Hegel's absolute idealism has become a traditional object of criticism of post-non-classical philosophy. An exception was provided by Robin George Collingwood (1883-1943), author of the famous work “The Idea of History.” He is one of the defenders of rationalism, but his Hegelianism is the least orthodox. It does not contain the dogmatics of absolute idealism that repels modern people. Collingwood makes an attempt to rethink some of Hegel's ideas while maintaining their positive character. Everything in history is unique and inimitable. The events of history have an external form and internal content. The first is a materialized phenomenon, the second is a thought. The task of the historian is to penetrate into the concept of the “historical,” for history is, first of all, the history of thought and the only subject of the historical process is the thinking person. In place of the metaphysical world spirit of Hegelian philosophy, Collingwood puts the “human spirit”, the main ability of which is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is historical. It deciphers thoughts fixed in individual actions and actions. The historian should be interested only in the “event” that happened in time and expresses a thought, and not any actions. The object of historical knowledge is a living experience that the historian must experience in his mind. Only those who are involved in the study of the past, have mastered the appropriate procedure for this and learned to apply it, and who have mastered the secrets of the historian’s profession can reflect on the peculiarities of historical knowledge. This is the only way to achieve not a reflection of the past, but its understanding, comprehension and explanation of the “historical”. If a historian wants to find out what Plato wanted to say in his Republic, he must think through Plato’s thoughts, reproduce them in the context of his own knowledge and only then evaluate them, admire or criticize, approve or condemn. He must take into account that thanks to the internal polysemy and metaphorical nature of the language, Plato’s text, like any other text, acquires an autonomous space of meaning, which is no longer associated with the author’s intention. As one of the authoritative thinkers specializing in the field of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur, noted: “the text now says much more than the author wanted to say.”
R. Collingwood is aware that understanding is a rational act, but the forms of manifestation of the “human spirit” also include the irrational, which does not participate in historical life, but always accompanies it. Understanding is the first step to providing an explanation. In other words, between the acquisition of history and its explanation, a certain place belongs to understanding. From the perspective of the concept of understanding, the historian does not think in facts or periods. Since the “historical” cannot be grasped and put into a scheme, he can only think in problems.
Having defined the problem and sketched out a sketch of the scientific search, the historian reproduces the past in his own knowledge and reveals its meaning. It follows from this that historical knowledge is both subjective and objective. It is subjective because from beginning to end it is our act of thinking. Someone else's thought is included in ours and is thought by us. Historical knowledge is objective because it retains the status of an object of knowledge, despite the recreation and rethinking of someone else's thought. Since we are talking about thoughts and not feelings, they always have something in common and this rational common is understandable. Availability is merely an opportunity. This means that not every historian and will not always be able to reproduce the “general”. It's not about his preparation, or a special vision. In order for a historical object to be resurrected in the mind of a historian, so that the best thoughts of others become the property of a researcher, a special disposition is necessary - sympathy, the presence of similar experience. We should not forget that a historian, in any case, is always a man of his time. Possessing autonomy of thinking, he can change his attitude towards those thoughts of the past that only yesterday seemed close to him, but new circumstances ensured their revaluation. In addition, any reconstruction of the “historical”, and especially its interpretation, always has the status of a hypothesis, not a theory.
Thus, historical knowledge, according to Colling-wood, differs from the simple reproduction of the past. It “constructs” history and interprets it, understands and reinterprets it in an act of reflection, showing freedom of thought. Freedom of thought consists in its unpredetermination and creativity, which does not mean arbitrariness, because in his rational activity the historian is guided by the situation determined by his own thoughts and the thoughts of other people.
R. Collingwood also has a unique understanding of historical progress. He believes that the misconceptions of many historians lie in the fact that they label this or that era as “bad” or “good” and see this as a state of progress or regression. Whereas the “calling card” of historical progress is the process of accumulation of solved problems. Therefore, progress is possible in the field of economics, politics, law, science, philosophy and even religion, but it is not possible in the field of art and morality, since works of art and moral standards are the result of unreflective experience.
Summary:By revealing the mechanism of understanding, Collingwood enters the realm of hermeneutics. Knowledge of the past appears in his concept as a rethinking of past events from the perspective of the present, which excludes pure reproduction of events. The gap between past and present is filled by the historian's imagination. The historian’s imagination is not an arbitrary fantasy, but a creative activity that has its own logic. This logic, first of all, is focused on reconstructing the intention of the “historical”, behind which stand the theory and practice of people, the process and result of their life. The historian's consciousness is projective because it has the ability to pre-construct a plan, formulate a guiding idea and direct research into uncertainty. No one is guaranteed against mistakes and delusions, for the historian is transported to another time on the “wings of his own imagination.” His freedom is not arbitrary. It is limited by historicity itself, by the framework of the problem field under study. Collingwood concludes that historical consciousness must coincide with historical existence, for “the historical process itself is a process of thought and exists insofar as the individual subjects that make up its parts recognize themselves as such.” Ultimately, history turns out to be “the self-knowledge of the mind.”
Not everything is indisputable in R. J. Collingwood's concept of understanding, but his intellectual honesty and his position to defend the rationality of historical science are captivating.
General conclusions:
I. The formation of the philosophy of history in the paradigm of post-non-classical rationality took place under the sign of the bankruptcy of post-classical rationality. The panrationalism of classical philosophy in the context of the development of industrial society with a focus on the fetishization of “goods, money and capital”, as defined by M. Weber, was transformed into “formal rationality,” which gave rise to its opponents in the person of S. Kierkegaard, A. Schopenhauer and other thinkers of the 19th century.
I. The post-non-classical rationality of mastering history is represented by the efforts of O. Comte, G. Spencer, W. Windelband, G. Rickert, R. Collingwood, and other thinkers of the 19th-20th centuries. It is focused not on deciphering the essence of the world, but on understanding the phenomena of this world given to man in experience. The requirement to “study the world as it is” is replaced by a search for an answer to the question “what meaning does this world have for us.” Ontology gives way to epistemology
ology, where absolute truth is replaced by relative truth.
III. The methodological principle of mastering a historical event is values. The concept of “value” provides an optimal assessment of a historical event. Searching for the meaning of history outside of the axiological interpretation of the historical is an absolutely meaningless exercise.
IV. The place of the world mind, as a self-developing substance, is occupied by the human mind with a focus on self-knowledge. The past appears not as a reproduction of a historical event, but as its rethinking. The gap between the past and the present is filled with imagination, but the historian’s imagination is not an arbitrariness of fantasy, but a creative activity that has its own logic and its own measure of responsibility.
V. Mastering history is both objective and subjective. Historical knowledge “constructs” the past in thought and provides its axiological interpretation. By rethinking an event, it shows a measure of freedom of thought, a measure of understanding and a measure of responsibility.
Control and self-test questions:
- 1. Establish the reasons for the emergence of post-non-classical rationality.
- 2. How did post-non-classical rationality influence the development of the philosophy of history.
- 3. Determine the advantages and disadvantages of O. Comte’s concept, where he views history as a form of expression of progress and order.
- 4. Assess G. Spencer’s concept of the evolution of the social world.
- 5. What factors determine the specific manifestation of the law of evolution in the social world.
- 6. What new does neo-Kantianism in the person of W. Wildenband and G. Ricker bring to the development of the philosophy of history?
- 7. How the concept of “value” constructs the concept of “historical”, ensuring the unity of the historical and logical.
- 8. Characterize three eras in the development of world history according to G. Rickert.
- 9. Determine R. Collingwood’s contribution to the development of history methodology.
- 10. How G. Collingwood solves the problem of the relationship between the rational and the irrational in the process of comprehending and explaining the “historical”.
Translation and comments by Yu. A. Aseev
Article by M. A. Kissel
Editorial Board of the series “Monuments of Historical Thought”
V. I. Buganov (deputy chairman), B. G. Weber, V. M. Dalin, A. I. Danilov, S. S. Dmitriev, E. M. Zhukov (chairman), A. P. Novoseltsev, M V. Nechkina, T. I. Oizerman, V. T. Pashuto, L. N. Pushkarev, A. I. Rogov, V. I. Rutenburg, V. V. Sokolov, Z. V. Udaltsova, N. N. Cheboksarov, S. O. Shmidt, B. L. Fonkich (scientific secretary)
Secretary of the series E. K. Bugrovskaya
Responsible editors
I. S. Kon, M. A. Kissel
R. J. Collingwood
STORY IDEA
INTRODUCTION
§ 1. Philosophy of history
This book is an essay on the philosophy of history. The term “philosophy of history” was invented in the eighteenth century by Voltaire, who understood by it simply critical, or scientific, history, that way of historical thinking when the historian independently judges the subject, instead of repeating stories read from ancient books. The same term was used by Hegel and other authors at the end of the eighteenth century, but they gave it a different meaning: for them it simply meant general, or world history. The third meaning of this term can be found among some positivists of the nineteenth century: for them, the philosophy of history meant the discovery of general laws governing the course of events that history is obliged to tell.
The tasks posed to the “philosophy of history” by Voltaire and Hegel can only be solved by historical science itself. The positivists sought to make it an empirical science like meteorology. In each case, the understanding of philosophy determined the understanding of the philosophy of history: for Voltaire, philosophy meant independent and critical thinking, for Hegel - thinking about the world as a whole, for nineteenth-century positivists - the discovery of uniform laws.
I use the term “philosophy of history” in a different sense from all those stated above, and in order to explain what I mean, I must first say a few words about my understanding of philosophy. Philosophy is reflective. The philosophizing consciousness never thinks simply about an object, but when thinking about any object, it also thinks about its own thought about this object. Philosophy can therefore be called thought of the second order, thought about thought. For example, determining the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a task facing thought of the first order, in this case the task of astronomy; to find out what exactly we are doing when we determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun is a task of second-order thought, that is, a task of logic, or the theory of science.
This does not mean that philosophy is the science of consciousness, or psychology. Psychology is thought of the first order, it looks at consciousness in the same way that biology looks at life. It is not concerned with the relation of thought to its object, it is concerned directly with thought as something that is completely separated from its object, as an event in the world, as a specific phenomenon that can be considered in itself. Philosophy never deals with thought in itself, it is always concerned with the relation of thought to its object and therefore deals equally with both the object and the thought.
This difference between philosophy and psychology can be illustrated by the different attitude of these sciences to historical thinking, this special type of thinking relating to an object of a special type, which we conventionally define as the past. A psychologist may be interested in historical thinking, he can analyze specific types of mental phenomena in the mind of a historian, he can, for example, prove that historians are people who build an imaginary world, like artists, because they are too neurotic to live comfortably in the real the world; However, unlike artists, they project this imaginary world into the past, since they connect the origin of their neuroses with past events of their own childhood and constantly turn to the past again and again in a vain attempt to free themselves from these neuroses. In the course of this analysis it is possible to go into detail and show that the historian's interest in such a strong personality as Julius Caesar, for example, expresses his childish attitude towards his father, etc. I do not want to suggest to the reader that an analysis of this kind is waste of time. I am only describing a typical case to show that here attention is concentrated exclusively on the subjective side of the original subject-object relationship. The psychological approach is aimed at the historian’s thought, and not at its object - the past. The entire psychological analysis of historical thought would remain exactly the same if Julius Caesar were a fictitious person, and historical science was not knowledge, but pure fantasy.
The fact that attracts the attention of a philosopher is not the past in itself, as for a historian, and not the historian’s thought about it, as for a psychologist, but both in their mutual relation. Thought in its relation to its object is no longer just a thought, but knowledge. Hence, what for psychology is only a theory of thought, a theory of mental events regardless of the object, for philosophy is a theory of knowledge. Where the psychologist asks himself: “How do historians think?”, the philosopher asks himself the question: “How do historians know?”, “How do they manage to penetrate into the past?” And vice versa, the task of a historian, and not a philosopher, is to know the past as a thing in itself, for example, that so and so years ago such and such events really happened. The philosopher deals with these events not as things in themselves, but as things known to the historian, and is interested not in what events occurred, when and where they took place, but in the property of them that makes it possible for the historian to know them.
Thus, a philosopher must think about the thinking of a historian, but at the same time he does not duplicate the work of a psychologist, and for him the thought of a historian is not a complex of mental phenomena, but a system of knowledge. He also thinks about the past, but does not duplicate the work of the historian, because the past for him is not a series of events, but a system of known objects. In other words, a philosopher, to the extent that he thinks about the subjective side of history, is an epistemologist, and to the extent that he thinks about its objective side, he is a metaphysician. But such a formulation would be dangerous, since it could inspire the idea of the separation of the epistemological and metaphysical sides of the philosopher’s activity, and this would be a mistake. Philosophy cannot separate the study of knowledge from the study of what is known. The impossibility of such a division follows directly from the idea of philosophy as second-order thought.
If this is the nature of philosophical thinking, then what do I mean when I add the qualifying characteristic of “history” to the word “philosophy”? In what sense is there a special philosophy of history, different from philosophy in general and from the philosophy of anything else?
The division of philosophy into different areas is generally accepted, although somewhat arbitrary. Most specialists distinguish logic, or the theory of knowledge, from ethics, or the theory of action, although many of those who make this distinction would admit that knowledge appears in some sense as a type of action, and action in the form in which it studied by ethics, represents certain types of knowledge (or at least is associated with it). The thought that a logician studies is a thought that strives to discover the truth, and thus it turns out to be one of the varieties of activity aimed at achieving a goal, and this is an ethical concept. The actions that the ethicist studies are actions based on knowledge (or belief) of what is good and what is bad, and knowledge or belief are epistemological concepts. Thus, logic and ethics are related and inextricably linked, although they are different from each other. If there is any philosophy of history, then it will be as closely connected with other special philosophical sciences as logic and ethics are connected with each other.
Annotation:As products of the imagination, the works of the historian and the novelist are no different. Where they differ is in the fact that the picture created by the historian intends to be true. (R. J. Collingwood) Current history began almost four thousand years ago in Western Asia and Europe. How did this happen? What are the stages in the formation of what we call history? What is the essence of historical knowledge, what does it serve? The greatest British philosopher, historian and archaeologist Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943) offers his answers to these and other questions in his famous study “The Idea of History”. Collingwood justifies his philosophical position by the fact that, unlike natural science , describing the external side of events in the form of laws of nature, the historian always deals with human action, for an adequate understanding of which it is necessary to understand the thought of the historical figure who performed this action. “The historical process itself is a process of thought, and it exists only to the extent that the consciousness participating in it recognizes itself as a part of it.” The content of parts I-IV of the work is devoted to the historiography of the philosophical understanding of history. Moreover, in addition to the classical works of historians and philosophers of the past, the author examines in detail in Part IV the views on the philosophy of history of contemporary thinkers in England, Germany, France and Italy. In the V part - “Epilegomena” - he offers his own study of the problems of historical science (the role of imagination and evidence, the subject of history, history and freedom, the applicability of the concept of progress to history). According to Collingwood’s concept, based on the ideas of Hegel, the truth is not revealed immediately and entirely, but is developed gradually, matures over time and develops, so that the opposition of truth and error becomes relative. The new view does not discard the old as worthless rubbish, but preserves everything viable in the old, thereby continuing its existence in a different context and under changed conditions. That which becomes obsolete and discarded in the course of historical development constitutes the error of the past, and that which is preserved in the present constitutes its (past) truth. But today’s truth is subject to the general law of development; it is also destined to undergo a merciless revision in the future, to lose a lot and be reborn in a greatly changed, not to say unrecognizable, form. Philosophy is called upon to summarize the course of the historical process, to systematize and combine previously discovered points of view into an increasingly rich and harmonious picture of the world. The specificity of history, according to Collingwood, lies in the paradoxical merging of the properties of art and science, forming “something third” - historical consciousness as a special “self-sufficient, self-determining and self-justifying form of thought.”
COLLINGWOOD, ROBIN GEORGE(Collingwood, Robin George) (1889–1943) - British philosopher, historian, archaeologist, specialist in the methodology and epistemology of historical science. Born 22 February 1889 in Cartmel Fell, Lancashire. Until the age of thirteen, he received his education in the creative atmosphere of his family. Under the guidance of his father, the secretary and biographer of the English writer and publicist J. Ruskin, in early childhood he began to study Latin, Greek, and read books on the natural sciences. Subsequently, he recalled that even then, having read the Cartesian compendium Principia he received his first lesson in the subject that became his specialty - the history of thought.
Despite the family's modest financial situation, Collingwood managed to enroll in Rugby, one of the oldest private schools in Great Britain, and then, in 1908, in Oxford. In 1910, when he began studying philosophy, the direction of absolute idealism was still dominant at the university, but a new philosophical school, “realism,” was already rapidly gaining strength. Among his philosophical teachers, Collingwood names G. Jochim, a close friend of the idealist philosopher G. Bradley, and J. A. Smith.
After graduating from university (1913), he became a philosophy teacher.
During the First World War he worked in the intelligence department of the Navy Ministry.
As a teacher, Collingwood, in addition to teaching philosophy, led summer archaeological expeditions in Britain. These two areas of interest shaped his path of scientific development.
From 1935 he held the position of professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, but in 1941 he abandoned it due to serious illness.
Collingwood early came to understand the limitations of the method of the school of philosophical "realism", based on the logical analysis of individual propositions. He proposed, following the tradition of F. Bacon and R. Descartes, to consider any proposal as an answer to a possible question. As a method of modern historical science, Collingwood turns to evidence based on the method of alternating questions and answers, which includes an analysis of the preconditions for the emergence of questions and strategies for solving them.
In the 1920s, he developed the principles of a philosophy of history that studies processes rather than events. Among the forms of spiritual activity, he assigns a central place to historical knowledge, which is opposed to science, which deals with abstract universal law, and philosophy as absolute knowledge. The subject of knowledge is a creation of the spirit. Consciousness must free itself from the power of imagination, which turns abstractions into an external object. Absolute knowledge is interpreted by him as the unity of theoretical knowledge and practical activity, presented in philosophy. Like B. Croce, Collingwood, from the position of historicism, argues that absolutely true knowledge is unattainable, because any knowledge (including philosophical) is constantly changing. At the same time, without affirming the possibility of philosophy as absolute self-consciousness, the historical process itself becomes meaningless. Dedicated to the dilemma of absolute historicism and absolute idealism, relativism and dogmatism Essay on Philosophical Method (An Essay on Philosophical Method. Oxf., 1933). This work, which arose as a result of previous work, nevertheless did not complete Collingwood’s research in the field of methodology of historical science.
Collingwood developed methodological principles that allowed the creation of a typology for the complete description of archaeological materials in Roman Britain ( Archeology of Roman Britain, The Archeology of Roman Britain, 1930). After his death, a fundamental three-volume Corpus of Latin Inscriptions for Britain(Collingwood R.G., Wright R.P. The Roman inscription of Britain. L., 1965–1970), on which he began to work in the mid-30s.
In 1938 he published a book Principles of Art (The Principles of Art. Oxf., 1938; M., “Languages of Russian Culture”, 1999), where he analyzes the relationship between art and non-art, problems of the theory of imagination (imagination and consciousness, language), principles of the theory of art (art as a language, truth, artist and society). One of the main theses of the book: “That’s why people need an artist, because society never knows its whole soul.”
In 1940 it was published Essay on Metaphysics(An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxf., 1940), where Collingwood criticizes positivism, identifies the “absolute prerequisites” of history, the causes of the irrationalist epidemic leading to fascism. He continued his criticism of fascism in New Leviathan (The New Leviathan. Oxf., 1942), where civilization (as a dialectically reasonable regulation of political differences) is contrasted with barbarism - the conscious use of brute force. However, Collingwood's posthumously published work brought him universal fame. Story idea(The Idea of History) (Story idea. Autobiography. M., “Science”, 1980). In it, he substantiates his philosophical position by the fact that, unlike natural science, which describes the external side of events in the form of natural laws, the historian always deals with human action, for an adequate understanding of which it is necessary to understand the thought of the historical figure who performed this action. “The historical process is itself a process of thought, and it exists only to the extent that the consciousness participating in it recognizes itself as a part of it.”
The content of parts 1–4 of the work is devoted to the historiography of the philosophical understanding of history. Moreover, in addition to the classical works of historians and philosophers of the past, the author examines in detail in the 4th part the views on the philosophy of history of contemporary thinkers in England, Germany, France and Italy. In the 5th part - Epilegomena (Additions) - he offers his own study of the problems of historical science (the role of imagination and evidence, the subject of history, history and freedom, the applicability of the concept of progress to history).
Man is the only creature capable of becoming a subject of the historical process. History is a process that includes the past, which is reflected in historical science, i.e. continues to live in the present. A person, studying history, reproduces in his own thoughts the past, of which he is the heir.
Comparing types of theoretical knowledge, some of which reflect individual, concrete objects, and others eternal, comprehended solely by the power of reason, Collingwood interprets historical science as a discursive knowledge of what is transitory and concrete. A necessary means for constructing history are specific forms of imagination: 1) constructive (the historian interpolates statements into the sources that are not directly contained in it, checks and criticizes the sources); 2) a priori (ensuring the choice of sources used). “The picture of the past created by the historian becomes an imaginary picture in all its details, and its necessity at every point represents the necessity of the a priori.” The historian's picture is localized in time and space, consistent and justified by the available evidence.
As a method of modern historical science, Collingwood turns to evidence based on the method of questions and answers.
The historian begins his research by posing a problem to solve which he poses questions. The meaningfulness of a question depends on the material from which a meaningful answer can be obtained. The answers received are the basis for a mandatory (deductive) conclusion necessary for an unambiguous solution to the problem posed.
The first question asked before starting any historical work is: “What is the purpose of this work?” The answer to this presupposes rationalization of the choice of subject, methods of work and scientific systematization of the results obtained. The second and third questions are closely related to the central principle of Collingwood's philosophy of history: history in the proper sense of the word is the history of thought. There are no simple events in history; any event is actually an action and expresses a certain thought (intention, goal) of the subject producing it; The historian’s job is to understand this thought. Therefore, having received any historical data, a scientist must ask: “What was the object he discovered intended for?” - and concretize the knowledge gained by answering the question: “Did he perform his task well?” Finally, any historical problem cannot be studied without a study of second-order history, or the history of historical thought, carried out in “historical criticism.” Historical criticism finds its final embodiment in history (understood by analogy with the history of philosophy).
The principles of the philosophy of history developed by Collingwood, his turn to metaphysics and the history of the spirit had a great influence on historiography, on the establishment of the principles of rationalism in historical science.
Other writings: Mirror of the Spirit, or Map of Knowledge (Speculum Mentis or the Map of Knowledge. Oxf., 1914); An Autobiography. L., 1944; The Idea of Nature. Oxf., 1960.
Fedor Blucher
Philosophy of history in the works of R. J. Collingwood "The Idea of History" and "The Understanding of History" by Arnold J. Toynbee
Robin George Collingwood(1889-1943) based the “Idea of History” on the neo-Hegelian idea of idealistic historicism. His concept is based on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Collingwood, not limiting himself to an analysis of Hegel's works, examines the contribution of each era of modern European civilization to the development of historical thought. In antiquity, philosophy represented "man controlling his actions, creating his own destiny with the power of his intellect." As philosophers believed then, the course of history was created and directed through the efforts of an individual.
In the 20th century, these progressive views for their time provoked criticism in the works of R.J. himself. Collingwood, O.A.G. Spengler, A.J. Toynbee. The reason for this was, among other things, numerous examples of various civilizations and cultures discovered by archaeological excavations at that time, unknown in the times of Voltaire and Hegel. These discoveries, to which both Collingwood and A.J. Toynbee were directly related, caused an information explosion in historical science in the second half of the 19th century and radically changed ideas about the constant and linear progressive development of historical diversity.
As a result of the crisis, the paradigm of the philosophy of history was revised and ideas emerged about the global historical process, united into a single process-time model. In contrast to the classical paradigm, the concept of historical science of the second half of the 19th century, the new one, called postclassical, had a number of features:
1. Like the ancient philosophers, history is personified because it is experienced and created by each person.
2. The main principle of modeling the historical process is the identification of cultures or civilizations as macrohistorical phenomena. Macrohistorical phenomena were understood as “dynamic formations of an evolutionary type” (Toynbee), historical uniqueness, characterized by internal immanent unity.
3. The postclassical historiosophical paradigm, in contrast to the classical one, which considered a single historical process as internally structured and staged, with stages identified on one or two grounds, now understands the historical process as a temporal process of the formation of social reality, within which civilizations or cultures are created and perished .
4. An important difference between the new concepts was that the identification of macrohistorical phenomena was carried out on multiple grounds at once.
Scribe
Therefore, Collingwood moved away from the understanding of the philosophy of history by Hegel and Voltaire. Voltaire saw the philosophy of history as critical or scientific history, when the historian independently judges the subject, instead of repeating stories read from ancient books. For Hegel, philosophy of history simply means general, or world history. Behind the events of the past, Collingwood assumed the presence of a thought that guided the participants in these events. “For history, the object to be discovered is not just an event, but the thought expressed by it. To open this thought means to understand it.” But the historian should not reduce the discovery of thought to a simple reconstruction. R. J. Collingwood called the first duty of a historian “The willingness to establish at any cost what really happened.” To do this, Collingwood proposes a method of empathy, i.e. adaptation and reincarnation of the researcher into the spiritual world of a historical figure. In addition, the historian must reproduce thoughts “in the context of his own knowledge and therefore, by reproducing them, he criticizes them, gives his assessment of their value, corrects all the errors that he can find in them.”
2. Understanding history as a process of development. History as a science does not deal with the unchanging object of the human spirit, but only with “a description of the conquests of the human mind at a certain stage of its history.”
3. History - experience of development. Systems of thought of the past, due to their strictly historical nature, remain valuable for posterity. “... the past is not dead; By understanding it historically, we incorporate it into modern thought and open up the possibility, by developing and criticizing this heritage, to use it for our movement forward."
Civilizations, from Toynbee’s point of view, “in subjective terms represent intelligible fields of research, and in objective terms they represent the basis for the intersection of fields of activity of individual individuals, whose energy is the life force that creates the history of society.” Civilizations, according to Toynbee, can go through the following phases of their existence: emergence, growth, breakdown, decline, collapse.
Toynbee A. J. Comprehension of history. Collection. Per. from English/Comp. Ogurtsov A.P.; Entry Art. Ukolova V.I.; Closing Art. Rashkovsky E.B. - M.: Progress, 1991. - 736 p. P.8. This book is an abridged edition: Toynbce A.J. A Study of History, containing 12 volumes. The first three volumes were published in 1934, volumes 4-6 in 1939, volumes 7-10 in 1954, volume 11 in 1959, volume 12 in 1961.
Philosophy. Nature, problems, classical sections: Navch. Pos_b. / V.P. Andrushchenko, G.I. Volinka, N.G. Mozgova and in.. Ed. G.I. Wolinki. 2nd view. - K.: Karavela, 2001, p.258.
Toynbee Toynbee A. J. Comprehension of history. Collection. Per. from English/Comp. Ogurtsov A.P.; Entry Art. Ukolova V.I.; Closing Art. Rashkovsky E.B. - M.: Progress, 1991. - 736 p. P.294.
Blind people. Bruegel.
At the heart of the premises of his theories, Toynbee laid down the personal character of history, the reconstruction and salvation of Being in personality, as well as the personal character of history. Toynbee viewed civilizations as the revival of the creative capabilities of individual groups of societies that had moved from a long existence in conditions of savagery or backwardness to a new life. The historian worked to create a concept of civilization, raising questions about the reasons for its emergence and development. However, A. Toynbee does not give a detailed definition of civilization, nor does he give clear criteria by which they can be classified. He names only two stable criteria: “... The universal church is the main feature that allows us to classify societies of the same type. Another criterion for classifying societies is the degree of distance from the place where a given society originally arose." In accordance with these criteria, Toynbee identifies 21 societies or civilizations. Earlier, back in the 19th century, the Russian sociologist, culturologist, publicist and naturalist N. Danilevsky argued that there is no universal civilization and proposed ten basic cultural and historical types that only existed in history. Their comparative analysis with Toynbee’s societies shows the absence between them fundamental differences.
According to Toynbee, history is carried out through the constant intervention of God, who realizes it through the existence of man and humanity. The divine logos acts as a world law, which, in interaction with humanity, creates the basis of history. The activity of humanity is a response to divine questioning, expressed in the form of a natural or other challenge. The degree of success of a person’s response to divine questioning determines the phases of development of a civilization closed on itself, its genesis and decline. According to Toynbee, “Personality is understandable only as a conductor of spiritual energy.” Thus, by comprehending history, a person comprehends himself and within himself - the divine law and the highest destiny. “The illumination of souls with the light of higher religions determines the spiritual progress of a person’s earthly life,” writes Toynbee. - The peaceful conquests of the highest religions mean much more in the history of mankind than anything that history knew before their appearance. Spiritual progress is defined by the phrase from the Christian prayer: “Thy will be done.” The salvation of those who have made the most of their spiritual capabilities to create a better life on Earth will be the grace that the Lord will bestow upon Christians who pray to him: “Thy kingdom come.” This approach may satisfy a follower of Aurelius Augustine, who affirmed the origin of history in God and its development towards the City of God by people chosen by God for salvation and endowed with grace by him, but not a historian seeking answers to the reasons for the genesis and existence of world civilization.
Having given a negative assessment of the racial theory that existed since the 19th century, Toynbee simultaneously rejected the theory of the influence of geographical conditions on the development of civilizations. Strongly objecting to the geographical approach to the causes of the emergence and development of civilizations, the historian points out the similarities natural conditions in the lower reaches of the Nile and Jordan rivers, noticing that civilization arose on the first river, but not on the second. The similarity is apparent. The sizes of the deltas fertilized by the silt of the floodplain areas are not comparable. The scale of the annual Nile flood and natural conditions made it possible to harvest up to three harvests a year, which made it possible for a significant number of people to live in a compact area. Surplus food contributed to the stratification of society, that is, the formation of significant groups of the population necessary for the development of a new social structure in relation to the primitive communal society - civilization.
Sunset. Firmament
While studying the history of the emergence of civilizations in the valleys of the Nile, the great Chinese rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges, Toynbee lost sight of an essential fact - the simultaneity of their emergence. “River” civilizations, including those in the Yellow River and Yangtze valleys, arose in a very specific period of time. In the presence of developed agriculture and cattle breeding, neither earlier than this period, nor in other natural and climatic conditions, they could not have arisen and did not arise, just as they did not arise in the Jordan and Rio Grande valleys. Civilizations arose where and when two natural secular processes came together, namely: when continental ice, which began to melt 20 thousand years ago, had mostly melted, and the advance of the sea slowed down to millimeters per year, which happened about 10 thousand years back. The humidity inside the continents increased (due to the global melting of glaciers) and the rivers, overflowing in their upper reaches, carried silt to their mouths in tenfold size. The removal of silt by rivers was two to three times higher than the rate of advance of the sea onto the land. This happened 5500 BC. The formation of mighty deltas as natural dams and the resulting large-scale seasonal floods of rivers that fertilized their floodplains with fertile silt were the reason for the stable intensive the development of a large community of people, the emergence and development of new forms of social and industrial organization and community culture, was the beginning of a process leading to the formation of civilizations. This factor was omitted by Toynbee in his works.
(to be continued)
