R. G. Collingwood

Quotes

• “Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.”
• “If it is asked why Socrates permits certain forms of art to be retained in the ideal state instead of consistently banishing all alike, the answer is surely obvious: these are, in the opinion of Socrates, the forms which art will take in the hands of men who understand its true nature.”
• “The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”
• “The essence of this conception is .. the idea of a community as governing itself by fostering the free expression of all political opinions that take shape within it, and finding some means of reducing this multiplicity of opinions to a unity.”
• “All history is art, because to tell a story is art, whereas to tell a true story is history: thus history is art, but a specification of art, art qualified by a condition (truth) which deprives it of a part of its character but not of all.”
• “The general conception here maintained is not new; it is one already familiar from the works of Coleridge, Croce and many others; it is the view that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination.”

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Key facts

Born

Robin George Collingwood , 22 February 1889, Gillhead, Cartmel Fell , Lancashire , England

Died

9 January 1943 (1943-01-09) (aged 53), Coniston , Lancashire, England

Alma mater

University College, Oxford