Chapter 7 - Period and Place: Wittgenstein and Collingwood on Understanding Others

Summary

Prologue

What it takes to understand radically different others lies at the heart of the philosophies developed by Collingwood and Wittgenstein at roughly the same time. Their approaches differ in three ways that are prima facie significant but ultimately prove to be little more than a divergence in emphasis. This is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that the two thinkers are frequently thought to stand at opposite ends of the methodological spectrum with respect to the value of metaphysics.

First, there is the difference between period and place. Whereas Wittgenstein typically considers examples of (chiefly fictional) people from geographically distant strange lands, Collingwood concentrates specifically on the thought and action of past figures from the history of Western civilization. This relates to the second difference between them, which is that Collingwood is primarily interested in individuals, whereas Wittgenstein focuses on collectives of people. The third, arguably greatest, difference is in their conceptions of what understanding involves. For Collingwood, this is a matter of re-enacting the practical reasoning of those concerned; Wittgenstein, by contrast, seems to think that it requires a serious immersion in the other's form of life, a feat more – on some views only – feasible with one's contemporaries.

We must nonetheless view their approaches to understanding others as complementary rather than opposed. For one thing, it is plausible to expect parallel conditions for understanding the foreign present and the local past (as in historical understanding). As the famous opening line of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between contends, ‘the past is another country, they do things differently there’ (Hartley 1953, 1). We must also take care not to exaggerate the differences between their interests. Wittgenstein does not focus solely on understanding one's contemporaries, and Collingwood was certainly interested in cultural beliefs and practices, as exemplified in his historical works as well as in his doctrine of absolute presuppositions (arguably inspired by Evans-Pritchard but connected to the ‘hinge propositions’ of Wittgenstein's On Certainty) and in his critique of anthropology. Pari passu, not all of Collingwood's pronouncements are about individuals, and, as we shall see, Wittgenstein's more personal worries about understanding others focus explicitly on the thought of individuals.