Collingwood and historical time

Jonathan Gorman
Paper delivered 24th March 2011 to
University of London Institute of Historical Research
Research Seminar in Philosophy of History

I
The boundaries of historiography

Among the invitations I received in the first six months of last year were one
from Robert Burns, to give a paper to this distinguished seminar on some
aspect of Collingwood; and another from Germany, where the School of
History in the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies has invited me to give a
paper in two weeks from now. This is for a workshop called “Breaking up
Time. Settling the Borders between the Present, the Past and the Future”.1
This made my decisions about these invitations easy: they both had to
involve planning to use Collingwood to make sense of historical time. But
Collingwood does not seem to me to address directly and at any length issues
about historical time,2 and these issues need first to be teased out by using
the questions which the German workshop raised.

The German call for papers remarks, “Since the birth of modernity history has
presupposed the existence of ‘the past’ as its object, yet the concept of ‘the
past’ and the distinction between the categories of ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and
‘the future’ have seldom been reflected upon within the boundaries of the
discipline [my stress]. They ask for “comparative analyses of the variety of
ways in which historians and historical actors have been breaking up time in
practice”. These questions seem eminently historical ones.

They also raise some distinctively philosophical rather than historiographical

issues: “is distinguishing between past, present and future simply a matter of
passively ‘recognizing’ or ‘observing’, what is ‘natural’ and ‘undeniable’, or
does it involve a more active stance in which social actors create and recreate
these divisions? Can we claim to know precisely how ‘present’ social and
cultural phenomena turn into (or come to be perceived/recognized as) past
phenomena?”

The distinction here between the historical questions and the philosophical
ones seems appropriate at first sight, but the German call for papers is a
touch ambiguous: it is written as if they might think that the philosophical
issues lie within the boundaries of the discipline of historiography. Those
whose philosophical approach is historicist, in an appropriately relevant sense

1 nd
Organised by Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage. Email to H-HISTORY-AND-THEORY list sent 2 June 2010,
for FRIAS-Workshop “Breaking up Time. Settling the Borders between the Present, the Past and the Future”,
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, School of History, Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany, 7-9 April
2011.
2
However, see Angela Requate, “R.G. Collingwood and G.H. Mead on the concept of time in history”, in David
Boucher and Bruce Haddock (eds.), Collingwood Studies, vol. 5, Explorations, Swansea: R.G. Collingwood Society,
1998, pp. 72-89, stressing a pragmatic interpretation of Collingwood in his Speculum Mentis, inter alia.
of that word, will think that, just as we all live in history, so all our
understanding must be cast in a historical mode. Such historicists may then
also think that there are no boundaries to historiography, that is, no
boundaries to the discipline of history. Whether such historicism is true, and
whether this implication for the limits of the discipline of historiography is true,
are not questions which will be directly addressed in this paper.3 Instead of
assuming that philosophy is, on historicist grounds, subordinate to
historiography, an elementary and traditional kind of contrast between the
disciplines of historiography and that of philosophy will be assumed here.

Yet, as Herman Paul rightly notes in his recent History and Theory article, in
my book Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice,4 I “blur
the borderline”, as he puts it, between the history of historiography and the
philosophy of history.5 My approach in that book is analogous to W.V.
Quine’s approach to the analytic/synthetic distinction, often described as a
“denial”, which leads to his view that philosophy and science are continuous
with each other. However, what is denied, both by Quine and in Historical
Judgement, is only such distinctions interpreted as metaphilosophically a
priori. The distinctions can remain on pragmatic grounds; they are fluid, not
fixed, and can change over time. The holist pragmatism explained by Quine
and used in broadly anti-realist form in Historical Judgement, is also adopted
in this paper.6 It is a historicist approach,7 but not one which requires the
outright denial of the historiography/philosophy distinction. The approach
sees history as what historiography expresses it to be, with historical
understanding part of the rolling web of reality-counting expressions, a
diachronic and historiographical version of Quine’s “web of belief” which has
both past and future.8

The organisers of the Freiburg workshop wish to connect historical debates

about temporal distinctions between ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ with
philosophical debates of a similar kind. But these debates barely exist, in
either discipline. Just as it is fair to say that “the concept of ‘the past’, and the
distinction between the categories of ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’,”
in the way historians use those words, have seldom been reflected upon by
historians, so they also have not been much reflected upon within the
traditionally-understood boundaries of the discipline of philosophy, as Frank
Ankersmit noted in 1990.9 While the word “time” appears in the titles of a

3
Some of the issues here are addressed in Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical
Choice, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007 and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.
4
Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007 and
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, pp. 33-40.
5
Herman Paul, “Performing history: how historical scholarship is shaped by epistemic virtues”, History and Theory
50, 2011, pp. 1-19 at p. 12. I don’t think I can go quite as far as Collingwood: “My life’s work”, he said, “as seen
from my fiftieth year, has been in the main an attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and
history”. R.G. Collingwood, Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, p. 77.
6
The approach is explained in the workshop paper “The grammar of historiography”. An abridged version of this
appears as Jonathan Gorman, “The grammar of historiography”, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Journal of
the History of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science [«Грамматика историографии», Эпистемология &
философия науки [Журнал Института философии Российской Академии наук] 3, 2010, 44-53.
7
This is argued for in my “The presuppositions of writing the history of historiography”, Storia della storiografia,
forthcoming 2011.
8
The “rolling web” is also explained at some length in Jonathan Gorman, “The presuppositions of writing the history
of historiography”, Storia della storiografia, forthcoming 2011.
9
Frank Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis: over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit,
Gröningen: Historische Uitgeverij Gröningen, 1990, p. 110; a reference I owe to Maria Grever.
number of writings by philosophers of history, it often does no more work than
the word “history” does, and, in general, most of the few philosophers – and
certainly the analytical philosophers – who have shown an interest in time in
the last hundred years or so have sought to make sense of time as that
concept applies in physics. I am not aware of any sustained and detailed
work comparing or contrasting perceptions or conceptions of time between
historiography and physics.

Moreover, such a project would be at once both too small and too big. Too
small, because isolating the physicists’ conception of time and attempting to
apply it to historiography could only be a very limited, and by itself probably
unintelligible, part of what ought to be a much larger project, of attempting to
apply the physicists’ conception of everything to historiography. Its limitation
and partiality would be so marked as to ensure failure. For the same
reasons, such a project would be too big if undertaken properly, for it would
then be an investigation into how far historiography does or can accept all the
assumptions and concepts and standards of physics, and not just those
relating to time. It would be to re-run the old debates about scientism in
historiography, debates as indeterminate as they are old and vast and
perhaps even dull.

II
Time in physics

Some philosophers, although not Collingwood, have recognised the need to

reflect upon historical time for its own sake, as it were. Here is Paul Weiss of
Yale speaking at the 1962 Symposium on Philosophy of History at the New
York University Institute of Philosophy:10 “An historic occurrence takes place
in a present which stretches over a number of the moments appropriate to
nonhistoric occurrences. It’s about time we asked ourselves how it is
possible for there to be presents of different lengths – or what is the same
question from another side, how it is possible for the historic and the
nonhistoric worlds to be related to one another”.11 He concluded, “The past
and the future effectively condition the nature of the historic present,
and…any attempt to isolate the present or to subdivide it will involve a loss of
something distinctively historic”.12

That is as far as Weiss went, but already he presupposed more than is easily
justifiable. His conclusion is that the historic present is conditioned by past
and future, and that the historic present cannot be isolated with respect to
past and future. But he strongly assumes a contrast between the “historic”
and the “unhistoric”: he plainly has no difficulty in allowing that the unhistoric
present can be unconditioned by past and future, and distinguished and
isolated from them. Indeed, the unhistoric present can be subdivided into

10 th th
11 -12 May, 1962.
11
Paul Weiss, “It’s about time”, in the conference proceedings: Sidney Hook (ed.), Philosophy and History: A
Symposium, New York: New York University Press, 1963, pp. 367-371 at pp. 368-9. Weiss was an indefatigable
fighter against ageism.
12
Paul Weiss, “It’s about time”, in Sidney Hook (ed.), Philosophy and History: A Symposium, New York: New York
University Press, 1963, pp. 367-371 at p. 369.
“moments”, and he uses this idea to explain that there are “presents of
different lengths”. Some of these are “historic presents”, a view which he
then – unsurprisingly – finds problematic, since his argument then suggests
that the historic present both does and does not consist of “moments”.

Then, he wonders, how can there be different lengths? How is the one
“present” related to the other?13 How is the historic world related to the
nonhistoric world? These questions are not at all clear, but it is plain that, if
his approach is right, we cannot make sense of time in the historic world
unless we can also make sense of time in the nonhistoric world, for he
presents and explains the one as existing as part of and in partial contrast to
the other. Two issues then arise for his overall explanation: first, whether
and how the unhistoric present can be isolated or subdivided into “moments”
and the like; second, how, given an answer to the first question, the historic
present is to be accounted for.

Weiss casts these issues in terms of the “present”, although that does not
necessarily mean our current “present” but rather the “present” of those past
historical events with which the historian is dealing. Understanding “present”
in this way, Weiss then imagines the “nonhistoric present” – that “present”
world before historians get their hands on it – stretching over a period of time.
He imagines that period of time as made up of “moments”, only “a number” of
which, that is, only some, make up the “historic present”. Thus he is
imagining that historians may be understood as selecting from that nonhistoric
period a smaller number of “moments”, so producing a historic period which,
since it has a different number of moments from the nonhistoric, has a
different length.

What, next, is Weiss’s nonhistoric present supposed to be? As I have

expressed Weiss’s point, it is the present world before historians get their
hands on it. It is, for Weiss, as if this temporally structured basis was already
there to be selected and moulded by historians into shorter temporal modes.
He does not mention historians structuring the nonhistoric present into a
longer mode; Weiss’s conception of the nonhistoric present is clearly that it
stretches over a longer period of time than any historic present, and he may
well be thinking of an infinite period of time, perhaps infinite twice over,
stretching into both past and future. If so, it is not present at all, as we now
ordinarily understand that.14 Moreover, Weiss thinks of this period as being
made up of a number of temporal “moments”, a conception which lies outside
the normal historiographical organisation of time. Given his view about the
place of “moments” in time, it is highly plausible to conclude that Weiss is here
drawing on an understanding of time which presupposes what Collingwood
described as David Hume’s “sensational atomism” in his 1925 article “Some

13
I shall drop the use of quotation marks around “present” after this paragraph, intending the word to be allowedly
read as referring to the “present” of historical agents, who may well be in the past.
14
We might instead hold to “eternalism”, the view that things in the past, present and future exist eternally, and that is
another way of saying that every event is present. It is assumed here that our current ordinary understanding of
“present” does not involve a commitment to this metaphysical position. However, see the paragraph associated with
footnote 79. “Presentism” in historiography I understand to be the anachronistic use of present-day approaches in
interpreting the past.
perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”.15 As the pragmatist
William James put it, “Time itself comes in drops”.16

Given Weiss’s view that nonhistoric time is there to be selected and moulded
by historians into shorter temporal modes, it may seem that, for Weiss, the
nonhistoric present is more basic in actuality than the historic present, and we
can easily see how we might slide from this to the view that nonhistoric reality
is what we are truly given, whereas historic reality is merely that constructed
by historians. We might then think that, briefly expressed, the nonhistoric is
objective and that the historic is subjective. We might then conclude that
time is objectively atomistic. At the time Weiss was writing, such atomism
was part of a fairly standard approach in the philosophy of the physical
sciences, a Humean empiricist approach which many philosophers – although
explicitly not Collingwood – had tried to extend to embrace all our human
understanding.

Following Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Foucault and many others, philosophers and

historians have today moved well beyond such positivism. However,
whatever Weiss himself thought, it should be observed that Weiss’s
arguments themselves do not presuppose or express a positivist position. At
most, his argument at this point merely draws on science as the source of an
answer to a factual question about the nature of time. It is often appropriate
for historians to draw on the sciences as part of their activities: for example,
the latest advances in medicine can properly constrain historians’ views about
the spread and impact of disease in the past.

What, then, does science tell us about the nature of time? Think of Kant’s
view of time, as, like space, an a priori intuition. This, in Kant’s view, shares
with other a priori features of the mind’s understanding of reality a central
feature: that of fixedness, of unchangeability. But this status does not, like
the categories, primarily derive from Kant’s view that reason is similarly
unchanging. Rather, it is a characteristic which is designed by him to match
the absolute frame of time and space which is asserted in Newton’s physics,
held by Kant to be true. Kant’s aim here is not to justify the truth of that
physics but to answer the transcendental question of how that given truth is
possible. Newtonian physics gives Kant the view that time and space provide
an unchangeable and eternal background which frames all possible
experience. The conditions for our experience, and the world as we
experience it to be, are alike to be understood in this way. Our individual
subjective understanding of time is also the time of the universe itself. This
Newton-derived truth is there for all of us, and a forteriori there for historians
too.

Yet, as mathematical physicist Stephen Hawking said, “before 1915, space

and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place. …it
was natural to think that space and time went on forever”.17 But, he

15
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 137.
16
William James, A Pluralistic Universe, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909, p. 232.
17
Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, London: Bantam, 1988, p. 33.
continued, “Roger Penrose and I showed that Einstein’s general theory of
relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning and, possibly, an
end”.18 Yet Hawking knew full well how problematic it was to suppose that
the ordinary English word “beginning” could properly be applied in this
context, given that he suspected that it was also the case that there was “no
boundary to space-time”.19 Physics does not, in fact, give us a clear view of
time. In part, it keeps a roughly traditional view that the world is made of tiny
particles moving in time and space, but those particles have other
characteristics than position and velocity, such as mass, electric charge and
so-called “colour” and “spin”. Historians do not need to know the details of
what is called here “quantum field theory”, but it enables physicists to make
sense of electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces affecting
such tiny particles, while it is also consistent, as physicists require it to be,
with quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity. These tiny
particles are well made sense of using this approach.

Unfortunately, despite its merits for understanding tiny particles, this approach
does not work for very large things like stars or the universe as a whole,
despite the fact that the very large things are made up of the tiny things. With
very large things gravity has a major role to play, and gravity, described by
Einstein's general (rather than special) relativity theory, does not fit into the
scheme of quantum field theory. Whenever one tries to apply the rules of
quantum field theory to general relativity “one gets results which make no
sense”, say the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
at Cambridge.20 Theoretical physics gives a name to that research which
tries to unify in a consistent way quantum mechanics with general relativity,
namely “quantum gravity”, but – unless one is heavily into the mathematics –
this is for many of us in the humanities not much more than a name. A
central difficulty is that the physics of tiny things uses what physicists, with a
range of metaphors at their command, call a flat space-time, while the physics
of very large things uses what they call a curved space-time. Whatever these
amount to, they cannot both be right about the nature of time.21

Quantum gravity seeks consistent unification, consistent resolution of this

conflict. But as Christian Wüthrich, of the University of California at San
Diego, puts it, “Among the most striking features of most approaches to
quantum gravity is their claim that spacetime as we know and love it
disappears in one form or another from the fundamental furniture of the world.
…[However, this] poses the additional threat of empirical incoherence, as the
absence of space and time deprives us of apparent prerequisites for the
empirical testing of physical theories”.22 Hence physics fails to give us a
consistent theory about the nature of time, or, if consistency is to be found,
time as we understand the meaning of that word disappears, or the theory is
empirically unfounded, or all these things.
18
Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, London: Bantam, 1988, p. 34.
19
Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, London: Bantam, 1988, p. 136.
20
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.
th
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html. Accessed by me 7 March 2011.
21 th
Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity. Accessed by me 7 March 2011.
22
PHILOS-L general Email notice, received from Roman Frigg [[email protected]], announcing Sigma Club
th
meeting on 7 March 2011 to hear paper from Chris Wüthrich on “To the Planck scale and back: on the emergence
of spacetime in quantum theories of gravity”.
 III
Folk time

While a good many of us historians and philosophers will have little idea what
the small print of the physicist’s sense of time amounts to, we do share the
same world with them. We know that theories in physics are not intended to
be flights of fancy, and that they are intended to be well confirmed by the
empirical evidence. Evidence, however, has to be sought and found in the
world as we experience it to be, and that is an everyday commonsense world
structured in terms of time and space as we ordinarily understand those. Our
sciences have to be grounded in that human experience. As already
remarked, following Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Foucault and many others, we no
longer think that science achieves a simple “objectivity”. On the contrary, it is
characteristic of the sciences that they assert so much more than human
experience readily yields. Scientific theories are familiarly understood as
underdetermined by the evidence.

If we are to allow anything at all to count as foundational for us in this practical

context, the nearest to it is commonsense everyday understanding itself.
This we may call, modifying the term “folk-psychological” from recent
philosophy of mind (for we are not engaging here in the philosophy of mind),
“folk”. Many philosophers think that the folk understandings in our ordinary
language express a theory of the world. This “theory”, if such it is, is no
doubt also underdetermined by the evidence. Whether that is so or not,
these folk conceptions are the ones we actually have and they are historically
located. We inherit them, and they are foundational in the sense that,
consistently with our pragmatic approach derived from Quine, we normally
feel disposed to conserve them, such that the burden of proof lies on those
who seek revision.23

This folk conception is not “unhistoric”, for historians use the very same
commonsense everyday understanding as the rest of us, and in particular
they do so about time. Weiss’s contrast between the historic and the
nonhistoric, which he then uses to try to make sense of the historic, can
amount to no more than an attempt to make sense of the commonsense
everyday conception of time in terms of a view of time derived from some
elementary pre-1915 understanding of physics, as being of vast if not infinite
length and as split into “moments”. There is no need to invent difficulties by
unnecessary comparisons between historiography and subjects like physics
which are problematically seen as foundational. Our real difficulties lie in
making sense of our commonsense everyday understanding of time, which
historians share. We need to identify these difficulties, and they initially lie in
noting and wondering about the wide variation which is available both to
commonsense everyday understanding and to historians alike, as to what
counts as the present and about how time as we live through it is to be
understood.

23
Revision is further analysed in Jonathan Gorman, “The commonplaces of ‘revision’ and their implications for
historiographical understanding”, History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 on “Revision in History”, December 2007, 20-
44.
It is not direct comparisons with modern physics which produce the difficulties
about time here but quite ordinary attempts to speak about time without self-
contradiction or confusion. This was recognised in ancient Greece.
Consider a problem raised by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Imagine Achilles
and the Tortoise having a race. Achilles beforehand, knowing how fast he
can run, agrees to give the Tortoise a start of some short distance. They
both start at the same time. In order to catch the Tortoise, Achilles has first
to reach the point from which the Tortoise started. After a short time he
reaches it. In the time he takes to get there, the Tortoise moves a further
short distance. Achilles has next to make up this distance. In the time he
takes to do so the Tortoise moves a further short distance. Achilles has next
to make up this distance. In the time he takes to do so the Tortoise moves a
further short distance, and so on without end. Thus Achilles can never catch
the Tortoise.24

And yet of course we know perfectly well that Achilles does catch the
Tortoise. This being so, our argument must be wrong, but where is the
mistake? We seem to rely on nothing more than our everyday notions of
space, time and motion in achieving the unacceptable result. Zeno used this
sort of paradox as part of an argument for the unreality of space, time and
motion. Plainly space and time do not “add up” or “divide” in an endless way
as our ordinary understanding supposes in this example. If we think of reality
as requiring such a consistent repetition or universalisation of the concepts
involved, then indeed space, time and motion as ordinarily conceived are in
some way unreal, and Zeno was right: we must have, to some extent at least,
simplistic and incorrect conceptions of them. But, plausibly, it is not the
concepts of space, time and motion which are directly at fault here, but the
assumption that we can “add them up” in an endless way. It is indefinite
repetition or universalisability which is the problem.

Contrast Kant’s happy assumption of universal reason, his need to assume

the consistent truth of our best physics as the foundation for our
understanding of time, and the absolutism of his conclusion about time, with
the approach of later thinkers about time. Analytical philosophers of physics
apart, these are characteristically in the idealist tradition: F.H. Bradley,
Collingwood himself and John MacTaggart. Bradley, like Quine, thinks
experience needs to be grasped in a holistic fashion. For Bradley, the
existence of past, present and future is ambiguous; just as for Zeno, time is
an illusory and self-contradictory appearance, and so unreal;25 its
appearance is compatible with a timeless universe.26 “Immediate experience
in time” is “false appearance”.27 Perhaps, he speculated, there are many
different temporal series. He would have agreed that our folk conception of
time is incoherent, since reasoning with it yields paradoxes in simple
24
For further detail, see J.A. Faris, The Paradoxes of Zeno, Aldershot: Avebury, 1996.
25 nd
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2 edn. (ed. R. Wollheim), London: Oxford
University Press, 1897, p. 36. See, for summary form, Richard Wollheim, F.H. Bradley, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1959.
26 nd
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2 edn. (ed. R. Wollheim), London: Oxford
University Press, 1897, p. 194.
27 nd
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2 edn. (ed. R. Wollheim), London: Oxford
University Press, 1897, p. 279.
situations. Collingwood felt much the same: “My central difficulty is this:- All
statements ordinarily made about time seem to imply that time is something
which we know it is not, and make assumptions about it which we know to be
untrue”.28 But Collingwood was optimistic in a way we shall before long
dispute: “No doubt time, like knowledge and goodness and number, is sui
generis; but it does not follow that there can be no ‘theory’ of it, if that means
a reasoned discussion of the difficulties which are encountered when we try to
think about it. And that is the only sense in which I ask for a theory of time or
of anything else”.29

It would indeed be an advance if physics could make sense of the world as

we experience it without the difficulties we have seen, by replacing our
ordinary conceptions of space and time with concepts which were universally
extendable and applicable, so that we could then learn to perceive the world
in terms of them. Perhaps our ordinary everyday understanding should be
rationally revised in this way, and our perceptual consciousness expanded, as
Paul Churchland suggests in a different context.30 In fact, physics can’t
supply what is needed. Physics can make some sense of time when it
localises its interest to tiny things, and it can make some sense of time when it
localises its interest to very large things, but it cannot provide an overall
consistent view. Similarly, our everyday conception of space and time works
well for very local matters like running a race, but as soon as we try to reason
about it with the universalisable exactness that Zeno sought we find we have
no generally consistent view. Like Saint Augustine, we sort of know what
time is, so long as we are not asked to rationalise it, so long as we do not go
beyond our practical and local applications.

The upshot is that, despite its theoretical difficulties, we have here to work
with time as ordinary people and historians in practice understand it and live
through it. Even for the physicist, an understanding of time has to be
grounded in the local and everyday, if physical theories are to be empirically
justified. Our ordinary understanding of time involves a conceptualisation of
our experience of time, and achieving clarity about time in history involves
clarifying and rationalising as best we can our historiographical
conceptualisations of historical time, temporally limited and localised as in
practice they are. As we noted, William James said that time comes in
drops,31 but he was not here asserting an atomistic world-view but rather
expressing, no doubt very partially, part of the phenomenology of temporal
experience, of what we immediately feel. He rightly added, “Our ideal
decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into still finer fractions is
but an incident in that great transformation of the perceptual order into a
conceptual order… It is made in the interest of our rationalizing intellect
solely”.32

28
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 138.
29
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 138.
30
Paul M. Churchland, in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979, pp. 25ff and passim.
31
William James, A Pluralistic Universe, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909, p. 232.
32
William James, A Pluralistic Universe, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909, p. 232.
We do not have, yet, a fully rational conceptual order for our experience of
time. We all of us, historians included, have only our inherited temporal
conceptualisations of experience to draw on. “Drops” and “moments” are a
limited part of that inherited range of conceptualisations, but they are
nevertheless there, and part of the approach in early physics. Yet our
ordinary world is largely organised by ourselves and by historians in different
ways. Weiss’s view that “any attempt to isolate the present or to subdivide it
will involve a loss of something distinctively historic”33 is not entirely true. We
subdivide time all the time: that is what clocks and dates are for. Dates are
notoriously thought by non-historians to be central for historians. But times
and dates involve numbering, with the mathematical paradoxes about infinity
which such understanding can lead to. Every historian will be aware of the
arbitrariness of dating from the birth of Christ, if there is no commitment to the
theology involved, and the same problem arises with the move from BC/AD to
BCE/CE. Moreover, thinking of a particular time or date as being the
property of a particular event, as being true of it, is itself problematic.
Perhaps time is best understood as relational; and here it is plausible to
follow MacTaggart’s famous paper on “The unreality of time” in holding
“earlier” and “later” to be metaphysically foundational in our personal
experience of time.34 “Personal” here is as that is conceptualised in our
perception; “no one has found a single part of the brain that keeps track of
time”.35 And in both historiography and our folk understanding we organise
time in far more sophisticated ways than mere dates and clocks can provide.

IV
Organising time

With regard to Weiss’s second question about how his “historic present” is to
be understood, it is not clear if thinks he is answering it when, in concluding
his very brief exposition, he speaks of “conditioning” the nature of the historic
present. He asserts without argument that it is the past and future which
condition the nature of the historic present, and by implication that the past
and future do not condition the nature of the nonhistoric present. To the
present-day analytical philosopher these read like factual claims, as if “past”
and “future” actually exist and have effects on the present. Speaking in such
heavily metaphysical terms with their incontinent generation of claims about
what exists, it is plain that Weiss is not disposed to accept Occam’s razor,
read as a principle against bloated ontology; this is rather surprising for 1962.

Certainly Collingwood, writing in 1925, was parsimonious in his ontology.

“We imagine time”, he said, “as a straight line along which something travels.
Without inquiring too closely what it is that does the travelling, we may ask
whether time is at all like a line; and, obviously, it is not. [quoting Lotze:]
‘Thought of as a line, it would only possess one real point – namely, the

33
Paul Weiss, “It’s about time”, in Sidney Hook (ed.), Philosophy and History: A Symposium, New York: New York
University Press, 1963, pp. 367-371 at p. 369.
34
This is the distinction between, respectively, the “A series” and the “B series”, drawn by J.M.E. MacTaggart in “The
unreality of time”, Mind 17, 1908, pp. 457-473. For a good explanation of the issues, see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#McTArg.
35
Maneesh Sahani, University College London neuroscientist, reported in the Financial Times FT Weekend
th th
Magazine, 29 -30 January, 2011, p. 50.
present. From it would issue two endless but imaginary arms, Past and
Future’ (Lotze, Metaphysic, Section 138). It is difficult”, Collingwood
continued, “to uproot from one’s mind the illusion that somehow the past and
the future exist, or that the past somehow exists, even if the future does
not”.36 But he was firm that it is an illusion none the less. “No doubt, the
present would not be what it is if the past had not been and if the future were
not to be; but it is a childish confusion of thought to argue that therefore the
past and the future are now real”.37

Yet Collingwood did not here express his idealism in the clearest way. “Ideal”
and “real” were not for him opposites: “the ideal and the real are not mutually
exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real”.38 While past and future are
not real, rather, “The real is the present, conceived not as a mathematical
point between the present and the past, but as the union of present and past
in a duration or permanence that is at the same time change. Thus the past
as past and the future as future do not exist at all, but are purely ideal; the
past as living in the present and the future as germinating in the present are
wholly real and indeed are just the present itself. It is because of the
presence of these two elements in the present … that the present is a
concrete and changing reality and not an empty mathematical point”.39
Recalling one of the questions with which we began, “Can we claim to know
precisely how ‘present’ social and cultural phenomena turn into (or come to be
perceived/recognized as) past phenomena?” We find our general answer in
Collingwood: “In actual history, events overlap; …and it is only when our
knowledge of events is superficial and our account of them arbitrary that we
feel able to point out the exact junction between them, or rather, feel that
there is an exact junction if only we knew it”.40

The present is both ideal and real. “Time, as succession of past, present and
future, really has its being totum simul for the thought of a spectator, and this
justifies its ‘spatialized’ presentation as a line of which we can see the whole
at once; it also justifies, so far as they go, subjectivist views of time like that
of Kant”.41 Let me repeat Collingwood’s point here: time is a succession of
past, present and future, existing all at once in thought. It is appropriate for
us here to interpret that in terms of history as the rolling web of reality-
counting expressions: the structure of time in past, present and future,
existing all at once in thought, which is the diachronic Quinean web.42 The
“present” is that bit of it which Collingwood here privileges as “real”; but, it will

36
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 143.
37
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at pp. 143-144.
38
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 150.
39
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 149. Again, “some things are merely ideal, and under this head fall the
past and the future”, p. 150.
40
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 141.
41
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 150.
42
Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007 and
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008; Jonathan Gorman, “The presuppositions of writing the history of
historiography”, Storia della storiografia, forthcoming 2011.
be asked by an anti-realist who is not quite as half-hearted as Collingwood
may seem here, what is added by that word “real”? Particularly when we
recognise that what Weiss called the “historic present” is the present of those
past historical events with which the historian is dealing, and not present to us
at all. Privileging some part by calling it “real” is still an act of thought; and
indeed Collingwood, as an idealist, would agree. “Real” has to be a word
which the successful anti-realist must be able to use without commitment to
unnecessary metaphysical baggage, and Collingwood’s position accords with
this requirement.43 Is Kant’s position “subjectivist”, as Collingwood suggests?
Says A.E. Taylor, “The whole distinction between a subjective and an
objective factor in experience loses most of its significance with the
abolition…of the vicious Kantian distinction between the ‘given’ in perception
and the ‘work of the mind’”.44 Collingwood versus Taylor on Kant is a
distinction without a difference. Objectivity is what subjectivity counts it to be.

What matters for Collingwood in our general understanding of time is not

whether any bit of it has some privileged existential status, but that it is all
there in thought at once, ready for us to conceptualise it, which we initially do
by distinguishing between past, present and future. But for an idealist or anti-
realist the world of thought is not to be contrasted with some external reality.
The distinctions we conceptualise between the categories of “the past”, “the
present” and “the future” are in principle ones that we choose, for, following
Quine’s holistic pragmatism (which is as anti-realist as Collingwood is,
equivalently here, idealist), the world is what we count it to be. This is a
choice only in principle, for we have inherited much of our conceptualisation of
time, and the practical room for choice remains to be seen.

Our inherited language is already organised to bestow structures on time, not

just in simple matters such as past, present and future tenses, but in, for
example, our use of the “narrative sentences” to which Arthur Danto drew our
attention. These illustrate the historic present being “conditioned” by or
“related” to the past or future, not by these as mysterious existents or
mysterious forces, but by straightforward linguistic redescription. As Danto
said, narrative sentences have the general characteristic “that they refer to at
least two time-separated events though they only describe (are only about)
the earliest event to which they refer”.45 An example is “Aristarchus
anticipated Copernicus”.46 Danto thought that narrative sentences commonly
take the past tense, but, as this seminar heard from me two years ago, Mark
Day introduces “an open narrative sentence”, which “is about a past event,
but which refers to it in terms of later events, including events that have not
taken place by the time of the speaker. Such sentences are open to the
utterer’s future”.47 On the pragmatist approach adopted here, reality is what
we count it to be, so that we should understand the power and confidence to
include the future as part of our current extended present as the power and

43
See, for development of this point, Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993.
44
A.E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, London: Methuen, 1903, p. 242.
45
A.C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, London: Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 143.
46
See Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, London: Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 156, chap. VIII
and passim.
47
Mark Day, The Philosophy of History, London and New York: Continuum, 2008, p. 227; Day’s stress.
confidence to control what we will accept as true descriptions of the future, at
the time they occur.

A narrative sentence may then in an important sense be future-referring. Day

stresses that “what is required is an act of will: the will to make that sentence
true by your future action”.48 In so far as we are periodising our own present,
it is then appropriate for us to use future-referring narrative sentences if we
have the confidence and power to bring their truth about.49 Hence, what we
count as historical reality is characteristically describable using “narrative
sentences” which, while being about the historic present, are also future-
referring or past-referring as appropriate. Narrative sentences are
characteristically embedded in accounts covering organised swathes of time.
In terms of the Quinean approach adopted here, such swathes of time are,
again, part of the rolling web of reality-counting expressions, which has both
past and future.50 While these swathes of time have different lengths, as
Weiss observed, there is nothing proto-Danto about Weiss. In fact, we
characteristically structure time in terms of human lifetimes or in shorter or
longer stories.51 “The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a
temporal world”.52 And vice-versa, David Carr suggests.53

Presupposing an anti-realist position similar to that now advanced, Nathan

Rotenstreich put matters in a way with which we may now agree: “…the
historical domain can be conceived of as an ongoing attempt to bestow partial
meanings and thus specific contents on the presupposed background of
time”. “Reflection is continuously involved in the historical process”.54
Again, “We remain within the sphere of time, but we also reflect upon it and
discern the orientation towards past, present and future on the one hand, and
towards crystallized modes of human creativity, against the background of
occurrences in time, on the other”.55 Reflection involves bringing to
consciousness matters about which we can think, re-examine and, in
principle, choose. How much choice we have in practice to revise our
conceptualisations of time is again the question to be dealt with.

48
Mark Day, The Philosophy of History, London and New York: Continuum, 2008, p. 227.
49
This point is illustrated by reference to “The Georgian five-day war” in Jonathan Gorman, “The grammar of
historiography”, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Journal of the History of Philosophy of the Russian
Academy of Science [«Грамматика историографии», Эпистемология & философия науки [Журнал
Института философии Российской Академии наук] 3, 2010, 44-53. On p. 12 of workshop paper “The grammar
of historiography”.
50
The “rolling web” is explained at some length in Jonathan Gorman, “The presuppositions of writing the history of
historiography”, Storia della storiografia, forthcoming 2011.
51
That some histories are “analytical” rather than “narrative” is not relevant here, since an “analytical” history is
deliberately attempting to avoid organising matters in temporal terms. Nevertheless, a temporal period is
presupposed. See Maurice Mandelbaum, “A note on narratives”, History and Theory 6, 1967, pp. 413-419.
52
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984, p. 3.
53
David Carr, Time, Narrative and History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. More generally, see also
Geoffrey Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader, London: Routledge, 2001.
54
Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History, (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 101),
Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1987, p. ix.
55
Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History, pp. 17-18. Again, “Heidegger gives unequivocal priority to
man’s relation to the future, though future is interpreted not as a dimension of openness, but as a dimension of the
end. Thus a certain interpretation of the future is immediately imposed on the dimension of future” (Nathan
Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History, p. 14) and “…his system is incapable of accounting for the historical
domain…”(Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History, p. 16).
Here, we have updated the idealism about time expressed by MacTaggart,
Bradley and Collingwood by following Quine’s anti-realist holistic empiricist
pragmatist approach. Given this, we understand that our organisation of time
is not determined by direct experience (which may be conceived in its
unconceptualised state as being “unsorted” and confused, as both Kant and
Bradley would have agreed). Instead, our organisation of what we count as
temporal reality is the outcome of a conceptual choice which is in principle
variable. While our concepts and categories may function in a somewhat
Kantian way, they are, against Kant, not absolute or fixed a priori.

Indeed, as we have seen, our conceptions of time are not readily

generalisable. We may reason beyond our actual experience and find
inconsistency similar to that shown by Zeno’s paradoxes. Reasoning beyond
experience, and seeking universality in the way that traditional philosophical
and indeed scientific attention typically requires, can be self-defeating.56 “In
philosophy”, Collingwood says, “…there is a continuity between the
experience and the theory; the theory is nothing but the experience itself, with
its universality further insisted upon, its latent connexions and contradictions
brought into the light of consciousness”.57 Against this inappropriately
optimistic insistence on universality, our actual experience is strongly
localised, and our temporal understanding is, in fact, internally consistent only
within such local frames. Crucially, however, we share time, and we organise
our temporal experience. What matter for us are, again, the limits on the
range of choices we might have here.

V
Absolute presuppositions

In the light of what has been said so far, and drawing in particular on part of
MacTaggart’s approach, it is plausible to hold that, as a matter of fact about
our folk conception of time, foundational in our actual personal experience of
time is our personal experience of “earlier” and “later”. In fact, we share an
understanding of these words. Following closely the argument of Historical
Judgement, you and I psychologically cannot believe inconsistent things.58 In
the present context, this amounts to holding that each one of us is unable to
conceive his or her actual experience in ways which are inconsistent with
what is captured by what we accept that we ordinarily mean by “earlier” and
“later”.59

Hence, my conceptualisation of the time of my experience in terms of “earlier”

and “later” cannot be re-arranged by me to reach what I judge to be
impossible results. Nor can you do such a thing. It follows that “we”,
conceived as a collection of first person singulars – as Kantian singulars,
indeed, you and I – cannot organise time in contradictory ways. And yet you
56
“A mirage”? For discussion of the situation in Kant, see Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Dialectic, London: Cambridge
University Press, 1974, p. 115 and passim.
57
R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, pp. 170-171.
58
This is a perceived psychological constraint. See Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of
Historiographical Choice, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007 and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, p. 159
and passim.
59
The role of logic in imposing on us a requirement for consistency is explained in Jonathan Gorman, “The
normativity of logic in the history of ideas”, Intellectual History Review 21, 2011, pp. 3-13.
and I might in principle organise our temporal experience differently from each
other, so as to contradict each other. Here, in principle, “we” can choose in
contradictory ways. As argued in Historical Judgement, “we” is ambiguous.60
On this second meaning, “we”, conceived as a group rather than as a
collection of singulars, can choose in contradictory ways, in principle, and it is
contingent what we choose; but we can also choose, similarly as a matter of
contingent fact, to share the same world with others and organise time in the
same way, so that we can get on with them.61

In so far as we have inherited a conceptual scheme in which we share the

same world with other people, we have to have overcome any differences in
our conceptualisation of time. It is a contingent question whether there were
in the past any such differences, not one determined by some a priori
argument. Our having overcome any such differences will, contingently,
have “fixed” our conceptualisation of our shared time. Since this “fixing” is a
contingency, we might have done it differently. It is a practical question how
far we can make sense of counterfactual alternatives to our present
conceptions, a practical question how far we would even bother to try, and a
practical question how far alternative schemes can be found in the human
past.

In fact, we have fixed “earlier” and “later” in our shared experience.62 But
have we fixed the present? Certainly not as a “point”, “instant”, “moment” or
“drop”. I am now delivering this paper, and it is still “now” as I come to the
end of this sentence. Collingwood plausibly explained the “present” as “the
union of present and past in a duration or permanence that is at the same
time change. …the present is a concrete and changing reality and not an
empty mathematical point”.63 But even if we do understand time as having a
mathematical point for the present, then the future is still included in “now”, for
“now” is not limited to a mathematical point even if we define “the present” as
being so: the “now” which I utter before coming to the end of the sentence I
am now delivering covers more than the mathematical-point-present, and
includes in the “now” of its delivery the anticipated end of this sentence.

Hearing a piece of music is another example of experiencing continuity over

time which nevertheless involves counting some or all of the experience as
taking place in the present. Our practical understanding is such that it is
impossible for us to conceive of this in such a way that, when we listen
together, for you, the first movement takes place earlier than the second,
while, for me, the first movement takes place later than the second. But we
may nevertheless count or periodise the “present” here in different ways.
You and I may be watching a film accompanied by music. You, hearing the
60
Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007, and
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, pp. 12, 160ff., 213. For a separate argument, see David Carr,
Time, Narrative and History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, chap. v.
61
The point is further explained in Jonathan Gorman, “The grammar of historiography”, abridged in Epistemology and
Philosophy of Science: Journal of the History of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science [«Грамматика
историографии», Эпистемология & философия науки [Журнал Института философии Российской
Академии наук] 3, 2010, 44-53. On p. 9 of workshop paper “The grammar of historiography”.
62
“That we accept some sentences, reject others, and withhold still others is a brute fact, there for us to use”.
Catherine Z. Elgin, Considered Judgment, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 101.
63
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 149.
music, may “periodise” it into passages or movements, for example,
concentrating on those; while I am periodising the music according to the
action on screen. Neither of us are wrong, and neither right, in counting or
periodising as we do.

Historians have traditionally faced the problem of how to “periodise” the past,
and they can periodise in different and contradictory ways. Moreover, they
can do so in ways which need not be shared by those about whom they write.
Plausibly, Kant knew he was living through an Enlightenment pretty much as
later historians conceptualised it (indeed, later historians did so as an
outcome of the self-understanding of people in Kant’s position); by contrast, it
is considerably less plausible to think that people living during the English
“long eighteenth century” knew that this was what they were doing; they did
not conceptualise their own time in that way.64 However, in order to share
their world with others of their own time, they did have to share to some extent
some other diachronic process of conceptualisation.

What we count as our shared world is a diachronic matter, with revision

sometimes preserving traditional shared understandings, sometimes not.65
The limits of our choices here have to explain the ways in which we see our
ongoing world as “fixed” or “unrevisable”. The future can similarly be
understood as “fixed” if we develop a grasp of the powers, and their
limitations, which govern the choices we will have over what to believe is the
case. A successful theory of the future might in principle be self-affirming if
humanity thought it true and acted accordingly; for example, the future-
referring model of God’s Providence operated in just such a way in pre-
modern times. It is a historically variable contingent matter recoverable by
historians, not primarily a matter for a priori philosophical theorising, what the
constraints are on how far we may think of the historical future as predictable.
We are still bound by nineteenth century decisions about railway times.

How confident or unconfident people frame their own positions in time, and
how they understand their own pasts and futures, give us (and them) periods
of calm or periods of uncertainty and fracture. Real confidence in organising
the present shows itself in a lack of consciousness of alternatives to the
ongoing certainties that people feel. It might, for example, be unthinkable at
some period that the sun would set on the Empire, or that the Reich would not
last for a thousand years. Following Wittgenstein, we may characterise the
swathes of time in which such commonsense certainties arise as “forms of
life”. How pervasive such certainties are can vary, and their fracturing
accordingly piecemeal and gentle, or catastrophic and revolutionary.
Historians writing about large-scale structures such as the civilisation of the
renaissance in Italy or the Enlightenment clearly think of them as wide-
ranging, and Wittgenstein thinks of them in that way too. Martin Kusch
quotes from him other metaphorical expressions than “form of life”: “a world-

64
The “long eighteenth century”: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815; the “short
eighteenth century”: the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 to the start of the French Revolution in 1789.
st
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18th_century, accessed by me 21 March 2011.
65
See Jonathan Gorman, “The commonplaces of ‘revision’ and their implications for historiographical understanding”,
History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 on “Revision in History”, December 2007, 20-44.
picture”; “the rock bottom of my convictions”.66 Kuhn would no doubt use the
word “paradigm”.67

Examining Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Kusch points out that Wittgenstein’s

view of these commonsense certainties suggests that they have a peculiar
character: “Wittgenstein characterises certainties in puzzling and sometimes
even contradictory terms. He writes that certainties are both true and neither
true nor false (83, 205)”.68 It is striking how similar Wittgenstein’s
understanding is to Collingwood’s notion of “absolute presuppositions” as not
properly capable of being true or false.69 Collingwood asserted that there are
historically contingent certainties. He called an “absolute presupposition” a
belief or assumption underlying the beliefs and attitudes involved in our
ordinary ways of life, an assumption which is a historical absolute for a time,
in that it is contingently uncriticisable at that time.70 This is because the
question to which it might be an answer is not raised, and it is Collingwood’s
logic of question and answer which leads to the view that truth and falsity do
not apply to absolute presuppositions. “Uncriticisability” here involves in our
terms a pragmatic impossibility, and we do not need to hold to Collingwood’s
logic of question and answer.71 A belief or attitude is uncriticisable at a time
because it is not even entertained at that time as a conscious thought, let
alone doubted and actively contrasted with a serious alternative. It is
unthinkingly presupposed by past agents. “Absolute presuppositions” may
be taken to mark the contingent limits of choice in the judgements made by
historians and by the rest of us, both for the present and the past. While in
principle agents can organise their world differently, in so far as they are not
aware of practicable alternatives, the choices they have are contingently
limited by their situation. Historical hindsight alone gives alternatives to
absolute presuppositions, and the required hindsight for our own present will
be future to us.72

The task of metaphysics, thought Collingwood, could only be the recovery of

absolute presuppositions, which was an undertaking essentially involving
historiographical method. Unfortunately, by historiographical method he
meant empathetic understanding, that is, the re-enactment of past thought.
However, the re-enactment of past thought is arguably impossible as a means
of recovering absolute presuppositions, since absolute presuppositions are
66
Martin Kusch, “Kripke’s Wittgenstein, On Certainty, and Epistemic Relativism”, publication forthcoming, pp. 15-16,
http://univie.academia.edu/MartinKusch/Papers/102778/Kripkes_Wittgenstein_On_Certainty_and_Epistemic_Relativi
nd
sm, accessed by me 22 February 2011.
67
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.
68
Kusch’s references in my quotation from him are to Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.
Martin Kusch, “Kripke’s Wittgenstein, On Certainty, and Epistemic Relativism”, p. 16,
http://univie.academia.edu/MartinKusch/Papers/102778/Kripkes_Wittgenstein_On_Certainty_and_Epistemic_Relativi
nd
sm, accessed by me 22 February 2011.
69
See also Peter Lewis, “Collingwood and Wittgenstein: struggling with darkness”, in David Boucher and Bruce
Haddock (eds.), Collingwood Studies, vol. 5, Explorations, Swansea: R.G. Collingwood Society, 1998, pp. 28-42.
70
See W.H. Walsh, Metaphysics, London: Hutchinson, 1963, pp. 160ff.; R.G. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics;
and R.G. Collingwood, Autobiography, chap. 8.
71
Rex Martin’s position, perhaps. See Rex Martin, “Collingwood’s logic of question and answer, its relation to
absolute presuppositions: a brief history”, in David Boucher and Bruce Haddock (eds.), Collingwood Studies, vol. 5,
Explorations, Swansea: R.G. Collingwood Society, 1998, pp. 122-133, and Rik Peters, “Collingwood’s logic of
question and answer, its relation to absolute presuppositions: another brief history”, in David Boucher and Bruce
Haddock (eds.), Collingwood Studies, vol. 6, Idealist Contexts, Swansea: R.G. Collingwood Society, 1999, pp. 1-29
at p. 1.
72
This is outlined in Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice, Stocksfield:
Acumen, 2007, and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, p. 8.
not consciously thought. We presumably could not put ourselves in the
position of the past agent and recover a thought which was never consciously
there. Herbert Butterfield picks up a similar problem: there are “things that
the men of 1600 shall we say – but the men of 1900 similarly – do not have to
explain to one another, and the result is that they do not always get into the
historian’s evidence”.73 Again, “it took a lot of work, a lot of insight, on the
part of Namier and others, to discover those dim unavowed things that the
men of 1760 had not even needed to talk to one another about”.74 To
recover absolute presuppositions without empathetic understanding, without
evidence, we may then have to engage in philosophical analysis of past
writings, or have to ascribe presuppositions and choices to past agents, using
a model which is inevitably anachronistic and only applicable with hindsight.75
Only hindsight allows the practical ascription of truth or falsity to absolute
presuppositions. Moreover, even if the actual thoughts were there and
recoverable, alternative thoughts plainly were not, and we could not uninvent
our own understanding of the thought, which typically comes complete with
the alternatives. The meaning of the thought would inevitably be ours, and
not the past agent’s, on this approach.76

What, now, is the difference between the “present” and the “past”? The
“present” is that period during which we all share with each other the same
broad conceptualisations of shared time, the same sense of sharing in the
same diachronic process, the same sense of periodisation, and in particular
the same absolute presuppositions. But, as Collingwood said, “in actual
history, events overlap”.77 At any given period – the “historic present” – there
will be a range of presuppositions, some with “absolute” status and wholly
unexamined, some consciously known and fixed because alternatives are not
available, some doubted with active search for alternatives which may yet
become available. A wide swathe of time, over large communities, will
certainly disclose the variability here, and the thought and life of a single
individual may well disclose it too.

The past comes into anti-realistically understood existence as contrasting with

the present when we, and the relevant historians, no longer share the world
with the past individuals in question. The change comes when people in the
present become conscious of central absolute presuppositions which people
in the past were unconscious of. The change comes when, because of
changes in the status of what were once absolute presuppositions, we no
longer feel we have to conceptualise our own time in the same way as they
did, and can periodise in ways which permit temporal choices and conceptual
re-arrangements which those past individuals never had available to them.
Butterfield remarks: “At one period it is felt to be the natural thing, as well as

73
Herbert Butterfield, “The discontinuities between the generations in history: their effect on the transmission of
political experience”, The Rede Lecture, Cambridge; London: Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 6.
74
Herbert Butterfield, “The discontinuities between the generations in history: their effect on the transmission of
political experience”, The Rede Lecture, Cambridge; London: Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 7.
75
Perhaps economic theory. See Jonathan Gorman, Understanding History, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press,
1991, chap. 5, and Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics”, in Frank Hahn and Martin Hollis
(eds.), Philosophy and Economic Theory, London: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 18-35.
76
Meaning involves the possible ascription of the words “true” and “false” in this context.
77
R.G. Collingwood, “Some perplexities about time: with an attempted solution”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 26, 1925-1926, pp. 135-150 at p. 141.
the proper thing, for the clergy to be amenable only to ecclesiastical law; but
in another period things are inverted, and, without any consciousness of
running to paradox, ordinary people will refuse to believe that the clergy
should not be amenable to the law of the land, like everybody else”.78

Butterfield’s example relates to absolute presuppositions marking temporal

change which are about the status of the clergy with respect to law, but the
absolute presuppositions which mark temporal change can also relate to time
itself: “The exponential explosion of timetravel stories in the popular media,
beginning late in the nineteenth century, is an indication that a very new
conception of time is brewing in the Zeitgeist. The utter absence of any
timetravel stories whatsoever prior to the nineteenth century is a profoundly
puzzling fact… I suggest that this is at least partly explained by the utter
universality of presentism prior to the nineteenth century and by the utter
absence of any rivals to presentism”.79 The philosophical position called
“presentism” holds that the only things which exist are present things.
“Eternalism”, its main rival, is the view that things in the past, present and
future exist eternally. While our present-day ordinary understanding of
“present” need not be taken to involve a commitment to either metaphysical
position, the suggestion here – whatever its historical (or philosophical) merit
is – may be taken to be that we have in this matter a central pre-nineteenth
century absolute presupposition about time.

However, just what count for historians as the central differences in absolute
presuppositions is a matter for historical judgement and sometimes, as here,
philosophical analysis. The differences between present and past lie in the
contingent differences between our absolute presuppositions and theirs,
whether about time itself or about anything else. The same kinds of
differences mark our distinguishing the people who we are from those in other
communities. In so far as communities are tied to territories, distinguishing
our areas of space from other areas lies again in the differences between our
absolute presuppositions. Where exactly the differences lie is a matter for
judgement, just as it is a matter of judgement what we choose to share, with
whom we choose to share it, and for how long we do so. With respect to
sharing with different peoples in the present, such judgements mark the limits
of toleration. With respect to the past, these judgements are all contingent
matters which include our senses of how far we ought to share past self-
understandings, how appropriate it is to revise them, and how soon we may
allow ourselves to forget what our forebears thought.

78
Herbert Butterfield, “The discontinuities between the generations in history: their effect on the transmission of
political experience”, The Rede Lecture, Cambridge; London: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 5-6.
79
J. Bigelow, “Presentism and properties”, Philosophical Perspectives 10, 1996, pp. 35-52 at pp. 35-36, as quoted in
Barry Dainton, Time and Space, Chesham: Acumen, 2001. p. 80.