Incapsulation as an Epistemological Necessity
The foundational claim of Collingwood’s ‘mature’ philosophy of history, of course, is his dictum that the processes of human history are processes of ‘thought’. Following from this, he argued that elements of the past are ‘incapsulated’ in the present, this then making historical knowledge possible (see ch.9 of An Autobiography and the critique of Herbert Spencer in The Idea of History in particular). So, if we divide up an historical process into distinct periods, the patterns of reasoning and belief that constitute each period will overlap, aspects of the first period being ‘live’ in the second, aspects of the second ‘live’ in the third, and so on. In coming to understand and re-think the thoughts of the distant past, then, the historian will progressively work her way back from the thoughts of a time she is familiar with – ultimately, the thoughts of the present – to the thoughts she is seeking to discover and comprehend, becoming able to understand an earlier period because the meanings that constitute it overlap with those of its successor. If there were no incapsulation, however, the thought of one period having no overlap with its successor, the different phases of an historical process would exhibit an absolute incommensurability that would render the past unknowable in principle – or so Collingwood’s reasoning goes.
In considering this thesis, the first thing one might point out is that Collingwood is unclear as to what sort of ‘thought’ needs to be shared between two periods for the first to become knowable given knowledge of the second – in other words, what type of thing goes into the ‘bridgehead’ (if I may borrow Hollis’ term) that knowledge of the successor period provides or at least contributes too?
Secondly, and as Leo Strauss pointed out in his extended review of IH, there may be cultures that are entirely unrelated to one another, Collingwood’s theory as a result failing to show how it is possible for (say) a twentieth century English historian to study Incan history. Nevertheless, it is unclear that Collingwood himself would have seen Strauss’s point here as a criticism; at least, one may easily enough find passages in his work such as the following:
[T]he mere fact that someone has expressed his thoughts in writing, and that we possess his works, does not enable us to understand his thoughts. In order that we may be able to do so, we must come to the reading of them prepared with an experience sufficiently like his own to make those thoughts organic to it (IH, p.300).
Because of this, early commentators such as Peter Winch wrote of Collingwood’s ‘profound historical scepticism’ – the interpretive claim being, while the whole rationale of the theory of re-enactment was to show how historical knowledge as such is possible, Collingwood did not therefore intend to show how knowledge of every particular aspect of the past is possible, far from it.
