Simon Blackburn has a somewhat surprisingly admiring review of a biography of RG Collingwood in a recent issue of TNR .  Collingwood comes off as very contemporary, very stimulating.  In what Blackburn calls a “succinct and perspicuous . . . statement of the public nature of the self,” Collingwood wrote, “The discovery of myself as a person is the discover that I can speak, and am thus a persona or speaker; in speaking I am both speaker and hearer; and since the discovery of myself as a person is also the discovery of other persons around me, it is the discovery of speakers and hearers other than myself.”  Very Rosenstockian, that.  Very Robert-Jensonian too.  And Wittgensteinian.

Not surprisingly, Collingwood rejects philosophical investigations that treat their subject matter in an ahistorical fashion.  The notion that we can get to a timeless a priori.  Blackburn summarizes Collingwood’s critique:

“For Collingwood, this is all self-deception.  What we may think of as a priori and timeless will be no such thing.  It will be simply an application of the ‘absolute presuppositions’ of our own period of thought.  Those are the presuppositions that lie so far underneath the edifices we build that we cannot dig down to them.  They remain invisible, if only because they would be at work determining the shape our digging would take, or what we could notice as we conduct it.  We can never step on our own shadow.  The only power that can reveal these presuppositions is that of time: later generations will see them, but we cannot.”

Blackburn gives a couple of examples: “The hiddenness of a presupposition is like the peculiarity of a fashion, obvious to subsequent generations but necessarily invisible to those whose fashion it is.  When Hans van Meegeren forged paintings of Vermeer, he could deceive most of his contemporaries in the 1930s, but what he produced now look like 1930s paintings, even to an amateur eye.  When Sir Arthur Evans meticulously and diligently reconstructed the Minoan palace at Knossos, it looked like a contemporary Hollywood film set, a fantasy of what Knossos might have looked like.”

Why is Collingwood almost unread, while Wittgenstein still strides the earth like a Colossus?  Blackburn says it’s personality: “With Collingwood, there is assertion and bravado instead of seduction.  Wittgenstein shows that he is a wonderfully and originally reflective thinker; Collingwood cannot help telling you that he is.  Wittgenstein is silent about his being capable of other things as well; Collingwood boasts of it.  You can read all of Wittgenstein without knowing of his genuine heroism during World War I.  One cannot help feeling that had Collingwood done anything like that, it would have cropped up on every other page.”

Lesson for philosophers: If you want to endure, don’t boast.  Seduce.