What Does It Mean to Understand the Past?

Imagine you find an old letter in your grandparents’ attic. It’s from 1943, written by someone you’ve never met, describing a day when they were scared and lonely. As you read it, you start to understand something about what that person felt—not just that they were scared, but what it was like for them to be scared in that particular situation, with the information they had, and the beliefs they held.

Now imagine a different scene. A geologist picks up a rock and says, “This rock is 200 million years old.” She can tell this because of the layers, the fossils, the chemistry. She knows things about the past—but the kind of knowing is completely different from what you were doing with the letter.

Here’s the strange thing: we use the same word—“past”—for both of these. But are they really the same thing? When a historian says they “understand” why Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and started a civil war, are they doing the same kind of thing as a scientist who explains why a star exploded? Or are they doing something fundamentally different?

This question was at the heart of everything R.G. Collingwood thought about. He was a philosopher, an archaeologist, and a historian who spent his life trying to figure out what it actually means to understand other people—especially people from the past.

The Puzzle of Philosophical Distinctions

Here’s a weird fact to start with: philosophers often make distinctions that don’t actually sort things into different groups.

Think about the difference between doing something because it’s pleasant, doing it because it’s good for you in the long run, and doing it because it’s the right thing to do. If you were a philosopher, you might want to distinguish these three concepts: the pleasant, the expedient (what’s good for you), and the right (what’s morally correct).

But here’s the thing—one single action could be all three at once. Eating a good meal could be pleasant, healthy (expedient), and also the right thing to do if you promised to share a meal with someone. So the philosopher’s distinction between these three concepts doesn’t actually sort actions into three separate boxes. The same action can fall under all three descriptions.

Collingwood noticed that this is true for a lot of philosophical distinctions. When philosophers distinguish between mind and body, they’re not saying that some things are purely mental and some are purely physical. A human being isn’t half mind and half body, like a centaur is half man and half horse. The whole person is body when you look at them one way, and the whole person is mind when you look at them another way. (This gets technical, but here’s what it accomplishes: it means that when we talk about “mind” and “body,” we’re not talking about two different things that somehow bump into each other. We’re talking about two different ways of understanding the same thing.)

This is crucial for Collingwood’s whole project. He thought that a lot of confusion comes from people treating philosophical distinctions as if they were like scientific classifications. Scientists sort things into groups: mammals over here, birds over there. But philosophers aren’t sorting; they’re describing different aspects of the same thing.

What Does It Mean to Ask “Why?”

Now let’s get to the heart of Collingwood’s thinking about history. He noticed that the word “cause” can mean very different things depending on what kind of question you’re asking.

Imagine you’re standing by the side of the road because your car broke down going up a steep hill. A physics professor walks by and says, “Your car stopped because hills are farther from the Earth’s center than flat ground, so more power is needed to go uphill.” Then a mechanic walks up, holds up a loose cable, and says, “Actually, you’re running on three cylinders.”

Who’s right? Both of them. They’re answering different questions. The physicist is answering a theoretical question about why hills require more power. The mechanic is answering a practical question about what you can fix to get the car moving again. They’re using the word “cause” in two different senses, and there’s no conflict because they’re not competing to answer the same question.

Now extend this to history. When a historian asks, “Why did Brutus stab Caesar?” they’re not asking the same kind of question as a physicist asking, “Why did that piece of metal expand when heated?” The historian wants to know what Brutus was thinking—what reasons he had, what he believed about Caesar, what he thought he was accomplishing. The physicist just wants to know what conditions reliably produce what results.

This is the big idea: understanding people is different from explaining natural events. Not harder, not easier—different. And Collingwood thought that pretending they’re the same thing leads to terrible misunderstandings.

The Inside and Outside of Events

Collingwood had a memorable way of putting this. He said that every human action has an “outside” and an “inside.”

The outside of Caesar crossing the Rubicon is: a man, some soldiers, a river, a particular date. You could film it. You could measure it. A scientist could describe it in terms of bodies moving through space.

The inside is: what it meant to Caesar and the people around him. The Rubicon was the boundary of Roman Italy, and Roman law said no general could cross it with an army. By crossing, Caesar was defying the Senate and starting a civil war. You can’t film that part. You can’t measure it. But without it, you haven’t understood anything.

“A mere event,” Collingwood wrote, “has only an outside and no inside. But an action is the unity of the outside and inside of an event.” The historian is never interested in just the outside or just the inside, but in the action as a whole—the physical movement understood as an expression of thought.

This means that when you study history, you’re not just collecting facts about what happened. You’re trying to re-think the thoughts of the people who acted. This is what Collingwood called “re-enactment.”

Can You Really Think Someone Else’s Thoughts?

Here’s where things get really interesting—and controversial.

Collingwood claimed that when a historian truly understands what Caesar was thinking, they don’t just have a similar thought. They have the very same thought. Not the same feelings, not the same situation, but the same thought content.

This seems weird. How can my thought be the same as Caesar’s thought? Caesar is dead. I’m alive. We’re separated by 2,000 years.

Collingwood’s answer is that thoughts aren’t like physical objects. If Jane and Jim both recite “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal,” how many thoughts are there? Two acts of thinking, but only one thought—the same logical content is being thought by two different people. In the same way, if I understand Plato’s argument in a dialogue, the argument I’m thinking through now is not an argument resembling Plato’s. If I understand it correctly, it is Plato’s argument.

The historian’s job is to think the same thoughts that historical agents thought—but to think them as theirs, situated in their context, with their beliefs and their information. You can’t just read that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. You have to re-enact what it meant to cross that river knowing what Roman law was, knowing what the Senate was doing, knowing what the consequences would be.

This doesn’t mean you have to agree with Caesar or feel what he felt. It means you have to reconstruct the reasoning that made his action make sense from his point of view.

Why This Matters: History vs. Science

Collingwood was fighting against a view that was popular in his time (and still is today): the idea that all knowledge should look like natural science. On this view, history is just a less precise, more primitive version of science. A historian is basically a scientist who doesn’t have enough data yet.

Collingwood thought this was completely wrong. The difference between history and science isn’t a matter of precision. It’s a matter of what kind of thing you’re trying to understand. Science explains events by showing how they fall under general laws. History explains actions by showing what reasons people had for doing them.

When a scientist explains why a star exploded, they’re saying: “Stars with these properties always explode under these conditions.” When a historian explains why Caesar crossed the Rubicon, they’re saying: “Given what Caesar believed and wanted, crossing the river made sense.”

These are two completely different kinds of explanation. They answer different questions. They rest on different assumptions. And Collingwood thought that confusing them—trying to explain human actions as if they were just complicated natural events—would actually prevent you from understanding anything about history at all.

The Philosopher as Untangler

This brings us to Collingwood’s most general point about what philosophy is for. He wrote that in unscientific thinking, “our thoughts are coagulated into knots and tangles; we fish up a thought out of our minds like an anchor foul of its own cable, hanging upside-down and draped in seaweed with shellfish sticking to it.”

The job of philosophy is to untangle these knots. Not to discover new facts, but to clarify what we’re already thinking—to distinguish concepts that have gotten tangled together, to show that different kinds of questions require different kinds of answers, to prevent us from mixing up things that shouldn’t be mixed up.

When people argue about whether mind and body are the same thing, or whether history is a science, or whether human actions have causes, Collingwood would say they’re probably tangled up in a conceptual knot. The solution isn’t to take sides in the argument—it’s to step back and ask: “What do you mean by ‘cause’ here? What kind of question are you actually trying to answer? What are you presupposing that makes this question arise in the first place?”

This is what Collingwood called “presuppositional analysis.” Instead of trying to prove that a particular view is right or wrong, you uncover the assumptions that make that view possible in the first place. And those assumptions, he thought, aren’t true or false—they’re not the kind of thing that can be true or false. They’re just the framework within which certain questions make sense.

A Living Debate

Philosophers still argue about whether Collingwood was right. Some think he was defending a sensible kind of pluralism: there are many ways of knowing, many kinds of explanation, and we shouldn’t pretend that one kind fits everything. Others think he went too far and ended up suggesting that different forms of knowledge are completely isolated from each other—that history and science, for instance, have nothing to say to each other.

There’s also a debate about whether Collingwood changed his mind. In his earlier work, he seemed to think that philosophy could identify the permanent, unchanging structure of different forms of knowledge. Later, he seemed to suggest that even the assumptions we make when doing science or history are themselves historical—they change over time. Which is it? Are the presuppositions of history and science fixed, or do they change as human thinking changes?

Collingwood himself would probably say that this is exactly the kind of knot philosophers need to untangle. And he’d remind us that the point isn’t to get the “right” answer and move on. The point is to keep thinking clearly, to keep asking what we’re really doing when we try to understand each other—across rooms, across centuries, across differences we can barely imagine.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Re-enactment	The idea that understanding a past person’s thought means thinking the same thought, not just a similar one
Inside/outside of an event	A way of distinguishing what can be physically observed from what it meant to the people involved
Philosophical distinction	A distinction between concepts that doesn’t sort things into separate groups (like “pleasant” vs. “right”)
Absolute presupposition	A basic assumption that makes a whole field of inquiry possible, but isn’t itself true or false
Presuppositional analysis	The philosopher’s method of uncovering the hidden assumptions behind our questions and answers
Explanatory pluralism	The view that there are many legitimate kinds of explanation, not just one (like science)

Key People

R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) — A British philosopher, archaeologist, and historian who argued that understanding human actions requires a different approach than explaining natural events. He thought philosophy’s job was to untangle conceptual confusions by revealing hidden assumptions.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) — A philosopher who argued that all sciences, including the study of human behavior, use the same basic method. Collingwood disagreed strongly.
Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) — An Oxford philosopher who corresponded with Collingwood and disagreed with him about whether philosophy has its own special subject matter.

Things to Think About

If Collingwood is right that understanding someone’s thought means thinking the same thought they thought, how do we know when we’ve gotten it right? Can we ever be sure we’ve re-enacted someone’s thought correctly, or is it always a matter of interpretation?
Collingwood says that when we distinguish between the pleasant, the expedient, and the right, we’re making a “distinction without a difference” in terms of the actions themselves. But doesn’t it matter why someone did something? If two people do the same action for different reasons, isn’t that a real difference?
Think about a time when someone completely misunderstood your reasons for doing something—they explained your action in a way that didn’t match what you were actually thinking. Does Collingwood’s idea of re-enactment help explain what went wrong?
If history and natural science are fundamentally different kinds of knowledge, does that mean historical claims can’t be tested or proven the way scientific claims can? Or is there a different kind of evidence and proof that works for history?

Where This Shows Up

In school: When your history teacher asks you to explain why the American Revolution happened, they’re asking for something different from when your science teacher asks why water boils at 100°C. Understanding people requires thinking about their reasons, not just finding patterns.
In arguments: The next time you and a friend disagree about why someone did something, notice whether you’re arguing about facts or about what their reasons were. Collingwood would say these are different kinds of questions.
In AI and psychology: Debates about whether artificial intelligence can really “understand” language—or just process it—are wrestling with exactly the questions Collingwood raised about what it means to think someone else’s thoughts.
In law and journalism: When courts try to determine someone’s “intent” or journalists try to explain why a politician made a decision, they’re doing the kind of work Collingwood described: reconstructing reasons, not just recording events.