Ambiguïtés et antinomies de l'histoire et sa philosophie (review)

146 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY life reason is not only autonomous but fully self-motivating and self-actualizing: Faith and reason, religion and philosophy, and so forth, are wholly distinct. Nowhere, however, did Collingwood so state the case. In fact, in a series of articles entitled "Religion, Science, and Philosophy" (1926), "Reason is Faith Cultivating Itself" (1927), and "Faith and Reason" (1928), he explicitly argued that "reason builds upon a foundation of faith and moves within a system whose general nature must be determined by faith" ("Faith and Reason," p. 27). And in an article entitled "Fascism and Nazism" (1940), as if to underscore the persistency of his earlier conviction, he observed: The time has long gone by when anyone who claims the title of philosopher can think of religion as a superfluity for the educated .... It is the only known explosive in the economy of . . . the human mind. Peoples rich in religious energy can overcome all obstacles .... Peoples that have reached the top of a hill by the wise use of religious energy may then decide to do without it; they can still move, but they can only move downhill, and when they come to the bottom of the hill they stop ("Fascism and Nazism," p. 176). It goes without saying that these references, and many more, may tend to undermine Donagan's conclusion that Collingwood was "like the penitents in Ash Wednesday 'who will not go away and cannot pray' " (p. 307). However, to repeat, such a dispute can be settled only after thorough consideration has been given the other "contributions." What is obvious at this time is Donagan's tendency to use familiar religious language in a manner that was not typical of Collingwood. Stated somewhat differently, Collingwood's use of certain key Christian terms, informed as he was by a careful reading of the literature, tends to be misinterpreted by Donagan; terms bear connotations not specified by Collingwood. In fact, Donagan at times appears to assume the very role Collingwood was attacking. Outstanding in this respect are the ways in which Collingwood, on the one hand, talks about "faith," "God," "religion," "absolute presuppositions," and the manner in which Donagan, on the other hand, responds. In short, Donagan's contribution in this area will involve a critical re-evaluation of the corpus guided by the consideration that inherent in the material is a religious theme which might not only hold the collection together but which might suggest that Collingwood was saying things that have passed unnoticed and therefore unappreciated. Whether or not Donagan has succeeded in "placing" Collingwood must remain an open question: It can only be answered when the above "contributions" are evaluated. As noted earlier, whatever the verdict, Donagan's book will remain a landmark: for it marks the point at which the method and sensitivities of one school of contemporary philosophy were put to the test. Donagan's book, however, may provide a turning point should the judgment be that his analysis fails to do justice to all the facets of Collingwood's life and thought. And ironic as it might later seem, it was an awareness that "positivism" and "realism" were somehow immersed in an inadequate hermeneutical method which some forty years ago convinced Collingwood to move on and to dig deeper: It could be that linguistic philosophy in this specific endeavor is similarly involved. GEORGE E. DERFER Arizona State College Ambigu~tts et antinomies de l'histoire et sa philosophie. Par ]~mile Callot. Prdface de Fernand Braudel. (Paris: ~dition Marcel Rivi~re et Cie, 1962.) In a letter to Christian Garve, September 21, 1798, Kant pointed out that the starting point of his critical investigations was not the problems concerning the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, but a definite epistemological problem which had been put into the foreground already in the dissertation from 1770: the problem of antinomies. Very often and repeatedly Kant dwelt on this problem, advocating the view that a general and definitive solution of the antinomies was urgently necessary if all activity in the theoretical field should BOOK REVIEWS 147 not arrive at an unsurmountable impasse. As he pointed out in his treatise Which are the...