Collingwood's Reform of Hegelian Dialectic

Abstract

The relation between Collingwood and Hegel has been mentioned very often but so far it has seldom been the subject of a thorough inquiry. Collingwood himself is for a large part responsible for this situation because he never expressed his debts to Hegel's philosophy. In the Idea of Nature and in the Idea of History, both published posthumously, Collingwood confines himself to a critical account of Hegel's philosophy of nature and history. The quality of Collingwood's interpretations in both works however, leads one to suspect that Collingwood had a very profound knowledge of Hegel's philosophy. This suspicion is confirmed by Collingwood's manuscripts in the Bodleian Library which show clearly that Collingwood studied Hegel much more thoroughly and continuously than his interpreters have assumed so far. In the manuscripts we find long and profound commentaries on Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, on his Science of Logic and on all parts of the Encyclopedia. The material in the Bodleian is so abundant that a whole book would be needed to interpret it satisfactorily. In this paper, however, I will restrict myself to the kernel of the Hegel's and Collingwood's philosophies which is the dialectic.It needs no comment that Hegel's system is thoroughly dialectical. About the dialectical character of Collingwood's philosophy, however, many interpreters have their doubts and even when they admit, always after long discussion, that some parts of Collingwood's thought are dialectical, they immediately claim that these parts are not the best.