History as a Work of the Imagination in Robin G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/RF.2017.028Keywords
anthropology, philosophy of man, history, historical imagination, historiographyAbstract
In this article, I claim that the ontological and anthropological optics that shaped among the standpoints of Kant, Humboldt, and Droysen was also adopted by Collingwood in dealing with historical issues. Dualism was its mode of rendering human reality. This meant that a proper approach to man involved conceiving him on two tiers: in his concrete historical form, but also in terms of the totality of human “nature,” or the possibilities of existence it includes. The second tier was commonly called “spirit” by the philosophers and philosophizing history writers of the nineteenth century. Referring to the cardinal points, the article sketches how its understanding grew deeper on the way from Kant to Droysen. Collingwood takes sides with Humboldt and Droysen, placing the methodological issue of the role of the imagination in history writing in the broader framework of the philosophy of history. He also does it by extracting a supra-individual structure from the empirical history – the “history of thought” as the constant movement of human imagination. Collingwood sees the historian’s participation in this “living history of thought” as the ontological justification for the objectivity of the imaginative view of the past in history.
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