Polytropy

Published in 1916, during World War I, Religion and Philosophy is the first book of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), but contains some of his finest writing and most inspired vision.

The vision is of a unified world. For example, punishment and forgiveness are not two kinds of justice, but one. Justice brings about “the criminal’s … regeneration and recovery into the life of a good society” (III.ii.2.b, page 179). This recovery inevitably involves “the pain of self-condemnation or moral repentance” (III.ii.2.b, page 178). Thus the just response to a crime is both

• to punish it, rather than to ignore it;
• to forgive it, rather than to use it as an excuse to inflict further suffering.

A theological term for justice is atonement. In reviewing Collingwood’s book for the International Journal of Ethics (Jul., 1917, Vol. 27, No. 4, p. 543), T. S. Eliot wrote,

The philosophical interpretation of the Incarnation, of the Atonement and of Miracle, are extremely well handled.

Incarnation and Atonement are the same thing for Collingwood, namely,

that taking-up of humanity into God which is called the Incarnation or the Atonement, according as the emphasis is laid on God’s self-expression through humanity or man’s redemption through the spirit of God. (III.i, page 147)

Miracles cannot be distinguished from ordinary events. For example,

Every cure is equally a miracle, and every doctor (like every other active and creative mind) a miracle-worker, in the only sense which can reasonably be attached to the word. (III.iii.3.a, page 211)

When so many people delight in classifying themselves, as by nationality, religion, sexuality, or football team, it is salutary that Collingwood points out,

To the eye of perfect insight … everything is unique. For such a consciousness there are no classes, there are only individuals; not in chaos, for every individual is related to every other … The true relation between individuals is not the resemblance which connects members of a class, but the co-operation which unites parts of a whole. (III.iii.3.b.ii, pages 213–4)

Collingwood may carry the unifications too far. He says, “there is no distinction whatever between Theology and Religion, so far as the intellectual aspect of religion is concerned” (I.i.2, page 12). Likewise, “the true religion and the true philosophy must coincide,” because “religion and philosophy are views of the same thing—the ultimate nature of the universe” (I.i.3.b, page 18). Even philosophy (or religion) and science are in principle the same:

It is no doubt possible to forget the whole in laying stress on isolated parts, as it is possible to forget details in the general view of a whole. But each of these is a false abstraction; we cannot identify the former with science and the latter with religion or philosophy. The ideal, alike for philosophy and science, is to see the part in its place in the whole, and the whole perfectly exemplified in the part. (I.i.3.c, page 20)

If the reader objects to the identification of theology, religion, and philosophy, Collingwood himself will agree in his next book, Speculum Mentis, in a footnote on the first page of Chapter IV, called “Religion”:

I may perhaps be permitted here to refer to a book called Religion and Philosophy which I published in 1916, and in which I tried to give a general account of the nature of the religious consciousness, tested and illustrated by detailed analyses of the central doctrines of Christianity. With much of what that book contains I am still in agreement; but there are certain principles which I then overlooked or denied, in the light of which many of its faults can be corrected. The chief of these principles is the distinction between implicit and explicit. I contended throughout that religion, theology, and philosophy were identical, and this I should now not so much withdraw as qualify by pointing out that the ‘empirical’ (i.e. real but unexplained) difference between them is that theology makes explicit what in religion as such is always implicit, and so with philosophy and theology. This error led me into a too intellectualistic or abstract attitude towards religion, of which many critics rightly accused me …

Religion, theology, and philosophy together are an example of the key idea of Collingwood’s 1933 book, An Essay on Philosophical Method: the overlap of classes. In one of the examples in the Essay, while doing one’s duty may always bring about or increase happiness, the concepts of duty and the promotion of happiness are not identical, and to think otherwise is what Collingwood calls “the fallacy of identified coincidents.” Thus he himself has committed this fallacy in Religion and Philosophy, regarding the two concepts in the title.

In Religion and Philosophy, Collingwood spends little time on the so-called Ontological Proof. Having delivered a series of lectures on the proof, starting in 1920, Collingwood will devote to it a chapter, called “Philosophy as Categorical Thinking,” of An Essay on Philosophical Method. As an example or application of the Proof, he will show how the philosophical sciences of logic and ethics are not simply descriptive (or empirical), and neither are they simply prescriptive (or normative). They concern not just what we do, in thought or act, but what we try to do, by our own standards. To me, as a logician, this makes perfect sense. I am not a judge who can send you to prison for making bad arguments. I ought to be able to help you make your arguments clearer, if that is something you want.

A science such as logic and ethics (also aesthetics and economics) gives an account—in Greek, a logos (λόγος)—of the criteria that we apply in judging our own efforts. In a word, such a science is criteriological. Collingwood will not actually use this word until The Principles of Art of 1938. He will explicate the concept of a criteriological science more fully in An Essay on Metaphysics of 1940. Meanwhile, in Religion and Philosophy, we can see the germ of the idea, with philosophy as the example:

And if theology is to be a merely empirical science, it has a corresponding right to make uncriticised assumptions. But the sting of the criticism lies in the fact that theology claims to be more than this. It presents itself as a philosophy, a view of the universe as a whole, the ultimate ground of reality; and philosophy can take nothing for granted … a philosopher has no right to construct the nature of morality out of his inner consciousness, and end in the pious hope that the reality may correspond with his “ideal construction.” His business as a philosopher is to discover what actually are the ideals which govern conduct, and not to speak until he has something to tell us about them. (II.i.1.a, pages 59–60)

In An Essay on Metaphysics, Collingwood will observe that, while a purely empirical science of human feeling is possible, and this is what psychology properly is, the same cannot exist for thought. As he will already have pointed out in The Principles of Art, thought differs from feeling by being “bipolar” in the sense that it can be done well or not. Both thought and feeling are in the scope of Collingwood’s work:

• Feeling is the subject of The Principles of Art, where art is found to be the creation of an imaginary experience whereby we express our emotions, by way of understanding them.
• Thinking is the subject of “The Principles of History,” which Collingwood could not complete, though some of the manuscript was published in 1946 in The Idea of History. The point of history is to understand the thought of others, and we normally cannot do this unless that thought has been successful, because otherwise we cannot figure out what those other persons were trying to do in the first place.

As a teacher, I am supposed to judge whether my students are thinking successfully. This is not like judging their health, with blood test or thermometer; for this kind of judging can be done without the subjects’ active participation. A brain scan might show whether students are thinking rather than sleeping; but it will not show whether they are thinking well. On the other hand, the students should be learning how to tell for themselves whether they are thinking well.

For his own understanding of the impossibility of an empirical science of thought, Collingwood, in An Autobiography of 1939, will credit the work that has gone into Religion and Philosophy. He says there, for example,

In conduct generally we have certain actions, individual or social, designed to attain the ends of morality, utility, or the like; psychology will study these actions without asking whether they are right or wrong, but taking them merely as things done. In general, the characteristic of psychology is the refusal to raise ultimate questions. And since that is so, it is plainly not in a position to offer answers to them. (I.iii.1.a, pages 40–1)

One of those ultimate questions is simply whether what we are doing is any good. Collingwood thought he had work to do that was worth doing. During World War II, when he knew he was dying, he managed to publish one last book, The New Leviathan: Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (1942), an account of what he thought was worth defending against the Nazis. The teaching of Jesus of Nazareth that he seems to have taken most to heart is Matthew 5:48,

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

For Collingwood, in Religion and Philosophy (I.iii.5, page 53),

the historical life of Jesus is the guarantee that man can be perfect if he will.

Collingwood applies the idea of perfection throughout Religion and Philosophy:

• “A philosophical problem cannot be insoluble, though it may be too hard for you or me to solve satisfactorily” (II.iv.1.a, pages 123–4).

• “Pain seems to involve imperfection only in the sense in which any one who has a thing to do and has not yet done it is imperfect; and in that sense imperfection is only another name for activity and perfection for death” (II.iv.1.b.i, page 126).

• “The world we see around us is not a stationary, already-existing, given totality, but a totality in the making: its unity consists only in the striving towards unity on the part of the minds which constitute it. This does not mean that its completion lies at some point in the future; it is a completion that never is and never will be attained for good and all, but one which is always being attained. The life of the world, like the life of a man, consists in perpetual activity” (II.iv.3.a, pages 140–1).

• “God’s attitude towards the sins of men must be one which combines condemnation of the sinful will with love and hope for it; these two being combined not as externally connected and internally inconsistent elements of a state of mind, but as being the single necessary expression of his perfect nature towards natures less perfect, but regarded as capable of perfection” (III.ii.3, page 180).

One may raise here the same sort of question that Eliot did:

Mr. Collingwood attacks the problem of evil by conceiving of God “not as imposing his will on the world from without, but as himself sharing in all the experiences of other minds.” “God is the absolute good will.” Mr. Collingwood admits that the universe is a totality only in posse. One is tempted to ask whether the omnipotence and absolute good will of God are also in posse.

Read the book and see what you think!