History as mind atoned: a reading of R.G. Collingwood

This thesis advances a new reading and interpretation of the philosophy of Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943). It explores Collingwood’s conception of Western civilization—which he sometimes identified with liberalism—as a civilization that is ultimately rooted in the Christian faith and animated by a conception of freedom of the will as the achievement of historical consciousness. The organizing hypothesis is that Collingwood gave a central place to Christian faith in Western civilization. He assumed that, so far from being aberrant or infantile, religion was one of the chief forms of consciousness along with art, science, history and philosophy, that religious insight was the key to understanding human history, and that without the vital spark it kindled, civilization could not survive. Self-knowledge was a dialectical movement from this religious insight towards a higher-order historical consciousness of the self in possession of free will, which involved consciousness of others as possessing free will of their own. The well-being and vitality of Western civilization, and its preservation in the face of the forces of barbarism, is shown to depend in Collingwood’s view upon continuous nourishment from its Christian ‘absolute presuppositions’, and, more broadly, from what Collingwood described as ‘the central doctrine of Christianity’, the idea of the Incarnation and Atonement. In his hands, this idea was translated into terms of universal significance: mind, history, and community were explicated in those terms and fell into one pattern of explanation, in which false oppositions were exposed and transcended through the reconciliation of the infinite and the finite, the eternal and the temporal, thought and mind, mind and man, man and man, man and God. The thesis presents Collingwood’s enquiries into religion, art, history, philosophy and politics and his arguments for a reformed metaphysics and a reformed conception of history as aspects of a single picture that was structured by his vision of the Incarnation as the (self) revelation to man that ‘he can become God, can be what he ought to be.’ What this meant for Collingwood was giving life to the divine spirit in man, by becoming or being ‘the right kind’ of person, one capable qua moral agent of acting dutifully and qua historian of entering into the minds of the persons whose actions he or she was studying. Such a person embodies in fact, to a greater or lesser degree, the Collingwoodian ideal I call in this thesis the atoned mind: for he is to that degree at one with himself and other men, and is eo ipso free. The thesis demonstrates this through an effort to circumvent dominant analytic and technical readings of Collingwood on the one hand, and on the other hand, to embrace a reading of Collingwood’s historicism not as a problem to be solved, but as the solution to a problem imposed by a naturalistic philosophy of history. Only when the Atonement is taken seriously as thought, is it possible to begin to understand the nature of the ideal that underpins the European Christian mind, and why Collingwood insisted that Western liberalism is an expression of Christianity in theory and in practice