that the term is problematic, insofar

as it does not designate any particular tradition, but a myriad of different ones.11 The philosophical

anthropology under which this thesis works, although historically related to Vico’s understanding,

follows Blumenberg’s notion that human life’s continual struggle with, and distancing from, an

anxiety brought about by the ambivalence of the immanence of reality, is not an essence of human

life, but merely a constant presence – a result of external forces.12 It is not so much a question, as

Carroll clarifies, of what man ‘is’, but what he ‘does’, “in response to the problem of existence.”13

The term does not, then, refer to an unchanging mode of understanding human life in spite of

history’s movement and ruptures but, rather, the philosophical potentialities that emerge in the

recognition that human self-refection is made possible, and is still marked by, older, more

ambiguous mythic (and metaphorical) forms of thought.

Finally, when referring to ‘the present’ I refer, on the one hand, to the banality of the

Benjaminian (and, less explicitly, Collingwoodian) notion of now-time that exists within the

naturalisation of progress in history. This is a time of living in which the other possibilities of

human life and self-reflection are crushed by the eschatological, fateful weight of history. On the

other, as will become particularly clear in the final chapter, this notion of the present, as the only

possible location in which philosophy can be undertaken, offers up untold possibilities, to those

who would seek to reconstruct the lost relics of the past. As such, the term ‘the time of writing’,

refers to the interruptive potential of the actual act of doing philosophy, and how it might

interrogate and disrupt the forms of mythic authority that still linger in the present.14

10 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 3. 11 Jerome Carroll, “‘Indirect’ or ‘Engaged’: A Comparison of Hans Blumenberg’s and Charles Taylor’s Debt and

Contribution to Philosophical Anthropology,” History of European Ideas 39: 6 (2013): 860. 12 See Blumenberg, Work on Myth. 13 Carroll, “‘Indirect’ or ‘Engaged,’” 873. 14 This notion, which informs an important part of this thesis, is inspired by Andrew Benjamin’s work on ‘the time of

writing’ as philosophically important. See Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (Oxon: Routledge, 1997), 26-27.

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The outcomes of this thesis are, thus, distinct but interrelated. This arises out of the thesis

itself being, firstly, a general confrontation with ideas surrounding myth, history and philosophy via

the exploration of different thinkers within the history of western thought and, secondly, a sustained

critique of the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood informed by his confrontation with Herodotus,

Vico and Kracauer. The triangulation of Collingwood’s philosophy via the thought of these three

thinkers, framed by certain notions of myth and its relation to reason, in turn has implications for

conceptions of history and temporality. The outcomes will thus be twofold: the emergence of a

viable and new understanding of Collingwood, which nonetheless avoids a rehabilitation, and an

engagement with a philosophically oriented reception history of the ambiguous relationship

between history and myth. Despite maintaining an essential peculiarity to Collingwood’s thought,

this thesis does present, however, an alternative reading of Collingwood, against the most common

reading of him; as articulated for example in David Boucher’s introduction to Collingwood’s New

Leviathan, in which he conflates the Collingwoodian notion that philosophy was a ‘historical

science’, with the Crocean idealism that claims, “philosophy…had been ‘liquidated’ and absorbed

by history.”15 On the contrary this thesis attempts to illuminate Collingwood’s radical (although

perhaps unfinished) ‘interruptive’ notions surrounding the role of philosophy. The illumination of

Collingwood’s distinctly modern ideas surrounding the relation between philosophy, myth and

history, does away with the common narrative of him being an intellectual outcast, who clung on to

peculiar modalities of Italian and British idealism; and instead locates him as simply one of many

philosophers of the early twentieth century who sought out a philosophical articulation of the crisis

of modernity, as the Fascist shadow crept over Europe.

Both outcomes (the reception history, and triangulation of Collingwood’s philosophy) arise

out of the engagement and confrontation with the other. Ambivalence will remain, however. As will

emerge by the end, the lack of concrete ‘methodology’, in favour of a more discrete meandering

through both the reception history and philosophical triangulation of Collingwood (an idea

modelled on Kracauer’s notion of ‘Orphean history’ – discussed at length in Chapter Three) is the

means by which genuine insights may be stumbled upon. An account of myth, in being in some

sense, if not opposite to, then distinct from, instrumental reason, resists methodology. The Oprhean

model therefore, while rejecting outright methodology in its reflective excavation, also presents a

powerful account of the legitimacy of ambivalence as conducive to the fostering of philosophical

reflection.

15 Robin George Collingwood, The New Leviathan (New York: Clarendon Press, 1992), xxii.

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The thesis begins with Herodotus. Collingwood does not deal with Herodotus in detail, other

than within the context of a brief discussion of Greek historiography and its limitations in The Idea

of History.16 Despite this, the poetic resonances of a confrontation between the two will be fruitful

within the context of a wider exploration of the complex relationship between history and myth. In

this chapter, I will challenge the commonly held view that, while Herodotus embodies some form of

figurehead for the beginning of historiography, Thucydides represents the beginning of ‘legitimate’

history. On the contrary, Herodotus’ traditional legacy as a weaver of untrue stories is challenged

when understood within the older context in which he was writing; namely the Homeric, and pre-

Homeric Greek historical legacies. Herodotus’ anxieties concerning the survival of the oral

traditions on which the civil institutions of his people were based, and the means by which he hoped

to save them, show the extent to which he was both engaged in both the oldest and newest Greek

traditions. The similar origins of both history (that is a concept of human life’s relation to the

passage of time), and tragedy, (a growing awareness of the role of human life before fate) will show

the extent to which historiography as it emerged with Herodotus, deals fundamentally with the

workings of fate, and its overcoming; through a distancing from it. The notion of distance, in

relation to the emergence of the Greek concept of theory, will occupy a strong undercurrent within

this chapter and wider thesis. The nature of Herodotus’ engagement with mûthos, contrary to what

Aristotle claimed, marks him as a thinker of logos, insofar as history (like tragedy) engages with

myth in a radically new way, as a basis for new forms of self-reflection. Thus, I will argue that,

although Aristotle leaves room for philosophical reflection on poetry, his dismissal of history in the

Poetics ignores the cathartic potential in the recitation of history. The brief overcoming of fate

through the recognition of its constant presence in human life is the commonality between history

and tragedy. This marks tragedy and history as moved by necessity, rather than contingency. The

overcoming of that necessity (however briefly) marks the philosophical interest in both.

What, though, is the advantage of a critique of Herodotus through Collingwood? An interest

in Herodotus, indeed the salvation of his legacy, to the extent to which it can be ‘useful’, must

always be understood in regards to modernity’s unique historical situation. Implicit within the work

of both Herodotus and Collingwood is the understanding of the necessity of ‘historical life’ as being

critical to political, and thus civil life. The respective crises of Herodotus and Collingwood’s day

obviously bear no relation to each other. And yet, their respective understandings of the critical

need for the collective (that is, society’s) engagement with the past as forming the basis for a

illuminative understanding of what it meant to be a human being warrants a discussion.

Collingwood, who watched Europe lurch toward war twice in his lifetime as if according to fate,

16 Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 17-31.

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with all the historical actors unable to extricate themselves from the necessity of the forces they

struggled with, saw a particular notion of historical, and thus human life, as key to breaking these

modern forces of fate. Within both thinkers, history emerges as a uniquely human phenomenon that,

should it be forgotten or ignored, threatened to dissolve the peculiar forms of life that defined

‘human’ life.

The second chapter deals with Giambattista Vico. While the influence of Italian, particularly

Neapolitan philosophy on Collingwood’s thought is well documented, it is usually in the context of

his contemporary Benedetto Croce. While the influence of Croce is undeniable, particularly in

Collingwood’s Principles of Art, the second chapter will demonstrate, through a critique of the two

thinkers’ (that is Vico and Collingwood’s) approach to myth and history (and the subsequent effect

of that relationship onto philosophy) that the essence of Collingwood’s work has its grounding in a

Vichean form of materialist historicsm, through which a similar philosophical anthropology

emerges (one that recognises human life as essentially frail, struggling against the ambivalence of

nature).17 Vico is said to have been before his time. Insofar as this can be true, and allowing for the

potential for genuine insights in such phrases, Vico’s unique understanding of the historical

importance of myth cannot be overstated. For Vico, the ancient Greek understanding of myth being

an insight into long lost events of the past is the reason for the historical legitimacy of myth, indeed

of its unique insights into times, in which other material relics have been lost. The recognition of

the myths as legitimate historical relics, beyond the historical positivist concern of whether mythical

events ‘actually occurred’, allows for a study of ‘resonance’; wherein the myths that resonated (and

thus survived) in the personal lives of past generations become illuminating historical sources.

For Vico, however, this was not merely a historical insight, but a critical philosophical once.

As Isaiah Berlin writes, the notion of the importance of the reconstructive imagination in the

historical practise, (what Vico himself called fantasia), was distinct from a priori or a posteriori

categories of knowledge.18 This third category can be understood as the searching for an alternative

grounding to the humanist discipline, that Vico feared (in the aftermath of the Cartesian revolution)

had come to see mathematics as the grounds upon which philosophy should progress. This is Vico’s

particular attempt to grasp what will be referred to as the ‘materiality’ of history (as distinguished

from histories that rely on an idealist or empiricist philosophy) that, through an imaginative

engagement with the monuments of past civil institutions, seeks to come to terms with the

17 It should be noted that any reference to the word ‘historicism’ is meant in its true sense, wherein historical events are

largely contextualised within the historical period in which they occurred; rather than the notion of universal history that Karl Popper equated it with.

18 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), xix.

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ambiguities of past human life. I will argue that this Vichean notion of ‘materiality’ informs the

basis of Collingwood’s philosophical hopes. That is, Collingwood’s position informed by the

Herodotean notion of historical life as being critical to human life, is complimented by Vico’s idea

that this past, this history, still maintains a material presence in the present. This is as much a

philosophical insight as a historical one, as it informs Vico’s philosophical anthropology that views

human life as fragile and regressive. However, Vico also differentiates, importantly as Karl Löwith

argues, between fate and divine providence in its relation to history.19 While this notion of

providence works entirely under the logic of Christian eschatology, it contains for the first time a

logic of human agency as being critical to an unfolding of history. Despite the regressive, barbaric

tendencies of humanity, a divinely ordained historical agency, imbues human life with a potentiality

that is quite its own. This historical autonomy is made possible only through the philosophically

oriented reception of that very history, wherein the regressive dangers of human life form the basis

for the hope of something better. Collingwood saw the re-emergence of regressive barbarism in his

own time, and as such his philosophy of history is best understood as the attempt to rally the

humanist potentialities that might prevent them.

With Siegfried Kracauer, and the third chapter, I come to one of Collingwood’s

contemporaries. Vico’s understanding, historically speaking, of the importance of myth, allowed for

the extent to which modern thinkers, in particular the critics of modernity of the first half of the

twentieth century, could illuminate the mythic shapes of our own present, due in no unsubstantial

part to the Enlightenment’s failure to understand the function and role of myth and magic in human

life. Kracauer invokes the journey of Orpheus into the underworld, for the sake of rescue, as the

fundamental metaphor for the historian’s task. A rescue of the past, for the sake of the present (the

ambiguous relationship of which Kracauer fails to entirely reconcile), that labours under the unseen

weight of myth, due to the supposed success of the secular rejection of past superstitions, is the

locus of hope for the philosopher-historian. For Kracauer this is a philosophical hope, insofar as the

rescuing of ‘lost’ histories, or the uncovering of a past that did not function within the mythic

projection and synonymity of human progress and chronological time, is entirely for the sake of the

fostering of a particular idea of ‘humanity’. A concern for the ‘vocation’ of human beings in the

present, and thus the future, marks Kracauer’s criticisms of Collingwood’s work in his

posthumously published History: The Last Thing Before the Last, as both a gross misunderstanding,

but also the grounds upon which a study of both the intellectual and poetic similarities of these two

men’s work, and hopes becomes possible. This final confrontation, not only situates Collingwood

along with some of his German contemporaries, as a critic of modernity, whose philosophy has an

19 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), 124.

17

anthropological basis (in which myth and magic is a continual presence in the warding off of

anxieties), but also illuminates our current insight (as moderns) into the relationship between history

and myth. Such an insight allows, I argue, for the brief cessation of what Habermas considered the

long history of the violent breakdown of human dialogue, so that the question of human life, can at

least be asked in a new light.20

The conclusion will seek to sketch out a position, in light of these three confrontations.

Collingwood is not, it must be said, a prominent name in contemporary philosophy. This thesis is

not an attempt to convince of Collingwood’s unique insight, or philosophical might. However, in

regards to the history of the relationship between myth and history, and that relationship’s relation

to philosophy, Collingwood was, and remains, an interesting voice. The insights of thinkers like

Collingwood, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Blumenberg in the latter half of the twentieth

century are the grounds upon which it becomes possible to investigate how humanity’s grappling

with history and myth informs our philosophical traditions. Such an insight into the history of

philosophy’s relationship to history and myth locates philosophy, and the present in which it is

undertaken, as a locus of hope.

20 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972), 315.

18

Chapter One:

Herodotus and the Reception of History: The Contemplative

Gaze. The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less

frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale

properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around

when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something

that seems inalienable to us, the securest among out possessions,

were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.21

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’.

When discussing Herodotus, to speak of beginnings is, perhaps, the first in a long line of

errors. And yet history has a beginning. Traditionally our, that is the West's, beginning is marked by

the emergence of writing. Homer, regardless of whether he was one or many people, casts a shadow

over a body of writing that connects his time to today. To speak of Homer as the beginning,

however, is to beg the question: of what? That the act of writing down, of finalisation, of the vast

array of oral traditions scattered throughout the Mediterranean, marks a beginning goes without

saying. And yet, as Hans Blumenberg writes, any beginning also marks the end of something else.

The finalisation of an ancient inheritance, the history of which is almost entirely lost to us, marks

Homer as occupying a place at the end, rather than the start. “I imagine (Homer)”, Blumenberg

writes,

...as a person who was full of anxiety about the continuance of the world in which he lived,

and who perceived himself as the preserver of what was best in it from destruction. Even if

that should be an exaggeration, in any case it illustrates the way our temporal perspective is

corrected by the realisation that what is earliest for us was already, in its immanent history,

something late.22

With such a perspective, Herodotus marks both a beginning and an end. Working some four

hundred years after Homer (by his own estimation23) Herodotus’ historical narratives, which were

intended to be delivered by means of oral recitation, represent an engagement with both ancient and

new modes of discourse. The extent to which Herodotus’ work marks a beginning – if not the

21 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings: Volume Three, 1935-1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings,

(Massachusetts: Harvard University press, 2005), 143. 22 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985),152. 23 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (London: Penguin Books, 1954), Book 2, 53.

19

beginning of history, then the beginning of historiography – must also allow for his representing,

much like Homer, a certain finality, or finalisation, of an older legacy. History as it is implicitly

understood emerges, both in its beginning with Homer and its reception with Herodotus, as a

grappling with that legacy.

Beginnings are perhaps, then, in some sense inescapable. Insofar as this is true, in what way

can Herodotus be said to embody the start of something? The Italian historiographer Arnaldo

Momigliano writes with puzzlement of Collingwood’s opinion of the ‘Greek mind’ as anti-

historical, a position Collingwood puts forward at the beginning of his The Idea of History.24 And

indeed Collingwood does make a strange, perfunctory remark regarding the absence of a historical

imagination in Greek antiquity. However, later passages regarding the specific work of Herodotus,

coupled with later, posthumously published essays, show the extent to which Momigliano is not

entirely fair in his criticisms of Collingwood. Rather, as I will argue, Collingwood is keenly aware

that a certain idea of human life central to history has its beginnings with Herodotus. The project of

this chapter aims to locate Herodotus, via a confrontation with R. G. Collingwood, within the

history of a grappling with history’s ambivalent relation to myth. The sudden scholarly interest in

Herodotus toward the end of the nineteenth century, following two millennia of Aristotelian

dismissal — where Herodotus wandered the pages of history as a mythmaker and liar — while

reflective of genuine historical insights into ancient Greek historical practises, is better understood

as entirely indicative of the hopes of a modern philosophically oriented historiography.25 The

twentieth century’s serious interest in Herodotus’ project locates his work as a locus of hope, both

poetic and material, for modernity’s understanding of history and thus, by definition, an

understanding of itself. Collingwood, who saw in the historical constellation of the twentieth

century a coming catastrophe (along with other intellectuals and critics of modernity), saw in

Herodotus’ struggling with the forces of fate, a struggle that he (and they too) tried to overcome,

albeit differently. Within ancient Greek thought, the commonality between the almost synonymous

historical materialisation of the Herodotean concept of history, and tragedy, is a grappling with the

fatalistic authority of myth. The great insight of the critics of modernity was the extent to which

their own forms of life were still consumed by mythic authorities as well. Although it is wrong,

both intellectually and poetically, to see in Herodotus a modern project (for indeed how could that

be so?), it remains the case that Herodotus’ concerns maintain a claim on the concerns of

modernity. Indeed, Aristotle's famous distancing from Herodotus’ work (and the subsequent legacy 24 See the beginning of Momigliano’s, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” in The Classical Foundations

of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29. See also, Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946.

25 The dialectical nature of Herodotus’ reception throughout history is covered in detail by Momigliano. See Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition.”

20

of Herodotean alienation, from which Herodotus has recovered only in the past few generations)

will come to embody the mistake which Herodotus’ larger project was an attempt to subvert. The

project of this chapter is then, firstly, to uncover the historicity of Herodotus’ own historical hopes

and, secondly, to show the extent to which Collingwood’s recognition in Herodotus’ project of a

contemplative reception of the past as being the key to historical (and thus human) life, opens up a

space in which Herodotus’ thought might still lay a claim on the present. If Collingwood was not

conscious of his debt to Herodotus, it remains the case that his work retains a Herodotean character.

That is, Collingwood’s dismissal of Greek myth in the first pages of The Idea of History sits at odds

with what is clearly a far more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of older, differing forms of

logos, as shown in his other work. In that sense alone he shows himself to be working in an

intellectual tradition begun by Herodotus that sees history embodying a reflective, contemplative

gaze upon all facets of past human life, as a way of forging potentially unknown forms of human

understanding. The insight of history, in itself an illumination of the historicity of humanity’s

grappling with fate, not only underscores the historical relation between history and myth; but

locates the relationship in the locus of the philosophical.

The collective understanding and reception of Herodotus is still, to this day, delineated and

informed to a large degree by Aristotle. The historical legacy of the division between mythos and

logos is a result of Aristotle’s attempt to differentiate his work from that of his predecessors. Norma

Thompson argues that Aristotle’s conception of his project and its enemies is made coherent, at

times, through an opposition to Herodotus, largely only alluded to.26 Theoria, being the highest

form of intellectual activity, must, by definition according to Aristotle, deliver “more pleasure than

all our knowledge of the world in which we live.”27 It is not always clear that Aristotle has

Herodotus in mind as his adversary. However, the reader can see in the former’s desire for universal

and rigorous theory, an opponent in Herodotus, in whom he sees a threatening openness to the

contingencies of what Aristotle considers pre-theoria facets of human life. Aristotle’s hostility does

not derive directly from Herodotus’ mythological project, however. In the Poetics, Aristotle writes

at length, and admiringly, about both tragedy and epic poetry. “Poetry”, he writes, “…is something

more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of

universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”28 It could well be argued, then, that Aristotle’s

opposition with Herodotus’ work does not lie in its mythical quality, but in its historical quality,

that sought to render coherent what he considered its contingent ambiguities of human life, rather 26 Norma Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996),

8. 27 Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), “Parts of Animals,” 644b. 32-35. All

references to Aristotle henceforth come from this edition. 28 Aristotle, “Poetics”, 1464a, 5-10.

21

than its universal properties. And yet an unresolved tension lies in the Poetics. Tragedy, when

properly done, writes Aristotle, concerns “…incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to

accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”29 For Aristotle, it is the quality of necessity in tragedy

that is instructive, whereas the contingency of historical events cannot illuminate universal,

philosophical ideas. While Aristotle clearly understands the philosophical interest of tragedy, as

well as the forms of truth that might emerge from it, he is not able to see the cathartic potential of

history that emerges from recognising its fateful, tragic quality. Herodotus saw fate’s hand not just

on the tragic stage, but in the historical material realties of Greek life. His hope for history and its

oral recitation, I will argue, lay in the similarity of the cathartic potential of history and tragedy.

Aristotle’s opposition to Herodotus rests, thus, on two, entwined but unresolved tensions:

Herodotus’ work not constituting theoria (which despite Aristotle’s admiration for poetry still

occupies the noblest pursuit), and Aristotle’s own unresolved understanding of history’s poetic (and

thus philosophical) potential.30

Thompson begins her book Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community with the

claim that the legacy of Plato, and especially Aristotle, cannot be properly understood without the

recognition that “...they stood on our side of what has become the greatest divide in intellectual

history: the pre-Socratics, and those who came after them.”31 Within this history, Herodotus must

be understood as on the opposing side of what Thompson calls “the Aristotelian moment in which

‘The Philosopher’ orients his thought against pre-Socratic thinking.”32 The modern idea of myth,

conceptualised as that which is contrary to truth, did not take solid shape in ancient Greece, at least

until the time of Aristotle, where mûthos began to assume negative connotations, as that which was

non rigorous and contrary to theoria. Kathryn Morgan articulates it succinctly when she writes:

“The distinction between mûthos and logos is a function of the rise of philosophical self-

consciousness.”33 Thus the criticisms levelled at Herodotus (that is, post Aristotle) were not,

historically speaking, coherent in his own time.34 Mûthos, as it emerges in Homeric Greece,

designates a form of what Morgan calls a “...semantically restricted term for an authoritative

29 Aristotle, “Poetics”, 1450a, 25-30. 30 The full implications of Aristotle’s attack on Herodotus — in particular the relation between the particular and the universal — requires a much fuller investigation not allowed for by space considerations. Nevertheless a point of departure exists in Elliot Bartky, “Aristotle and the Politics of Herodotus’s ‘History,’” The Review of Politics Vol. 64, No. 3 (Summer, 2002). 31 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 7. 32 Ibid. 33 Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2000), 23. 34 The extent to which these criticisms of Aristotle are entirely fair, or indeed simply caricatures in themselves, is of

course worthy of attention. In essence this chapter, however, intends only to show the similarities of the projects of Herodotus, and the post-Socratic philosophical tradition that would emerge shortly after his own time.

22

speech-act”, that is the distinguished relation of epos, meaning simply ‘word’ or ‘utterance’.35 The

concept of authority is the critical point here. Logos, on the other hand, could denote something like

‘story’, ‘narrative’ or ‘explanation’.36 Morgan argues that philosophy would later attempt to

appropriate the meaning of mûthos “for its own creative intellectual project this aura of authority

and effectiveness.”37 Logos, then, took on mûthos’ traits. It is unlikely then, in the case of

Herodotus, and impossible in the case of Homer, that these early Greek thinkers had any collective

concept of mythology, as the post-Socratics understood it; its opposite had not yet been

conceptualised. Morgan concludes: “...until the rise of philosophy, there was no ‘mythology.’38

This did not mean, of course, that life prior to philosophy was devoid of rationality. If the

reception of Herodotus, even today, is based around the legacy of the ‘Aristotelian move’ — a case

of philosophy’s dogged (yet successful) attempt to rob the poets, early philosophers and historians

of their authority — it seems critical to understand Herodotus from the contingency of his own

historical position, insofar as that is possible. The Herodotus that emerges from such a critique is,

far from being the misleading orator, or the wandering bard of tradition, engaged in the same wider

project as Aristotle. If indeed the divide between mûthos and logos represents, at least in some

respect (ignoring the largely ‘mythologised’ transition from the former to the latter), a genuine

problem that humanity grapples with by nature of its existence; it must be understood, following

Blumenberg’s advice, as a relatively recent insight into a much older problem. The problem is that

of fate and what it means to be free of its dictates. Although it is perhaps later than is ordinarily

understood in the conventional temporal perspective, it is perhaps earlier too in regards to this

particular problem. A temporary fix to our temporal short-sightedness shows the historical legacy of

the divide between mûthos and logos as providing an insight into humanity’s attempt to come to

terms with older crises, to which Herodotus belongs as much as Aristotle. Insofar as what

Thompson calls the ‘Aristotelian move’ embodies a mistake from which the intellectual history of

the West never fully recovered – that is, the idea that the powers of mythology had largely been

vanquished in the face of a newer, hardier form of human thinking – Herodotus’ work represents an

alternative history. The recognition of the critical importance of stories in the formation of human

dialogue and discourse, an idea that both Herodotus and Collingwood shared despite their temporal

distance, is critically related to the historical immanence of different modalities of rationality. The

point at which the insight into the critical relevance of myth in human life becomes historical (that

is, myth’s ability to illuminate legitimate historical realities is recognised, rather than mythologised

35 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 17. 36 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 20. 37 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 18. 38 Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato, 21.

23

within a historical past) is the point at which the question of the overcoming of myth can be posed.

Herodotus’ historical position as a thinker who deals in myth rather than history proper, stems

from his accounts of Greek and barbarian (meaning simply non-Greek) stories, regardless of their

objective truth. Both Herodotus and his critics agree that a particular story’s objective status as fact

is not of particular interest to him. This is the critical differentiation between the historiography of

Herodotus and Thucydides. As opposed to what would later be considered ‘proper history’, namely

a chronological political catalogue of human action, Herodotus wishes to deliver an account of what

the respective people before his time believed to be true.39 His reputation since his own time,

marked by the criticisms of Thucydides and Aristotle (to name but two) has occupied an ambivalent

space; his authority as hístōr undermined by later thinkers, who label his work mythical.40 That is,

untrue. Herodotus is relegated to a bard who spins stories. This in and of itself is not entirely

inaccurate. Stories are critical to Herodotus’ historical epistemology and ontology. However, the

explicit rejection of Herodotus’ work as historical, is an implicit rejection of his rendition of what

constitutes history. What is history? Thucydides’ attempt to uncover the unchanging rules of human

life through his study of the Peloponnesian war constitutes a theoretical rigour that seems to exist

on the Aristotelian side of the ‘Aristotelian move’. It sits comfortably as a work of logos. Its aim

was an uncovering of the deeper unchanging truths of human nature.41 While acknowledging

Thucydides’ contribution to Greek thought, Collingwood ultimately cites his wider project as

mistaken in its attempt to reduce the actions of the past to a set of laws by which human life could

be understood.42

Herodotus’ account of human life, the idea of which I will return to in detail, does not,

according to his critics, seek out an unchanging essence of human life from which a logos might

emerge — that is an authoritative, explanatory, narrative.43 The extent to which this is mistaken and

misleading, however, is illuminated by Blumenberg’s reminder that the West’s beginnings are by 39 See, for example, his recounting of the story of Thales diverting the water of a river in such a way that Croesus and

his army could cross, despite Herodotus himself professing the belief that a bridge already existed. Regardless of whether Thales was involved in the river crossing, that it remains “a common Greek story” speaks a great deal as to the nature of the Greek sentiments regarding Croesus’ campaign. See Herodotus, The Histories. Book One, 75.

40 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin, 1954), see Chapter One, 13. The Greek etymology of hístōr means ‘enquiry’ or ‘investigation’, but also maintains connotations with ‘wise man’ or ‘judge,’ which is as old as Homer and Hesiod. See John Gould, Herodotus (London, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1989), 9.

41 It is worth noting that Momigliano agrees with Collingwood on this point. He claims that the major differentiation between Herodotus and Thucydides is the latter’s interest purely on a political history, which was largely concerned with the present, and would venture into the past only as far as firm sources would allow. At its heart, Momigliano argues, Thucydides’ notion of history postulated the permanency of human nature. See “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” 41-44.

42 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 30. 43 See Herodotus, The Histories, Book Four, 195: “…again, I merely record the current story, without guaranteeing it.”

Aristotle sees in the free running prose, a lack of control: “This style is unsatisfactory just because it goes on indefinitely.” ‘Rhetoric’, 1409a3if, as quoted in Thompson.

24

definition the ends of something else. Even allowing for the criticism that Herodotus only deals

with the ‘banality’ of the contingency of the everyday, it stems from a recognition of the role a

conception of fate plays in driving all human interactions. Deeper than the essentially meaningless

transition from irrationality and superstition to rationality, is the claim that even in the time before

Homer, human life was marked by the attempt to conceptualise itself, which must be understood in

some sense as an engagement with history. It is not so much life, but historical life, that Herodotus

suggests is uniquely human. Any notion of history necessitates a notion of historical time, and the

place of human life within that temporality. The context of human life, for the ancients, must be

understood through what Benjamin called “the guilt-complex of the living”, namely that of fate.44

The force of mythic authority (upon which Benjamin based a critique of the law) “…condemns not

to punishment but to guilt.”45 Of course, the twentieth-century differentiation between a history of

ideas and a history of the demons in our thought (that is, a history of the questions and anxieties that

have marked the human condition since the beginning) is not an insight that can be attributed to

Herodotus, or indeed any of the ancients.46 However, the understanding of guilt as the uniquely

human relation to divine authority is the historical context in which both the Greek historians (and

tragedians) are working. Human life (an existence formed by confrontations with demons; that is,

authorities other than our own, that prevent us living autonomous, free lives) is marked by a

wrestling with fate. History, in its attempt to recount and celebrate human life, represents one of the

first conscious attempts to subvert guilt, and thus, fate.47 It is precisely this idea that Thompson has

in mind when she writes: “History is all we have. To try and make sense of history is to attempt an

explanation of the human situation itself.”48 If Thompson is right that Herodotean history represents

at least some conscious reception of the human situation, it must allow for the insights of

Horkheimer and Adorno, who in their insistence that any work of mûthos must by necessity be a

work of logos, acknowledge that all forms of myth represent some form of formalisation and

44 Walter Benjamin, "Fate and Character," in Selected Writings: Volume One, 1913-1926, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol.

1 (Massachusetts: Harvard University press, 2005), 204 45 Ibid. 46 Blumenberg and Cassirer deal with this explicitly. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans.

Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1983). See especially the first chapters, in which Blumenberg mounts a devastating critique of the very conception of secularised eschatology as an incoherent bi-product of the wider hysteria surrounding the perceived illegitimacy of modernity. On the contrary, the modern conception of progress, argues Blumenberg, is a reoccupation (that is historically legitimate) of the Judeo-Christian space that demands to know humanity’s origins and ending which, following the success of the sciences and humanity’s in early modern times, had been made redundant. In other words the modern notion of progress was a modern answer to an ancient question it no longer had any business engaging with. See also Cassirer in Ernst Cassirer, "Language and Myth," The Warburg Years (1919-1933), trans. S. G. Lofts & A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale Universtiy Press, 2013), 130.

47 Less conscious challenges to fate, of course, are encapsulated in both the arrogance of Prometheus and Niobe. While both suffer at the hands of fate, neither are entirely destroyed by the authority of the gods. Their living, in spite of their punishment, represents a historically material example of the emerging challenge to the authorities the Greeks lived under.

48 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, ix.

25

finalisation of earlier, more primitive legacies. The obvious fact that Homer’s The Odyssey (for

example) represents the ordering of countless ancient oral traditions, scattered around the

Mediterranean, shows new forms of self-reflection, and the presence of logos in mûthos, but also

that the attempt to come to terms with fate goes back much further than Plato, or even the pre-

Socratics, or indeed even Homer.49 Any attempt at explanatory distancing from the authority of

mûthos, as Herodotus’ work was, constitutes some modality of logos. A coming to terms with fate,

however it manifested in human life (from the very earliest primeval cave paintings, to the high

point of Greek tragedy) must also be understood as the attempt to undermine, or at least live with,

its authority.50 Essentially, the aesthetic reflections of fate that myth constitutes are attempts to

locate a space in which a human life can be lived.51 History, as it emerges with Herodotus, is an

offshoot of an older legacy. In this sense, and to reiterate, Herodotus must be understood as dealing

with an idea of history, and historical time, made possible by the pre-Homeric oral traditions that he

inherited.52 The Histories were simply one moment in the history of a collective coming to terms

with fate. However, Herodotus is distinct from Homer in the manner of the reception of past

legacies. Insofar as the transition from mûthos to logos does embody a real shift (that is to the extent

that the thinkers themselves considered it to be real), Herodotus must be understood as a conscious

thinker of logos. The degree to which this is in itself misleading will be shown later.

The Tears of Remembrance

To speak of history is to speak of an implicit conception of historical time. Hannah Arendt

argues, in Between Past and Future, that history as a category emerged not with Herodotus, but in

49 Theodor W. Adorno Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum,

1944). See in particular ‘Excursus 1: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, 43. 50 Nietzsche, in particular, was keenly aware of the extraordinary form of terror that marked Greek pagan life, to which

Greek religion, and later tragedy, was a response. “How else could life have been borne by a race so sensitive, so impetuous in its desires, so uniquely capable of suffering, if it had not been revealed to them, haloed in a higher glory, in their gods?” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London, Penguin Books, 1993), 23.

51 The necessity of mythic authority in the emergence of human life has been shown by Benjamin in Critique of Violence; what I refer to as a ‘grappling with fate’ is not intended to suggest a conscious battling of human life against divine authorities but, rather, material legacies (what Benjamin might have called monads) in our history that showcase a developing expression of human autonomy – that is, self governance (from the Greek autónomos, to live under one’s own law. See Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Selected Writings: Volume One, 1913-1926, 236.

52 The extent to which Herodotus relied on Homer’s work as well is discussed in detail by Jonas Grethlein. Grethlein argues that Herodotus forges a new conception of historical meaning by using Homer, and the heroic past, as a point of reference and departure, so that a Homeric authority would infuse his own work. The discovering of historical meaning in “the underlying assumption of regular patterns” between the Trojan War and the Persian Wars, “was a means to overcome the arbitrariness of chance, which was perceived as a threatening force.” In this case, the terror of chance, should be interpreted as the terror of that which is outside the realm of human control – that is fate. See Jonas Grethlein, “The Manifold Uses of the Epic past: The Embassy Scene in Herodotus 7.153-63,” The American Journal of Philology 127, no. 4 (2006): 502.

26

Odysseus’ stay with the Phaeacians in book eight of The Odyssey.53 His journey nearly at an end,

during a feast, Odysseus asks the bard Demodocus to recite the story of Troy.54 “What had been

sheer occurrence”, writes Arendt, “now became history”. Odysseus, by the very virtue of his being

present to hear the rendition of his trials and those of his companions, hears “...the story of his life,

now (as) a thing outside himself, and “…object” for all to see and to hear.”55 The unique

configuration – that is, the presence of a man who had taken part in the tales themselves – renders

the events having ‘actually happened’ as proven. The reliability of a tale, which up until this point

had relied purely on the truthfulness of the bard, overseen by the authority of the Muse, suddenly

enters the human realm as immanently verifiable.56 When Odysseus subsequently identifies himself

as the man from the legend, Arendt sees the beginning of history, where human life’s relation to

historical time suddenly becomes part of immanent human consciousness. It is necessary to go one

step further, however, and see in his identification (and the subsequent request for him to recount

his tale in full) the beginning of a modality of historical time which is made coherent by the deeds

of humanity, rather than the gods. Time, and its passing, becomes entirely a concern for man.

Beyond this, however, Arendt sees the beginnings of history as evolved from poetry, a legacy it has

never entirely shaken. She writes:

The scene where Ulysses listens to the story of his own life is paradigmatic for both history

and poetry; the 'reconciliation with reality’, the catharsis, which, according to Aristotle, was

the essence of tragedy, and, according to Hegel, was the ultimate purpose of history, came

about through the tears of remembrance.”57

Poetry and history, then, have a collective origin in the attempt to subvert the authority of fate. A

further illumination of this comes from Benjamin. His argument that one of the first instances of

sublimity lies with the historical emergence of Greek tragedy, whereby humanity’s demonisation by

fate is celebrated through the aesthetic distance of the Chorus – a case of the collective celebration

of man’s lot before fate by an attentive audience – sits in agreement with his admiration for

Herodotus.58 In his essay The Storyteller, Benjamin admires Herodotus’ account of Psammetichus’

53 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 45. 54 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), Book VIII, 70. 55 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 45. 56 François Hartog, "The Invention of History: The Pre-History of a Concept from Homer to Herodotus," History and

Theory 39, no. 3 (2000): 389. 57 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 45. 58 Blumenberg agrees and claims, further, that the concept of conceptual distance as being critical for theory is

quintessentially Greek. “The mental schema of distance still rules the Greek’s concept of theory as the position and attitude of the untroubled observer. In its purest embodiment, in the attitude of the spectator of Greek tragedy, this schema paves the way for the conceptual history of ‘theory’. See Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 117. Blumenberg elaborates on this further in Shipwreck with Spectator, through a critical analysis of the shipwreck metaphor

27

attempt to discover the origins of language, noting that his entirely dry rendition, in which he offers

no explanation or interpretation of the events he writes about, allows the story to “provoke

astonishment and reflection” even thousands of years later.59 It is through Herodotus’ ‘dryness’ that

the feats of man come to enjoy an authority that was once the domain of the Muse. The celebration

of humanity before a collective fate is, as Benjamin was right to argue, a historical moment in

which man’s freedom emerged as an idea to be dealt with; a moment where “pagan man becomes

aware that he is better than his god.”60 Tragedy, although a celebration of fate, and thus necessity,

promises a potentiality for contingency in human life. History shares such a potentiality.

Arendt’s critical point, of course, is that this awareness began much earlier than is

traditionally understood. In the days before Homer, in which Odysseus presumably lived in the

countless ancient stories kept alive by means of oral recitation, there is already a concern for the

remembrance of human exploits. That countless oral traditions surely were lost to posterity in the

thousands of years before Homer emphasises the extent to which the stories that did survive, did so

by means of their resonance in ancient communities.61 The continuation of an oral tradition (that is

the collective remembrance of it) is the most radical testament to its resonance in the emotional

landscape of pre-historical human life. From this temporal perspective, Homer represents a mere

epilogue, from which everything that came after can be understood as having originated from. The

pre-Homeric myths, having been honed over countless oral generations, needed only to be finalised

in the act of writing. Insofar as any of this is true, it must be acknowledged that a concern for

human exploits, and of the nature of human life, predates the dateable. The beginning of a historical

consciousness embodies the emergence of the only thing that truly differentiates us from nature: a

history of ourselves.62 Rather than being the beginning of anything, Herodotus emerges within the

throughout the history of the western tradition. In particular the role of the spectator of the shipwreck, like the philosopher in the poetry of Lucretius’, offers up an expression of a deeper reflection of the essence of the ontology of Western theory. See Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 26.

59 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 148. 60 Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” 203. 61 This is what Blumenberg calls the ‘Darwinism of Words’. “The age of oral communication was a phase of continual

and direct feedback regarding the success of literary means” and “…the entire stock of mythical materials and models that has been handed down to us has passed through the agency of reception, has been ‘optimised’ by its mechanism of selection.” See Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 152/168. See also, Irad Malkin as quoted in Joseph Mali’s Mythistory who writes: “…the entire ethnography of the Mediterranean could be explained as originating from the Big Bang of the Trojan War and the consequent Nostos diffusion.” Mali goes on, “The nostoi myths proved so effective among all the Mediterranean nations because they were universally admired, not only for their special poetical superiority, but also, and primarily, for their historical authority: for many centuries they served as the standard measure of communication and mediation in ‘international’ affairs. They would probably not have lasted if they did not contain at least some truths that could not have been otherwise known.” See Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography (Chicago: The Universtiy of Chicago Press, 2003), 5.

62 This is why Arendt considered history an interruption of nature. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 43. This is almost certainly derived from Kant who saw in the emergence of humanity the beginning of contingency (that is that which would be otherwise) in the necessary world of Nature (that is that which cannot be otherwise). Contingency,

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older context of wrestling with authorities other than our own. Such an acknowledgement not only

corrects our tradition’s warped chronological sense, as Blumenberg argues, but also underscores the

inadequacies of an account of human life that fails to account for the dialectical modalities of

human thought in which mûthos engages with logos. Although aesthetic explorations of human

submission before fate, the myths that were collectively remembered (to the point where even

modernity is still moved by them) represented a culmination of a struggle that was much older and

arguably more urgent: namely the articulation of a space that is uniquely human, wherein the

anxieties of the primeval world’s totality could be rendered manageable.

In witnessing the recitation of his own human actions, Odysseus’ tears represent the

emergence of a particular notion of historical time which is necessarily ambiguous. Whether

Herodotus represents an occupation of a historical consciousness that opened long before his time,

or a beginning, can almost certainly never be answered. However, as Collingwood argues,

humanity’s grappling with its relation to the passing of time certainly becomes less ambiguous in

Herodotus’ project. “The events inquired into”, he writes, “are not events in a dateless past, at the

beginning of things: they are events in a dated past.”63 Herodotus hopes that the collective

recollection of past human feats will ensure they are not forgotten by posterity. Collingwood’s view

is, by revealing “man as a rational agent...Herodotus does not confine his attention to bare events;

he considers these events in a thoroughly humanistic manner as actions of human beings who has

reasons for acting as they did.”64 In his paper ‘Myth, Memory and History,’ Finley concludes that

Herodotus’ establishment of a chronology directly linked to his own time as “...perhaps the greatest

of his achievements.”65 The beginning of a chronological system that connected Herodotus to a

datable past, rather than a dateless mythic past, posits man as the central logic in the passage of

time. Historical time is a time marked by human life. Collingwood concludes that Herodotus hoped,

in reciting the past actions of great men, that there existed a means of challenging fate. He writes:

The fate that broods over human life is, from the Greek point of view, a destructive power

only because man is blind to its workings. Granted that he cannot understand these

workings, he can yet have right opinions about them, and in so far as he acquires such

in Kantian terms, is the necessary possibility of our moral character. There is a fragility because nothing is entailed necessarily. Our fragility, that is humanity’s negotiation between animality (necessity) and humanity (contingency) is a necessary contingency for our human character. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), section 45, ‘Beautiful Art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature’.

63 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 18. 64 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 19. 65 M. I. Finley, "Myth, Memory, and History," History and Theory 4, no. 3 (1965): 287.

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opinions he becomes able to put himself in a position where the blows of fate will miss him.66

The affinity and similarity with the Aristotelian account of the nature of political life is

striking here, albeit unrecognised by Aristotle himself. For although he remarks in the Metaphysics,

“But into the subtleties of the mythologists it is not worth our while to inquire seriously”, Aristotle

himself is aware of the power of stories.67 In the first book of the Politics he recounts the anecdote

of Thales' “...financial device, which involves a principle of universal application, but is attributed

to him on account of his reputation for wisdom.” Aristotle recounts that Thales went on to make a

good deal of money through the establishment of a monopoly.68 The story is the same as Thales’

(in)famous incident with the well. Whether it actually happened is irrelevant in the face of what

Thales’ legacy, as well as the laughter of the Thracian maid, embodies for those who hear the tale

later as representative of a particular human feat. It is telling that Aristotle begins a philosophical

account of politics with an engagement with stories of the past. Collingwood’s suggestion that

Herodotus’ history attempts to illuminate the workings of fate recalls Thompson’s claim that

Herodotus’ understood the emergence of the Greek polis as a critical outcome of a concerted

attempt to make sense of the past. Aristotle’s misunderstanding of Herodotus in that sense could not

have run deeper. The ‘forgetting’ of the historical question was precisely what Herodotus feared.

Indeed The Histories were dismissed as a collection of mere tales that were not reflective of human

achievement. Such a dismissal entailed the forgetting of the conditions under which they resonated

and were believed, meaning those historical conditions ceased to be past material realities from

which dialogue (namely dialogue upon which the praxis of human concerns would be understood in

political terms) could emerge.

Collingwood’s respect for Herodotus is encapsulated in his ranking him as important as

Socrates. The continuation of Socrates’ legacy was ensured by his students’ critique of the

philosophical problem of human life. Herodotus, who had no such students, and his posing of the

historical problem was soon forgotten. And yet, Collingwood considers these two men the

intellectual figures of the fifth century.69 If there is a commonality between Collingwood and

Herodotus it exists in their respective anxieties concerning the worlds in which they lived. The

forgotten element in the historical question as posed by Herodotus was, for Collingwood, the

centrality of human life. Collingwood worried about the complicity of his present in the forgetting

66 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 24. 67 Aristotle, ‘Metaphysics’, 1000a18. 68 Aristotle, ‘Politics’,1259a7. 69 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 28.

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of the past, a lesson that Herodotus himself had tried to teach.70 This is not to claim that Herodotus

and Collingwood struggled with the same problems, but rather, to suggest that Herodotus embodied

for Collingwood the beginning of the framing of the problem of humanity’s relation to historical

time, and the modalities of thinking that constituted history. It was this central problem of history as

concerning human freedom that Collingwood himself sought to investigate in his own day, as the

spectre of fascism emerged across Europe. 71 In Collingwood’s eyes, Herodotus successfully

uncovered the critical junction between, and relation of, historical and human life. The salvation of

their respective presents could never be conceived as being comparable, and yet an anxiety

surrounding the present’s reception of the past, for the sake of the future, is at the very heart of the

historical problem; their unique worries occupy the opposing poles in the chronology of history’s

problematic relation to human life. Its beginning in Homer’s tears saw its reception in Herodotus’

delivery of The Histories. Of course, the contemplative gaze at the heart of Herodotus’ conception

of historical life (that is, the relation to the present) did not have the interruptive, transformative

guise it would take on in Collingwood and other critics of contemporary modernity (a discussion I

will return to in detail in Chapter Two, but Chapter Three in particular). Despite these later

formulations, the idea of human dialogue and solidarity having its basis in a collective

contemplation and reception of the past (of historical life being critical to human life) is entirely

Herodotean.

The Commonality of History

This conception of a collective commonality warrants some discussion. The struggle to make

sense of the past, to render it meaningful for the present, is the critical task of The Histories.

Herodotus’ repeated use of the first person plural, argues Chamberlain, beyond being a mere

inclusive grammar (a case of a more straightforward poetic performance where the singer includes

his audience) is a reflection of his establishing a critical “interpretive distance between himself as a

knower and what he knows…in order to imbue his voice with a particular kind of authority.”72

Although Chamberlain concedes the general possibility of the former, more straightforward position

of the first person plural, he suggests, instead, that “…the use of the first person plural consistently

collapses into a singular referent – the researching and narrating histor.”73 The Greek historiê, of

course, designates much more than the modern ‘history’, the former is often associated with

70 Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings: Volume Four, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W.

Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), Paragraph 11, 390. 71 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Penguin Books, 1939), chapter XII, ‘Theory and Practice’, 98. 72 David Chamberlain, "'We the Others': Interpretive Community and Plural Voice in Herodotus," Classical Antiquity

20, no. 1 (2001): 21. 73 Chamberlain, “We the Others,” 29. Regarding Histor, see footnote 16.

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Heraclitus and other sixth century Ionians who sought a methodical, critical approach to knowledge

as distinct from poetry and myth.74 Chamberlain writes that historiê “(was) the process of

interpretive research and…the publication, monumentalisation or performance of that process.”75 It

is this space in which such a monumentalisation occurs. It is almost certainly true that an

establishment of an historical voice in the wake of a much older historical consciousness remains

Herodotus’ primary legacy. And yet, Chamberlain overlooks the commonality inherent in

Herodotus’ use of ‘we’, forgetting, perhaps, the deeper meaning of the material space in which

Herodotus would have recited to his audience. The historical voice is a distinctly human one, and

thus Herodotus’ establishment of a particular voice of authority in which the past reflections of

human life could be rescued through its recitation before an attentive audience, is inherently a

plurality of community. Essentially, Herodotus’ authority is only acknowledged and legitimised by

the listeners whom he includes in his historical voice. The Greek etymological root of histor lies in

a proclamation of knowledge that differentiates itself from other, older forms. However, knowledge

in and of itself does not constitute power; a realisation that Chamberlain argues goes back to

Homer.76 He insists that it is the fact that “…one must be in the position of the knower” that

differentiates Herodotus’ use of the first person plural. The formulation of the voice is of itself an

act of authority. Despite this, Chamberlain’s concluding passage, a quote from The Histories,

amplifies the ambivalence of his position. The tears of the Persian at the banquet display the

inherent necessity of a commonality in the struggling with authoritarian voices. “Sir”, says the

Persian, during a banquet in the ninth book, “…that which a god wills to send no man can turn

aside…What I have said is known to many of us Persians, but we follow, in the bonds of necessity.

It is the most hateful thing for a person to have much knowledge and no power.”77 As will become

clear, such an authoritarian voice as the beginning of historiography, takes on a much deeper power,

and even sublimity, as a reflection and expression of a common humanity in the face of fate’s

authority; a case of man’s knowledge transforming the terrors of chance, of fate, into a celebratory

source of power and autonomy.

The Histories begin with Herodotus’ assertion that what follows is written in the hope that

“...human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds – some

displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show

why the two people fought with each other ” (my italics).78 He offers no further explanation, but

74 Herbert Granger, “Heraclitus' Quarrel with Polymathy and "Historiê," Transactions of the American Philological

Association (1974-) Vol. 134, No. 2 (Autumn 2004): 235. 75 Chamberlain, “We the Others,” 6. 76 Chamberlain, “We the Others,” 30. 77 Herodotus, The Histories, Book 9, 559-560. 78 Herodotus, The Histories, Book One, 1.

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concludes Book Nine of The Histories by quoting Cyrus who asserts that “...soft countries breed

soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.”79 Aside

from brief extrapolations such as these, Herodotus offers little justification for the re-telling of the

stories of both his own people, and those who would have had them undone, beyond the wish that

such exploits should not be forgotten. The lesson, however, is contained entirely in his opening

sentence, and the moral is encapsulated by Cyrus’ warning. What, then, was the lesson Herodotus

hoped to convey to his Athenian contemporaries? Norma Thompson writes: “...Herodotus stresses

less about what we can know about human events than what we can use in our various

remembrances to think meaningfully about the human condition.”80 This is what Thompson means,

by her assertion that “history is all we have.”81 It is in light of these claims that she argues that

Herodotus, rather than being the opponent of Aristotle – a historical legacy that would see the early

historian transformed into the mythologised figure – was in fact operating under the same

assumptions as Aristotle pertaining to notions of man as a political animal.82 Thompson argues that

Herodotus, in making a point of not differentiating between stories that were verifiable and those

that were not, was making a critical historiographical point.83 The stories recounted in The

Histories, may not have factually obtained (for example Psammetichus’ hiding away of children in

order to discover the origins of language84) however, they resonated (a word for ‘believed’ which

avoids the associated clumsy positivism) with the vast majority of the society from which they

emerged. It was this resonance, in the cultural myths of the respective societies of the Greek islands

that Herodotus understood to be the basis for the foundations of culture itself. A recitation of the

systems of belief of the Greeks and their enemies was an analysis of the foundations of political,

and thus civil, life.85 Rosaria Vignolo Munson agrees, writing that although Herodotus’ work

concerns “...different cultures,” it nevertheless concerns “all men”.86 An understanding of the

foundations of civil institutions and political life was critical to Herodotus’ work. The lessons

contained within the stories of the past offered a memorial to its great tragedies and hardships.

Herodotus’ re-telling of the collection of stories that were said to have contributed to the Persian

79 Herodotus, The Histories, Book Nine, 122. 80 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 87. 81 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, ix. 82 Ibid. The political animal, of course, ceases to be marked by their original animality. This, it seems, is the distinction

between zoe, bare life, and bios, a qualified, human life. 83 Joseph Mali quotes John Gould at length, who makes a similar claim regarding Herodotus’ historiography. He writes:

“Thucydidean narrative, in the very rhythms and texture of its language, claims and enacts authority. Herodotean narrative, by the same criteria, is a very different thing: it retains the rhythms and forms of oral tradition, familiar to us in folk talks and märchen, but at the same time incorporates into the text as folk narrative never does, its own authorial commentary on the sources and truth-value of the narrative.” See Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography, 3-4.

84 Herodotus, The Histories, Book Two, 2. 85 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 167. 86 Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Massachusetts: Center

for Hellenic Studies, 2005), 8.

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Wars is based around the fostering of social memory, critical to the preservation of cultural

institutions. “(Myths) become significant” writes Joseph Mali, “precisely in moments when

common traditional meanings of life and history have become indeterminate, as in wars or

revolutions, and their social utility is to sustain the structural tradition of society by some dramatic

reactivation of its original motivations.”87 One of the critical lessons of The Histories comes at its

end, on the final page of Book Nine: “soft countries breed soft men”. This is not the moral of The

Histories so much as the recollection of a distant collective memory.88

However, that Herodotus sought to recollect the ‘lessons of the past’ for an attentive audience,

while true, is not the most important facet of his work. Rather, it is the means by which he hoped

these lessons would be learned; through vignettes of refracted memory and stories that resonated

with the emotional lives of the past. The fostering of community came about through the communal

recognition of the importance of these stories in imparting something particular about the human

condition. In this sense at least, there is a hope for the present, and by definition the future, in

Herodotus’ work. This is what Momigliano meant when he wrote that Herodotus’ critics were

unable to grasp the “depth of his humanity.”89

Thompson sees a poetic resemblance in Herodotus’ hope for the future in Arion’s famous

leap.90 Leaping into the water to escape Corinthian pirates, Arion is rescued by dolphins, and

brought to safety, embodying a Promethean-like challenge, in this bold act, to the fate that awaited

him. Thompson concludes that Herodotus’ project required a similar courage. She writes:

The task then is to fulfil the human vocation, to create history through art and to form

community by means of that perception. To be human is to engage history, for history is all

we have. What we make of it will shape a common destiny. If shaped well, the community

may thrive; if not, it may crumble when out of its element or confronted with crisis. Arion's

87 Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography, 5. 88 For more on collective, or ‘cultural memory’, see Jan Assman, John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural

Identity,” New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring – Summer, 1995). This brief paper seeks to outline a conception of ‘cultural memory’ in which the meaning of various cultural traditions or institutions, when formed by the crystallisation of collective experience, “…when touched upon, may suddenly become accessible across millennia,” 129.

89 Momigliano makes an even more fundamental point previous to this, almost in passing. He points out that even those who admired Herodotus the most, such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Lucian, “…praised his style, rather than his reliability.” The fundamental humility of Herodotus’ conception of historical life comes out of a sense (no doubt derived from Homer) that the way in which a story is told dictates the extent to which it will resonate. If history is to truly resonate, to become the foundation of historical life, it must allow for the means by which, as Momigliano himself puts it, “…mankind – or its greater part (is allowed to) reflect itself undisturbed in his mirror.” See Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” 39-40.

90 Herodotus, The Histories, Book One, 24.

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story stirs us toward courage, creativity, and a readiness to leap into an unknown future.91

That Herodotus saw his project as critical to an unknown future speaks for the increasingly difficult

relation that his Greek contemporaries had to fate. History’s concern for human agency leaves the

role of the gods ambiguous. Herodotus’ attempt to rescue the past traditions and beliefs of those that

preceded him – to make something of, in Thompson’s words – is entirely for the sake of his

people’s present and thus, by definition, their future. A people who misunderstand their own

history, and misunderstands the historical contingencies of human autonomy and agency, risk

disaster and a fate that otherwise might still be outrun. The contemporaneity of history (that is,

Herodotus’ work) with the emergence of tragedy should not be forgotten in this instance as both are

works of interruption. This acknowledgement of human life before the authority of fate, Arendt

argues, was a making of history through an interruption of that which could not have been

otherwise. Arendt understands this more deeply as the interruption of nature; as representing yet

another step in humanity’s attempt to distance itself from its origins.92 Although the presence of

divine fate, presumably in the earliest primeval antiquity, allowed for the means by which humanity

shook off earlier forms of ‘bare life’, history (as well as tragedy) embodies a willing self-conscious

celebration of human action in the face of the authorities that dogged it.93 History, in being the

celebration of the means through which humanity escaped ‘bare life’, becomes the means through

which the basis for a dialogue of the polis emerges.

Barbarism and Historical Life

Collingwood’s own understanding of the relation between historical and civil, political life,

was not purely intellectual. Like Herodotus, it was derived from his fear of the regression into

barbaric, more violent forms of life. In Collingwood’s case he feared the new barbarism embodied

by the rise of Fascism and National Socialism. Writing in the early half of the twentieth century,

Collingwood was to some extent a man not of his time, largely surrounded by what was then called

the ‘British Realist’ school, centred in Oxford and Cambridge. This tradition would go on to outline

the methodological blueprint of what would become known as the analytic school of philosophy.

The main point of contention between himself and the realists was the latter’s largely ahistorical

91 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community,167. 92 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 43. 93 The term ‘bare life’ is used by Giorgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovreign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1998) which in itself is the adoption of Benjamin’s ‘mere life,’ discussed in Critique of Violence, 250. The means by which the early forms of divine authority allowed for the conditions out of animal, bare life, will be discussed again in Chapter Three in my discussion of Vico, specifically in his discussion of the Cyclops.

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approach to philosophy. A failure to account for history in the philosophical dialectic, Collingwood

argued, went deeper than the failure to account for the historical contingency of particular

philosophies. Rather, it threatened the very act of rational thinking at its foundation.94 The a priori

detachment upon which the movement was based, Collingwood wrote, was the blueprint “for a

coming fascism”.95 This was not a claim about an inherently conservative politics of analytic

philosophy, nor a comment about his colleagues and contemporaries (although it was

understandably taken as one). It was, rather, a claim about that particular wider intellectual

tradition’s position in the history of the reception of the legacy of the Enlightenment, and rationalist

philosophy since Descartes. It was not simply the fate of political Europe that was at stake

according to Collingwood, but the entire legacy of Western thought, the liberation from which the

rationalist Enlightenment thinkers hoped for in the name of reason and renewal (which

Collingwood suspected might result in the descent into its opposite). His emphasis on the historical

in philosophy was quasi-formalised in a dialectical logic he called ‘the logic of question and

answer.’96 In direct opposition to the British Realist’s analysis of propositions only, the logic of

question and answer sought to analyse a proposition as true or false only in relation to the question

in which it was intended as an answer. Whilst this is often, and correctly, understood as a form of

historical ‘methodology’, it must also be understood as a way in which Collingwood sought to

understand, and more importantly uncover, the materiality of the struggles of the human condition

in the past.97 In some sense, it was an anti-methodology in its attempt to distance itself from a

stringency not suited to history, or the inherent ambivalence of human experience. An uncovering,

or unearthing of the past (and it is no coincidence that Collingwood conceptualised his logic of

question and answer partly during his archaeological work) was, Collingwood considered, a finding

of that which was still ‘live’ from the past, perhaps latent in the present’s very foundation.98

94 Jeff Malpas locates Fascism, in a similar way to Collingwood, not simply as a reflection of a lingering pre-modern

barbarism, but a distinctly modern phenomenon, in which Romantic ideals become blended with modern, rationalized technology. Auschwitz thus embodies “a terror at the heart of modern culture itself.” See Jeff Malpas, “Retrieving Truth: Modernism, Post-Modernism and the Problem of Truth,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 75, No. 2/3 (Summer/Fall 1992): 291.

95 Collingwood, An Autobiography, 112. 96 Collingwood, An Autobiography, see Chapter V, 'Question and Answer', 24. 97 The concept of ‘materiality’ will be critical in Chapter Two. 98 To note the resemblances in Benjamin and Collingwood’s respective works is not to make, necessarily, a claim about

the similarity of their projects, although this may be true in some respects. However the extent to which they are working under the same, what Benjamin might have called, constellation, presents itself in a moment of relevance, through the ways in which they both talk about archaeology. An expert in Roman Britain, Collingwood writes of the changing culture in archaeological circles, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: ...long practise in excavation had taught me that one condition – indeed the most important condition – of success was that the person responsible for any piece of digging, however small and however large, should know exactly why he was doing it. He must first of all decide what he wants to find out, and then decide what kind of digging will show it to him. This was the central principle of my 'logic of question and answer' as applied to archaeology. See Collingwood, An Autobiography, Chapter XI, ‘Roma Britain’, 81. It is interesting to note that, in a small piece of writing named Excavation and Memory, Benjamin uses similar terms when, in explicating his conception of memory, writes:

36

A pivotal part, worthy of historical attention, was the effect of what Collingwood calls

‘magic’ on past emotional lives.99 Magic, he insists, was not a pre-scientific representation of

reality, but the manifestation of reality itself, functioning within a different (or perhaps earlier) logic

entirely. Magic represented the historical insight into the emotional landscape of human life, long

ago. It was this misunderstanding of the past in particular that Collingwood thought his present

laboured under; not in itself a Romantic opposition to Enlightenment, but rather a dismissal of how

the Enlightenment, and its subsequent traditions, had historically materialised compared to its

original promises. The historical reality of the Enlightenment (as opposed to the historical

constellation of hope under which it first emerged), as Blumenberg writes, is in many ways the

coming to terms with the continued relevance of the old myths, despite the increased exposure and

success of the secular response.100 The inability to understand myth as in some sense rational

embodies the revisitation of instrumental reason’s fear of its origins. The failure to understand the

historical realities of humanity’s collective subjugation before authorities other than their own,

through the presence of stories, myths and magic, embodied for both Herodotus and Collingwood

the potential downfall of their civilisations. In the case of Herodotus, as Munson argues, the pivotal

assumption under which the Greeks were operating under was the explicit superiority to other

people and civilisations.101 The Histories became, then, a way in which to reconcile the Greek

worldview with those of others, with the intention of dissolving a cultural arrogance that might,

Herodotus feared, be the eventual downfall of his people. Collingwood, on the other hand, feared

the mythic, and thus fateful realities of his own day, namely in its conception of historical time – the

idea of and faith in progress – which emerged out of the Enlightenment’s reception of the past (this

will be discussed in detail in Chapter Four). When Collingwood controversially charged his Oxford

colleagues with being, if not directly responsible for, then at least party to, the fascist shadow, it

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging....In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part Two, 1931-1934., ed. Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 576. Visualised as such, Benjamin's wandering through the Parisian arcades, and Collingwood's archaeological digging, suddenly render this accessing of 'memory space' as a grasping for a certain kind of ‘materiality’ of the past. I will return to this theme in Chapter Two. See in particular Ian Richmond, R. G. Collingwood, The Archaeology of Roman Britain (London: Methuen & Co 1930). Also, see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Kevin McLaughlin Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002).

99 Collingwood does not talk about ‘myth’ in the same way many of the Germans did, such as Cassirer, Benjamin or Blumenberg. And indeed all these thinkers meant different things by the term ‘myth’. However, as can be seen in his essay ‘Magic’, in which he outlines the critical importance of a history of magic, as reflections of other manifestations of human life outside of rational thinking, ‘magic’ is roughly synonymous with what the Germans collectively mean by myth, disparate as those definitions themselves are. See R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), Chapter, ‘Magic’, 195.

100 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 101

Munson, Black Doves Speak, see Chapter 1 and 2, 7-30.

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was not a claim regarding the inherent conservatism of British realism.102 It was a criticism, rather,

of a wider disregard, and forgetting of, a particular Herodotean tradition (of which the largely

ahistorical analytic philosophy was really a symptom, rather than a cause) that saw a critical role of

historical life in the forging and maintenance of political life. Political, in this sense, must be

understood in relation to its Greek origins of polis, in which those who belong to the polis are

differentiated from those that do not belong to it. The state of nature is necessarily the antithesis to

political life. Historical life, in that sense, lies in opposition to natural, fateful life. The potentially

new forms of dialogue that emerged out of a collective historical consciousness offered the hope for

such a life.

Collingwood was not alone in suspecting that the lack of serious interest in myth, or ‘magic’

as he called it, stemmed from an inherited Enlightenment tradition, that considered myth a

superstitious remnant of savage society, not simply irrelevant, but potentially dangerous in a

rational age. Collingwood outlines in detail in The Philosophy of Enchantment why it is illogical

(that is, a betrayal of genuine enlightenment hopes) to treat past cultures as backward when,

historically and anthropologically speaking, we have evidence for their evident rational

sophistication.103 The belief in myth was not a sign of the unenlightened but, rather, a way to

resolve emotional conflicts; to adjust a people to the practical life for which these conflicts rendered

it unfit. 104 The conventional Enlightenment narrative functions in this case as a gargantuan

misinterpretation of a past people’s inner lives. Collingwood was certain this lay in the

misunderstanding of the treatment of myth. He writes in The Philosophy of Enchantment:

This...is the general function of those almost infinitely various magics which serve, in one

way or another, to human beings against the ghosts that haunt them...if some charms, such

as the sign of the cross, are more effective, this is because the cross symbolises a complete

relief from our sense of guilt, standing as it does for the belief that God himself has borne

the burden of our sins.105

102 That Collingwood saw in the “minute philosophers of [his] youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific

detachment from practical affairs, “...the propagandists of a coming Fascism”, is not surprising considering that, what he in fact saw, was the surrendering of the past's potential to interrupt the fateful condition of the present. Like Benjamin, Collingwood saw the coming fascism as the material proof of an intellectual climate (which had in turn influenced day-to-day civic discourse) that had failed to recognise, not only the immense importance of its own history, but also the fact that an understanding of it outside of the realm in which it was currently understood (that is, only with reference to the projection of a future progress), might inform a new way of thinking which might, in turn, inform a human dialogue in which fascism was impossible.

103 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 181. 104 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 208. 105 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment 205.

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Collingwood believed that the civilised man contained within him what he ironically called “the

savage”; that is, the remnants of primeval guilt, which emerged at our early subjugation before

divine authority (what Blumenberg knows as the inherited primeval fears that marks human life).

Collingwood sought out a philosophical and historical tradition that dealt with our own tradition’s

past myth and magic as historically-contingent material reflections of reality — as reflections of the

fears to which past humanity had been subjugated — rather than as existing in a binary relation, on

the opposite end of the same spectrum as Enlightened rationalism.106 The ahistorical drives of

Cartesian, and later Enlightenment philosophy, promised a particular way out of irrationalism and

barbarism. The Herodotean project that Collingwood inherited saw promise in the reception, rather

than its rejection, of humanity’s past. In so doing, Collingwood hoped to have a better

understanding of the myths of ‘the savage’ that continued to afflict us as modern people, rather than

allowing for them to linger in contemporary discourse unseen. Benjamin referred to this idea as the

naturalisation of myth.107

The Arionian Challenge

The extent, therefore, to which Herodotus’ work and wider project, should be understood in

106 This, it must be said, is the critical problem of Cassirer’s understanding of myth. Despite acknowledging the inherent

logic (that is, the earlier rationality of myth) Cassirer insists that such a logic is subsumed by later rationality, in particular the post Enlightenment tradition in which he operates. See in particular his essays ‘The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking’ and ‘Language and Myth’ in Cassirer, The Warburg Years (1919-1933). Blumenberg argues that Cassirer is wrong to focus on the origins of myth. He writes, “…it is not as a result of the fact that a certain content is ‘thrust back into the temporal distance’ and ‘situated in the depths of the past’ that it gets its mythical quality, but rather as a result of its stability through time,” 160. His mistake, argues Blumenberg, in “…demanding a theory of the origin of myth” is his forgetting that “…the circumstances that the entire stock of mythical materials and models that has been handed down to us has passed through the agency of reception, has been ‘optimised’ by its mechanism of selection,”168. In an earlier passage, he reminds us, “Even the earliest items of myth that are accessible to us are already products of work on myth. In part, this pre-literary phase of work has passed into the compound myths, so that the process of reception has itself become a presentation of its manner of functioning,” 118. The dangers of Cassirer’s understanding of early myth, which is linked to his theory of early symbolic form, a primitive ‘tethering’ of the world, is its implicit understanding of that beginning being a point of departure from which later, more modern forms of rationality become coherent through a notion of intellectual progress. Of course, as Blumenberg argues, myth, in both its beginning and current existence, should not be understood as “‘symbolic form’ but above all a ‘form as such’, by which to define the undefined,”168. In other words, mythology, which has its origins in early symbol and metaphor, is not a ‘primitive’ expression of human thinking, but the basis upon which all thinking is possible. This is an anthropological, rather than epistemological claim, wherein, “understood in terms of its origin, ‘form’ is a means of self preservation’; that is to render intelligible, and thus meaningful, an alien world. Cassirer’s failure, then, is his inability to understand the full repercussions of an early rationality in mythic thinking. Rather than an earlier, primitive form of something that has been perfected throughout history, it is the form and means by which we are able to think at all. This is the theory behind Blumenberg’s notion of the ‘absolute metaphors’ that are buried deep in our discourse, unrecognized, 168. All references to Blumenberg are to be found in his Work on Myth.

107 In the case of Benjamin and Collingwood, the most insidious and far reaching example of the naturalisation of myth in modernity was the naturalisation of human progress, wherein historical time, chronological time and the upward movement of (largely technological) human development are entirely synonymous. This was the form of fate in modern life. See Walter Benjamin, “Theories of a German Fascism” in Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part One, 1927-1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 312. See also Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 180.

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the historical context of an older collective grappling with the forces of fate, cannot be overstated. It

is precisely this project that sees his confrontation with Collingwood as viable, because

Collingwood’s work can also be understood within the context of trying to highlight his culture's

inundation in its own conception of fatality, as well as the necessity of historical life to civil life.

What is it to live according to fate? Benjamin, as previously mentioned, likened the presence of

myth to the presence of fate. However, Blumenberg’s understanding of myth — which is usually

understood in opposition to Benjamin’s conception — can also be helpful in this discussion.108

Myth’s emergence at humanity’s beginning as a response to the utterly alienating features of the

world (that is, as Alison Ross puts it, to make that which is totally strange, only humanly

strange109), necessitates a recognition of its particular rationality, and also an acknowledgement of a

historically-grounded understanding of the changing modalities of rational thought. Human thought,

which is much older than the rigid rationalism the West inherited from Greek philosophy, has

always functioned around a logos (a narrative explanatory form), although unrecognised by the

post-Socratic champions of logos, who legitimised their own work through the tarnishing of older

forms of logos as being equivalent to myth. The desire for renewal and distancing from older

thinking is itself a critical component, both of the history of logos, and its futile attempt to entirely

outrun the authoritarian speech acts it emerged dialectically from. Rather than the progress of myth

to rationality along a binary relation (which throughout history has also become synonymous with

the empty flow of chronological time), human life must be understood within the context of an

older inheritance — never entirely escaped — of the fear that arises by virtue of our living.

Although the exact circumstances of the evolution from animal to primitive man are by definition

lost to the pre-historical past, the necessity of a moment in which the world, suddenly terrible and

ambiguous and thinkable in ways unknown before, needed to be controlled and kept at bay seems

undeniable. The most primitive metaphor, which would have almost certainly evolved into

primitive myth, does not paint a world of pre-rational concepts, but a world in which the foundation

of conceptual thought is possible in the first place. The warding off of primeval anxieties, a facing

of demons that haunt us by virtue of our living, is the means by which, not pre-rational thought, but

thought itself, emerges.110 All works of myth, Blumenberg reminds us, are works on myth. It is

from this perspective that the question of whether Herodotus was a storyteller or a historian

dissolves. His storytelling links him to Homer, and the earliest reflections of Greek like, and his

historical delivery represents a new form of self reflection on an old subject. Myth and history

108 Although Benjamin and Blumenberg are, as has been discussed in a previous footnote, often seen at odds in their

theory of myth, it is clear (especially in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’) that both parties saw the necessity of mythic authority (on which the rule of law is based) in allowing humanity to emerge from the purely natural sphere.

109 Alison Ross, “Moral Metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg: Toward an Analysis of the Aesthetic Settings of Morality,” Thesis Eleven 140, no. 1 (2011): 44.

110 Blumenberg, Work on Myth. See Chapter One, ‘After the Absolutism of Reality’, 3-33.

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reflect difference forms of human reflection on the oldest most obvious anxieties of existence. It is

this recognition of human thought’s radical quality, regardless of the particular modality in which it

finds expression such as that of the mage, or the philosopher, that necessitates a remembrance of the

futility of the traditional Enlightenment narrative of the need to override older ‘superstitions’. Nor,

however, does it entail a Romantic respect for earlier magic ritual. If modern humanity is better

placed than ever to shrug off the external authorities by which it has lived, it is only by virtue of the

historical recognition and acknowledgement of those early forms of thought, that rendered modern

rational thought possible. Blumenberg points to the continual relevance and resonance of myths, in

spite of the rise of the sciences, but also the inversion of their original lessons (such as in Camus’

Sisyphus111). He argues this accounts for the fact that despite the rise of science, the world remains

often impenetrable and ambiguous, the constant return and renewal of myth evidence of the fact

human life is still beset with the anxieties that appear in the early stories; for example in

confrontations between parent and child, or individuals and higher authorities.112 Indeed, it is

myth’s continued existence and relevance in spite of its constantly shifting nature, and in spite of

modern modalities of rationality, that suggests its necessity in delineating the form of consciousness

rather than its content. The primary existential confrontations that mark the human condition, in

other words, are not satiated by, for example, the modern answers of natural science, and instead are

only subdued by the aesthetic quality of myth that are made manifest before an attentive audience in

the immediacy of an historical moment.113

Within this perspective, Herodotus’ work appears even after all these years, as Benjamin

noted, still able to amaze.114 Herodotus’ work, which it must be remembered was intended for oral

recitation was, as Arendt argues, a form of remembrance, and thus celebration of the great deeds of

man and the stories by which he lived. This celebration goes deeper than a mere retelling of stories

that may or may not have occurred. Rather, as Arendt suggests, the Greek understanding of the

world, and nature, as permanent and eternal, came in stark differentiation of its understanding of

man as small, and fleeting. Histories such as those of Herodotus sought to immortalise particular

human action and thus, in so doing, interrupt nature. “The subject matter of history”, Arendt writes,

“is these interruptions – the extraordinary in other words.”115 Nature, in its eternity, could not be

otherwise and was in that sense fateful. Just as tragedy did, history sought an interruption (if only

momentarily!) of fate’s authority over human life. Such an interruption might emerge in the

collective celebration of human deeds. Through such a Promethean or Arionian challenge, a purely 111 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brian (London: Penguin, 1955). 112 Blumenberg, Work on Myth. See Part II, Chapter Four, ‘To Bring Myth to an End,’ 263. 113 With thanks to my friend James Mitchell for this point. 114 Benjamin,“The Storyteller”, see footnote 34. 115 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 43.

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human – and thus political sphere might emerge. Collingwood’s fear at the breakdown of political

dialogue in 1938-39 was, in essence, a fear of the naturalisation of a state of nature that threatened

the very essence of the polis. Through such an understanding, history cannot be understood as

necessarily beginning with Herodotus, but as yet another form of humanity’s wider, and much

longer, collective struggles against fate. Such a struggle, however, does not necessarily come

through fate’s direct denunciation, but rather in its historical celebration. Such a celebration

represents a deeper understanding of the human condition and the means by which it might become

manageable; that is, liveable.

This makes Thompson's claim that “history is all we have” perhaps even more solemn than

can be immediately appreciated. One particular moment in Herodotus’ Histories reinforces this. His

admiration for Hegesistratus the Elean, who escapes captivity by cutting off part of his foot — a

deed Herodotus considers “the bravest action of all those we know” — reminds the modern reader

that in his work, as Thompson puts it, “...the most admirable characters seem to be those who

manage to assert their freedom and self-sufficiency in the face of overpowering necessity”.116 This

is precisely what Thompson is alluding to when she insists history can be the only true legacy of

humanity. History cannot merely be the retelling of human feats, but the articulation of a space in

which they can be remembered meaningfully, wherein human kind can challenge the necessity of

nature, and thus by definition, fate. Odysseus’ tears of remembrance embody such a space, and it is

why Arendt sees the beginning of a historical consciousness in that moment. This was the essence

of Collingwood’s dilemma, and construal of the crisis of modernity. Where could such a space be

articulated? What claim for civil life could be made in a world in which the political machinations

of fascism had not only emerged, but also emerged victorious?

Mûthos: The Fear of the Sirens Returns.

Arendt’s claim that the West's historical consciousness was born with Odysseus’ tears of

remembrance on hearing his own exploits – a case of man's remembering, and thus recognising, the

tragic forces at play in his life – marks Herodotus as both a radically new thinker in his time, and as

part of the oldest traditions. On the one hand, Herodotus’ work represents a particular historical

sensibility in his attempt to locate and render meaningful human actions for the sake of a political

community. On the other, however, it becomes evident the extent to which the problems in which

Herodotus was ensnared, can be seen as stretching back further to a past largely lost. Horkheimer

116 Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community, 111. See also Herodotus, The Histories, Book

Nine, 37.

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and Adorno recognised the extent to which Western culture was still embroiled in Odysseus’

journey home from Troy.117 The fear of the Sirens, which sees Odysseus lash himself to the mast of

his ship, as well as the fear of the Cyclops’ revenge, continues to resonate in our cultural memory.

The fear of myth within the history of philosophy, shown by Thucydides and Aristotle to the

present day, and its response, namely the confined bounds of ‘rationality’, shows both that the fear

of a primeval past goes back much further than the emergence of philosophy in Greece, and the

extent to which humanity is still ensnared by fears and anxieties that dogged its earliest ancestors.

Plato, and then Aristotle’s, warning of the powers of mythic authority over human life, in remaining

ensnared, if not by the Siren’s song, then the fear of it, ensured the continual authority of powers

other than humanity’s own.118 The dialectic of thought, between mûthos and logos, necessitates that

both are modalities of the other. The divide between the two that becomes coherent only after the

rise of philosophy and its stripping mûthos of its original authority, is a late event, comparatively

speaking. Mûthos and logos, in being different modalities of human thought, can be understood as a

unified response at the collective terror of that which beckoned from what Benjamin called “…the

primeval forest.”119 Early grappling with these terrors, mûthos, took on the form of an authoritative

speech act originating in the will of divine forces. Although later on in our existence, philosophy,

and its rigid formulation of what constituted rationality, overcame myth’s role (in terms of

legitimacy), it did not entail myth’s collective disappearance. Just as early primeval myth, and

metaphor, would have held at bay ancient, animal fears, so too did philosophy hold at bay the fear

of the Sirens’ call, which seemed to beckon us back into a past that humanity would rather forget.

Thucydides, in demanding of history the rigour that could ensure the banishment of stories that had

not in fact occurred, displays the terror of Odysseus’ fear of shipwreck upon the Siren’s rocks, and

betrays the unchanging worries that beset rational human life. The fear of Herodotus’ stories is, in

effect, the one and the same fear as that of the Sirens. The residual fear of that which would leave us

wrecked marks Herodotus’ legacy throughout history, and any re-conceptualisation of him

(however humble) must take into account such fear of shipwreck. Such a disaster, the fears

suggests, would entail the loss of the conceptual basis that marks human life. As discussed,

ironically, Herodotus himself (and indeed Homer) were marked by the same fears.

If indeed Herodotus does embody the beginning of history, it is a legacy that was only

recently rescued. David Chamberlain’s reminder of the word under which Herodotus worked – that

117 Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment”, 43-80. 118 Joseph Mali writes that Thucydides knew “…that the charm of the Homeric myths, like those of the Sirens, were too

great to resist; he therefore chose, much like the hero of the Odyssey himself, to tie his fellow travellers, his ‘readers’, to stricter disciplines, to make sure that they would not submit to the mythological temptation.” Mali, Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography, 2.

119 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N, (On the theory of knowledge, Theory of Progress), 456.

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is historiê – meant much more than our equivalent word. It was, firstly, a process of interpretation,

but also the subsequent “...monumentalization or performance (apodexis) of that process.”120 The

Sirens that Odysseus dealt with, are never directly mentioned by Herodotus, but the celebration of

the same ambiguous power of stories is his point of departure. A history that ignored the stories that

formed the basis of civil cohesion, both in Greek people and foreigners, cannot be a true history. If

there is even some commonality in origins of tragedy and history it lies insofar as both sought to

overcome (if only momentarily) the forces of fate (and thus myth) through their celebration.

Tragedy’s chorus is not entirely dissimilar to what Chamberlain calls Herodotus’

monumentalisation. Blumenberg insists that the primal reaction to reality, of which myth was the

response, is not something that has (yet) been overcome, and that any claim to have done so must

belong to that very same anxiety. And yet the act of history, in witnessing this, allows for the

conditions that dissolve the fears of human life. As Benjamin argued with tragedy, there are

moments in our history that open up as places of hope, in which the question of human life free of

authorities other than our own, can at least be asked through the collective recognition of human life

as being marked (in different ways throughout our history) by those very authorities. Herodotus’

work must be understood as such as a work of logos; a work that recognises both the origins of

logos, and its limitations. Such a reading is located within the modern reception of Herodotus who

for many, in this case Collingwood, embodies an alternative history to the reception of the past and

the constitution of history. The understanding of Herodotus, which is coloured to such an extent by

the Aristotelian move, has recovered perhaps only in the twentieth century insight of the critical

dialectical nature of myth. Herodotus’ notion of historical life being critically related to an idea of

civil, human life is a tradition that was largely ‘forgotten’ for more than a millennium. The

‘remembering’ of the contemplative gaze, of a notion of historical life being critical to a

philosophical anthropology of human life, (that is, questions regarding man’s essential nature) does

not exist in one historical moment. And yet, the emphasis of this Herodotean tradition in this

chapter requires an exploration of its recollection in early modern Europe.

120 Chamberlain, ""We the Others," 6.

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Chapter Two:

Vico and the Remembering of History: The Legitimacy of the

Contemplative Gaze.

If historical life began with the tears of Odysseus, and its reception with Herodotus, what

then? If, within The Histories there lies, as with tragedy, grounds upon which challenges to fate can

foster forms of human solidarity in an articulation of the nature of human life, it exists in the hidden

interstices of history. If that was Herodotus’ legacy, it was lost in the almost immediate immanence

of philosophy’s interjection against older, more obscure forms of logos. Philosophy’s forgetting of

historical life in the sense that Herodotus intended — that led Collingwood to declare him a thinker

with as much standing as Socrates — began its remembrance in the work of Giambattista Vico.121 If

Herodotus embodies the beginning of some conception of historical life, then Vico’s important

differentiation between fate and divine providence in history, represents divinity in history as a

material presence. Based around this possibility, this chapter will argue that Vico’s philosophy of

history deals explicitly with a conception of ‘materiality’ that is distinct from idealism or

empiricism.

Vico’s relatively quiet life must be remembered in relation to his home city Naples, a city in

which, Walter Benjamin once wrote, “…Catholicism strove to reassert itself in every situation.”

That the later Hegelian school of Naples (despite being the “...fruits of importation” as Giovanni

Papini argues122) must have been, necessarily, shaped by the historical presence of a devout

Catholicism, seems beyond doubt.123 Guido de Ruggiero, in 1936, outlines in a yearly survey of

Italian philosophy, how Benedetto Croce dealt with the controversy caused by his secular reading of

Giambattista Vico via a thorough respect for, and mastery of Catholicism. 124 The obvious

influences of Hegelian philosophy on Italian thought dominate a more hidden Vichean one. The

extent to which the work of Vico, in his differentiation between fate and divine providence

121 This should not be taken as a strictly historical assertion. As Momigliano outlines, the salvation of Herodotus came

slowly, beginning in the Renaissance, and solidifying in the eighteenth century. My specific claim refers to a rescuing of a particular tradition of history that was largely lost. Although Herodotus’ reputation was improving by the late fifteenth century, I argue that the philosophical insights contained within Herodotus’ understanding of history, came to be fully realised via the insights of Vico. Vico would almost certainly have rejected the assertion; and yet there is a sense in which he is uncovering a philosophical potentiality within historiography that had almost entirely vanished. See Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition,” 29.

122 Giovanni Papini, "Philosophy in Italy." The Monist 13, no. 4 (1903): 555 123 For a good overview of the history of Italian thought see Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: The Origins and

Actuality of Italian Philosophy, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012) and Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

124 Guido de Ruggiero, Constance M. Allen, "Philosophy in Italy," Philosophy 11, no. 44 (1936): 478.

45

anticipates the later teleology’s of the universal histories, is beyond the scope of this chapter, and

has been discussed by others.125 Such a discussion, in addition, further betrays Vico’s legacy, in the

equation of his project with a form of proto-idealism. A perhaps surprising discussion between

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, uncovers the divide between the philosophies of history of Croce

and Vico. Both writers praise Vico’s understanding of history – indeed Joyce’s Ulysses and

especially Finnegan’s Wake were influenced by Vico’s work – but it is Beckett who directly warns

against, not only Croce’s idealism as being the antithesis of Vico’s project, but also Croce’s reading

of Vico, which had become available to the English speaking public when it was translated by

Collingwood in 1913.126

The project of this chapter can be divided in two parts. The first part seeks to rescue Vico’s

peculiar form of philosophical materialism from the later idealist universal histories that would

subsume him, and its subsequent influence on the philosophy of Collingwood. To make this more

explicit I will do this by first outlining the extent to which the normal equation of Crocean idealism

with Collingwood’s own philosophy is misguided. The major philosophical differentiation between

Croce’s philosophy of ‘history as liberty’ (which despite Croce’s claims never seems to fully outrun

Hegel) and Collingwood’s project, is the fact the latter does not see his own time as culminating in

a liberal freedom, but as standing before a precipice. Although Collingwood undoubtedly retained

idealist ideas, derived from both Hegel and Croce, his fear of historical disasters stems, I argue,

from a Vichean notion of ‘materiality’. This notion is neither idealist, nor empiricist, and allows for

the possibility of historical regression. This is derived from Vico’s idea that primitive expressions

of human life continue to linger under the surface of material present day institutions, which

threaten to engulf them through not being recognised. When used, then, ‘materiality’ refers to a

difficult Vichean conception of the relics of the past, historical legacies, and their presence in the

present. Through this conception, Vico not only recognised the lingering presence of myth in his

own day as a historical discovery, but that historical legacies existed not just in the mind of the

historian, but also in the material presence of society. Vico considered the failure to recognise the

remnants of ‘primitive’ human life in the present as representative of the possibility of culture’s

regression into that very state. The logic of divine providence is all that protected human life from

these barbaric forces. The second part of this chapter explores Vico’s idea of divine providence, in

particular his clear differentiation between it and fate. Divine providence drives his conception of

historical time, and its fundamental divorce from fate shows a keen awareness of the potential of a

125 See in particular Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976) and Karl Löwith, Meaning in History

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 126 H. S. Harris, “What is Mr. Ear Vico Supposed to be ‘Earing?,” in Vico and Joyce ed. Donald Verene (New York:

State University of New York Press, 1987), 68.

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philosophical account of history’s relation to divinity and, thus, human life. The second part of the

chapter will outline the extent to which Vico’s notion of divine providence, and its relation to

historical life and human freedom, was hugely influential to the thinkers of a particular tradition of

twentieth century thought (of whom Collingwood is one) who sought a salvation from the

illegitimacy and crisis of modernity. These twentieth century thinkers considered the context of

crisis that beset modernity symptomatic of a ‘misremembering’ of history, and the mythic (and thus

fateful) forces that came entwined in that history. It is Vico who correlates the historical

imagination (fantasia) with a form of remembering.127 Finally, this chapter will show the extent to

which Vico’s uncovering of the legitimacy of the contemplative historical gaze would only find its

full repercussions long afterwards in the understanding that such a gaze could become a

transformative one.

Croce’s Philosophy of History

Rik Peters writes that Collingwood’s treatment of Croce in The Idea of History –

Collingwood's most famous work – is also his most generous.128 Indeed, a periphery concern of the

first part of this chapter is to show explicitly the extent to which Collingwood owes the concept of

‘the living past’ — that is, the dialectical relationship between the past and the historian who

attempts to access it in the present — to Croce. However, in an earlier essay, “Croce's Philosophy

of History,” written in 1920, Collingwood is far more critical of what he considers an incoherent

thesis that oscillates between a naturalism of “...a curious eighteenth-century flavour” and

idealism.129 Croce understands history, in being a logic of process toward liberty, as incapable of an

evil that is not necessary for the further progress of humanity. Collingwood writes of Croce’s

understanding of history:

Croce's contention is that I am forbidden to pass any but an exclusively favourable

judgement...Thus the idealistic principle that there is a positive side in every historical fact

is combined with the naturalistic assumption that the positive side excludes a negative side;

the principle that nothing is merely bad is misunderstood as implying that everything is

wholly good130

The abstract logic at the heart of this vision of historical time, described by Collingwood as

127 Vico’s Platonic dues here are particularly stark. 128 Rik Peters, “Croce, Gentile and Collingwood on the Relation between History and Philosophy,” Philosophy, History

and Civilization : interdisciplinary perspectives on R.G. Collingwood, ed. David Boucher, James Connely, Tariq Modood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 160-161.

129 R. G. Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History (New Delhi: Isha Books, 2013), 9. 130 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 10-11.

47

allowing the historian “...[to] only write down what he finds written on the pages of History”, is

perhaps what led Croce to continue to support the fascist regime under Mussolini well into the

1920’s.131 Although he eventually renounced Mussolini unambiguously, Croce’s understanding of

history briefly clouded his political thought. A fierce advocate of the Italian nation state, Croce

dismissed any possibility that humanity’s fate might not rest on an internal, rational logic, manifest

in the passage of external history. “All histories”, he writes, “which tell of the decay and death of

peoples and institutions are false...‘elegiac history’ is always partisan history.”132 His oscillation

between what Collingwood considers naturalism and idealism originates in Croce’s understanding

of the role of philosophy. The idealist strain which, along with thinkers like Giovanni Gentile,

locates philosophy and history as being separate but critically related tasks, clashes with the

naturalist strain that considers philosophy a component and manifestation of an internal movement

of Nature.133 As Denis Smith outlines, Croce was first and foremost a nationalist, who saw the

historico-political struggle as showcasing a logic that culminated in the Italian nation state.134 In so

being Croce marks himself as a thinker whose hopes are based entirely within the unificatory and

nationalist movements that swept through parts of Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth

century. Croce’s early support for Mussolini and the Fascist party, one that perhaps lingered too

long, was, always, per Italia. In that sense, the relatively recent cultural memory of Italy’s

Risorgimento remained the historical and political centre, not only of both his own, and Italy’s life,

but the locus of its historical life, and thus, crucially for Croce, its future. It is perhaps worth noting,

too, that while Croce’s understanding of liberty was synonymous with the beginning of the nation

state, Vico’s own work took place during the transition of power in Naples from Spain to Austria.

The logic of fragmentation under which Vico worked, resonates with Collingwood’s witnessing of

political and social fragmentation in the late 1930’s.135

Collingwood criticises Croce's vision of progress as having, “...assert[ed] the existence of a

criterion outside the historian’s mind by which the points of view which arise within that mind are

justified and condemned.”136 The culmination of this is, Collingwood writes, “…the shifting of

Croce's own centre of interest from philosophy to history”, wherein “...philosophy is the

‘methodological moment of history.’”137 History could not influence the critical task of the present's

131 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 10. See also and Denis Mack Smith, "Benedetto Croce: History and

Politics," Journal of Contemporary History 8, no. 1 (1973). 132 Croce, as quoted in Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 12. 133 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 14. 134 Mack Smith, "Benedetto Croce: History and Politics,” 42-46. 135 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Vico’s Scienza nuova: Roman ‘Bestoni’ and Roman ‘Eroi,’” History and Theory Vol. 5, no.

1 (1966): 5. 136 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 12. 137 Collingwood, Croce’s Philosophy of History, 15.

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philosophical direction (indeed, the critical nature of philosophy is entirely lost) because the entirety

of the philosophical dialectic was contained within a larger world historical one. Croce’s attempt to

escape the Hegelian immanence of Spirit within history, that is, the equation of the movement of

history with Spirit, according to Collingwood, merely sees historical progress naturalised. Within

this naturalisation Spirit, while not the motor of history, emerges in particular ‘moments,’ a case of

the universal emerging from the particular.138 Croce’s understanding of the philosophy of Spirit

comes to be synonymous with history, because the immanence of any historical moment is the only

reality in which Spirit emerges. Philosophy’s position within the naturalised movement of history

reduces philosophy merely to the manifestation of the progress of history toward liberty. This was

Collingwood’s critical concern: in becoming a manifestation of history, philosophy’s interruptive

potential, where philosophy is capable of articulating other potentialities outside of historical

possibilities, is lost.

Croce always thought of himself as having moved beyond Hegel’s universal history. Hegel's

Spirit, which Croce presents as, “the manner in which the spirit of a philosophy of servitude to

Nature, or to the transcendental God, has elevated itself to the consciousness of liberty,” marks a

point of differentiation between the two thinkers, at least for Croce himself.139 However, Croce

writes: “To negate universal history does not mean to negate the universal in history.”140 Although

history did not embody the motion of Spirit, Croce argues that within the historical process,

moments of the universal emerge; that is, Spirit emerges in historical moments, a case of

consciousness’ reiteration of its forming part of nature. This is part of Croce's belief that, just as

history, when properly understood, relieves us of universal history, so too does philosophy,

“...immanent and identical with history,” destroy the notion of an universal philosophy (what Croce

calls a closed system).141 Croce concludes:

Thus history becoming actual history and philosophy becoming historical philosophy have

freed themselves, the one from the anxiety of not being able to know that which is not known,

only because it was, or will be known, and the other for never being able to attain to definite

truth – that is to say, both are freed from the phantom of ‘the thing in itself.142

138 Benedetto Croce, Teoria e Storia della Storiografia (Bari: Gius. Leterza & Figli, 1943), 46-47. 139 “(il) modo in cui lo spirito da una filosofia, di asservimento alla natura o al Dio trascendente si è innalzato alla

conscienza della libertà.” Croce, Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, 47. 140 ”...negare la storia universale non significa negare la conoscenze dell'universale nella storia. Croce. Teoria e Storia

della Storiografia, 49. It should also be noted that Croce’s position is stated within a language of negation that betrays the continuing influence of the shapes of Hegelian thought.

141 “immanente e identica con la storia” Croce, Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, 51. 142 E la storia, fascendosi attuale, come la filosofia fascendosi filosofia storia, si sone liberate l'una dell'ansia di non

poter conoscere ciò che non si conosce solo perché fu o sarà conosciuto, e l'altra dalla disperazione di non raggiungere mai la verità definitiva: cioè entrambe si sone liberate dal fantasma della 'cosa in sé. Croce, Teoria E

49

This was the crux of Croce's project surrounding the notion of history as ‘present thought’:

philosophy and history reduced to the same project of the dialectical recognition of the concreteness

of lived experience as being the particular manifestation of universal Spirit. Thought that, as

Collingwood put it, “knew itself as so living,” allowed the problem of historical time’s relation to

the present to become irrelevant. Human, and thus historical life, in other words, was made manifest

by the reception of that very history. Collingwood writes of Croce's final view of the autonomy of

history:

History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the

historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being

historically known is that they should 'vibrate in the historian's mind...For history is not

contained in books or documents; it lives only, as a present interest and pursuit.143

The vibrancy of the past – of the historian's freedom to enter the contingency of material reality

long since departed – in its manifestation, renders immanent both the present in which it is thought,

and the very history to which it belongs. History is the process of the dialectical recognition of past

Spirit – of humanity's move toward liberty – that lives as being so recognised in the present.144 The

philosophical project of the present was defined and came to know itself through the recognition of

past projects. History itself, then, becomes the philosophical project – it is the project of

rationality’s self-recognition.

The notion that philosophical reflection must come to terms with past thought within the

present is the basis for Croce’s assertion that there could only be ‘present history’. The

understanding of these historical moments as only able to resonate within the present of the

historian, influenced Collingwood a great deal.145 However, it cannot be understood as the work of

a disciple. This is not an attempt, it must be stressed, to make a case for Collingwood’s ingenuity.

Rather, the influence of Croce’s notion of the critical importance of the present in the past’s

resurrection (and it must be remembered that Croce understood this notion within an idealistic logic

Storia Della Storiografia, 52.

143 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 202. 144 Croce, Teoria E Storia Della Storiografia, 13. See also Benedetto Croce, “La Storia Come Pensiero and Come

Azione,” La Critica: Revista di Letteratura, Storia and Filosofia diretta da B. Croce, Vol. 35, no. 1 (1937): “La Storiografia come Liberazione della Storia”, 21.

145 These early quotes (taken from Croce’s Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, written during the Great War) represent an anti Hegelian, or anti-universalist stance, that faded later in his life; the dialectical culmination of history through a nationalist liberty, becoming more critical to his philosophy, wherein his entire ontology centres around a form of ‘historical present’, that sees the forces of history culminate in human freedom as manifest through the State.

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of historico-eschatological culmination) entered Collingwood’s own philosophy of history almost

exclusively as a reaction and rejection of the then blossoming British Realism. To Collingwood, the

realists embodied (perversely, given their hopes of reducing the world to its rational properties) the

final victory of irrationalism. This was the great intellectual irony that Collingwood laboured under:

that the champions of enlightened, rational and logical thought, had in fact succumbed to the forces

they sought to overthrow. Crocean concerns aside, the ultimate hopes for Collingwood make a great

deal more sense when read in conjunction with those of Vico – to which the second half of this

chapter is dedicated – than the universal history of Croce, for whom positivism and empiricism

were the enemy of genuine historical insight. This in itself is an interesting point to examine the

fundamental ambivalence within the philosophy of Collingwood, since he was equally suspicious of

the positivist tendencies of his colleagues, and yet harboured obvious approval of the empiricist

nature of archaeology; the spirit of which inflects much of his more straightforward understandings

of history and its relation to philosophy. Collingwood was not an empiricist. And yet, there is in his

philosophy (and it is at this point, it can be argued, that Vico’s influence is most coherent) an

attempt to render coherent a philosophically-viable concern with a form of materialism that

balanced a notion of empirical realities that did not forget the Kantian categories for such

empiricism to be possible.146 In other words, as can be seen in his obvious correlation of

archaeological concerns with philosophical ones, Collingwood is trying to make sense of a material

sense of the past that avoids the abstraction of Hegel and the naturalised progress of Croce, and

instead renders a thinking of the materiality of the past a critical concern for the present (his

essentially Hegelian differentiation between inward and outward expressions of human action in

history, in allowing for an account of history as constituting the dialectical movement of human

thought (and its subsequent outward expression), does not discount the philosophical importance of

an account of that exterior materiality as constitutive of the inner lives of past men and women).

Croce and Collingwood’s shared project – of the critical relation between philosophy and history –

beyond a superficial collective rejection of realist empiricism (what Croce called an ersatz

philosophy, by which he meant a banal philosophy147) in fact only emphasises the different ends

envisioned by the two philosophers. Where the spectre of Hegel never entirely leaves Croce’s own

philosophy, his attempt to subvert him not enough to escape the eschatological forms of progress

that mark the post Kantian universal histories, Collingwood is best understood as intending to find a

philosophical account of the inherent ‘reality’ of the past’s relation to the present. In other words,

not an account of liberty, or progress, but how the recognition of history as marked by violent

ruptures might inform a present that sought to interrupt such ruptures. That is to say, to strike upon 146 R. G. Collingwood, “The Science of Absolute Presuppositions,” in An Essay On Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1940), 34-48 147 G. R. G. Mure, “Croce and Oxford,” The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 4, no. 17 (Oct. 1954): 328.

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a philosophical account of human life that escapes (via its confrontation) a historical legacy that had

silenced other potentialities.

David Bates, in “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History (In and Out of Context)”,

argues that Collingwood’s notion of re-enactment as forming the basis of his philosophy “...opens

up a complex connection in Collingwood's thought between ethical action, historical time and our

relationship with divine reality...that leads to a re-evaluation of his own historical context.”148

Rather than being an eccentric idealist Bates argues that Collingwood must be read within the

history of philosophy that emerges in Europe between the wars as a response to what was

considered a crisis of culture, an illegitimacy of modernity – a movement that “...was trying to

mediate transcendent reality and concrete historicity in a situation of crisis and fragmentation.”149

Where Croce’s philosophy is marked by an optimism that functions as a category in terms of which

historical time is judged logical and coherent, Collingwood’s project involves the suspicion that the

eschatological character of historical time – its linearity and its subjugation to the naturalisation of

chronology – marks the illegitimacy of the present's relation to its history. Croce, working under the

historical constellation of the Risorgimento, considered he had “vinto l'astratteza dell', hegelismo”

(“ defeated the abstraction of Hegelianism”) and thus fell into the Hegelian category of the

development of Spirit.150 Croce’s understanding of historical time, which sought to render coherent

the naturalist dialectic of the philosophical project (and thus the history of humanity's relation to the

present) must be understood separately from the urgency of Collingwood’s project. This latter

project sought out, as Bates writes, rather than a coherent logic of history, a “...a violent

intervention.”151 The root of the distinction between Croce and Collingwood is grounded entirely in

the extent to which they differ in their understanding of the urgency of the philosophical project’s

relation to the present. The present for Collingwood, in representing the only possible time of

writing, embodies a unique space for the philosophical. The philosophically-driven intervention into

our historical subjugation (in the sense meant by Benjamin, that is the constant repetition and return

of violent forces in history), offers up the only hope to alter the collective historical legacy; that is, a

collective sense of human life that is distorted by a historical forces. Collingwood, who would have

agreed with Adorno that progress began only when the notion of progress had finally been

terminated, wrote with the tradition of understanding the present as in a state of crisis.152 Bates

148 David Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History (In and Out of Context),” History and Theory Vol. 35,

no. 1 (Feb. 1996): 29. There was, it must be noted, a genuine excitement on reading Bates’ paper. It was the only academic paper I found during my research that shared my own understanding of Collingwood’s wider philosophical project as being distinctly modern, rather than old fashioned, or simply peculiar.

149 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History,” 29. 150 Croce, Teoria and storia, 288. 151 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History, 50. 152 Recall that this point made by Adorno, was not a point regarding the illegitimacy of progress qua progress but,

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writes:

Collingwood always emphasised that historical work is not so much an attempt to observe

passively the spectacle of past events of humanity, as it is an admittedly violent intervention

into the past in order to perform a task in the present.153

Croce’s notion of philosophy as a product of the dialectical passage of a broader historical ontology

reduces philosophy to an unchanging, methodological category. This cannot be reconciled with

Collingwood’s notion that philosophy, although necessarily a task performed in the present, also

represents a powerful, interruptive force in which the present itself is formed.154 The relation of the

present to historical time exists in the philosophically charged gaze backwards into the past as being

critical to some possibly new articulation of what it is to be human. This, in some essential sense,

constitutes the philosophical task for Collingwood. A reception history of the linearity of historical

time as it is usually envisaged, promises a critical re-thinking of human life in the present and thus,

in so doing, offers a hope for the future. This form of hope, unlike Croce’s that was logically

ensured, anticipated certain emancipatory forms of life had not yet emerged as ‘thought’, and thus

lay hidden as a potentiality within already existing forms of historical life. Although Collingwood,

like Hegel, cannot allow any notion of the future to enter historical discourse, his ideas surrounding

the philosophical task (explicitly linked to historical time) are unambiguously linked to an ontology

of hope; that is, a philosophical articulation of another possibility.

Vico and the Cartesian Move

To undermine Croce’s traditional position as Collingwood’s primary influence is not to

suggest that Vico is a more appropriate one. Although the more general influence of Italian,

specifically Neapolitan philosophy, on Collingwood’s work must at least be noted, the genuine

insights gained from a critique of Collingwood’s relation to Vico stems from, on the one hand,

an elaboration of the latent philosophical tradition that Vico inspired (particularly in the late

nineteenth, early twentieth century), and on the other, the different understanding of

rather, any concept of progress or its negation. In other words, any notion of historical time framed around questions of progress or regression was by definition problematic. Collingwood makes an almost identical claim in his essay “The Present Need for Philosophy”, in Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),169.

153 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History, 50. In Chapter Three I will explore the extent of Collingwood’s understanding of the present’s historical task via a reading of his and the work of Kracauer.

154 Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (Oxon,: Routledge, 1997), 26-27. This is an idea articulated explicitly by Andrew Benjamin, and yet it is a notion to which Collingwood would have been strongly sympathetic. The present’s forming the philosophical task necessitating the philosophical task’s influence on the present occupies an important space in Chapter Three.

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Collingwood’s project that emerges when understood in relation to that tradition. Vico and

Collingwood worked similarly against the prevailing winds of the establishment philosophy of

their respective times, perhaps explaining their common dismissal as ambiguous, as well as the

common misappropriation of their work. Born in 1668, Vico lived and worked under the shadow

of Cartesian philosophy, and died in 1744 aged seventy-five, a relatively unknown and obscure

professor at the University of Naples.155 Collingwood writes that Vico was a man “…too far

ahead of his time to have very much immediate influence.”156 As Max Horkheimer outlines in

his essay Vico and Mythology, Vico’s vision and larger project was, in being located in

opposition to a then utterly dominant Cartesian rationalism, a reconsideration of the very

foundations of humanity’s relation to rationality, and indeed of the foundations of internal logics

of rationality itself. That is, humanity’s understanding of reason, lay not in the a priori probing

of its machinations, but in a historical study of our relation to its conceptual emergence.157

Almost necessarily, given the historical contingencies and forces at work during Vico’s life, his

work was doomed to obscurity. It was not until much later that his legacy was truly understood

and built upon. Indeed, Isaiah Berlin suggests that Vico’s work is continually forgotten and

rediscovered.158 And yet, as Löwith outlines, his work anticipates many later philosophical

projects.159 It is Horkheimer, however, who explicitly names Vico as the source of a great deal of

inspiration for many of the early twentieth-century German thinkers.160 The Vichean notion that

a sound historical study and critique of the origins of our civil institutions was critical to a

contemporary understanding of them, turned into the twentieth century project (historically

related but separate to Vico’s original hopes) of seeking out a redemption for the malaise of

modernity through a reception of history. It was the modern hope that through this reception

brief interruptions of historical time were possible.

In the fifth paragraph of the Scienza Nuova’s ‘Establishing Principles’, Vico writes: “If

philosophy is to benefit humankind, it must raise and support us as frail and fallen beings, rather

155 The extent to which Vico was an intellectual outcast, however, is addressed in Joseph M. Levine’s “Giambattista

Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1991): 62-63.

156 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 71. 157 Collingwood, “Metaphysics an Historical Science,” in An Essay on Metaphysics, 49-57. 158 Berlin, Vico and Herder, 3-5. 159 Löwith, Meaning in History, 115. 160 Joseph Maier, in “Vico and Critical Theory” is right to suggest, however, that Horkheimer’s broader claims, namely

that Vico was the first to gain insight into the nature of ‘the primitive mind’, were misleading. Not only was the theory that contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures were reflective of early human lives, as well as the notion that the minds of children mirrored these cultures, arguably the ideas of Lévy Bruhl, but they were also anthropologically and ethnologically false. Horkheimer’s interest in Vico remains critical, however, because, as Maier insists, his interest was ideological, insofar as he wanted to see if Vico “…offered anything in the way of ‘useful means’ in the present struggle for ‘the establishment of a just order of life.” See Joseph Maier, “Vico and Critical Theory,” Social Research 43, no. 4, Vico and Contemporary Thought -2 (Winter 1976): 848.

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than strip us of our nature or abandon us in our corruption.”161 Vico’s so-called ‘new science’

was indeed a philosophy that, contra Descartes, departed from a form of humanism, rather than a

strict rationalism. In one of the more famous passages of the science, he writes:

Still, in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal

and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly

the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must

be discovered within the modifications of the human mind. (…che questo mondo civile egli

certamente è stato fatto dagli uomini, onde se ne possono, perché se ne dobbono, ritruovare i

princìpi dentro le modificazione della nosta medesima mente umane). If we reflect on this we

can only wonder why all the philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world

of nature, which only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of

nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know because they created it (…di meditare

su questo mondo della nazioni, o sia mondo civile, del quale, perché l’avevano fatto gli

uomini, ne potevano conseguire la scienza gli uomini).162

This is a critical passage because it shows the grounds upon which Vico presents his alternative

philosophy. The broad philosophical questions concerning human life are to be derived from

principles concerning its history, rather than those that attempt to uncover the principles of nature.

Horkheimer argues that Vico’s philosophy should primarily be understood as a rejection of

Cartesian metaphysics. 163 To do so meant “…a confrontation with the question whether

mathematical thought is the true manifestation of the essence of man.”164 The Cartesian position,

Horkheimer writes, can be traced through thinkers like Leibniz and Kant, eventually becoming the

groundwork of the founding principles of modern philosophy. History (with the exception of Hegel)

is consigned to “…a descriptive account of happenings…entirely irrelevant to the decisive forms of

161 “La filosofia, per giovar al gener umano, dee sollevar d reggere l’uomo caduto e debole, non convellergi la natura

né abbandonarlo nella sua corrozione.” Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova (Milano: Bur Rizzoli, 1977), 163. English translations to the text are taken from The New Science, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 77.

162 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 220/New Science,120. 163 Horheimer, however, perhaps overstates Vico’s opposition to Cartesian philosophy. Joseph Levine outlines the

extent to which Vico greatly admired modern philosophical criticism, “…which starts with the certainty of clear and simple ideas and builds knowledge by means of abstract reasoning.” However, Vico also did not want to entirely dismiss the ancient art of rhetoric, “…which preferred concrete sense perceptions and arrived at a knowledge of things only probable by means of imagination and memory.” See Levine, “Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns”, 65. In other words, Vico saw a necessity in balancing the insights of the ancients with those of his modern contemporaries. This was a historico-philosophical position, that saw the advantage (indeed the necessity) of modern forms of thought remaining in dialectic with older modalities of thinking.

164 Max Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” New Vico Studies Vol. 5 (1987): 64.

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theoretical knowledge.”165 Berlin writes, keenly aware of the ambivalence of Vico’s legacy, that

Vico must in some sense represent an alternative grounding for the human sciences; namely the

historical imagination (fantasia), constituting a form of recollection of collective societal memory,

as distinct from a priori and aposteriori categories of knowledge.166 It is important to note that

Vico’s primary differentiation from Cartesian philosophy was the grounding of his founding

principles in historically-grounded anthropological principles, furnished by a divine law, rather than

mathematical or naturalistic ones. In this sense, given the Cartesian tradition arguably represents the

beginnings of the concerns of modern philosophy, Vico embodies an alternative history of western

intellectual history, another potentiality.167

The particular element of his historical critique that led Collingwood and others to declare

Vico ahead of his time was the amount of time spent on myth as constituting a serious historical

category. Vico’s guiding principle that all civil institutions are the result of human action,

necessitates the admission that, given the vast majority of the history of human life has been lost,

almost all of the histories of the origins of those institutions are also lost. He thus goes on to

claim that the myths that have survived offer reflections of true historical realities that have

otherwise been lost to the murkiness of prehistory. This was not a claim about the actual

obtaining of the fall of Troy, or the wanderings of Odysseus, but rather a desire to return to

myth’s original meaning of vera narratio, and the subsequent implications of that return. Vico’s

major recognition is the historical meaning, and importance of stories that, despite the ambiguity

of their origins, necessarily (that is by virtue of their survival) played a major part in illuminating

ancient worlds. These were not simply stories that told of those worlds, but that actually forged

those worlds. This is not merely the idea that myths constituted the ‘first histories’, but that they

offered up the histories of the emotional, inner lives of early human life. Modern terms like

‘cultural memory’ go some way toward capturing this Vichean idea, and yet are not quite

adequate. The role of ‘myth’ in historical study was not only the description of the inner lives of

past men and women, but a study of the grounds upon the very possibility of an inner life in the

first place. The uniqueness of Vico’s insight, given his historical circumstances, was that myth

(stories that did not describe life, but constituted a form of it), in constituting not mere

165 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 65. 166 Berlin, Vico and Herder, xix. 167 Of course, the extent to which Descartes does represent the beginnings of philosophy’s concern with the individual,

and subjective experience is contentious. As Cassirer notes, there is an alternative history of the development of the concept of the subject, emerging in Italy during the Renaissance. See Ernest Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy trans. Mario Domandi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1963). Vico of course would have been keenly aware of this tradition and as such his own understanding of the basis for philosophical enquiry must be understood within the context of this much wider (and indeed ambiguous) debate. Indeed, recent work argues that Vico was consciously operating within a reception of this ‘other’ possibility of the humanities. See Rubini’s The Other Renaissance.

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descriptions of past human life, but the grounds upon which life became distinctly human,

represented an important human legacy. Myth not only embodied older, different and legitimate

modalities of logos, but also that these modalities were reachable, even tangible, in the civic

institutions of Vico’s own day. These insights necessitated the serious critical analysis of the

myths that had come down to modernity as constituting a genuine and important historical

category in themselves.168

A critical and original facet of Vico’s historical study of myth lay in the idea that the modern

mind was utterly alien to that of the ancient way of thinking, and that to study myth was to be

exposed to an alien world view, that would require a great deal of time and effort to understand.

Collingwood’s insistence (almost certainly influenced by Vico) that metaphysics was a historical

science caused him to claim that the backward gaze into the past was an inherently metaphysical

(and thus inherently difficult) act.169 Vico’s devout Catholicism required him to regard humanity as

a fallen being, who began its existence in utter barbarism and primeval fear. The journey was

fraught: “For I have to descend from today’s civilised human nature to the savage and monstrous

nature of these early people, which we can by no means imagine and can conceive only with great

effort.”170 That early human life managed to constrain this terror of the world was evidence,

according to Vico, of the emergence of poetry and singing before prose and the spoken word. For it

was the rhapsodical nature of early human communication that was able to tame the strangeness of

the natural world. The point at which poetry becomes sublime exists in its function: early poetry’s

forging of a form of human solidarity, an early aesthetic expression of our fallibility before terrible

and strange forces. Vico argues that early pagan civilisation’s terror at the first case of lightning one

hundred years after the Great Flood caused it to look up in fear at the sky and see it as a living being

(calling it Jupiter) and in conjuring this deity, succumbed to the fear of Nature. In Vico’s work the

subjugation before fate is the subjugation before nature; a life that is mediated by the thinnest

threads of early theology, the origins of human institutions, but also a force of terrible

ambivalence.171 Vico’s understanding of early pagan life is one of inner conflict: marked by animal

(that is, creaturely) lust, but unwilling to display this before Jupiter, the first men dragged the first

women into their caves, the subsequent rape and forced cohabitation marking the beginning of the

168 As Joseph Mali writes, Vico hoped that his science of mythology would re-instate their original meaning as vera

narratio (true narration), “…not stories that merely tell how the first humans institutions were made, but stories that actually made them, and still kept them intact, by the sheer power of their poetry.” Scholars of Vico are at pains to make clear that Vico’s idea of myth was not romantic but anthropological in its origins. The early poetry was contextualised in purely practical terms: it was a song, a “ritualistic incantation, that served to impose the ‘magical formalism’ of the word onto the world.” See Mali, Mythistory, 73-74.

169 Collingwood, ‘Religion and Natural Science in Primitive Society’, An Essay on Metaphysics, 191. 170 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 227/New Science, 125. 171 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 251-252/New Science, 146.

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matrimonial and patriarchal structures of early pagan civilisation. The later emergence of agrarian

law necessitated a fear and loathing of earlier, pastoral and nomadic forms of life. This particular

confrontation is embodied, according to Vico, in Odysseus’ confrontation with the Cyclops. The

fear of earlier, more primeval forms of life cement a differentiation between natural and civil life,

constituted around notions of guilt. Guilt, in this context, rises up out of early man’s predisposition

to fall back into forms of mere life, and his unwillingness to show this before the deities that make

manifest his immediate world. Guilt is thus a manifestation of myth’s authority on life. The Jews,

living entirely unknown to the pagans, fared better, their negotiation with the horrors of nature were

mitigated by the institutions forged by their law.172

The Magic Formalism of the Cyclops

Vico’s understanding of early human life touches upon one of the critical junctures of his

philosophy: that poetic, rhapsodic forms of life (despite what he would have considered their

‘primitiveness’) were necessary beginnings for later forms of rationality. The meeting of lawless

man (that is, ‘without law’) with those who lived under law, finds its absolute metaphor in

Homer’s Odyssey in the confrontation between Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus. Vico

sees in this confrontation a representation of humanity’s struggle with its barbarous origins.

Polyphemus, the lawless monster, is defeated by Odysseus through rational cunning. As Lewis

notes, “…when Homer calls the Cyclops a ‘lawless minded monster’ this does not mean merely

that in his mind he does not respect the laws of civilisation, but also that his mind itself, his

thinking, is lawless, unsystematic, and rhapsodical.”173 Vico’s notion of the poetic nature of

barbarism is something he both reviles as savage, yet admires as a form of ‘magic formalism’,

and constitutive of human beginnings.174 Homer, who predates the distinction between mûthos

and logos through the establishment of Greek philosophy by hundreds of years, probably

understood the lawless, poetic nature of the Cyclops as pre-anthropological, insofar as they did

not figure within an anthropology. To figure outside of an ánthrōpos (the absence of the law) was

to exist outside of the human realm. In other words, the absence of an ánthrōpos was the

presence of the creaturely. 175 Vico’s insights into the historical potency of myth, which

172 This is a possible influence on Benjamin in Critique of Violence, in recognizing the necessity of the law (myth) to

extricate ourselves from an earlier, more savage existence. Benjamin’s awareness of the ambivalence at the heart of the law, the rotten mythic core, does not also mean he wasn’t aware of the origins of the law being the grounds upon which early human life emerged from an older ‘mere’ life.

173 Pericles Lewis, “The ‘True’ Homer: Myth and Enlightenment in Vico, Horkheimer, and Adorno,” New Vico Studies Vol. 10 (1992): 28.

174 Eric Auerbach, Scenes From the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 193. 175 The etymology of anthropology, which although it can be traced back to the Greek word ánthrōpos, is traceable

further backwards to Indo-European words meaning, roughly, ‘of the earth’, although the latter is disputed. See

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subsequently formed the basis of the modern twentieth-century critiques of culture, illuminated

the narratives and metaphors of ancient myth, not only as aesthetically important, but historically

and culturally central to the legacy of Western intellectual history. Horkheimer and Adorno’s

argument, (which itself derives at least in part from Vico) that the survival of certain myths

necessitates a logic of cultural resonance with their people (that is their survival depends on their

resonating with its audience) sets up Odysseus’s confrontation with Polyphemus. This

confrontation represents not only a good story, but as an insight into the anxieties of the people

living around the Greek peninsula in the centuries (and millennia) before Christ.176 The law’s

confrontation with the lawless (or, as Vico would put it, the poetic) illuminates the preoccupation

with animal beginnings and the triumph of reason over it, and finds its clearest expression in

Odysseus’ adventures in the cave, proven by its clear resonance throughout the ancient

Mediterranean. Odysseus’ confrontation with the Cyclops embodies one of the earliest remnants

of the collective grappling with lives befitting rational beings, expressed through the contempt

and disgust as Polyphemus’ animality and Odysseus’s cunning, and eventual return to Ithaca, the

return itself a foundational metaphor in Western discourse. Not only does the myth grant an

insight into the existential struggles that resonated in Homeric life, it also opens a window into

the deeper past, suggesting what the Homeric Greeks thought of their own ancestors. This

ancient past was considered by Homer and his contemporaries as a Golden Age of poetic, heroic

life. Although the Cyclops is eventually defeated by cunning Odysseus, it is not without some

degree of nostalgia for a form of life long gone in which the chasm between ourselves and the

divine seemed less wide.

The danger of Enlightenment thought, the first Cartesian glimmerings through which Vico

lived, and set about confronting, again found its metaphor in the culmination of Odysseus’

meeting with the Cyclops, where the creature is blinded by a sharpened stake. Although Vico

welcomes the victory of rationality over barbarism, there is an uncertainty with which he

receives the news. Auerbach’s argument that Vico in fact had deep, if qualified, admiration for

the magic formalism of early life, stemmed from his suspicion that Vico longed for the

overwhelming, immanent nature of reality as it must have appeared to the early poets. Myth and

the ‘primitive’ imagination did not represent a freedom reminiscent of the freedom of nature, but

rather an establishment of fixed, manageable limits on a world that was utterly foreign and

Robert Beeks, Etymological Dictionary of Greek: Volume One (Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 106. Homer’s revulsion at the Cyclops was a revulsion and fear of older, murkier modalities of human life. Life, perhaps, that did not constitute human life at all.

176 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 547/New Science, 367.

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terrifying.177 Vico’s notion that ‘barbarism’ was not so much lawless, as before the law, led him

to see the beginnings of human life in poetry, not philosophy — in the immediacy of ‘reality’,

rather than its mediation in abstraction. It was not that Vico admired the rhapsodical over the

abstract, but rather he was concerned by the ahistorical “conceit of scholars” that met the past on

the present’s terms. This ahistoricism, driven by the assumption of the unchanging human mind,

misunderstood older forms of thought as merely ‘savage’.178 This ambivalence was later further

articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno who were troubled, in the champions of the

Enlightenment’s joy at the subduing of the beast, how the Cyclops would take its revenge. Vico,

who like many other thinkers of his day, surely felt that he stood on the cusp of a great leap in

human achievement, could not have foreseen that the later generations of thinkers would

increasingly come to think of their own modern era as a time of crisis and illegitimacy.179 And

yet, despite this, Vico seems sure that in the celebrations over the Cyclops defeat, the creature

itself, and the magic by which it lived, should not under any circumstances be forgotten by those

who benefitted from that defeat.

Vico considered the preservation of Homeric myth in Greek society, even in the face of the

rise of philosophy and the tragic plays, as one of the greatest achievements of pagan man.180 He

followed the Greeks in his division of historical time between gods, heroes and men, and

considered the continued resonance, on behalf of the Greeks, of the poetic stage of human life, as

being an intrinsic connection to the time of heroes and, still farther back, of the gods themselves.

The resonance of Homeric stories, even after the time of Aristotle, who so famously dismissed

these forms of logos, (by hardening the divide between mûthos and logos as a way of

establishing the philosophical project) created a sense in which the Greeks remained in touch

with their earlier selves. Indeed, they forged a historical linearity between themselves and the

177 Auerbach, Scenes From the Drama of European Literature, 194. 178 See Levine, “Giambattista Vico and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” 74. See also La Scienza

Nuova: “…And the conceit of scholars, who claim that what they know was clearly understood at the beginning of the world, makes us despair of discovering these principles in the philosophers,” 119. The Italian reveals a possibly more ambivalent tone: “…altronde la boria de’ dotti…” (an ambivalent term for scholar which maintains a notion of pedantry) “…i quali vogliono ciò ch’essi sanno essere stato eminentemente inteso fin dal principio del mondo, ci dispera ri ritruovargli da’ filosofi…”, 219.

179 In his The Principles of Art Collingwood outlines the necessity of the presence of magic in healthy society. The role and function of magic (of which story telling, and tragedy constitute a particular modality) is inextricably linked to the negotiation of the emotional sphere and material realities of human life. “…is a representation where the emotion evoked is an emotion valued on account of its function in practical life, evoked in order that it may discharge that function, and fed by the generative of focusing magical activity into the practical life that needs it.” A society that fails to understand the logic of magic – that is fails to rationalize the multi faceted modalities of rationality itself – cannot expect longevity. Collingwood goes on to outline the unrecognised modern manifestations of ritualized magic, for example the traditions surrounding the upper class male, the fox hunt and even the wearing of shoes. He concludes: “A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that is has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance.” See R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 68-69.

180 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 170-171/New Science, 82.

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actions of past heroes as well as monsters. For Vico, this was an example of fantasia: the

historical imagination’s ability to draw meaningful lessons from the collective cultural memory

of times long before Homer, and thus a glimpse of the age of heroes. A notion of the past’s

connection to the present through the sheer aesthetic power of these stories, so thought Vico,

ensured the continuation and legacy of Greek culture. The Romans, he argued on the other hand,

lost track of the original history of their Gods, and thus were unable to draw any deep aesthetic

or ethical meaning from their earlier traditions, thus explaining the eventual disintegration of

Roman culture.181 The dubious nature of the concrete historicity of particular claims by Vico,

and the extent to which his model of corsi e ricorsi (that is, the cyclical nature of history) fails to

reflect genuine history, while notable, does not detract from the philosophical potency of his

work. What is critical in Vico’s science is the acknowledgement of myth’s critical relation to

notions of historical time, and the role of philosophy to that relation.

Historical critiques of myth became not merely windows into the past but illuminations of

the constitution of the very pillars and foundations of civil institutions. These illuminations then

played a role in the acknowledgement of what a thinking of the past played in a thinking of the

present. The insights gained by the ‘cultural memory’ of myth become a topic of philosophical

interest and its point of departure; thus, the ambivalence of the cheer of Odysseus’ crew at the

blinding of Polyphemus.182 The victory of rationality over poetic thought, of the distancing of

abstraction over the immanence of magic, must always be remembered in terms of the necessity

of poetry’s coming before, in order to subdue even earlier primeval creatureliness. Instrumental

reason’s further distancing of the world compared with the relative immediacy of incantation,

does not negate the fact that incantation still constituted a distancing from the terror and anxiety

of a formless world. History, and historical time, must relate in some sense to humanity’s

reception of that very struggle; this is what might be called ‘historical life’. It is almost certain

that Vico did not see all of this. And yet, he seems aware the dangers of Cartesian ahistorical

naturalism threatened to alienate philosophy from the very grounds of philosophy’s own

emergence.

The Materiality of the Past

Horkheimer correctly recognises in Vico a form of materialism which sought out, not an 181 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 170-171/New Science, 82. 182 The term ‘cultural memory’ is again derived from Jan Assman and John Czaplicka’s “Collective Memory and

Cultural Identity.” It is a modern term that would not have been familiar to Vico. Arguably, though, the grounding notion in this modern idea that the past can be ‘recollected’ collectively relies on the Vichean insight that the infinite legacies of the past exist in the present’s socio-cultural institutions.

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abstraction of the divine, but a study of the remnants of the past’s material realties. Myth, as the

direct response to a fear of what Horkheimer calls “the overwhelming forces of nature,”

represents the earliest reflections of human life available to the backward gaze, thus constituting

‘history’.183 The early fear pagan man had for his deities forced a certain civil order into what

was at first only chaotic and arbitrary.184 Myth, as reflection and response to material crises in

early human life, rather than free creations of the mind, offers up philosophically-driven

historical insights, that, while aesthetic in themselves, are also anthropologically grounded.185 To

this end, Horkheimer concludes that it is to this end that Vico’s work embodies a genuine,

philosophically driven, understanding of human origins that also offers ways of understanding

(philosophically) what it would mean to uncover these remnants of early human life in his own

day’s society. To Horkheimer however, the pivotal discovery of Vico’s science is the continued

negotiation with earlier modalities of thinking that remain in modern institutions and ideology.

This cyclical vision of historical time does much more than anticipate Hegel; it acknowledges

the very real possibility of modern European culture’s descent back into barbaric forms of life.

This is not so much a claim about the past, or indeed the future, but rather the ontological status

of the present as materially constitutive of the past legacies that gave rise to it, and how that idea

relates to philosophy. If Cassirer was right regarding the fact that the Renaissance, while being a

historically material result of its philosophy, must also have been a key material influence on that

very philosophy’s emergence, Vico constitutes an important figure in the reception of that

legacy.186 To the extent to which the Renaissance can be considered a legitimate historical

constellation (leaving to one side the obvious and real historiographical debates surrounding that

idea), it represents a historical locus of a certain conception of the present as the time in which

philosophy is done; not an “abstract shadow” as Cassirer called it, but an “active” and

determinative force in the formation of that present.187 If indeed, as Horkheimer claims, Vico

was one of the first to see the present as existing in a state in which there were “...tensions of a

kind which may well result in frightening relapses” of barbaric forms of life, then his science

demands a philosophy that can negotiate those forces. It must be recalled that notions of

barbarism, encapsulated by the Cyclops, are inextricably linked to notions of ‘the creaturely’,

and nature (that is, mere, or bare life) and thus fate. His notion of divine providence, which will

183 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 69. 184 Ibid. 185 A distinction must be made between an aesthetic understanding of myth and an anthropological one. It is clear that

Vico’s understanding of myth was a hybrid of both. On the once hand, he clearly recognizes early rhapsodical myth as an aesthetic response to tame the ambivalence of nature, and on the other, he understands this aesthetic response within a wider (philosophical) anthropology: namely that despite historical ruptures, there is a certain constancy in the fallen nature of human life.

186 Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 6. 187 ibid

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be discussed shortly, embodies not only the logic of history, but offers up a reflection of how

actual human life (as a manifestation of divinity) can actively work its way outside of fate’s

logic. This particular element of Vico’s philosophy also goes some way towards explaining

certain aspects of Collingwood’s work that are not immediately reconcilable within the context

of either the Crocean or Hegelian idealism in which he is conventionally understood. Vico’s

science, which of course is not strictly empirical in the way it is normally understood, does,

however, as Horkheimer insists, rely on a certain understanding of the philosophical importance

of material realities of the past, as opposed to the pure idealism of the thinkers that would follow

him. This particular concern for the materiality of the past, which at its core was a concern for

different forms of human thinking, simply did not neglect the philosophical importance of what

it meant to think meaningfully about the lives of the past.188 The inherent metaphysical nature of

the attempt to capture the past, necessitated the recognition that any metaphysics must be an

inherently historical exercise.

Collingwood’s notion of ‘historical re-enactment’, the dialectical engagement of the

present thinker with the past thinker, is the establishment of a rigorous philosophical concern for

metaphysical questions (questions of knowledge, ethical action, and a certain relation to a divine

reality) within the act of history.189 The re-enactment of past thought in the present (which Bates

argues has a quasi-spiritual dimension that must be read within the context of Collingwood’s

attempt to rescue an account of philosophy and modern theology) can be understood in terms of

the Benjaminian ideas surrounding the ‘blasting’ of the historical ‘monad’ from the past into the

present.190 The materiality of the past, or the materiality of the past that emerges in the

immanence of the present via the contemplative gaze backwards, seeks out an interruptive,

othering force within the present. In other words, a form of reflection on the thinking of what

human life might otherwise be like, beyond the history that had (so far) obtained. The sudden

emergence of a material past within the present, removed any abstraction from a thinking of it,

and made the past an immanent philosophical problem of the present. The issue of the

philosophical problem of materiality, and its role in the contemplative, transformative gaze, will

be returned to.

Karl Löwith makes the critical differentiation between fate and divine providence in 188 The extent to which a past met on its own terms still stood to affect the present is the basis for discussion in Chapter

Three. 189 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Penguin Books, 1939), 24-34. 190 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History,” 42. The ‘blasting of the monad’ is, of course, a reference to

the passage in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” thesis XVII. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in Selected Writings: Volume Four, 1938-1940. Ed. Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 396.

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Meaning in History.191 Providence, as Löwith remarks, is used by Vico as the ‘method’ of the

New Science, in which the lawful happenings of history are made manifest. “What distinguishes

the belief in providence from that in fate or chance,” writes Löwith, “…is that divine providence

uses for the attainment of its universal ends the free, though corrupted, will of man. The doctrine

of fate ignores the dialectic between providential necessity and the freedom of will…”.192,193

This must not, Löwith swiftly reminds the reader, allow us to read in Vico (as Croce does), “..the

absolutely un-Vician conclusion that man is the god of history, creating his world by his free

activity.”194 Divine providence, on the contrary, is a manifestation of the human vocation to

move beyond ‘bare life’ despite a common tendency to fall back into sin and bestial customs.195

Vico writes:

In providing for this property (our social nature) God has so ordained and disposed human

affairs that man, having fallen from complete justice by original sin, and while intending

almost always to do something quite different and contrary – so that for private utility they

would live alone like wild beasts – have been led by this same utility and along the aforesaid

different and contrary paths to live like men in justice and to keep themselves in society and

191 Löwith, Meaning in History. 192 Löwith, Meaning in History, 124. 193 There exists a correlation between fate and nature in Kant, and then Hegel. Kant, in the Third Critique understands

Nature as necessarily absent of contingency. Nature is that which could not be otherwise. Humanity, that is our negotiation with nature, and our vocation to be something other than natural beings, is marked by contingency. The Kantian moral kingdom – and thus our vocation as moral beings – exists within a state of negotiation between animal necessity and that which could be otherwise. The inner workings of fate in Greek myth, as necessarily that which unavoidably befalls human life, exposes the function of fate as a manifestation of a natural order that can never be fully outrun, in spite of challenges to it by humanity. The challenge to fate, embodied in the Promethean story, constitutes a challenge to necessity, and thus the natural origins of human life. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), section 45, ‘Beautiful Art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature’. Hegel’s preliminary discussions of knowledge in his Encyclopaedia Logic acknowledges the critical importance of the relation between knowledge and the Fall. Hegel recognises that humanity’s vocation as manifestations of divinity was only made possible through the primary disobeying of God’s demand that Adam and Eve should not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The flourishing of divinity within humanity was only possible through the challenge to the necessary state of its conditions. To live within the forces of fate is to live without the realisation of that which makes us uniquely human, rather than mere creatures. To some extent, Vico’s notion of divine providence anticipates these later, more sophisticated philosophical ontologies, that see the critical essence of human life as being built around a negotiation with that which could not be otherwise (representing our natural origins) and our vocation as autonomous beings. Is this case autonomy is marked by the entrance of contingency in the realm of necessity. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, CA: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 63-65.

194 Löwith, Meaning in History, 124-125. 195 Where fate implies a subjugation, providence implies an uncovering or discovery. Horkheimer argues that that

notion of providence etymologically has its root in divinari, that is to uncover what is hidden. See Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 66. The drive behind Vico's implementation of a science of history lies in his desire to uncover the workings of divine providence, namely God's will, that materialises and manifests itself in the world of men. The logic of fate, then, is stripped of its inherent subjugation, in favour of a man's destiny, in which humanity’s free will, though operating within providence, is free of the terrible ambiguity of fate or chance. What differentiates Vico from the historical constellation under which he worked was his insistence on the insights that could be gained from understanding the past and its relics as critical to that development.

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thus to observe their social nature.196

It is a further manifestation of divine providence, Vico writes later, that logos overcomes mûthos.

Logos, which Vico traces through the Latin word fabula (fable), and subsequent favella (old

Italian for ‘speech’), is opposed to mûthos, from which Latin derived mutus (mute).197 Vico’s

idea of providence, the grounding logic of his science, also clarifies Benjamin’s hope for a

theological understanding of historical time as rendering vocal what once had been mute. It is

worth reiterating a key question: what might the articulation of a long silent possibility offer for

the present?

Joseph Mali writes, taking as his point of departure Horkheimer’s argument that Vico’s

idea of providence was thoroughly modern: “...even though Vico certainly believed in the

providential agency in the world, he perceived and described its actions in immanent, rather than

transcendental terms, working, as it were, not so much on men as through men”.198 This is not

Croce’s secular reading of Vico, from which Löwith rightly warns us away. Rather, it is Vico’s

acknowledgement that it was human life, and human institutions (mediated through the higher

powers of God) that would eventually come to confront the mythic (and thus fateful) origins of

human life. Logos (speech) to Vico was the ultimate manifestation of God’s will on Earth.

Speech sought a confrontation with the mute terror at Jupiter’s wrath in which human life began,

in order to realise humanity’s autonomy – a reflection of divinity. It is precisely our negotiation

with the necessity of nature that marks the entrance of the realm of contingency as the human

realm (that is, it being possible to be otherwise), that defines collective notions of civil

humanity.199 Collingwood touches on this when he writes, “Man occupies an ambiguous

position. He stands with one foot in nature and one in history.”200 The implication is, of course,

that historical life, in being the uniquely human reception of their own lives, is the primary

(perhaps only) differentiation between that, and the necessity of nature.

Cicero’s Servant Girl 196 Löwith, Meaning in History, 126 (his translation). Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 75/New Science, 2. 197 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 268/New Science, 157. The connection between the subjugation before fate (that is the

authority of myth) and silence would later be explored by Benjamin. See Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”. Benjamin’s discussion of the mute Niobe will be returned to in the conclusion of this thesis.

198 Joesph Mali, “Retrospective Prophets: Vico, Benjamin, and other German Mythologists,” Clio Vol. 26, no. 4 (1997): 439.

199 These are explicitly Kantian positions, especially the notion that the moral law (that which marks our humanity) is marked by contingency. It is in our vocation to act morally (that nevertheless does not ensure our morality) that encapsulates our frailty, and fallibility as creatures negotiating both our origins, and what we might be. Where fate embodies the necessity of nature, free human life is marked by there being the possibility of it being otherwise. Our striving to be moral, constitutes the centre of human morality. See footnote 193.

200 W. Jan van der Dussen, "Collingwood and the Idea of Progress," History and Theory 29, no. 4 (1990): 27

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A fundamental differentiation that must be made, of course, is the difference between

Vico’s philosophy, and its subsequent reception. The extent to which the Marxist influence on

many of Germany’s early twentieth-century thinkers was tempered by a Vichean materialism is

explicitly outlined by Horkheimer. Although recognising the popular proto-Hegelian vision of

Vico’s work, he differentiates the two thinkers by noting a fundamental divergence in their

respective points of departure. Vico's work, he writes, “..is much more empirical and less

speculative than the constructions of the great idealists thinkers whose aim it was to demonstrate

the presence of the divine in this world.”201 Further, Joseph Mali sees critical relation between

Vico and the later work of Benjamin, especially in the critical relation between theology and

historical time. Benjamin's hope for enlightenment departed from the Vichean idea that the past

contained hidden, unrealised moments of human life, the successful rescuing of which, offered

up certain hopes and potentialities for the present.202 Mali is right to accentuate Benjamin's

fondness for Friedrich Schlegal’s definition of the historian as the ‘retrospective prophet’.203 It is

the radicalisation of this image of prophecy that imbues Benjamin’s Angel of History. The

historian writes Mali, quoting Benjamin:

“...turns his back on his own time,” away from the utopian visions of the future back into the

mythical revisions of the past, so as to light up “at the sight of the mountain tops of earlier

human races receding ever more deeply into the past” whose sites of memory, like Paradise,

where human beings, “people we could have talked to, women who could have given

themselves to us,” had once sought amelioration and eventual redemption of the human

predicament. And though their hopes and dreams have been falsified by the terrible events

of history, they must still be pursued: “our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with

the image of redemption...Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed

with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.204

A true understanding of the other potentialities of the present necessitates the recognition of the

forces at play in the past of historical time, not merely in the annals of history familiar to us, but

also in the older, murkier parts of human life, that represent both humanity's beginnings and

foundations. Vico’s claim that “...all the histories of the gentiles have their beginnings in fables,

which were the first histories of the nations...” locates what Horkheimer considered his great

201 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 67. 202 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 440. 203 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 447. 204 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 448.

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‘discovery’.205 Myth, rather than operating as a conscious deception controlled by the priestly

classes, as the thinkers of the Enlightenment would claim, functions in Vico’s history as all too

human reflections of a social reality that, although long since gone, continue to linger in the

hallows of human history and, thus, human thought.206 He writes:

Truth is sifted from falsehood in everything that has been preserved for us through long

centuries by those vulgar traditions which, since they have been preserved for so long a time

and by entire peoples, must have had a public ground of truth. The great fragments of

antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered, shed

great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored.207

The extent to which Vico’s work is caught up in the manifestation of his legacy is not

immediately clear. Yet, the differentiation must be made. The anthropological, material basis of

Vico’s logic of providence, mingled with Marxist-Hegelian dialectics, clearly made a large

impact on certain thinkers of the twentieth century who sought to save modernity from a state of

crisis. The affinity with Vico’s project in Collingwood’s work locates him as one such thinker (a

group he is not often affiliated with). However, the similarities of Collingwood’s wider concerns

of philosophy with some of the critics of modernity, mark the (nearly) hidden influences of

Vichean philosophy in modern intellectual history. Insofar as this is true, a rescuing of Vico’s

legacy is in itself a rescuing of a tradition of the humanities which might, had things been

different, have hugely changed the history of the philosophy of history in the last three hundred

years. Even allowing for Descartes’ oft cited criticism that anyone concerned with the past can

expect to know as much as Cicero’s servant girl, Vico was ultimately concerned with what might

come about should the servant girl, after all, have something to say.208

The ambivalence of Collingwood’s position is simplified to some extent by his legacy to a

large extent being built up from The Idea of History, a posthumous publication instigated by his

executors.209 It is this text, as well as his Principles of Art, which are in large part responsible for

205 Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” 71. 206 Mali, “Retrospective Prophets, 434 -438 207 Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 235-236/New Science, 131. 208 Berlin, Vico and Herder, 18. 209 It is telling that, following the death of T. M. Knox – the man entrusted with Collingwood’s legacy – a great deal of

Collingwood’s writing emerged that did not immediately fit comfortably with works such as The Idea of History. W. Jan van der Dussen describes how some of Collingwood’s sub titles within The Idea of History went from, “Re-enactment of past experience the essence of history”, and “Progress”, to “History as re-enactment of past experience”, and “Progress as created by historical thinking.” van der Dussen, “Collingwood and the Idea of Progress,” 23.

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his reading as an Idealist in the vein of Croce and, perhaps, Hegel.210 That Collingwood shared

particular facets of these thinkers’ arguments is incontestable. His notions surrounding the

reproducibility of past thought in the present – which he explicitly calls Spirit in The Idea of

History – should be read in conjunction with Hegel’s Idea in particular. However, the collection

of his essays published after the death of T. Knox, the primary caretaker of Collingwood’s

legacy, reveals a far more nuanced, indeed ambiguous, philosophy. It reveals hidden elements in

his famous dialectical logic of history; the so-called ‘logic of question and answer’, whereby a

proposition can only be judged as true not based on semantic/logical principles but through a

form of dialectical historical reception, in which a statement is judged according to the question

it was deemed to be an answer to. Commonly understood as a methodology of his peculiar brand

of ‘British Idealism’ (as his detractors would have called it), a manifestation of Spirit’s self

recognition and unwinding, the logic of question and answer, read in conjunction with

Collingwood’s work on fairy tales in particular, reveals a philosophical anthropology also at play

in his work. This reveals the critical connection between Collingwood’s dual careers in

philosophy and archaeology as fundamentally connected to his wider project. Such an

anthropology considered the anthropological constant not in terms of a human essence, but as a

result of external forces and ruptures. In his essay ‘Fairy Tales’, Collingwood addresses the

conditions under which historical evidence can be sought out and understood. “For a long time”,

he writes,

…it seemed impossible to use anything effectively as historical evidence, except written

documents attesting the occurrence of certain events. During the nineteenth century,

archaeologists learnt to use very ancient implements as evidence for periods of history

which have left no written memorials.211

An anthropology that understood human life as grasping at pre-conceptual fears that emerged,

not as a result of, but synonymously with human life, was the basis for Collingwood’s

understanding of the legitimacy of older magic and ritual as merely older responses to that same

ambiguity of nature.212

Collingwood sees a certain similarity in the study of fairy tales — by which he means, 210 See Collingwood’s The Idea of History but also The Principles of Art. This is also discussed by van der Dussen in

“Collingwood and the Idea of Progress.” 211 R. G. Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” in The Philosophy of Enchantment, ed. David Boucher, Wendy James, Philip

Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005),115. 212 This is explicitly Blumenberg’s anthropology and, while perhaps not entirely fair to locate Collingwood’s in the

same place, the spirit of their work has a commonality in Vico’s notion of the ‘fallen being’, perhaps a secularised rendition of an ultimately theological understanding of human life.

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“...subject matter consist(ing) in a general way of elements arising out of the idea of magic” —

insofar as their ancient origins, lack of defined authorship and oral transmission, make for

difficult but telling sources.213 He goes on,

The methods to be used in this kind of excavation will resemble those used by the

archaeologists, differing only in that they are here applied, not to the relics of what is called

material civilisation, such as pots and knives, but to the relics of custom and belief.214

The rescue of the past’s voices through the serious study of fairy tales and myths — in other

words the rescue of older forms of logos (logos itself representing an authoritative, but

explanatory, speech act that sought to subdue earlier anxieties) — offers up insights reflecting

older forms of the human relation to reality compared to those who live in the present. The

ancient laws of enchantment, Collingwood argues, were taken no less seriously than modern man

takes the laws of natural science.215 By realising this, the historian who dares to journey deep

into the utter blackness of pre-history or the murkiness of the so-called ‘dark ages’, uncovers

magic as it existed when its laws were respected and obeyed, and in so doing uncovers an

entirely alien relation between man and world.216 Magic, Collingwood claims, did not ‘describe

the world’ in lacking for a rational description, as Enlightenment narratives insist, but was

intrinsic to the world’s manifestation; the making thinkable what was chaotically unthinkable. To

dismiss the actions of the shaman and the laws of the magic circle, as Adorno reminds us, is the

equivalent of dismissing the scientist and his work. It is not that the world without the security of

heliocentrism is unrecognisable, it is that it is unfathomable, unreachable — in short,

unthinkable. To understand the modalities of thought that function within magic, or myth, is to

understand the materiality of past realities as they emerged in their respective and unique

expressions of joys, hopes, fears and terrors — in Benjaminian terms, to acknowledge the past’s

‘claim’ on the present.217 Such a claim makes clear the extent to which the past’s ghosts still

haunt modernity; the hidden elements of past magics made manifest in the present through such

a historical study. These myths and enchantments are familiar to us, as Collingwood writes, 213 Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” 115. 214 Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” 116. 215 In this context, Collingwood’s idea should be taken again in conjunction with Blumenberg’s notion that the

theological and later secular manifestations of life constituted different answers to the same, ancient, pressing questions. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

216 Collingwood dismisses the absurdity of rationality’s hope of extinguishing magic with appeal to experience by appealing to the idea that magic ritual did not ‘explain’ the world in some rudimentary way, for lack of science, but was the manifestation of reality itself. “To suggest that ‘experience’ might teach my hypothetical savages that some events are not due to magic is like suggesting that experience might teach a civilized people that there are not twelve inches in a foot and thus cause them to adopt the metric system.” Collingwood, “Religion and Natural Science in Primitive Society,” An Essay on Metaphysics, 194.

217 The ‘claim’ on the present by the past comes from Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” thesis II, 390.

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“...something which we habitually do, something which plays a part in our social and personal

life, not as a mere survival of savagery, but as an essential feature of civilisation.” 218

Collingwood’s philosophy (which articulates a sensitivity to humanity’s ‘savage beginnings’, but

also those forms of savagery that reside still within modern life; dangerous only because they go

unrecognised under the guise of historical progress) should be understood in terms of Vico’s

notion of poetic beginnings as being lawless in terms of before the law. Collingwood’s notion of

‘savagery’, in other words, names a rhapsodical, poetic state of human life, where the rule of

magic rather than the law, dictated human life. The rhapsodical beginnings of human life — its

lawlessness — suggest a shared belief by Collingwood and Vico in the inherent frailty of human

life, and that the role of philosophy was to “raise and support us as frail and fallen beings”.219

The understanding of human life as frail, when philosophically driven, seeks out an alleviation of

that frailty by means of the search for another understanding of human life.

Both Vico and Collingwood are, of course, creatures of different times, and different

historical forces. To see a similar spirit of endeavour in the philosophy of the two is not to make

the ahistorical claim (and indeed the banal one) that their projects are the same. And yet,

Collingwood’s affinity with the materialist core of Vico’s work, the past constituting a

recognition of a certain constancy to human life’s struggle in spite of its particular historicity,

marks him as belonging to a particular tradition within his own time. The notion of a philosophy

of the past as being critical to a task to be performed in the present does not derive from Vico

directly, and yet it is Vichean. The vast difference between this and Croce’s logic of

eschatological liberation is particularly clear here. The concern for the present as a moment of

crisis and illegitimacy, for Collingwood, but also for thinkers like Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno

etc., stems from a fear of what resides unseen in any notion of completion of fulfilment in

enlightenment. These are not Romantic dismissals of enlightenment – a case of the Sirens’

victory over Odysseus – but a fear of what Horkheimer and Adorno saw as the unseen dialectics

of enlightenment, which threatened to overcome the original hopes and dreams of Enlightenment

thinking (perhaps best articulated in Kant) through the uncritical acceptance of, not only a

218 Collingwood, “Fairy Tales,” 129 219 Here the affinity between Vico and Collingwood is very clear. Maier claims that, unlike Horkheimer, who saw in

reason older modalities of irrationality, for Vico, “…it was precisely the non-rational character of myth that enabled it to perform an essential function for the society…and the personality. It would never be entirely overcome.” See Maier, “Vico and Critical Theory,” 854. These are precisely Collingwood’s opinions; see footnote 42 regarding his ideas surrounding the necessity of magic in ritual in any healthy society. It was not that magic was irrational, but operated outside rationality’s realm. This was a rescuing of the original ideas surrounding logos, the spoken word, and the warding off of the ambivalence of nature. It must be noted briefly, the extent to which this categorization of Horkheimer is a fair one is another matter entirely. There is a strong case to be made in the claim the Horkheimer and indeed Adorno put forward a very similar argument in their notions surrounding the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ in the book of the same name.

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naturalised chronology of historical ‘progress’, but also the acceptance of the dogma that past

superstitions had been defeated. Collingwood too was especially cautious of any pervading sense

of completeness or finality in accounts of enlightenment which for him, by definition, must

remain unfinished works.220 This marks Collingwood as a particular kind of anti-revolutionary.

Bates writes that Collingwood considered that “…rejecting outright whatever inspired the old

orders, and inventing a new one altogether, would continue this repression, leading to disastrous,

even violent results.” This was symptomatic of Collingwood’s dialectical logic, best expressed in

his An Essay on Philosophical Method, which hoped new forms of thought would “cut through

contradiction while preserving previous attempts to confront the crisis.” 221 The endless

confrontation, marked by a preservation of previous confrontations with the striving for human

life that befit the human vocation, was not a matter of upheaval and enlightened renewal, but a

case of the philosophical recognition of the inherent necessity of that very negotiation. This in

itself, for Collingwood, was the continuance of the genuine enlightenment tradition.222

The Revisitation of the Sirens

Rather than myth and rationality being accounted for in contradistinctive terms, they

emerge as historically-grounded complementary forms of consciousness that signify humanity’s

history of its grappling with the problem of primeval anxieties or, as Mali writes, “...in which the

human consciousness accounts for its experience in different degrees of self awareness.”223 A

sensitivity to the elements within modern thought susceptible to the Sirens’ songs (that is, the

lure of natural, mere life) is not merely to recognise the remnant of our creatureliness, ‘the

savage within us’ as Collingwood would have ironically put it, but also to recognise the extent to

which our modern world still relies on some of these ancient structures of thinking. To lose sight

of the mythic shapes and drives of our beginnings, so argued Joyce, is to lose any possibility of

220 See in particular his essays “The Present Need of a Philosophy”, and “Fascism and Nazism”, as well as the final

chapter of his autobiography, where he outlines the political dangers that arise out of breakdowns in philosophical discourse. See Essays in Political Philosophy, 166-170 and 187-196, and Autobiography, 100-112.

221 Bates, “Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History,” 50. See also Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. See in particular “The Scale of Forms,” 54-61.

222 The endless negotiation with older forms of human thought (and thus life) as a Vichean idea finds its surprising illumination in James Joyce's characters Stephen and Bloom who, in Joyce's Ulysses, recognise the image of the sirens as 'enemies of reason' as a historically contingent prejudice, and indeed a form of superstition in itself. The extent to which Joyce, a scholar of Vico, attempted to integrate a Vichean ‘science’ within his fiction is hotly contested. His attempt within Ulysses, a modern rendition of the journeys of Odysseus, to uncover lost perspectives in ancient myths, is in fact the attempt to discover the extent to which a modern rendition of the ancient tale would uncover the elements still embedded (through metaphor, allegory and stories) in the institutions of his own time. Stephen and Bloom’s recognition that Odysseus' struggle with the sirens is a historical reflection of primeval logos' terror of its mythic origins (rather than a transcendental account of logos overcoming mythos) is Vichean in its origin. See James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 618.

223 Joseph Mali, “Mythology and Counter History: The New Critical Art of Vico and Joyce,” in Vico and Joyce, 41.

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grounding or understanding ourselves in the present. This is the critical point: the deeper

meaning and symbolism in myth — that which resonates in the broadest human terms — still

exists in modern consciousness and cultural systems, however, it goes unrecognised given the

rhetoric of philosophical enlightenment and historical progress. This is precisely why

Collingwood (and indeed Vico) cannot be understood as Romantic in their rejection of

enlightenment as a project, or indeed as a historical location. Neither recognise myth as

uncovering ancient truth, or timelessly relevant to human interests. On the contrary, Vico’s, and

subsequently Collingwood’s, point of departure is unambiguously on the side of the Aristotelian

project, and yet, unlike Aristotle, they recognised mûthos and logos as historically contingent

modalities of thinking – and thus distancing – from earlier ambiguous terrors. If philosophy’s

task, in the broadest possible sense, is the critical penetration of forces that detract from what

Kant would consider our vocation to be autonomous, moral beings, than the philosophical task

must be sensitive to those very forces which still exist within the subterranean foundations of our

present. A historico-philosophical reception of myth — that is, the history of our collective

evolving consciousness — allows for the basis upon which the philosophical task can proceed.

The philosopher-historian, like Odysseus, listens to the songs of the Sirens, and in so doing

recognises their allure as calling to something that remains deep inside him, long forgotten.224

However, unlike Odysseus, the philosopher need not be threatened. A true, post-

Enlightenment account of logos must understand the mythic origins of itself and, in so doing,

recognise the critical importance of past accounts of logos in historical life, and consequently in

conceptions of the present. Vico considered the task of the historian to “...save the logos of

ancient myth and make it significant for the modern mind.”225 Ulysses’ Stephen and Bloom’s

insights into the history of our fear of the Sirens is neither a longing for the ancient truths of their

song, nor a dismissal of the possibilities of ever outrunning them, but merely an

acknowledgement that the logic of the metaphor exposes the origins of logos in mûthos (and

indeed the fact that human history has at all times been marked by a negotiation with that

fear).226 Joyce sees such a historical acknowledgement of fate as articulating a space in which its

224 The implications of the need for the crew to stuff their ears with wax adds a further ambivalence. In the critique of

Horkheimer and Adorno, this is generally understood as a criticism of the means by which modern, industrial life emerged – namely in the repression and control of the working class. However another reading of this argument suggests that Horkheimer and Adorno are fully aware of the historical necessity of the rise of the bourgeoisie, for the possibilities of enlightenment to emerge. Without the wax, Odysseus and his men would have been broken on the rocks, and yet the danger emerges at the satisfaction at this state of affairs. It is not, in that sense, a criticism of enlightenment but, rather, a warning of the forms of barbarism that can re-emerge within the alienation of modern, industrialised life. That is, the barbarism that emerges in the satisfaction of completion, or the failure to recognise enlightenment as an unfinished project.

225 Joseph Mali, “Mythology and Counter History,” 35. 226 Joyce, Ulysses, 618.

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blows cannot fall. To fear the sirens is to still fear the creaturely beginnings of that which could

not be otherwise, and thus to live according to fate. Any project of enlightenment that functions

with such a fear internal to it cannot by definition be enlightened. Philosophy’s grasping at a

thinking about thinking must acknowledge the different modalities of thought that emerged as

responses to the first ambiguous terrors that marked human life.

The materiality of Vico’s philosophy not only renders the association with Collingwood in

a clearer light, but also shows the extent to which conceptions of materiality affected the

philosophers of the twentieth century, in their criticisms of modernity. Vico’s philosophical

project, in being neither idealist nor empirical, resides on difficult ground. The philosophical

task, in its necessary correlation to a thinking of how human life is to be thought in relation to

the present in which it exists, deals with the material presence of thought in any given moment.

Pure empiricism, which would reduce the concerns of philosophy merely to the sensuous, cannot

account for the conditions that provide the grounds for the intuitability of the world. One of the

foundations of the Vichean/Collingwoodian concern for materiality is that behind the ‘empirical’

manifestations of human thinking lies the countless inner lives of every human being. It is the

ambivalence between the relation of the material relics of human institutions, and the inner lives

that gave rise to them (coupled with their historical distance) that provides a groundwork for

philosophical inquiry. Idealism, on the other hand, despite its insights into the manner in which

the world is made manifest and intuitable through human thought, cannot give a philosophical

account (beyond the passage and movement of Spirit) of the voices of the past. In particular,

idealism cannot account for the claim the voices of the past continue to have on the present and

the subsequent philosophical task that takes place within that present. A thinking of the

philosophical importance of materiality, and indeed of the materiality of philosophy, marks

Vico’s project.

A differentiation, at this point, must be made. Vico’s insights into the philosophical

importance of the revealed material realities of past lives within the myths that survived must be

placed within their own historical context. Vico’s project, though widely ignored during his life,

legitimised the voices of the past. History became a concern, not merely of a dead past, but the

present in which it is thought. Hence, the subsequent inextricable connection between history

and philosophy. Those who worked under Vico’s legacy – perhaps hidden amongst the more

spectacular projects of Hegel and Marx – though, fully embarked on the philosophical

implications of the legitimacy of the past. Collingwood’s idealism, which is tempered via his

serious philosophical concerns for material relics of the past, is once such voice. As unlikely as a

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correlation between thinkers as diverse as Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer and Collingwood

might be (the affinity of the latter two will take up the fourth chapter) all of them unambiguously

relate the role of the historical task (and its relation to the philosophical) to a rescuing of the past

on its own terms (that is, divorced from the naturalisation of chronological time embedded in the

historical notion of progress) for the sake of the present. This is the critical difference between

the reception of his legacy, that is, philosophical works inspired by Vico, and the work of Vico

himself. Vico saw the serious (that is philosophical) implications for the study of myth when

understood as genuine, historical reflections of material human life, that is otherwise entirely

lost. In being lost, they were unthinkable. Vico’s defence of the study of myth as historically

oriented made the deep past thinkable. Those who worked within his legacy, on the other hand,

grappled with what making the material realities of past humanity thinkable once again meant

for the present in which it was thought.

Vico was perhaps one of the first to see an element of nostalgia within the Homeric telling

of the blinding of the Cyclops. He ridicules the Homeric romanticism for a long-gone heroic age.

And yet his mockery (that is, laughing at the past’s ghosts), the action of which belongs to its

own history, uncovers a materiality of the past that had been entirely forgotten. What might a

collective remembering of the past look like, wondered Collingwood et al. Such a remembering

– a remembering that gave force to the philosophical task that sought a new articulation of

human life – did not seek to ‘bring back’ the past (for indeed, how could that be done?), but to

reconceptualise the remnants that remained within the material institutions of the present. Such a

reconceptualisation, in reviving the pasts which still ‘had a stake’ in the present, involved the

endless negotiation with them. The reception of and negotiation with past material voices within

the present marks the negotiation with certain moral notions pertaining to what other forms of

human life might look like.227 Insofar as this was the philosophical task, which takes place

infinitely within a present which, by definition, never ends, the materialism of history (Vico’s

major insight) made an enormous claim on what the role of the philosophical task was to be in

the modern era. Furthermore, the logic of divine providence allowed history to become manifest

through autonomous human action which, although modulated by God, became historical

precisely in its recognition as uniquely human. Historical life, in other words, became a

genuinely philosophical topos. The discovery of the contemplative gaze in Herodotus, and its

rediscovery or rescuing by Vico, allowed for the question of the transition of the contemplative

gaze on our past to become a transformative one. The philosophical question of the past became 227 Kant’s work is once again relevant here. As he writes in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, it is with the sublime

that humanity becomes aware of its vocation as moral beings. The negotiation with that which may not be moral marks our task as humans.

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a critical question for the present, and what it might otherwise be like. The opening up of the

question of the extent of Vico’s influence on a certain tradition of twentieth-century philosophy,

as this chapter did, necessitates a closer critique of that very tradition. Via a confrontation

between Collingwood and Siegfried Kracauer, the next chapter will show how the historico-

philosophical reception of the past ultimately hoped for an entirely new way of understanding

the relation of human life to historical time.

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Chapter Three:

The Interruption of History and the Present’s Historical Task:

Kracauer as Reader of Collingwood and the Transformative

Gaze.228

Like ghosts they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. In their simple and passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes to say and we can never guess.229

Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

How is the present, in its relation to historical time, to be understood? This is a philosophical

topos in itself. The existence of the present as the culmination of a flowing, naturalised

chronological time strips it of meaning. The question is, then, what does it mean to write

philosophically about the present, given that, as Andrew Benjamin writes, the fact that the present

will define the nature of the philosophical task must imply that the philosophical task, will define

“the construal of the present”?230 This chapter will outline the extent to which the historico-

philosophical criticisms of modernity that emerged in the early years of the twentieth century, in

this case as articulated by Siegfried Kracauer and Collingwood, relied on the philosophical

possibilities that were opened up by thinkers like Vico and Herodotus, wherein history (the

reception of human affairs) is indistinguishable from historical (that is distinctly human) life. The

Herodotean notion of history being critical to the success of the polis, a case of the engagement, and

confrontation with fate, in the name of the articulation of another potentiality, was an important idea

for the critics of modernity. Coupled with the Vichean insistence that the natural world cannot

illuminate the laws of divine providence, which although the work of God, ultimately allows human

life a domain which is distinctly theirs (and from which all human institutions emerge) locates the

modern criticisms of the present as simply the latest perspective in a long, difficult, history.

228 This chapter will appear slightly amended in Critical Horizons, forthcoming 2016. 229 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (London: Penguin, 1954), 773. 230 Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present,” in Present Hope: Philosophy,

Architecture, Judaism (Oxon: Routledge, 1997), 26-27.

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Kracauer’s reading of the work of Collingwood illuminates the crisis point in the relationship

between philosophy, history, and conceptions of the present; that is, how it (the present) is thought.

His attempt to broach a new philosophy of historical time, with Proust and Burckhardt elevated to

his historiographical champions, took the philosophical desire radically to re-imagine the present as

its point of departure; one in which it is possible and appropriate both to attempt a new articulation

of human life, and to have a philosophy in which to reshape the present in which it is articulated.

The use of the Orphean metaphor to dismiss what Kracauer considers Collingwood’s vulgar

present-centric philosophy of history is instructive insofar as the changing interpretations of the

Orphean myth, throughout its historical reception, mirrors that of the ambiguity in the historical

relationship between history and the philosophical conception of the present. The transition of

Orpheus’s journey from tragedy to the banality of the lieto fine — the happy ending imposed on the

myth during the Baroque period, in which Orpheus would succeed in recovering Eurydice from the

underworld — highlights (through its obscurification) the ambiguity of the historical project’s

relation to its philosophical counterpart. This history or Orphean metaphor illuminates a crisis: the

question of whether history’s philosophical importance lies in history’s tragedy — that is, its

ultimate futility — or, in the banality of its possibilities, is never entirely reconciled by Kracauer.

The impossibility of Orpheus remaining in the realm of the dead illuminates the crisis point in the

historical task. Just as Eurydice can never return to the land of the living, the past can never be

entirely rescued, necessitating a logic of tragedy within history itself. As the previous chapters have

explored, the potentiality of this modern insight is grounded upon the conditions of possibility in

which Vico wrote.

The Orphean futility of the historical project, however, does not leave the present with

nothing. Rather, it creates an urgent need to re-conceptualise the historical ruins that we succeed in

recovering. The space that opens, after such a re-conceptualisation, allows for a place in which a

form of historically-driven philosophical anthropology allows for a thinking of human life.231 This

chapter will argue that Collingwood shared Kracauer’s hopes of rescue, and grounded his project

within a similar philosophical project of ‘humanity’. He relates the historical task unambiguously to

the role of the present, but also writes with an understanding of the underlying tragedy of history as

being crucial to the formulation of the philosophical task in the present, and the subsequent implied

necessity, of the present’s forces shaping of the role of the philosophical task. One of the central

aims of this chapter is to show that Kracauer’s reading of Collingwood resonates with a surprising

urgency, not simply because it is mistaken, but also because Orpheus’ journey, which Kracauer 231 Such an anthropology is not, as previously stated, an ‘essence’ of human life, but a characteristic of historical life

which, in all its infinite variations, ultimately appears to be the manifestation of the drive to respond to questions that defy answering.

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intended to use to render Collingwood’s position unimportant, illuminates precisely why

Collingwood shared Kracauer’s historico-philosophical hopes, indeed perhaps understood the stakes

better. It also locates Collingwood within the tradition that sought a salvation for modernity (in the

face of the crisis of fascism) through a philosophico-historical reception of the past. There is a sense

in which Collingwood would seem more attuned to the Orphean myth, as well as its history: happy

ending or tragedy, with or without Eurydice, Orpheus cannot remain in the underworld. Kracauer’s

insistence that the past must not be approached on the present’s terms, forgets that history by

definition must take place in a present in which the past is contemplated. For Collingwood and

Kracauer, the historical task, in being linked with the philosophical, must embody some hope for

the present, but also understands the present as a locus of hope. Collingwood, however, seems to

understand the ambivalence at the heart of the relationship between the past and the present in

which history is done. The Orphean journey, fate dictates, demands a return.

The Oprhean Journey

“Orpheus descended into Tartarus to fetch back the beloved who had died from the bite of a

serpent. His plaintive music, as Ovid writes, ‘so far soothed the savage heart of Hades that he won

leave to restore Eurydice to the upper world.’”232 The soothing nature of Orpheus’s music is

perhaps the best model by which Kracauer’s idea of historical inquiry can be explained. The

uncovering of the past requires both a soft tread, and a gentle disposition; a wandering through the

past, with no other object other than to see what one might find. Orpheus is granted entry to the

underworld to rescue his beloved, on the strict condition that he will not look back at Eurydice until

they are both under sunlight once again. Orpheus, overcome by the oppressive silence, is unable to

resist a furtive glance back, and so loses his love forever. Kracauer elaborates: “Like Orpheus, the

historian must descend into the nether world to bring the dead back to life. How far will they follow

his allurements and evocations?... And what happens to the Pied Piper himself on his way down and

up? Consider that his journey is not a return trip.”233

As Alan Itkin points out, despite his use of the Orphean analogy for the historical task,

Kracauer says “...very little about how historians ought to actually write their histories.”234 Of

course Kracauer did not intend History to be a historian’s guide – he writes at one point that the

historian’s task is simply to render material as impartially as possible – but an attempt to render

232 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Thing before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 79. 233 Kracauer, History, 79. 234 Alan Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer’s Underworlds of

History.” The Germanic Review 87, 2 (2012): 175-202 (176).

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comprehensible a form of historical reflection that might foster a new form of humanity. “There is”,

he writes, “a way of thinking and living which, if we could only follow it, would permit us to burn

through the causes and thus to dispose of them – a way which, for lack of a better word, or a word

at all, may be called humane.”235 This line, written in the introduction, is perhaps a little unclear. He

tries again on the final page, entitled, ‘In Lieu of Epilogue’. “Focus on the ‘genuine’ hidden in the

interstices between dogmatized beliefs of the world, thus establishing tradition of lost causes;

giving names to the hitherto unnamed.”236 It must not be forgotten that the crisis of dogma that

marked modernity was accompanied by the rise of fascism.

The influence of, and affinity with, Walter Benjamin’s attempt to outline a new philosophy of

historical time is clear here: Kracauer’s tradition of lost causes and what Benjamin would describe

as the entrance of the Messiah, both relating to a philosophical system that attempts to imbue the

present through a historical study with a genuine meaning.237 That the historian’s universe is, as

Kracauer writes, “of much the same stuff as our everyday world”, does not consign the historical

task to the mundane.238 Indeed, it points to the transcendent possibilities sketched out in his

introduction. The historian’s journey, if properly undertaken, has the radical potential to redefine

the collective notion of the present and what it is to think in now-time: how our present (that is, we

of the present) considers what it is to reflect upon the present and, in turn, how that changes what it

is to live in the present. The attempt to rescue the moments of genuine thought in the past, on their

own terms, before they are swept up in the canon of dogmatised belief is, for Kracauer, not only

possible but crucial for the present’s humanity. The Orphean journey seeks out the emancipation of

the present from the myth of progress, that which Benjamin calls the “filling up of empty,

homogenous time.”239 Indeed, it is the reconciling of both chronological time and historical time

that defines much of Kracauer’s philosophico-historical task. The recognition of chronological time,

both its necessity and its banality, is crucial to the understanding of the historical task as a form of

remembering.240 Kracauer envisions, following the Orphean metaphor, a sort of anteroom, and what

Itkin appropriately calls a form of “historical memory space.”241 In wandering through the historical

underworld, the historical traveller must not demand questions of it but, rather, respectfully listen to

what she might be told to allow the voices of the past to speak for themselves.242 Proust is here

elevated to the historical champion who, in disregarding chronological time as the prism from

235 Kracauer, History, 8 236 Ibid. 237 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389-399. 238 Kracauer, History, 46. 239 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 396. 240 Kracauer, History, 151-52. 241 Kracauer, History, 195 and Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus”, 181. 242 Kracauer, History. 84-85.

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which to explore a life lived, attempts to recall his life from the perspective of the genuine

intersections of his life and, in so doing, occasionally stumbles upon moments of the sublime.243

Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu shows, for Kracauer, that the past only gives itself up to

those who work hard and that, when it does emerge, the historian must give himself up to it, as it

emerges out of the depths of memory.244 The moment of the past’s emergence on its own terms is

when it can be explored, which, in itself, allows for a disconnection of the present from a notion of

progress. In the recognition of the countless pasts as preserving the genuine voice of humanity from

a tangible, material moment in historical time, the historical traveller’s conception of the present,

and her task in it is transformed. Although Kracauer’s understanding of the historical meeting of the

past on its own terms is suggestive of a form of historicism, his philosophical interest and debt to

the present, (and his explicit comparisons with Benjamin’s work) cannot be forgotten. He writes

with reference to Benjamin that “historical ideas”, “…quiver with connotations and meanings not

found in the material occasioning them.”245 Shadows can be seen of the latter’s conception of

‘messianic light’ that emerges in a ‘moment of danger’; Kracauer’s conception of the genuine,

hidden between the interstices of dogmatised historical narrative, is also clarified, and yet his

understanding of the historical return to the present remains ambiguous. 246 The historian’s

‘descent’, of course, resonates within the legacy of Vico’s conception of fantasia, wherein the

‘historical imagination’ seeks out the quivering potentialities of past legacies.

The post-Kantian hope to uncover the rational in history is sharply de-emphasised in the

tradition in which Kracauer is working, in the attempt to see history, as the constant attempt to

overcome the “traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue,” as Habermas put it.247

This response to the universal histories operates within the Kantian tradition which, despite its

recognition of history as process of nature, insists that the ontological question regarding other

possibilities of human life, resides outside any reduction of history to a process of nature — the

historical narrative becomes one of humanity’s struggle to overcome its animal origins. The Kantian

naturalisation of progress stands as the point of departure for Horkheimer and Adorno’s assumption

that the Enlightenment project failed from the beginning, in its failure to recognise the mythic

structures of its desire to consume myth.248 The eschatological framework of history, which reduces

243 See, for example Benjamin’s insistence that, “Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection,” in Walter Benjamin,

“On the Image of Proust,” Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part One, 1927-1930, ed. by Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 244.

244 See, for example, the passage at the railway station in Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. I, 694. 245 Kracauer, History, 98. 246 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391. 247 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 315. 248 Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum,

1944). See in particular Chapter One, ‘On the Concept of Enlightenment,’ 3-42.

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the chronology of naturalised rationality to a form of fatalistic subjugation must, by definition, look

to the past from the perspective of the present. Like Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’, it is an

unfolding disaster that renders the present coherent by embodying the logical culmination of human

disasters until that point. However, the present is not just the point of departure, but also the only

position from which the past can be understood. Although Orpheus too succumbs to the tragedy of

fatalistic subjugation, it is not before he challenges the very authority of the gods. In his attempt to

rescue the dead on their own ground, he challenges the notion that their voices are lost to us forever.

Two chapters in History, ‘Present Interest’ and ‘The Historian’s Journey’, set out to undo the

notions that historical enquiry must begin from the present’s perspective and that it must in some

sense, render the present coherent.

Kracauer is critical of Croce’s understanding of history as synonymous with the movement

toward liberty. Liberty was the subject of history, rather than its end — “the eternal creator of

history, and itself the subject of every history.”249 History, in being contemporary, was the present’s

consideration of its past self, which knows itself, as Collingwood wrote, “as so living.”250 Croce’s

desire to overthrow Hegelian universal history is hampered by his unwillingness to abandon the

Enlightenment project entirely, his notion of history as the dialectical recognition of liberty as the

precondition for historical insight, unable to exist free of a Hegelian eschatology. The concept of

‘live thought’ (past thought’s resonance in the present) was, as Kracauer argues, “...a sheer playing

with words in view of Croce’s idealistic desire to equate the total historical process with a

progressive movement, a movement toward ‘liberty’”. 251 In the outlining of the presentist

opposition, Croce and Collingwood are represented as though they were from the same school of

thought. As the previous chapter suggested, however, Collingwood’s approach and hopes are

distinctly more Vichean and, indeed, that fact alone goes someway to suggesting an affinity

between him and Kracauer that the latter certainly did not recognise. The reiteration of the

ambivalent relation between Collingwood’s philosophy and Croce’s idealism acts as a point of

departure to explore why Kracauer’s criticisms of Collingwood open a space in which the

similarities of their philosophies, as well as their shared hopes, become evident.

Orpheus’ playing, so soothing that Hades’ usual mistrust of the living entering the land of the

dead disappears (indeed, he “moved the bloodless spirits to tears”), reflects the gentle approach of

249 Benedetto Croce. History as the Story of Liberty. Trans. Sylvia Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949),

59. 250 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 227. 251 Kracauer, History, 159.

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Kracauer’s historian.252 A soft tread through the past is required so as not to startle the voices of the

past into retreat.253 Not so the ‘present interest’ historians who, so writes Kracauer, demand of the

past questions brought about by “...a deep concern for [the present’s] problems, sorrow and

objectives.”254 This is an explicit rejection of ‘methodology’ that Kracauer feared would allow the

tendencies of the natural sciences to creep into the humanist discipline. Kracauer opposes any study

of the past that is undertaken for any other reason than for its own sake. By way of explanation —

for what indeed could a study of the past for its own sake mean? — he emphasises the importance

of nineteenth-century historian Burckhardt and his use of the word nun, the German word for

‘now’.255 Kracauer argues that this word allows Burckhardt historical “loopholes” by which he can

“escape the tyranny of the chronological order of things into more timeless regions where he is free

to indulge in phenomenological descriptions...to shift the emphasis from the possible causes of past

events to their consequences for posterity, their effects on the wellbeing of the contemporaries.”256

The introduction of the concept of nun into the historical equation allows for the conditions through

which the historian comes to understand the implications of the historical contingencies as they

arose (or arise). Historical time is thus prevented from entering the prism of chronology, by which

later events – beyond nun, that is, the interests of the present – might arise to render that particular

event coherent to us. Burckhardt de-emphasises chronological periods in favour of what Kracauer

calls “a gentle pricking up of the ears, coupled with steady industry.”257 Not so Collingwood,

however, whose ideal historian, according to Kracauer, “...were he ever to prick up his ears, would

not hear anything, because all that comes to him from the past is drowned in the din of

contemporary noise.”258 Kracauer’s point of objection in this case is what he calls Collingwood’s

Baconian method of ‘question and answer’, an approach to historical enquiry that, as previously

discussed, sets out the questions that are to be asked of the past, before the journey begins. The past

cannot be put to the rack for its answers, Kracauer claims, without first quietly listening to what it

might have to say. “Need I repeat,” Kracauer demands, “...that [the historian’s] findings may

obstruct his original research designs and therefore determine him to alter the course of his

investigations?”259

Orpheus travels to the underworld for the sake of rescue. When he loses Eurydice for a second

time, he tries to cross the river Styx once again, but “...his pleas were in vain and the ferryman

252 Ovid, Metamorphoses. Trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 384. 253 Kracauer, History, 69. 254 Kracauer, History, 69. 255 Kracauer, History, 186. 256 Ibid. 257 Kracauer, History, 86. 258 Ibid. 259 Kracauer, History, 91.

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pushed him away from the bank”.260 Forlorn, Orpheus weeps bitterly on the riverbank, the loss

magnified by the proximity of the return home. The present-interest historian, moved by

contemporary factors, seeks out the past to render comprehensible his own historical perspective.

What, though, of the return to the present? “Consider that his journey is not simply a return trip,”

writes Kracauer. Orpheus is, through the tragedy of his journey, profoundly changed. Does the

historian also risk undergoing a transformation as a result of his hearing the voices of the dead?

Kracauer quotes Leo Strauss in his paper on Collingwood’s philosophy of history: “He embarks on

a journey whose end is hidden from him. He is not likely to return to the shores of his time as

exactly the same man who departed from them.”261 What, indeed, is the traveller to do if she returns

to the present not entirely belonging to it anymore? These are real dangers according to Kracauer,

dangers to which writers like Proust were sensitive, in his recognition that memories of the past can

surface at any time, and forever change the understanding of the correlation between the present –

the nun in which life is lived – and the chronological past to which it is necessarily connected.

Kracauer seeks to satiate the fears of the would-be traveller: “[The historian] is the son of at least

two times — his own and the time he is investigating. His mind is in a measure unlocalisable; it

perambulates without a fixed abode.”262 There is, then, much more at stake in the historical journey

for Kracauer. The present, to teeter on the verge of the banal, must be present, must encounter

Burckhardt’s nun. The Orphean rescue of the past, should it succeed, seeks to relieve the present of

the weight of the chronological past and the unending potential of the future. It can then find solace,

perhaps, in but one moment of time, which was in itself a ‘present’ at some point, as mutual

reflections of human life. Recall Proust, for whom, “history is no process at all but a hodge-podge

of kaleidoscopic changes — something like clouds that gather and disperse at random.”263

In his criticism of Collingwood, Kracauer explicitly takes as his point of departure the 1952

paper by Leo Strauss, entitled, ‘On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History.’264 Strauss is highly

critical of Collingwood’s conception of historical inquiry, which he considers a form of neo-

Idealism, the particular historical modalities of which are encumbered with the present’s reflections

and demands.265 Recall Strauss’ concern that the historian’s return may not be as straightforward as

260 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 385. 261 Leo Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History.” The Review of Metaphysics 5.4 (1952): 583. 262 Kracauer, History, 93. 263 Kracauer, History, 160. 264 Strauss, “On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History”. 265 For a discussion of Strauss’ reading of Collingwood, see Alessandra Fussi, “Leo Strauss on Collingwood:

Historicism, and the Greeks,” Idealistic Studies, Vol. 1 (2015), forthcoming. In this paper Fussi outlines Strauss’ contention that Collingwood is prevented from taking the past seriously because if his belief in historical progress. That Collingwood had such a faith, I counter, is an understandable mistake (given the nature of Collingwood’s project, and the goals of his literary executors), and yet it remains interesting that those who have most in common with his project – in particular the notion of taking the past seriously (and in spite of obvious differences and

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he suspects thinkers like Collingwood to believe. The price the historian pays, in meeting the past

on its own terms, is the ambiguity of the nature of her return. “[The historian’s] criticism.” he

writes, “...may very well amount to a criticism of present day thought from the point of view of the

thought of the past”.266 This criticism, however, is the cost. This is precisely what Collingwood

does not do according to Strauss. In his ‘presentist’ style, Collingwood leaves no room for the

past’s own concerns, failing to realise that “...the historian must provisionally subordinate his own

questions to the questions which the authors of his sources meant to answer.”267 In relation to his

study of Plato, Strauss charges Collingwood with demanding to know whether what Plato says is

true, rather than trying to establish what Plato might be saying and, then, which question it might

have been considered an answer to. He correctly points out that any study of Plato and its relation to

truth cannot possibly come before a systematic understanding of Plato in his historical position

which, as he says any historian must know, is a naturally incomplete process.268 These are as much

Kracauer’s criticisms as Strauss’. Kracauer hoped that a new, philosophical conception of historical

time might at the very least allow for the interruption in the modern collective dream state to

conceive of a different present in which to live. This is the core hope of the spirit of Orphean rescue

that Kracauer alludes to: the project that seeks to comprehend the past outside of an eschatological

conception of progress promises to rescue it from the shackles of chronology.

The Reception of Orpheus

The rescue is not straightforward, however. The ambiguity within the history of the Orphean

myth’s reception throughout time is revealing, insofar as Kracauer’s failure to mention it

illuminates the ambivalence at the heart of his own project. Orpheus’ journey, in relation to the

Baroque period, occupies a unique space. Jacobo Peri, in his opera in celebration of the marriage of

Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France, changed the ending of the well-known tragedy (to mark

the joyous occasion) to a happy ending, the lieto fine, with Orpheus successfully leading Eurydice

back to the world of the living where they are finally married. Performed on the 5th of October

1600, Peri’s opera Euradice was partly inspired by Poliziano’s Orfeo (1480). As Jeffrey Buller

points out, “...Poliziano drew precisely...[on the images of]...the pastoral tradition and then

incorporated them into the literary form of an ancient tragedy.”269 Peri’s Euradice, moves further

toward the joyousness of the banal, beginning with a prologue in which the personification of

allegiances) – seem most determined to misrepresent him.

266 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 583. 267 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 582. 268 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 583. 269 Jeffrey L. Buller, “Looking Backwards: Baroque Opera and the Ending of the Orpheus Myth.” International Journal

of the Classical Tradition 1. 3 (1995): 62.

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Tragedy informs the audience (who would have been familiar with the traditional story):

Tal per voi torno, e con sereno aspetto

Ne’ Reali Imenei m’adoro anch’io,

E su corde più liete il canto mio

tempo, al nobile cor dolce diletto.270

The opera culminates with Eurydice celebrating her love’s courage: “Tolsemi Orfeo dal tenebroso

regno” — “Orpheus tore me away from the realm of darkness”. It was not until after the death of

Mozart in 1791, that the traditional tragic ending reinstated itself with Joseph Haydn’s opera

L’anima del filosofo.271 An insight into the Baroque’s reception of the Orphean myth, in this case,

illuminates the ambivalence within the history of the myth itself. This mirrors the history of the

relationship between the conception of historical time and the philosophical task.

The difficulty of the historical project, and its relation to its philosophical counterpart, is

under-developed in Kracauer’s own argument. If history is to be understood as reflected in the

Orphean metaphor, does its success as a project (that is the return of the dead to the land of the

living and the present) entail its banality? Or is history to be forever consigned to the tragic realm,

with the impossibility of the return both its eternal lesson and salvation? History is saved, insofar as

it retains important philosophical meaning for the sake of the present, through the impossibility of

the return. Far from rendering history meaningless, its tragic character only forces us to re-

conceptualise its relics, in the light of the present. If there is a tragic lesson to be taken from

Orpheus’ journey, it must be in the ambiguity found in the history of its reception. Orpheus’

transition through time from tragic hero to idealised shepherd of Neo-Platonic Christianity and

back, functions as metaphor (beyond the poetic potential intended by Kracauer), by also

illuminating the ambiguity of the historical task and thus the necessary close relation to its

philosophical counterpart. Kracauer’s dismissal of the present’s interest in the historical journey

(along with the philosophers he considers guilty of this project) betrays a failure to anticipate, not

only his own debts to the present, but also the full repercussions of employing a tragedy whose

ending has, historically at least, always been unresolved. Kracauer’s use of the Orphean metaphor

to highlight the critical importance of the historian’s journey into the past to meet it on its own

terms, problematises the historical project: the return, according to the traditional myth, is steeped

in tragic forces — Orpheus returns empty handed and forlorn. Kracauer’s seemingly unresolved 270 Buller, “Looking Backwards”, 66. . “.. Thus changed, I return; serenely, I, too/ Adorn myself for the Royal wedding/

And temper my song with happier notes/ Sweet delight to the noble ear.” 271 Buller, “Looking Backwards”, 79.

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opinion of the present’s relation to the task of history forever consigns it to a relationship of

problematic ambivalence with the philosophical project — the philosophical task must, by

definition, take as its point of departure the present in which it is conceived. Although Kracauer

depicts Collingwood’s present as a form of modus operandi toward the historical task — a place in

which history is done — it is better understood as a philosophical category. Despite agreeing with

Kracauer that the past must be met on its own terms, as but one refraction of human life,

Collingwood recognises history as the act of coming to terms with the failure to return from the past

with anything other than fragments (which must be reconstructed carefully in order to understand

them). It is the very nature of the return to the present with these fragments of past material realities

that focuses and makes urgent the philosophical question. Collingwood’s philosophical project

demands a historical project (a perspective) that renders possible the philosophical task of the

present. The recognition of the philosophical importance of the time of writing underscores

Collingwood’s work, in which the demand that a philosophy must be a product of the time of its

writing emerges from a more foundational bedrock; namely the recognition that the philosophical

task will shape the present in which it is written.272

The Interruption of Historical Time and the Transformative Gaze

In light of the philosophical importance of the time of writing as being generative of how the

present is thought, it is critical to read Collingwood’s ideas relating to history, as they illustrate his

philosophical hopes. Like Kracauer, he is searching for a different modality of history.

Collingwood’s insistence that the reflections of the past must be, according to his own terms, re-

thought by us in the present, is not evidence for Kracauer’s feared presentism. In his small

autobiography (a book not consulted by either Kracauer or Strauss) Collingwood criticised many of

his contemporaries who belonged to the so-called British realist school, preferring in his study of

Aristotle, for example, “to concentrate on the question, ‘What is Aristotle saying and what does he

mean by it?’ and to forgo, however alluring it might be, the further question ‘Is it true?’”273

In the Idea of History, Collingwood writes, “We shall never know how the flowers smelt in

the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the

mountains...but the evidence of what these men thought is in our hands; and in re-creating these

thoughts in our own minds...we can know, so far as there is any knowledge, that the thoughts we

272 The ‘time of writing’ is used once again in the sense meant by Andrew Benjamin in “Time and Task.” That is, the

idea that the time in which philosophy is done occupies an important space of that very philosophy. 273 R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography. (London: Penguin Books, 1939), 23.

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create were theirs.”274 This passage is instructive, as it registers Collingwood’s fervent belief in the

legitimacy of the past’s voices. The reverence with which he treats the thoughts of past lives (what

Benjamin would have called its monadic nature) is the grounds upon which a new modality of time

opens up; one in which Collingwood as well as Kracauer would have been more or less

comfortable. Their collective discomfort over the myth of progress that had entrenched itself within

cultural and intellectual discourse, demanded a historical insight that allowed for the voices of the

past to truly speak outside of a naturalised chronology. A further investigation into his studies on

magic (which admittedly Kracauer did not have the benefit of reading) highlights the extent to

which Collingwood was sympathetic to the dangers of the Orphean journey, and what was at stake

for the present.

Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’ is implied in his philosophy of history, but it is

only explicitly discussed as a quasi-formal logic in his autobiography.275 For the discipline of

philosophy, this meant a historically-charged investigation into the material realities in which a

given philosophical text was written.276 Strauss says much the same, prefaced with his concern for

Collingwood’s methods: “If it is necessary to understand Plato’s thought, it is necessary to

understand it as Plato himself understood it...It is to be feared that Collingwood underestimated the

difficulty of finding out ‘What Plato meant by his statement’ or ‘Whether what he thought is

true’”.277 Kracauer voices similar doubts when he calls into question Collingwood’s confidence that

the past will give up its secrets in the name of the “allegedly superior constructions of present

thought.”278 It is difficult to imagine a less sympathetic interpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy

of history. The construction of the ‘logic of question and answer’ itself occupies a unique historical

moment — it embodies Collingwood’s response to the Logical Positivists, who hoped to reduce

philosophy both to the process of verification of empirical propositions, and science’s handmaiden.

The Socratic dialogue between historian and historical relic was, for Collingwood, a mode of

thinking that allowed for the present’s particular din (as Kracauer would have called it) to

subside.279 It checks the rhetoric of progress (increasingly naturalised by philosophy’s positivism)

in order for the past, in being ‘re-thought’, to enter an immediacy (Burckhardt’s nun) that allowed

for a modality of historical time (the present’s relation to the past) to emerge. The locus point was

not chronology, but rather human autonomy. As such, Collingwood was aware, more than most, of

the utmost importance of meeting the past on its own terms. In his view, there was a very real

274 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 296. 275 Collingwood, An Autobiography. 24-33. 276 Collingwood, An Autobiography. 31. 277 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy”, 585. 278 Kracauer, History, 76. 279 Kracauer, History, 86.

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possibility that the present might in many respects be ‘inferior’ to the past. In other words, the

present might still be confronted with the dangers of the descent into barbarism, a potentiality that

Kracauer (and Strauss) both allude to in their respective works.280

Kracauer’s criticisms of Collingwood stem from his having misunderstood the latter’s notion

of progress, outlined by Collingwood toward the end of The Idea of History. This is not only the

fault of Kracauer, but Collingwood too, who is, at times, too fleeting in his explanations.

Collingwood makes it quite clear, however, that he does not give any philosophical weight to any

notion of progress in the chronological structure of historical time.281 His conception of progress

exists solely within the Kantian category. Kant understood progress as not directly related to

historical progress, but within the domain of human thought which can develop and grow, through a

historico-humanist philosophical tradition. The collective criticism, and reception of history,

constituted a form of human progress. Collingwood’s debt to Kant is especially obvious here,

especially in relation to the latter’s conception of the logical necessary possibility of progress, of

which the Enlightenment represented the historically contingent locus.282This simply meant that the

question of enlightenment could not be forgotten once it was voiced. Collingwood was opposed to

the traditional Enlightenment project as it historically obtained, (that is the general disregard for the

past as a source of knowledge or wisdom), rather than how it might have. Progress was not

historical, but philosophical. It what sense, then, was this differentiated from historical progress? It

allowed the light of a new form of philosophico-historical insight (which could readily be called, as

Kracauer had hoped, ‘humane’) to emerge.283 This idea required reconciling some of the historical

problems of the past, not as pre-cursory data to a perfect present, but rather as tangible dramas that

represent the dreams and struggles of a material time in history. The modern understanding of what

it is to live in the present is thus redefined because progress qua progress, in terms of a naturalistic

unravelling of human potential or spirit, is nowhere to be found.284 In the final chapter of his

autobiography, ‘Theory and Practice’, Collingwood suggests that the nineteenth- century 280 “Studying the thinkers of the past becomes essential for men living in an age of intellectual decline because it is the

only practicable way in which they can recover a proper understanding of the fundamental problems. Given such conditions, history has the further task of explaining why the proper understanding of the fundamental problems has become lost in such a manner that the loss presents itself at the outset as progress.” Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History”, 585-586.

281 Collingwood, The Idea of History. 321. 282 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment”, Political Writings. Trans. H. B. Nisbet.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 3-8. 283 It was this idea that was the basis for Collingwood's conviction and exploration of the idea of the savage remaining

in modern man. 284 There are interesting Kantian shadows here, as well as parallels to be drawn with Benjamin's historical project. The

acknowledgement of the naturalisation of progress, and its affiliation with chronology, as rooted in mythic authority from pre-historical times, allows for a deeper insight, and a new coming to terms with what it might mean to live a meaningful life through historical time. In other words, the recognition that myth, rather than existing in a binary relationship in opposition to Enlightenment, is always present in the shapes of our historical lives, allows for a new mytho-historical ontology to be posed. On these themes, see Joseph Mali, Mythistory.

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confidence in the scientific project, and the expanding influence of positivism in intellectual

discourse, was symptomatic of a growing disregard for history — not history in and of itself, but a

history that calls into question the location in time from which the historical question is asked. The

sense of cultural optimism that pervaded during much of the century was a reflection that the

doctrines of the Enlightenment regarding the growing rationality and achievement of humanity were

finally being realised. The existence of mythic forces (the remnant of an eschatological logic)

within the collective socio-cultural discourse of the nineteenth century, remained under the guise of

myth’s destruction in the face of unstoppable scientific progress. It was this consideration of the

past as inferior (in terms of its ability to inform the present) that led, so thought Collingwood, to the

breakdown of intellectual, and thus civic, discourse that bore the responsibility for the encroaching

spectre of fascism.285 He puts it even more explicitly in his final paragraph of The Idea of History:

“If we want to abolish capitalism or war, and in doing so not only to destroy them but to bring into

existence something better, we must begin by understanding them...And we ought by now to realise

that no kindly law of nature will save us from the fruits of our ignorance.”286 This political rally cry

stemmed from a recognition of the immense difficulty of meeting the past on its own terms. The

logic of question and answer, although outlined schematically, and directed toward the school he

despised, implies a dialectical excavation of the fragments of the past and, poetically at least, allows

for the same struggles Orpheus underwent. It is not simply historical accuracy, or largely

misleading questions pertaining to truth that was at stake but rather the entire conditions for our

conception, and reception, of the present. The philosophical force of the question related to how this

historical form of enquiry could assist in emancipating us (albeit briefly) from what Habermas

called a historical narrative of violence.287 This is the fundamental point of Collingwood’s wider

project. The emancipation from a violence that prevents genuine means of dialogue — a way of

thinking that recognises humanity’s grasping for autonomy from that which would keep us

subservient — promises to reframe the question of how the present is to be thought as relying

entirely on how the past is approached.

In a posthumously published essay entitled ‘Magic’, Collingwood outlines the importance,

philosophically and historically speaking, of magic. In a preceding essay called ‘The Historical

Method’, Collingwood outlines the necessity of perceiving the continual existence of ‘the savage’ in

modern humanity. The savage, rather than being an object of collective cultural shame, must be

recognised, Collingwood argues, as the catalyst for the grounds upon which the struggles of the

human condition are founded. In terms very similar to those of Hans Blumenberg in Work on Myth, 285 Collingwood, An Autobiography. 100-112. 286 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 334. 287 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest. 315.

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Collingwood sees the acknowledgement of ‘the savage within us’ as the recognition of the

ambiguous fears that have marked human existence since pre-historical darkness.288 A study of

myth or magic offers glimpses of the past that have, in many cases, been otherwise lost.289 Through

such a study, Collingwood argues, the historical traveller must come to recognise that, in spite of

the existence of magic (proof for modernity that the past consisted of barbaric rituals, and savage

customs), many of these societies had otherwise very sophisticated ways of life, such as complex

agriculture, artistic work and highly complex forms of ritual: evidence, in other words, of the

rational. Rallying against the Enlightenment narrative, Collingwood points out that the existence of

magic alongside an otherwise rational culture, was proof that magic answered to a different calling,

and emerged in humanity not as a pre-cursor to science but “...to protect human beings against the

ghosts that haunt them.”290 This is, in effect, a reference to ‘demons in our thought’ to which this

thesis submits as a uniquely modern insight, as well as the basis for the anthropology that emerges

from it. This spelt the end of any notion of progress for Collingwood. Not only did myth remain in

spite of the success of science, as the champions of the Enlightenment had noted with puzzlement,

(proof that rational thought did not entirely subsume whatever human urge or anxiety that myth

satiated), but rational man had always existed, in various forms, with no correlation to mythic

authority. This formed a very complex dialectic between mythos and logos.

This idea of the study of magic as a gateway into material history, or a reflection of humanity

in a given time, is a crucial insight into Collingwood’s position — not only in the philosophy of

history, but in his dealing with how the present should be conceived. A study of the history of

magic, in this case, allows for a historical insight into the collective human grappling with the

concept that stretches well past the Enlightenment. The Faustian presence behind the myth of

progress (which itself contains the lurking shadow of Prometheus) becomes illuminated through a

historical study, as a reflection of humanity’s constant struggle to rationalise the uncontrollable.

Rational progress is consumed by the mythic it cannot outrun.291 Collingwood understood the

Enlightenment’s fear of pagan or religious man’s fears more than most and, as such, understood

where the Enlightenment tradition had failed to conceptualise the mythic structure of its desires and

larger project. Collingwood put no intellectual weight in naturalised historical progress, and would

have agreed with Benjamin’s argument that historical progress was the filling of “empty,

homogenous time.”292 The image of humanity that Collingwood conjures is one of the constant

288 R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 180. 289 Collingwood’s position here is largely influenced by the work of Vico. See Chapter Two. 290 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 205. 291 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), 263-295. 292 “The conception of a 'law of progress', by which the course of history is so governed by the successive forms of

human activity exhibit each an improvement on the last, is thus a mere confusion of thought, bred of an unnatural

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battling of man to come to terms with the radically ambivalent nature of his reality. The historical

insight of humanity as dogged by constant attempts at “...a complete relief from our sense of guilt”,

allows for both expiation of the myth of progress which ensnares us, as well as the re-bordering of

the present. The latter emerges as but one moment of historical time, a reflection of humanity’s

hopes and fears, no different in many ways from the past, but in no sense, necessarily, improved.293

It is darkly ironic, as Benjamin points out in “Theories of a German Fascism” that the naturalisation

of the myth of progress allowed for the conditions for fascism to arise in the first place.294 The

conception of the civility of the present that reached fever pitch in the nineteenth century, allowed

for the conditions for barbarism to appear, grounded in a form of unconscious faith in the necessity

of naturalised progress. The Enlightenment hope had, in some sense, entered society’s collective

dreams to such an extent that it became blind. The new modality of history and implied form of

historical insight, as outlined by Kracauer and, I argue, Collingwood, allow for the interrupting

conditions that might arouse the present from its collective, ‘presentist’ dream state, in which the

present hovers meaninglessly between two chronological points. Collingwood’s acknowledgement

that those who live exist in a state of continual distancing from primeval anxiety, concedes the

possibility that we may all suffer the same fate as Orpheus. Moreover, it recognises the benefit of a

historical model that is sensitive to humanity’s fallibility before fate. In so doing, Collingwood

touches upon the key similarity between his and Kracauer’s idea of history— namely, the idea of

gentle solidarity. The opportunity that opens in that moment of historical insight, or solidarity,

allows for (at the very least) the framing of the question that asks whether there is another way to

conceive of human life in the only prism which is liveable: nun.

Following Blumenberg explicitly, Kracauer argues towards the end of History that the

modern idea of progress exists as a re-occupation of older, humbler ideas, which were coherent only

in relation to early modern scholarly work, rather than the secularised manifestation of an

eschatological vision. These related to the humanist aesthetic and the natural sciences, which were a

response to a weakened theology that no longer sat as comfortably within its eschatological

category.295 Kracauer argues that the way to pierce the myth of progress that had consumed

unison between man's belief in his own superiority to nature and his belief that he is nothing more than a part of nature.” Collingwood, The Idea of History, 323.

293 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment. 205. 294 Walter Benjamin,‘Theories of German Fascism’ in Selected Writings: Volume Two, Part One, 1927-1930. Ed.

Michael W. Jennings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005), 319. 295 Kracauer, History. 185, 202. “...secular conception[s]...ha[d] been burdened with the obligations to cater to the very

human needs which once found their outlet in messianic prophecies.” 185. Blumenberg argues that the modern concept of progress emerges from the development of astronomy that, increasingly throughout its history, became aware it would take longer than the span of a human life, to unlock the secrets of the universe – that is, “...the consciousness that a great deal of time would still be needed to do no more than put astronomy...in possession of its problems.” Hans Blumenberg and E. B. Ashton." On a Lineage of the Idea of Progress.” Social Research 41. 1

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intellectual and civic discourse was to radically de-emphasise chronology, in favour of “...the

meaningful patterns of events,” as Burckhardt does.296 He suggests this drives a “...compassionate

urge to uncover lost causes in history.”297 The case for compassion is extended in Kracauer’s

likening of Burckhardt as a Sancho Panza to Nietzsche’s Don Quixote. Although Burckhardt

“watched, where he dare not follow, how surely Nietzsche treaded on ‘dizzying cliffs,’ he (and here

he quotes Kafka) “philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of

responsibility...”298 The implication for the metaphor is that, while Nietzsche was tilting at

windmills, Burckart’s thought had “a utopian character....(that sought out) a terra incognita in the

hollows between the lands we know.”299 Burckhardt’s (as with Proust’s) emphasis on the movement

of ideas, rather than chronological time, is compassionate in its treatment of the past as unique in

and of itself, rather than as a piece of data with which to explain the present. Within it, as well, lies

Kracauer’s hopes for a present that acknowledges the humanity he had hoped for in his introductory

sketch.300 Phillip Smallwood argues, in his introductory paper in Collingwood’s Philosophy of

Enchantment, that Collingwood’s work could be seen “...along the axis of the cultural,” increasingly

as he aged.301 One need only look to his plea for the study of old magic and myth “to comprehend

the relations between the surface of life and its depths” as reflective of a humanity that, as the form

of National Socialism solidified over Europe, appeared to have disappeared with the disappearance

of folk tales, or their relegation to children’s stories302. The utopian image to which Kracauer refers

is one that Collingwood would be sympathetic to. This could be understood as a compassionate

study of the past, in which the root of the original word, the Latin cum, denotes the philosophical

importance of a communal solidarity – a commonality. The compassionate study of the past and the

recognition of past lives as unique reflections of human life, sees the fostering of a philosophical

sense of a common humanity in which, perhaps, new forms of dialogue might see the present in a

light other than in which it had been seen. The historian is a traveller who has explored the hidden

interstices of history and found moments that, albeit briefly (remember of course Kracauer’s

recognition of the impossibility of dissolving chronology altogether) dispatch the notion of

progress. A destruction of the notion of progress by a historical compassion, that is a commonality

that recognised historical time as a tragedy from which humanity cannot entirely escape, inundates

the present with philosophical urgency. Far from being a point in an upward progression toward

(1974). Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy as well as Rubini’s The Other Renaissance also support this thesis.

296 Kracauer, History, 209. 297 Kracauer, History, 209. 298 Kracauer, History, 217 299 Ibid. 300 Kracauer, History, 3. 301 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, liv. 302 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, l.

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utopia, the present exists as the only moment in which humanity can come to terms with its attempt

to re-think the ambivalence of its historical conditions.

In his essay ‘Man Goes Mad’, Collingwood writes, as Benjamin does, of the perversity of a

notion of progress, following the horror of the Great War:

To the generation that has passed through that experience, those old forecasts of man’s

future, and the whole system of ideas on which they rested, seem strangely perverse. For

they all assumed that the road which nineteenth century man was treading led uphill to

infinity: whereas we have now seen that it led to the brink of a precipice.303

It is what is at stake in the historical quest, where Collingwood’s thought most intersects with

Kracauer’s (as well as Strauss’ and Benjamin’s). The recognition of the past in general intellectual

discourse is entirely tied up not just in the present, but in the dangers of the present’s descent into

savage violence. Collingwood and Benjamin both saw this absurdity in the aftermath of the Great

War, but Kracauer sees it more starkly still, with the uncovering of the Holocaust. Kracauer’s

‘hidden genuine’, Benjamin’s ‘messianic light’ and Collingwood’s notion of progress in

philosophy, all seek out in their respective Orphean travels through history. These are genuine

reflections of the past that renders the present as fitting, in some sense, into a largely meaningless

chronology, but also as the point of departure in the historico-philosophical reception and

recognition of history as a violent narrative. This narrative tells of the repeated attempts of human

life to escape its origins: in Kantian terms, “pure animality”.304 The attempt to outrun, often reduces

human life to that very regression. History becomes the negotiation of humanity’s capacity for

barbarism that must be overcome. The insight that comes out of that, recognises a humanity that

struggles, as we have always struggled, with the obscure fears that mark us as human beings. As

Blumenberg suggests, in so doing the mythic authority that marks the human condition is pierced

briefly to catch a glimpse of what it might be like to live outside that condition.305 Such autonomy

does not lie in what Blumenberg considers the ambiguous promise of the ‘end of myth’ (the

possibility of which he leaves, largely, aside). Rather, through the recognition of the extent to which

the history of thought is marked by these mythic qualities, there is the insight that any serious

consideration of thought is impossible without taking into account the fact that thought’s ‘shape’ is

largely grounded on these unseen myths and metaphors. Any confrontation with ‘thought’ or

303 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 305. See also Benjamin's “Theories of German Fascism”, 312-321. 304 Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology. Trans. George Di Giovanni and Allen W. Wood. (Cambridge:

Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1996), 74. 305 Blumenberg, Work on Myth.

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‘history’ is impossible without returning to these forms of thought. This does not discount the

possibility of another utopian side of thought – unseen and un-thought – but its emergence (the

transformative quality it promises) relies on the confrontation with human history; a history that is

marked by a grappling with the grounding myths that lie at the heart of human discourse and

institutions. The transformative quality of the Orphean gaze requires, first, the contemplative gaze

backwards on the violent and tragic forces of history.

Examples of the transformative gaze exist throughout history, wherein the human gaze upon

the collective lot of human life constitutes a form of celebration, which in itself marks the

recognition by humanity of other possibilities of human life. These are the hidden, lost causes

within human traditions that Kracauer hoped would be uncovered in his philosophical history.

Along with the rest of Greek tragedy, the tragedy of Orpheus constitutes a historical instance of the

sublime — of a moment in historical time where in the celebration and recognition of humanity’s

collective fate through the aesthetic distance of the Chorus, human beings overcame the authority

that dogged them.306 The story of Orpheus can only be understood this way through its being treated

in the revelatory terms in which it emerged. However, it must also be understood as Kracauer saw

it: as a story of rescue. Kracauer, as discussed, was not one to suggest that historical enquiry

required the present’s context in which to embark on its journey. He suspects that Collingwood

does. In fact, neither do, but Kracauer understates his own debts to the present. The past, like

Orpheus’ journey, must be tackled on its own terms. What, though, of the return? As Kracauer

himself says, the historian must, “return to the upper world and put his booty to good use.”307 What,

then, of the present? From where else can the traveller through historical time depart? As Strauss

and Kracauer argue, the traveller may not return the same, perhaps marked by tragedy as Orpheus

was, her fate demands that she ascend back to the land of the living. The realm of the past is not for

the traveller – she must make her life in the present. This admission does not require the

‘presentism’ that Kracauer attributes to Collingwood, as both his own historical model, as well as

his criticisms of Collingwood shows. It does, however, require some thought as to the nature of the

present, the historical traveller’s return to it, and what it constitutes, philosophically speaking.

The danger of the myth of progress, lay not so much in rendering the past banal (that is,

rendering it inoperable for a thinking of the future), but rather in the self-satisfaction of the ideas

surrounding the present, which manifested themselves as fitting into a particular historical narrative

of quasi-Hegelian completion. As Itkin points out, the notion of progress, for Kracauer, was

306 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 263-252. 307 Kracauer, History, 88.

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discredited beyond doubt with the Holocaust. His image of history as travel through memory space

“...in the absence of the ordering principle provided by the linear notion of time, produces montages

of images of the past that signal their own provisionality and incompletion.”308 An understanding of

the past as fragment uncovers the contingency of the historical conditions upon which it arose. The

implication within the philosophical necessity of progress, as with mythic fate, is that the past could

not have obtained in any other way. The fragmentation of the past robs it of its mythic narrative,

forcing the historian to allow for the many past presents to arise as they may have emerged. Within

this structure, the possibility that the past’s relation to the present lies only in the most banal

structure of chronological time, is allowed, leaving the radical contingency of the present revealed.

With such an exposure, the collective gaze might be able to look back through the ages, as

Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew does, and witness the end of history.309 In what sense can history

end? Certainly not in the Hegelian sense but, rather, in the sense that Habermas alludes to when he

writes that history is nothing but the narrative of our own inability to overcome our natural

condition — of the breaking down of every attempt at genuine human discourse — a history, in

other words, of violence.310 Framed as such, the present, as Benjamin hoped, embodies a place of

infinite possibility, where any moment might contain a divine moment of expiation.311 The present,

in other words, presents itself as being the grounds upon which humanity might realise its

autonomy; not from the dispatch of progress — recall that Blumenberg argues that the conjuring of

the end of myth is itself mythic — but, rather, through the establishment of a mere moment of

insight that recognises human life as dogged by the primeval anxieties that marked humanity’s

struggle with the immediacy and terrible ambivalence of the world. It is through this historico-

philosophical insight that mythic authority is pierced, to show the genuine humanity within it.

Within that moment, fleeting as it may be, the ontological question emerges: is there another way to

imagine human life? This question cannot be answered directly, but its Kantian form hopes to

colour and inform the reception of our own history from therein; a recognition of our living in a

moment of genuine human thought and autonomy over itself. The historical journey, and especially

the return to the land of the living, promises much.

To realise a historical “tradition of lost causes” as Kracauer wanted, is to challenge the

particular conception of the present’s relation to historical time (namely that of the progress, and the

supposed meaning in a naturalised chronology), necessitating, therefore, a change to the conception

308 Itkin, “Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus”, 201. 309 Kracauer, History, 157. 310 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest. 314-315. 311 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, 397. Benjamin also considers this in the “Critique of Violence” – whereby

the notion of expiation (the atonement of guilt) embodies the rupturing of fate and, therefore, the history of mythic authority to which humanity is subjugated.

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of the philosophical project. Kracauer’s categorising of Collingwood’s philosophy with that of

Croce’s idealism (which Croce himself would deny) stems from the suspicion that Collingwood’s

ideas surrounding the historian’s ‘re-living’ of past thought, is a barely concealed account of

Hegelian Spirit, wherein the present is seen as both the inescapable place of study, as well as the

culmination of the subject of the study itself.312 This ‘present interest’ history cannot, he argues,

ever meet the past on even grounds, so caught up is the historian in the noise and din of the present.

The Orphean quality of genuine historical enquiry offers greater insight, but also much greater risk.

Recall Kracauer’s hope that a new historical vision will render the present more “humane”. This

humanity, Habermas suggests, stems from an acknowledgement of our historical lives as the story

of the constant struggling with primeval fears. If Blumenberg is correct to suggest these anxieties

arose synonymously with humanity’s emergence, then any hope for enlightenment must take into

account the conditions of possibility that allowed for thought in the first place. The Enlightenment’s

terror of what Benjamin called the “horrors that beckon deep in the primeval forest” give rise to the

conditions through which we lose the unique moments of the past as distinctly human, and the myth

of progress forges on.313 Collingwood’s own Orphean tendencies are never more explicit than in his

study of magic. He writes:

[the historian] has to face the fact that the distinction between savage and civilised man is a

fiction designed to flatter his vanity...If his study of it is effective, he reconstructs it within

his own mind and it becomes a prized possession. What he began by thinking peculiar to

savages, and now finds inside himself must therefore be regarded not with hatred and

contempt as irrational...but as something worth having, something of which the recognition

increases instead of impairing his self-respect...”.314

This is a critical insight. The enlightenment hopes that Collingwood entertains are ultimately shaped

by the inherent ambivalence of human life, and the necessity of the negotiation with that

ambivalence as a critical insight in a sense of humanity that seeks out other potentialities for human

life.

Collingwood’s hope, in engaging seriously with primeval myth, was to gain an insight into

the elusive, and often profound, realities of a past otherwise lost. Such a historical journey allowed

for a sensitivity to the relics that are recovered; that is, the elements of ancient mythology that

continued to mark modern humanity. The recognition of the present as a place beset with primeval 312 Kracauer, History, 64. 313 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456. 314 Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment, 194.

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anxieties clarifies the task of the philosophical within that present: the salvation of the present as a

locus of hope. By doing so, the insidious incoherence of a progress that marches on, despite crises

like the rise of National Socialism, not only becomes incoherent, but succumbs to the mythic

authority to which it was still, unknowingly, enslaved. This fragmentation of historical time (recall

that certain moments will resist less to their excavation) is entirely Orphean in its desire for rescue.

Kracauer’s criticism of Collingwood, which calls on Orpheus for the task of dispatch, illuminates

the similarity of their philosophical hopes. In so doing, however, he also uncovers the philosophical

ambivalence within his own project. The tragedy of history — the impossibility of its unambiguous

rescue — is under-estimated by Kracauer, who utilises the myth of Orpheus without acknowledging

the historical ambivalence of such an action. An entirely successful history in which its relics are

entirely rebuilt, cannot be imbued with a sense of human loss, entailing its being forgotten,

preventing it from shaping the present through a communal recognition of the humility that emerges

at the loss of the past. Kracauer, who fails to see the affinity between his and Collingwood’s

projects, never entirely reconciles the repercussions of the Orphean myth, and in so doing

accentuates Collingwood’s having unconsciously done so. The impossibility of the return, as

dictated by fate, ensures the lasting meaning of history, and its relation to the philosophical task of

the present insofar as the reconceptualisation of history’s ruins necessitates the re-thinking of

human life. The space that opens in the wake of this allows for Collingwood to be read as but one of

the thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century who sought a salvation for the crisis of

modernity through a philosophy that examined the critical conjunction between historical time and

the present.

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Conclusion

The relation between history, myth and philosophy is ambivalent. One of the more periphery

intentions of this thesis was to locate a philosophically viable and legitimate understanding of

ambivalence. What, philosophically speaking, emerges in the confrontation of these thinkers? One

of the major arguments – perhaps the major argument of this thesis – is the claim that it is the very

articulation of the form of ambivalence that emerges in a philosophical study of myth’s relation to

history, that offers up a genuine space in which something new about the thinking of the thinking of

human life might emerge. I have presented the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood as framed within

the search for such an articulation.

Although it would be expected (and indeed easier) to present a ‘rehabilitated’ Collingwood as

an important thinker who has until now perhaps been misunderstood or ignored, so that he might be

‘used’ in future philosophical debates, this thesis defends the impossibility of this hope. It might be

conceded that, like many thinkers of his time, Collingwood’s philosophy retains a certain

incompletion from which an ambiguity festers, as a result of the horrific, totalising historical

ruptures he lived through. I have argued, however, that the ambiguity of Collingwood’s project,

which inspires the uncertainty with which he is dealt, is the result of his ultimately difficult and

subtle conception of myth and magic, and its relation to the historico-philosophical task. As such,

while it is true, I argue, that Collingwood’s ideas have been largely misconstrued so that they can be

deployed in the name of other intellectual agendas, this thesis has merely presented another way in

which his philosophy might emerge in a ‘flash’ of relevance within the broader, and infinitely

complex history, of the wrestling with the problem of history and myth.

Via the confrontation with Herodotus, I have shown the extent to which a conception of

‘historical life’ was critical to Collingwood’s philosophy. What precisely Herodotus’ understanding

of ‘historical life’ was remains problematic. However, if, as I have argued, Herodotus’ idea of

history shares a commonality with tragedy as dealing inherently with the Greek understanding of

human life as marked by a fateful necessity, then the question of ‘historical life’ emerges in the

possibilities of contingency that emerge in the recognition of that necessity. That is, other

possibilities of human life (of solidarity, of discourse) emerge in the recognition of human life as

inherently susceptible to tragic forces. Historical life, then, embodies in some critical sense, a space

in which human life can flourish in the face of the inescapable ambiguities that mark the human

condition. What differentiates Herodotus from Thucydides (and insofar as these two thinkers

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embody two different potentialities for history), is the former’s desire to study all facets of human

life, and in particular those stories that formed what modern academia might call ‘webs of

meaning’. Where Thucydides marks his project, and differentiates himself explicitly from

Herodotus, by looking at the concrete political events of the past, Herodotus seeks to uncover the

important historical place of myths that ground meaning amongst communities. It was this

fundamental understanding of meaning, and its historical celebration that Herodotus considered the

critical locus of political dialogue, and thus the key to the continuation of the civilisation in which

he lived. Although I have presented Collingwood’s Herodotean interest in defending the historical

legitimacy of myth and magic, it is the stronger, but more difficult claim of Collingwood’s on

which I have focused, namely his belief of the correlation of historical with political life. His

explicit claim at the end of his autobiography that equates the breakdown of political dialogue, and

the victory of Fascism and National Socialism in Europe with the forgetting of a form of collective

historical reception, is Collingwood’s attempt to articulate the peculiar nature of ‘historical life’.

For Collingwood, the historical circumstances of his own time continued to be marked by

peculiar, seemingly unexplainable forms of fate that seemed to drag Europe to the brink of

destruction on more than one occasion during his life. Such ignorance of these fateful, violent

forces in history on behalf of the British politicians of the 1930s, and their inability to anticipate the

horrors that threatened to erupt from Germany, was down to a failure to understand, not only the

continued presence of myth in modern life, but how this failure was essentially a failure of historic,

and thus political thinking. This was not simply the recognition that a historical study would

illuminate the presence of myth in human life (although this may also have been true), but the

extent to which myth, and thus fate, inhabited (unrecognised) the historical ruptures of

Collingwood’s time in spite of the apparent victory of rationalism over superstition. Of course, as

this thesis has shown, Collingwood was a qualified champion of the Enlightenment. His defence of

instrumental reason is measured by his ardent (if guarded) admiration for magic, the danger of

which only existed in humanity’s collective failure to recognise its presence. Collingwood’s notion

of historical life, then, embodied a deep and critical thinking about the susceptibility of human life

to regress into barbaric forms, and what a reception of that very regressive tendency might offer in

terms of new, other possibilities.

The second chapter dealt with Collingwood’s notion of what I called the ‘materiality’ of

history via a confrontation with Giambattista Vico. Where the Herodotean legacy in Collingwood’s

thought attempted to articulate the peculiarity of ‘historical life’ as constituting something uniquely

human, the influence of Vico related to that form of life as representing not just a material ‘reality’

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of the past, but an immanent reality in the present. This is the essential quality of Collingwood’s

philosophy of history that differentiates him from the forms of Hegelian cum Crocean idealism with

which he is normally associated. Vico’s great discovery was not simply the historical interest of

myth, but the extent to which these myths, with their origins in the earliest cultic and ritualistic

incantations, were reflective of material ‘realities’ which humanity found itself confronted with

long ago. Myth was not a reflection of human essence, or spirit, but rather the expression of the

human desire to tame a strange and ultimately hostile world. For Vico, this anxiety, and the mythic

formulations that followed, were not only a legacy of ‘primitive’ life, but also of his own time,

where mythic forms of life could be uncovered hiding beneath the surface of the supposed victory

of Cartesian rationalism. The ‘materiality of history’ in other words refers to both the fact that

historical ‘forces’ are not in and of themselves a driving force, as with the Hegelian ‘cunning of

reason’, but reflections of historical realities (of which myth constitutes an important part of making

that human reality manifest), as well as the notion that these historical legacies continue to reside in

the present as worthy of philosophical attention. The affinity of Collingwood’s with Vico’s project,

then, lies in the former’s attempt to unearth, through a historico-philosophical project, the

unrecognised mythic forces that threatened to engulf Europe. Vico’s understanding of the

possibilities of human regression into barbarism were the source, I argue, of Collingwood’s

rejection of the faith in historical progress, and his recognition of it as inherently mythic. Its danger

as myth lay in its being unrecognised. That is, humanity’s susceptibility to its forces, in the name of

its opposite: the victory of instrumental reason over earlier superstitions. The understanding of myth

as reflections of material historical conditions, rather than eternal psychological states, lay the

ground for Collingwood’s more modern insights regarding how the return of these myths in

historical time, (in this case the naturalisation of progress, the logic of which did not anticipate

Fascism), could be interrupted and illuminated for what they were.

This modern project of Collingwood’s, I have argued, is perfectly illuminated in the

confrontation with Siegfried Kracauer. Kracauer’s reading of Collingwood as a Crocean idealist is

typical of many interpretations of the his work. Citing the Orphean tragedy, Kracauer goes to great

lengths to illuminate the futility of what he considers Collingwood’s project: the rescuing of the

past for the sake of a defence of the present. Kracauer’s deployment of Orpheus is a response to

what he considers Collingwood’s vulgar and simplistic understanding of history and his failure to

understand the philosophical relation to it. I have argued, however, that, not only does Kracauer

misinterpret Collingwood, and mistakenly correlate his project with Croce’s, but also that the

Orphean metaphor highlights the full ambivalence of history; an ambivalence that even Kracauer

himself seems unable to reconcile. Collingwood is not committed to the idea of a full

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‘rehabilitation’ of the past; a past that emerges fully formed as a result of the historian’s

interrogations, as Kracauer claims. Beneath the seemingly explicit methodology of his ‘logic of

question and answer’, Collingwood’s remains sensitive, like Kracauer, to the susceptibility of the

past being scared into retreat at the philosopher-historian’s demands. It is this very fragility of the

past that marks the commonality of these two thinkers. And yet ambivalence remains. Kracauer,

who insists the past must be met on its own terms, away from the din of the present, never fully

reconciles how the inevitable Orphean return to the surface will emerge. Collingwood’s insistence,

that historical insight must begin and end from the present and its concerns, anticpates the Orphean

journey, and illuminates his understanding of the ultimately tragic nature of history. Vico’s legacy

is critical on this point. The historical understanding of the mythic foundations of contemporary

social and cultural institutions allows for the modern understanding of the present as a site of

philosophical work. History’s repeated succumbing to tragic, fateful forces necessitates a

reconstruction of the mere fragments that emerge from the past. Collingwood’s project, as the

Fascist shadow crept over Europe, entails a reconstruction, and re-articulation of the potentialities

that emerge from those fragments. This, I have argued, is the same as the ‘humanity’ that Kracauer

hoped would emerge from the “hidden interstices” of history. The commonality of these two

projects was not intended to suggest the projects are the same. Rather, the confrontation of these

two thinkers, allows for a moment of insight into that distinctly modern idea. History is not in and

of itself tragic (that is, driven by necessity) but a reflection of material conditions that show the

extent to which human life is susceptible to the regressive forces of the barbaric forms of life

(forces of necessity) that emerge when living according to fate. The modern insight, then, that

human life as marked by historical conditions, many of which are dogged by mythic forms of

consciousness to render them manageable, allows for a moment in which this susceptibility

becomes a potentiality for another form of life.

Despite my attempt in this thesis to rescue Collingwood’s project from other philosophical

agendas to which he does not entirely belong, while at the same time avoiding a definitive

articulation of what his project might in fact be, I have risked doing just that. My hope in avoiding a

concrete methodology, in favour of a discrete wandering through the philosophical space, risks the

obvious danger that Collingwood himself would not recognise his project as I have presented it.

Indeed, I think there is a strong argument to be made that the primary reason for Collingwood’s

being understood, for the most part, as an obscure idealist, was due to his own unresolved

intellectual dues. Any notion of historical materiality that emanates from his Vichean influence sits

uneasily with his obvious Hegelian commitments, his inability to relinquish some notion of ‘spirit’

the most obvious example. Despite this, Collingwood’s other work, and particularly that which has

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emerged in recent years, lies in stark contrast to the common caricature. This does not render his

idealist tendencies redundant, but merely highlights the difficulty in articulating Collingwood’s

ultimate philosophical hopes. Located within the historical conditions in which he lived, he emerges

as a thinker who grappled relentlessly with what he considered the sinister subterranean forces that

lurked beneath the victory of philosophical realism: the victory of irrationalism in the guise of its

opposite. Despite the ambiguity of his philosophy, the main commonality that emerges in the

disparate fragmentations of his work is the rescuing of a notion of genuine enlightenment.

Ultimately, Collingwood’s concern seems to deal with the inherently magic reality of the world – of

the inescapability of magic formalism and incantation – and the need for the genuine enlightenment

project to recognise this as an inescapable part of the rationalist project, rather than its enemy. The

myth of historical progress, for example, posed a problem only insofar as it went unrecognised, and

therefore free of philosophical scrutiny and penetration. Collingwood, then, accepts the presence of

some form of fate within human life as a remnant from the most primitive expressions of life that

nonetheless continue to mark modernity. The project of enlightenment emerges as the critical

historico-philosophical negotiation with older forms of thought, in the name of potentially new,

unrecognised ones.

Niobe Speaks

The ambivalence with which this thesis grapples is a historical outcome of the ways in which

myth and history have been thought about since Homer. In other words, the distinction between

mûthos and logos, is a differentiation that has its historical immanence in humanity’s reception of,

and grappling with, myth. If myth represents fatalistic subjugation, as Benjamin thought, and

history the self-conscious self-assertion of human rather than divine life; then historical life

uncovers our own self-conscious negotiation with older authorities. It falls to philosophy to render a

space in which something can be said in light of that reception.

In an appendix to his Knowledge and Human Interest, a passage alluded to throughout the

text, Jürgen Habermas writes:

Only when philosophy discovers in the dialectical course of history the traces of violence

that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to

unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise

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legitimates: mankind's evolution toward autonomy and responsibility.315

Habermas suspects that history itself is the record of constant violence – both physical and

metaphysical — that deforms and perverts our constant attempts at genuine dialogue. This dialogue

aims at a solidarity that emerges from fears of obscure terrors that mark the human condition.316

What differentiates humanity, in other words, from its own purely biological past (that is, a

historical life) both allowed for the differentiation in the first place, but also prevents us from living

a life proper to the promise of the human vocation.317 This is one of the great paradoxes of human

life: the urge to articulate and find solace over our metaphysical anxiety on leaving what Benjamin

called the “primeval forest” allowed for the conditions for myth to emerge. The act of speech, or

perhaps even pre-lingual metaphors, such as drawings, represents the staking of a claim on the

world that is distinctly human — that distances and keeps at bay the earlier, more terrifying

ambiguities of nature. On the other hand, the emergence of speech also, paradoxically, allowed for

the presence of mythic authority to enter human life, which cut off our hopes for genuine discourse,

literally, before it had begun.318 The means by which nature was silenced, at least momentarily, to

allow early human life space in which to breathe (“so that human lungs could have air”, as Kafka

once wrote319) was also the means by which everything, in becoming thinkable, became tethered to

particular modalities of thought. The constant revisitation of violence in history alluded to by

Habermas is, on the one hand a reference to the more banal nature of physical violence, but also to

its root cause; namely, the forms of thought that consistently shut down potentially new ways of

understanding and thinking about human life. The violent nature of this story is what makes up the

majority of human history or, to put it another way, human history is the narrative by which we fail

to become fully human. Historical life, thus far, has failed to conjure a life befitting its promise.

The extent of the ambivalence, however, becomes clearer in the extent to which this thesis is

not an analysis and critique of mythic thinking. Benjamin and Habermas articulate it best in their

acknowledgement of the necessity of myth and its manifestations (in this case, via the law) to the

beginnings of human life. The same claim can be seen in Kafka’s acknowledgement that myth 315 Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interest, 315. 316 This notion of genuine dialogue, from which truth might emerge, is dependent on a form of trust that our speaking

partner speaks truly, and experiences the world in similar ways to us. Thus, as Malpas is right to point out, the notion of truth emerging out of dialogue relies not simply on a solidarity for the human capacity for suffering, but on the recognition of that capacity on behalf of others, and the subsequent engagement that comes out of that primary recognition. This is the ultimate foundation for the unique human qualities of love and hope. Malpas, “Retrieving Truth,” 299-300.

317 See chapter III of 'Theory and Practise', specifically, 89 in Kant, Political Writings. Kant considers what appears to be modern vice as the growing awareness of what constitutes a moral life, and our subsequent abhorrence at action which does not adhere to such a life.

318 Hans Blumenberg, Work On Myth, first chapter, 'After the Absolutism of Reality', 3-32. 319 Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920, as quoted in Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 3.

103

allowed for the thriving of early humanity, so that the terrors of the ambiguities of nature could be

distanced. Vico, too, despite his fear of ‘primitive’ life, sees the grounds of civil life as existing in

the customs of early pagan man which, although bestial and savage, kept at bay the terrors of the

night sky and the thunder which erupted from it. Its being kept at bay necessitated it being named.

What was “…utterly strange, became only humanly strange,” to recall Ross’ prescient

formulation.320 Nor, however, is this thesis (or the anthropology from which it departs) rooted in

Romantic defences of the myth as being attached in some sense to an eternal, unchanging human

spirit. Blumenberg, towards the end of his extraordinary chapter “To Bring Myth to and End”,

makes an obscure reference to the nature of myth’s presence in history.321 He writes:

Anyone who considers these forms of a ‘final myth’ to be obsolete rubbish will be mistaken;

the oppressiveness of contingency, which lies behind myth, does not cease. Ernst Bloch

returns, in 1977, to a discussion of death and immortality conducted in Königstein on the

day of Adorno’s death in 1969, and desires, on the day of the murder of Jürgen Ponto, that

it be published in the final volume of his ‘Gesammelte Schriften’. That interval that is

encompassed by these dates is perhaps itself an aspect of the subject.

Blumenberg does not refer to the ceaseless return of myth, nor indeed does he exclude the

possibility of there being a form of human life that excludes myth. There is perhaps a place where

myth is brought to an end. And yet, he is quick to counter, as can be witnessed in the murder of the

banker Ponto by the radical Marxist revolutionaries, that history is dogged by violent forms of life,

in particular during times of supposed renewal, enlightenment, or revolution. The ancient myths and

metaphors that form the basis of the possibility of thought — that is, reflection — in the first place,

also construe the modalities of thinking to this day. History, in being shaped by these forms of

thought, is dogged by them. The genuine philosophical task, Blumenberg argues, and the genuine

hopes of enlightenment, must be recognised as belonging to that legacy, rather than seeking to

overthrow it. It is only through a philosophically-oriented reception of that history, that the

possibilities for othering human thought emerges. These moments of reflection that alleviate human

life, momentarily, from the means/ends forms of thought, allows for insights into the other infinite

possibilities of human life. The uncovering of the “hidden interstices” in history as Kracauer calls

them (the best example of which is Benjamin’s account of Greek tragedy, wherein human

autonomy and solidarity emerges via a celebration of fate through the aesthetic distance of the

320 Alison Ross, “Moral Metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg,” 44. 321 For an excellent summary of Blumenberg’s negotiation with both Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism, see

Robert Segal, “Hans Blumenberg as Theorist of Myth,” Theorizing about Myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 143.

104

chorus) are the grounds upon which Habermas hoped for the emergence of conditions of genuine

dialogue. Such a dialogue, or insight, which perhaps last but a moment, is the genuine interruption

of historical time (as opposed to the revolutionary one). Questions regarding truth, beauty and

justice – that which human life could aspire toward – emerge in such a moment as questions worthy

of the philosophical task.

The transformative nature of the contemplative historical gaze, which is interruptive in its

intent (that is, it seeks to interrupt the nature in which history has, thus far, destroyed all attempts at

new forms of life) does not discount utopian possibilities, but merely recognises human life thus far

as unmarked by them. There may be another (and here the concept of other is the foundational idea)

form of human life possible, but the framing of such a question (inherently the question of

philosophy) only emerges in the confrontation with our history, and its mythic shapes. The

reception of the inherent ambivalence of human life marks a way in which new philosophies might

offer new forms of life. The opening of new forms of dialogue from such insights promises the true

promise of enlightenment: perhaps, as Blumenberg suggests, there is something new to say after

all.322

In the classical myth, Niobe is punished for her pride. Her muteness becomes a manifestation

of fate in the earthly realm. And yet, as with the reception of Orpheus, the legacy of Niobe in

history is less straightforward. Throughout her reception, she has struggled, and spoken against it,

overcoming her fate — Niobe suddenly speaks!323 Such an articulation represents and extraordinary

moment in history. If mûthos and logos differentiate between particular kinds of speech act — one

authoritative, one explanatory — it is unambiguous that Niobe’s primary tragedy is a result of fate’s

terrible authority. The question is, then, in the renditions of the myth where she speaks against fate,

what kind of speech act does she thrust upon an unsuspecting world? If the Orphean gaze seeks

another articulation of human life in the face of history’s terrible ambivalence, perhaps Niobe, as

she is received throughout that history, embodies a particular hope for human life.

322 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 636. 323 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1926), 433.

105

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