Is Incapsulation the Presupposition or Product of Historical Thinking?
In general, Collingwood’s incapsulation doctrine as it appears in An Autobiography seems to hold that the fact that aspects of the past are incapsulated in the present is an absolute presupposition of re-enactment, and thus, is a condition for the possibility of historical knowledge. In one place, however, the fact of incapsulation now seems to be not the presupposition of re-enactment, but its product. The context is Collingwood describing what it means to re-enact Nelson’s thought ‘in honour I won them, in honour I will die with them’, upon which he writes:
To Nelson, that thought was a present thought; to me, it is a past thought living in the present but (as I have elsewhere put it) incapsulated, not free. What is an incapsulated thought? It is a thought which, though perfectly alive, forms no part of the question-answer complex which constitutes what people call the ‘real’ life, the superficial or obvious present, of the mind in question. For myself, or for that which at first sight I regard as myself, the question ‘shall I take off my decorations?’ does not arise.
This would seem to imply that a past thought becomes incapsulated when being re-enacted, as opposed to the fact of its already being incapsulated allowing either its own re-enactment or the re-enactment of a thought close to it that is not incapsulated.
Nevertheless, there might not be an either/or here. So, in the first instance, the ‘incapsulated’ thoughts are those of the past still alive in the present. These then allow historical inquiry to begin. In pursuing this inquiry, however, the historian comes to re-think thoughts that were not incapsulated – after all, history is still about the past, even if this past does to some extent overlap with the present. In coming to re-think thoughts unknown in the present, however, they are added to the present – the present of the historian now including this new historical knowledge. In re-enacting a thought that was not originally incapsulated, then, the historian raises it to the status of being incapsulated, a constituent part of her historical knowledge in the present that may then serve as the bridgehead for understanding some still earlier happening. In sum, while historical inquiry cannot begin without parts of the past being incapsulated in the present, in its very success it expands the range of incapsulated past thoughts.
