Collingwood on the Concept of ‘Influence’
In The Idea of History, Collingwood writes of the study of ‘influences’ as ‘futile’ when they ‘are conceived as the decanting of ready-made thoughts out of one mind into another’. The error here, he claims, is twofold: of seeing the inquiry into influences as valuable in itself rather than as the upshot of seeking to identify the problem one’s subject was seeking to answer (this problem being obscure in the present because it was taken as a given in the subject’s own context), and of thinking that relations of influence are relations of similarity rather than relations of where ‘the conclusions reached by one thinker [gave] rise to problems for the next’. True intellectual history, then, is the history of an ongoing dialectic of problem and solution.
Now one immediate objection that might be raised here – an objection, indeed, that was actually raised by Leo Strauss in his interesting review of IH – is that this distorts history by unreasonably stipulating a presupposition of necessary progress, the historian in understanding the past having to show a progressive increase in knowledge amongst those whose work she studies. I don’t think this inference holds however.
The reason for this is that when a philosopher sets to work on a problem, one may assume the problem to have two sources: the studies of her intellectual forebears, and her own particular context. In her own theorising, then, the philosopher contributes both to an intellectual history that, potentially at least, spans millennia (it is unusual for a Western political philosopher not to see their work as contributing to an intellectual tradition that begins with Plato if not earlier, for instance), and to the self-understanding of her own age, be this self-understanding affirmatory (‘the real is indeed rational, and objective spirit has reached its culmination in post-Napoleonic Prussia’) or near-despair (‘after Auschwitz one can no longer write poetry’). Allow there to be a merely contingent relation between these two dimensions of an intellectual problem, then, and what I have called the ‘dialectic’ of problem and solution need not be much of a dialectic at all, since each philosopher in the process will be working on a genuinely distinct problem, the solution of one philosopher not necessarily being a solution for a predecessor. (Cf. Collingwood’s account of genuine progress in IH: progress occurs only when the persons whose views or livelihoods have supposedly been superseded would recognise the supposed successor as superior.)
