A Philosopher and Appeasement: R.G. Collingwood and the Second World War

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A PHILOSOPHER AND APPEASEMENT

R. G. Collingwood and the Second World War

A Philosopher at War Volume Two

Peter Johnson

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Copyright © Peter Johnson 2013

The moral rights of the author have been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks are due to my fellow Stakhanovites in the study of Collingwood, David Boucher and James Connelly, who over many years have inspired me to greater efforts, if not rewards. Their help in bringing this two-volume project to completion is much appreciated. Matthew Townend selflessly provided me with the results of his labours in the W. G. Collingwood archives which led to the solution of at least one difficult problem. The Naval Historical Branch (now based in Portsmouth) responded charmingly to my enquiry about I. D. 32 by saying that probably I knew more about it than they did, a comment which still does not wholly convince me. There is a book to be written exclusively on I. D. 32, but it will have to be tackled by an author whose grasp of the mysteries of British Intelligence during the First World War is greater than mine.

My interest in Collingwood began with research in University College Swansea, then a constituent college of the University of Wales, under the supervision of the late Professor W. H. Greenleaf who was both a fine political historian and political philosopher. Jack’s supervision sessions were awe-inspiring in their concentration, historical detail, and length. My focus of attention then was in Collingwood as a political philosopher. In this study Collingwood remains very much centre stage, but with the political events of his time, dramatic and world changing as many of them were, making their appearance as Collingwood, the philosopher, responded to them in his thought. Quite a few years after those Friday evening seminars with Jack in which I would dwell on the arguments it is not a little ironic that I should now write a book in which events and Collingwood’s arguments go hand in hand. Almost certainly, Jack taught me better than I knew.

British political history in the 1930s is a heavily congested field, and among historians appeasement remains nearly as contentious a topic as it was at the time. I have dipped cautiously into this literature, deploying it when it serves the needs of the narrative and argument. My thanks are due to the historians whose works have shed light on the problems I tackle. Where I stumble over personalities and events the fault remains my own. A study which combines philosophy with history, even if in unequal measure, is sure to place heavy demands on research material and my thanks are due to the staff in the libraries I have used for their efficiency and helpfulness, especially the staff in Inter-Library Loans in the University of Southampton Library whose devotion to duty seemed limitless. Where I needed books to own rather than borrow, October Books in Southampton never let me down and they were supported by many serendipitous finds, especially in modern history, in charity shops across the South Coast. Speaking of books, I would also like to thank Imprint Academic for producing the books with cover photographs which match their subject-matter so appropriately.

My wife, Sue, earns a special mention in dispatches for strengthening my resolve when I woke her at 4.30am one cold and dark January morning to say that the computer had wickedly shown me that there was more than one way of losing 20,000 words of text. For a confirmed Biro man the discipline required to stay at the task was more than I usually think myself capable of. Friends rallied round at this difficult time, especially Tony and Jean Palmer, my jewels in The Crown Inn at Highfield, Southampton, who I am sure were so keen to get their hands on the finished books that they were prepared to sacrifice anything - well, almost anything - to encourage me back to work.

Finally, and since the members of the Department of Philosophy in the University of Southampton persist in the practice of acknowledging the role of public houses in facilitating their various publications, I would like to thank the Shirley Hotel in Southampton for providing the necessary pick-me-ups after my usual pre-dawn writing start and for letting me know that there is at least one pub in Britain in which the atmosphere of the Cardiff pubs of my youth has not been entirely lost.

Epigraph

As the organ of his own society’s self-criticism the philosopher finds himself called to follow Socrates in the calling that led Socrates to condemnation and death. That call came from Delphi; and the philosopher who makes his pilgrimage to Delphi sees there not merely the place where long ago an event happened which was important in its time and may still interest the historian, but the place whence issued the call he still hears: a call which, to one who can hear it, is still being uttered among the fallen stones of the temple and is still echoing from the ‘pathless peaks of the daughters of Parnassus.’

- R. G. Collingwood, The First Mate’s Log of a Voyage to Greece in the Schooner Yacht Fleur De Lys in 1939, Oxford University Press, London, 1940, p63, entry dated 14 July 1939.

No one I imagine can think that the arrangements made at Munich were anything but the choice of the lesser of two horrible evils...with the development of the air the capacity of this country as it existed in the XIX century, based on sea power, to do the cosmopolitan policeman no longer stands...we have not been as wrong and unprincipled as you think...a hideous choice of evils...I could not have prevented a worse fate for Czechoslovakia...and if I had sought that remedy, it would have been at the price of immeasurable suffering imposed on the world, and the probable disruption of the British Empire, which may yet perhaps be a rallying point of sanity for a mad civilization.

- Lord Halifax, British Foreign Secretary at the time of the Munich crisis, writing in a letter to Lord Francis Scott 18 October 1938, as cited in Andrew Roberts, ‘The Holy Fox’ A Biography of Lord Halifax, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1991, p124.

Introduction

When R. G. Collingwood returned to Oxford in the late summer of 1919 his project of bringing philosophy into proximity with life was a work in progress. He had, it is true, given a number of public addresses on religious and political subjects, but these were fed as much by his Anglican faith as a settled view of what philosophy is and can achieve.[1] Even though reflection and speculation continued the published results were mostly less than satisfactory. A work on philosophy and politics, Truth and Contradiction, had been completed, but then set aside,[2] and his experience of working on British preparations for the Peace Conference had provided him with more than just a glimpse of the frustrations involved for the academic who attempts to influence public policy, especially in wartime.

Even so, for Collingwood the Socratic belief that the unexamined life was not worth living remained an enduring presence, less a presence, perhaps, than a test because without a principle of enquiry the precept will not work. Of hope for human improvement Collingwood, like many after the sufferings of the First World War, did not require convincing. What Joseph Conrad in his novel, Nostromo, describes as the weary desire for peace conveys very well the general longing which comes after extended and prolonged conflict. Collingwood, however, asks for something more. Any examination of life which is less than fully revealing of its own assumptions and guiding procedures will be futile. At the end of the War Collingwood was a philosopher searching for a voice. To reformulate the world in thought is the aspiration. The method of achievement is philosophy.

If the course it followed became irregular and often traumatic, Collingwood’s desire for rapprochement between philosophy and history and between theory and practice came to him early. In its mature form we might think of it as the bedrock of his personality and beliefs, but it also has some of the hallmarks of a quest - the certainty that the project is rational, the faith in being able to see it through and the conviction that philosophy is best conceived not as the philosophical doctrine of realism portrays it, but as it is defended by Collingwood himself. Not that a conception of philosophy came ready-made. What the exploration leads to changes with the exploration itself. Moreover, as with all pursuits, Collingwood’s is vulnerable as much from without as from within. External events throw up obstacles which have to be overcome. Ideals once thought to be practicable turn into failures, as the League of Nations was mournfully to illustrate. Liberal principles are made to seem platitudes. As the decades following 1919 take their melancholy course new dangers to civility and civilization in the shape of aggressive dictatorships imperil both the quest and the philosopher who aims to see it through. Equally threatening are the storm clouds which come from the project itself. Reshaping the world in thought depends on the thought being true, and this in turn depends on philosophy’s methods being sound. For philosophy to collapse into something which it is not shows that the project as originally conceived will not work and so Collingwood has to get the relations between philosophy and history and between theory and practice right.

To some degree self-doubt affects all quests and Collingwood’s is no exception. He was not the first to embark on this journey of exploration. Plato, Kant and Hegel are among the philosophers who precede him and from them in varying degrees he learned much. The history of philosophy, however, is an uncertain guide since, as Collingwood came to see, past ideas cannot be understood at all except from the perspective of the present, and, so, while he listens attentively to what earlier thinkers have to say the only voice which can help him is his own. There is an important reason for this. Collingwood wishes for a philosophy which can influence life, but the life to be influenced is the one that is lived in the present. A philosophy which ignores this by speaking in general terms will not be sufficient. Of Collingwood’s search for a confirmation of liberal humanist ideals we should be in no doubt. That institutions are open to rational scrutiny and that moral and political problems are in principle soluble, that reason and faith can be reconciled and that a systematic justification of human freedom can be given are each basic to the pattern that shapes Collingwood’s thought. But Collingwood is also forced to address life directly. And, so, in the case of appeasement, an issue on which Collingwood considered it vitally important to take a stand, it is not the prevention of war in the abstract that faced him, but the prevention of the Second World War and how, if at all, this can be achieved. We can see Collingwood as an indebted critic of the Enlightenment - indebted because it is to its legacy that he turns for a rebuttal of irrationalism. Critic because Collingwood soon comes to realize that without a firm grasp of history modernism in ethics and politics will fail.

To a philosopher who sees no connection between philosophy and life there is simply no difficulty here. Political beliefs occupy their own ground. But if we have got the character of Collingwood’s thinking right then this stance is closed to him. Nor should we allow Collingwood the distance between philosophy and life that is provided by Socratic irony. Philosophical thinking is self-reflective where history and science are not. Moreover, the basic tenet of Collingwood’s thinking - the unity of thought and action - gives philosophy a pivotal role. A worthwhile life is one that fulfils the many-sidedness of human nature. Art, history, science, religion and philosophy satisfy distinct human needs. Each is a contribution to the sense that a human life is complete. Remove philosophy and decisive questions will remain unasked, the deepest concerns left unexamined. The ancient Athenians found Socrates intensely irritating. Collingwood would have known why since he took the view that the ring of solid thought[3] which makes up our most basic convictions is not best left unspoken. Philosophy’s job is first to find out what we do believe and then to put those beliefs to the test. It is this idiom which governs much of what Collingwood says when he tries to speak directly to life. Later in his writings Collingwood argued that psychology performs this task of self-examination badly, but the conviction that a life without philosophy is one lived in the shadows was present in his work from the start.

As it is lived, however, life operates on a less abstract level. To be sure, human practices are rule governed and the knowledge involved in following rules is historical knowledge which implies that history bears a significant relationship with practice,[4] but even so the problems in taking a practice forward stand alone. Thus, when a democratic way of life once again finds itself endangered by an enemy recently defeated at an enormous cost in terms of human suffering and loss of resources the problem of how to resist the new threat is acute. Stanley Baldwin, one of the leading opponents of British rearmament in the early 1930s saw war as a great evil. Collingwood, along with Winston Churchill and others agreed, but they also argued that war was not an evil which ought to be avoided at all costs. Collingwood saw from his historical studies of the Roman occupation of Britain and from his knowledge of the German treatment of Belgium in 1914 that there are some occasions when the price of compromise is too high. The charge that appeasement merely feeds the aggression it is intended to prevent was frequently made, but when made by a philosopher its character changes. For Collingwood argues that political beliefs are reflections and, possibly, amplifications of a different order of understanding and enquiry.

There are a number of related issues here. Collingwood held that to take political decisions in the light of a false conception of politics leads to error. Thus, to approach politics wholly in a Kantian or Utilitarian frame of mind leaves many serious considerations unaddressed. However, to get politics right as a form of experience philosophically understood does not guarantee sound decisions. Politics involves practical judgments and there is a clear and obvious logical gap between such judgments and what philosophy can say about them. Moreover, Collingwood was not a philosopher politician, let alone a philosopher-ruler. If political action takes place on stage then Collingwood’s was an off-stage voice, one which followed a script of his own devising even when speaking of political dilemmas which are general in their effects. His aim is to bring philosophy into a closer relation with life, but without a principle of enquiry which distinguishes political beliefs led by rhetoric from those informed by argument the plan will not work. Further, since valid arguments can be practical as well as theoretical we need to distinguish between those arguments that stem from Collingwood’s philosophy and those that do not.

Collingwood’s political beliefs responded to events as they developed as well as to his understanding of philosophy as this changed in relation to history and practice. Here Collingwood’s An Autobiography is a key text because it gives us a history of his political opinions written from his own point of view.[5] I have spoken of the Socratic belief that the unexamined life is not worth living. Collingwood is often portrayed as a public intellectual, but if that is indeed what he is then he neither addresses political issues from the Olympian heights nor does he leave his own political psychology unexplored. For Collingwood tells us[6] that there was a time when he did not examine his life enough. He tells us that behind the Collingwood who was wholly dissatisfied with the contemplative life there was the philosopher who knew that the division between theory and practice was false and the private man who lived as if it was true.

There is much more than biographical interest in these remarks. We might think of the intellectual in politics as someone who attempts to bring reason and method to bear on political problems. To a degree this is Collingwood’s way of thinking, but only to a degree. For bringing reason to bear on political problems can be as readily attempted from a realist point of view as not, and Collingwood makes it absolutely clear that by 1919 he knew that realism in all its forms was false. The realist division between history and philosophy was unpersuasive. In other words, for Collingwood the attempt to bring philosophy closer to life was itself a philosophical problem. By contrast, for Bertrand Russell, while political problems were certainly intellectual problems requiring intellectual solutions, in this area of life philosophy simply has no purchase.

One way of linking philosophy with life is through a statement of ideals. Collingwood, following T. H. Green, often speaks in this manner himself. Since it is hard to imagine philosophy entering practical life directly it is given the job of elucidating the values without which life would be scarcely worthwhile. Between the two World Wars, however, the claim that philosophy is able to provide a basis for human values lost much of its power. The business of moral philosophy is not telling people what to do, but analysing and clarifying moral language as it is actually used. Collingwood does not equate ethics with casuistry, but neither does he think of it as purely analytical. So while the gap between Collingwood’s methods in philosophy and those of analytical philosophy can be overstated it remains forcibly the case that Collingwood wanted a philosophy which could influence life.

The intellectual difficulties specific to this aim are quite transparent. Collingwood’s broad strategy is to narrow the gap from both sides. The political philosopher is not to be thought of as an engineer brought in to repair the faults in the machine, even less as a sculptor shaping political life to a predetermined plan. Similarly, political beliefs are not to be conceived as intuitions, still less as matters of taste, wholly removed from rational scrutiny. And, yet, few political problems are open to neat solutions. Often the lack of a solution is an indication of the seriousness of the problem. The dilemma of appeasement is one such case. Disagreement existed over appeasement as the solution to a problem and over the problem it was meant to solve. Moreover, political decisions involve commitments which are not easily reversed. Policies are formulated in conditions of uncertainty in which present choices alter future circumstances. Politics and history, in other words, bear a close relationship. What this means is that Collingwood’s moral philosophy and his philosophy of history now become the key operators in his attempt to bring philosophy closer to life. Without a rapprochement between philosophy and history and between theory and practice the project will fail. Thus, in the lectures on moral philosophy given and revised almost yearly from the end of the First World War it is the nature of action which is Collingwood’s main focus. Similarly, and with growing control as the inter-war years take their course, in lectures and writings on the philosophy of history it is the nature of history and its relation with practice which preoccupies him.

As the ideological battles between Left and Right intensified in the 1930s, liberalism’s voice struggled to be heard. We might think this to be especially true of Collingwood’s since he writes not only as a liberal, but also as a philosophical liberal, one who believed that the liberal values of freedom and justice are weakened without a foundation in thought. Moreover, Collingwood writes not only as a philosophical liberal, but also as a Christian, one who believed that without the support of spirituality and faith no community can survive. A purely secular liberalism is not enough. Even so, intellectuals who abandon reason for fascism are traitors to the liberal cause and philosophers who take the same route lose all authority, as Collingwood famously remarks (possibly of the Italian philosopher, Gentile), There was once a very able and distinguished philosopher who was converted to Fascism. As a philosopher, that was the end of him.[7] Yet, Collingwood’s attempt to ground liberalism in reason, faith and history does sail close to scepticism. Better than many liberals, Collingwood does see clearly how hollow the liberal elevation of neutrality can become. What is the point of protecting liberty of choice if no choice is more worthwhile than any other? The idea that people should be allowed to think whatever they liked because it didn’t really matter what they thought[8] is, Collingwood argues, false to the relation between thought and life and, in any case, it is dangerously destabilizing from the point of view of individual moral psychology. If there are no substantial principles to abandon, Collingwood is telling us, a liberal apostasy begins to looks like a contradiction in terms.

The reformulation of liberalism in an historical context in which it was thought to be philosophically and politically dead is, then, the task that Collingwood undertakes, but he sees, too, that this would be hard to achieve without also examining the relation between liberalism and history. According to Collingwood it is possible to characterize each age in terms of a single problem - in the medieval world it is the philosophical status of religion, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it is our relation with nature and, hence, the philosophy of science. In the twentieth century it is history,[9] and history unavoidably places politics in sharp relief. No political action is possible without a heavy and not necessarily reckless investment in how beliefs and policies turn out. Moreover, political ideologies, and liberalism is no exception, have an interest in making it appear that the tide of history is moving in their direction. And, yet, scepticism stalks these ideas, too, for there are few grounds for thinking that history is moving in any direction, let alone a liberal one. Whether liberalism triumphs or is defeated has no more necessity in history than the eruption of a volcano or the arrival of a comet. And, so, for Collingwood, the rationality of the historical process, including what distinguishes it from nature, is made an urgent object of study.

Read in the light of Collingwood’s own response to the First World War we should not find this surprising. The Versailles Peace Settlement served only to store up trouble for the future while the Allied Naval Blockade which was a significant factor in securing victory only increased resentment in Germany. So in a relatively short period of time a peace designed to make the world ordered and safe produced exactly the opposite. There is a paradox here. As many historians have pointed out,[10] the roots of appeasement lie in 1918, but in 1918 there were only hopes for a better world and the stated intentions of politicians to bring it about. The course of Collingwood’s life was framed by war, as a boy by the Boer War, as a young man by the First World War and, finally, four years or so before his death, by the second great global conflict. During this period, as D. C. Watt has pointed out, the meaning of appeasement changed from its original sense of the defusing of conflict to purchasing peace for one’s own interests by sacrificing the interests of others. In its later usage, Watts continues, it is only where such a policy is unsuccessful, where it has fired the appetite of the acquisitive and encouraged the bully to believe he lacks serious opposition, that it is called ‘appeasement’. Where it succeeds then, Watts adds "it is defended as realpolitik. Appeasement, like treason, has to be unsuccessful to be both immoral and unrealistic."[11] Collingwood was an advocate of appeasement in its original sense as an ideal, perhaps the overriding ideal of international relations conducted on a civilized basis. When appeasement altered its meaning in the face of hard circumstances and the decisions of politicians Collingwood saw that liberalism had failed and that there was work for philosophy to do if the political creed of his youth was to be resuscitated and renewed. In common with most liberals Collingwood’s perspective on war derives from the