A World of Questions & Answers—Part II
Presenting the Past
Introduction
This week we take the next small step in our continuing exploration of the deep practical significance of the question-and-answer logic and epistemology that was Collingwood’s response to the riddle posed by the Sphinx of Kensington Gardens.
In particular, we dig a little deeper this week into his notion that all history is the history of thought, by way of introducing and illustrating his notion of “survivals.” Collingwood, in his philosophy of history and indeed in his philosophy of science, thought of the past, not as something that came before and is now gone forever, but something which endures among us here and now, part of the present, is part of who we are and how we go about our business, if only we have the knowledge and make the effort to read the evidence in front of our eyes.
We begin by revisiting that critical incident in 1916 and looking at it in this light.
—The Editors
A World of Questions & Answers—Part II: Presenting the Past
Not on sad Stygian shore, nor in clear sheen
Of far Elysian plain, shall we meet those
Among the dead whose pupils we have been,
Nor those great shades whom we have held as foes;
No meadow of asphodel our feet shall tread,
Nor shall we look each other in the face
To love or hate each other being dead,
Hoping some praise, or fearing some disgrace.
We shall not argue saying “ ’Twas thus” or “Thus,”
Our argument’s whole drift we shall forget;
Who’s right, who’s wrong, ’twill be all one to us;
We shall not even know that we have met.
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men
—Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
A Meeting of Minds: Reprise and Reevaluation
When that young intelligence officer from the Admiralty fatefully encountered Scott’s sphinx on his way to and from work each day back in 1916 and was tortured by the riddle it posed, a perplexing riddle that simply would not leave him, this was not just a random encounter of any random young man with a random, if notable public monument.
When we sketched last time, with some colourful representative details, the singular childhood of that remarkable young officer, we wanted to give the flavour, a sense of who he was, what manner of man he was—and not least the wealth of specialist knowledge and experience which had by then become very much part of him and at the heart of what he was about, by the time he found himself face-to-face with Scott’s terrible monster for the first time.
For everything that he had lived in his young life, from the time he took up Latin at 4 and Greek at age 6, had conspired to prepare him for grasping the significance of this new riddle of the sphinx, and for solving it as only he could.
Only in this way was he in a position to draw from it such a motherlode of intellectual wealth, enough to payroll a veritable revolution in ideas that was to come—a radical new philosophy of history and historiography, a new philosophy of art, and much else besides, but not least a new epistemology of question-and-answer whose reverberations will rumble on for many centuries more.
As we saw, young Robin Collingwood was by then, at only 27, already a seasoned Oxford philosophy don, with some five or six years under his belt as a Fellow of Pembroke, having been tutoring and arguing incessantly with Oxford University philosophy undergraduates one-on-one, all day long, day in, day out, in the demanding, sometimes gruelling, ancient, unique Oxford tutorial tradition of the intellectual duel which lives on even today.
It had already been some two decades since he first took up the study of Kant, and only a year less than that since he had consciously embarked upon the study of “the history of thought” as being his chosen life’s work after studying Descartes’s 1647 mathematical treatise on the laws of physics, the Principia Philosophiae, when he was a nine-year-old prodigy with a passion for science, philosophy and above all for history and knew at once how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
As we have seen, Collingwood had also had by 1916 more than two decades behind him of the in-depth study of the history and theory of the sciences, including both the natural sciences and the social sciences, as well as an encyclopaedic knowledge of all of these but in particular of archaeology, scientific history and historiography, with in-depth specialist knowledge of the history, historiography and archaeology of the classical world—above all Roman Britain, on which he was well on his way to becoming a noted authority.
More importantly, however, he had also accumulated by that time some twenty years of hands-on practical experience in scientific work himself, sleeves rolled up.
He had personally been trained, as we saw, in Roman history and archaeology by Oxford’s Francis Haverfield, the doyen of the field and former protégé of Mommsen himself. The young intelligence officer knew from many, many years of firsthand experience what the daily grind of scientific detective work and the eureka of scientific discovery were all about. Collingwood had staffed countless major scientific digs since his early teens and had led a number of major archaeological excavations of Roman ruins himself since his early twenties.
What is more, he was well versed in the history and philosophy of art and was on his way to being an important aesthetician, and thanks to his mother, had a deep knowledge of music, and thanks to his father, of painting, and he painted and composed music throughout his life. He ranged across so many fields, yet in each he was always the consummate participant observer, and always and in every domain a student of the history of thought.
And yet…. And yet that bewildering monument in Kensington Gardens, which challenged all his refined sensibilities and breathtaking erudition, addling the brain of this singular, gifted intellect, had had an even longer and more remarkable story to tell, as he was in time to discover.
Sir Gilbert Scott’s "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” embodied and was unintelligible without the extraordinary story of the romance of Queen Victoria who had fallen in love at first sight with her cousin, the dashing 20-year-old Albert, and without some knowledge of the history of what was by then the world’s largest, wealthiest and most powerful empire, back in the days of Victoria’s 64-year reign, when Britain was widely regarded as the world’s preeminent nation.
Nor could Scott’s creation of genius speak to us without our knowing and witnessing the Memorial’s retelling and reliving of the life story of, and trumpeting the remarkable career and achievements and influential, progressive values of the Queen’s Consort, Franz August Karl Albert Emanuel, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861).
The sphinx’s riddle was impossible properly to understand too without recollecting Albert’s vision and his achievements, not least the Great Exhibition of 1851, and his Chancellorship and thoroughgoing reform and modernization of Cambridge University.
It was unintelligible above all, perhaps, without some acquaintanceship with his liberalizing, reforming, humanitarian zeal that extended throughout an Empire he effectively ruled without formal power or office; puzzling to the casual visitor without knowing about Albert's valiant career-long campaign against slavery worldwide; without knowing about his devotion to emancipation at home and abroad.
It would have been barely half-understood without knowing about Albert’s tireless efforts to do what he could to dismantle, or at least ameliorate the worst damage wrought by the British class system so alien to the deeply held values of this serious German student of philosophy, of the history of art, and of political economy, law and literature, who had been taught by the idealist Fichte and romanticist Schlegel. Albert was also a gifted musician and composer and outstanding sportsman, who valued talent and ability for its own sake, and cared not at all for titles and social standing.
Here was a Memorial to a born reformer who had used his immense influence over the Queen and over a nation whose respect and loyalty he commanded, to strive, however clumsily, to create equality of educational opportunities for all; to make available to everyone the cultural privileges he knew how fortunate he had been to have been born into—irrespective of their occupation or social class or the accident of their birth, whether shopkeeper or labourer, craftsman or farmer, that they might all, equally, enjoy the rich educational and cultural heritage that was their birthright every bit as much as it had been his.
Scott’s memorial was impossible to comprehend in its full significance too, without taking in the sweep of the whole history of art, the thousand-year history of university education and the history of science; without an understanding of the architectural language of the Gothic Revival and some familiarity with the courtly jewellery of the Middle Ages on which the overall design was partly based.
Above all, as we have seen, it would have remained a riddle without comprehending fully the all-consuming grief of Queen Victoria at the tragic loss of the love of her life and the country’s beloved and revered cultural leader, when Albert succumbed to typhoid at the height of his powers at only 42, a tragedy which sent the still young Empress into seclusion and deep mourning for the next four decades until she died.
And remarkably, all this and more is in the story told vividly in iconic imagery by Scott’s extraordinary Memorial to a great man, whether it appeals to us aesthetically or not.
And thus did two worlds of thought meet and collide when Collingwood came face to face with the riddle of Scott’s apparently ridiculous, vulgarly ostentatious and, to him at first, unspeakably ugly piece of civic architecture. As we saw two weeks back, it was particularly incomprehensible to Collingwood, considering that this eyesore had evidently been the most prestigious commission received by the country’s most prolific and distinguished architect of his time.
It incorporated hundreds of fine sculptures by the country’s leading sculptors of the day, more than a hundred of them full-length, life-size likenesses of distinguished individuals in the arts and sciences, or else very much larger-than-life figures representing each of the arts and sciences themselves, carved in marble and cast in bronze, with a frieze at its base depicting 187 noted poets, musicians, composers, painters, sculptors and architects (the multitalented Michelangelo got to appear twice in the frieze).
And yet this monument like no other, as a whole, appeared to Collingwood at first blush to be nothing but an indefensibly bad, incompetent piece of utterly tasteless art, hideous to behold.
Or so it did until he began to approach it as he would have approached any other artefact of the past, as a scientist, an archaeologist, a scientific detective, seeking to understand what it was that Scott, who had clearly failed in his view to produce something beautiful, had instead actually been trying to do.
This meant having to think all over again the very same thoughts that Scott had been thinking, identifying the very particular questions to which the resulting design was the best, indeed the only possible answer.
The Presence of the Past
Robin Collingwood and the Albert Memorial equally, each in their own unique and very different way, were the very embodiment of their own remarkable history, and of the whole worlds of history each brought with them—whole constellations of thought from art, the humanities and sciences, commerce and manufactures, culture and religion.
From the perspective of Collingwood, for whom all history was the history of thought, the past is not at all something that has been before and is gone forever, but something which has undergone a gradual and often complex transmutation into the present.
Everything always leaves “survivals,” as he called them, sometimes staying on as the very contrary of what they were when they first appeared. The books we read by authors long dead, and the books of those who have read those books and been influenced by them, if only by way of reaction against them, carry on into the present.
The study of history was for Collingwood a way of understanding the thought of the present, the way we live and think and act today, and our possibilities for tomorrow, something which could teach us far more, he felt, about human experience, its foibles and its lessons and potentialities, than all the world’s psychologies put together.
For the thoughts we think, the life we lead, the patterns which endure in our culture and in our organizations and in our lives, our present predicament and future possibilities, from our personal interactional patterns with others, to the patterns in our family or workplace, to major cataclysms at the geopolitical or ecological level, are at the same time not just the product of the past which got us here.
Rather they are the very living past itself, the living thought, conscious and mostly unconscious, of generations past, tens or even hundreds, in many respects even thousands of years ago, which still live on in another form, the living patterns in which we operate, modes in which we think, and metaphors we live by, first introduced in times gone by.
All the while, we all too readily mistake history for what is vulgarly thought of as “history,” imagining it to be stories of ages long gone rather than an understanding of the present, right here where we dwell, helping us to understand what we are dealing with now, answering the question, “What is this?”
But the thought process—the scientific detective work of the true historian as opposed to the scissors-and-paste historian—can bring that history to light here and now where it still lives on, seemingly almost by a kind of X-ray vision.
To take a case in point:
The house in which I have been living and working for the past twenty-five years is over two centuries old, built during the reign of George III. It has been home to earls and countesses, to surgeons and merchants. After two decades of my getting to know and restore every corner of this building, it took an architectural historian and heritage expert with a keen eye to reveal what not only had I never seen or imagined, but what had not been seen or remembered for generations.
Here the highly trained and experienced, discerning eye of that architectural historian found the surviving evidence—two vertical cuts in the stone skirting, a thinning of the wall, a hollow sound when tapped—of an extra entrance door off the front lobby, long ago plastered over and invisible from one side, a blind door from the other side, which had been presumed formerly to have been put there only for purposes of symmetry.
It had been during the 1850s the patients’ entrance to the practice of Dr John Smith Soden, a noted local accoucheur and leading ophthalmic surgeon, one of the founding 300 Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a pioneer of cataract surgery. But why the extra door?
In the days before hospital births, difficult deliveries beyond the midwife’s capacities requiring surgical intervention were brought to an accoucheur like Dr Soden, and in the midst of labour the patient would not have been able to make it any further in their wheelchair. And by the time his ophthalmic patients attended Dr Soden's practice to chance his new and risky procedure of cataract surgery, they would have been almost completely blind. The extra entrance was a necessity.
Nor would the porters and their carers have been allowed any further into the good doctor’s family home, let alone anywhere near his famous library of the history of medicine and the priceless treasures it contained.
And look, here was something else odd too—in another room, now a laundry room, the fine ashlar stone fireplace was oddly placed, off centre and far too near the window of this small room. Some tapping on the wall and some other visual evidence showed that the hearth had actually been moved at some point to a new location a couple of feet away from the hidden flue to which it was no longer connected. Why?
A search in the city archives produced a hand-drawn plan of the layout of the ground floor from 1808 amongst the deeds presented to the house’s first occupant. The plans confirmed that the fireplace had indeed been centred and that the current doorway into the room did not then exist.
Nor could it have, for there was only room for it to open inwards, and if it did so then the edge of the mantelpiece in its original location would have blocked it. So the fireplace was moved to enable this door to be installed! But why was the original doorway blocked off and replaced with this new entrance?
Also found in the archives was an old builder’s estimate from a century ago for installing a cooking range against the long wall of the room opposite the fireplace, a wall which in 1808 had had a door in it.
The original plans showed that the little room had been built as a cloakroom for boots and outerware, which made sense as the original door to it (the one blocked off to make room for the cooking range, to turn the room into a kitchen) had led off a rear corridor, at the end of which was the door leading to the rear garden and from there to the stable. After all, you wouldn’t want to bring your muddy riding boots and wet coat and riding breeches through the polite rooms of the house.
That rear corridor no longer existed because at some point in the building’s history, as not only the 1808 plans but a telltale bulge in the ceiling confirmed, its other wall must have been removed to enlarge the room on the other side of it, which the 1808 plans showed to have originally been the Housekeeper’s Room.
As there were extensive kitchens downstairs, why, however, would someone a century ago have built a further kitchen unless the house had been converted to be in multiple occupation?
A search of the archival records of births and deaths showed that indeed different babies with many different surnames had been born in this house at around the same time, more than half a century since it ceased to belong to Dr Soden or to his son who had continued his surgical practice there, and after which it had been the home of a local merchant.
The census records established that the then owner of the property, a Mrs Miriam Stone, was herself living elsewhere, in a very grand house in the countryside some miles from the city. So a century ago the house had indeed been converted into multiple units with a number of shared kitchens and shared indoor bathrooms. Further such evidence, both architectural and documentary throughout the house, confirmed the hypothesis, and explained other oddities of construction elsewhere.
Bit by bit, the two centuries of history of the building and its occupants revealed themselves, including its time as a secret WWII installation for battleship design, disguised as a YMCA hostel to make sense of all the comings and goings and not draw the attention of German spies.
With enough such historical detective work, more and more of the survivals, to use Collingwood’s term of art, in documents stored in city record offices, in the national archives, boarded-over openings, odd bits of joinery and ill-matched stone, and so on, brought to light more and more of the history of the house and the daily life of its inhabitants, and above all, precisely what those who had made the changes to the building were thinking when they made them.
The Persistence of Patterns, for Better and for Worse
The past is not gone. We are living it, and its survivals are everywhere.
Just look around you. All those artefacts have been designed and manufactured by someone, somewhere, before now, perhaps for something like their present purpose, perhaps for another purpose altogether. These are not just products of the past, but they are the past surviving into the present.
The historian’s job, as above all a student of the present, and of human thought and human conduct first and foremost, is to help us understand what we are really dealing with.
As Collingwood describes it, it’s like a clump of grass in the wild which to most people is just a clump of grass, but which a skilled woodsman can see is just where a tiger is lying in wait.
What are we to make of the movement in the grass? If, he says, your only interest in tigers is in shooting them, very well, you can go to a gunsmith; but you need someone with a deep knowledge of woodcraft to know what you are really dealing with when you see movement in the tall grasses.
Will you just raise your gun and shoot because you believe you have sufficient reason to conclude it’s a tiger? What if, on the contrary, it’s your own child playing hide and seek?
So many of the patterns by which we feel hamstrung are, once understood by clarifying their origins, relics which once served a purpose and are now truly hampering our search for better solutions.
Yet some of those inconvenient patterns, whose origins are perhaps long forgotten, were laid down for a reason, a reason which holds just as good today as back then, and which we abandon or dismantle at our peril.
To be continued, next week…
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted