The problem of "influences" in the history of ideas

The problem of "influences" in the history of ideas is another perpetual problem. "Action at a distance" seems to be admissible in the  field of intellectual influences

Collingwood's pronouncement:

"...these methods of description are characteristic of that frivolous and superficial type of history which speaks of ‘influences’ and 'borrowings’ and so forth, and when it says that A is influenced by B or that A borrows from B never asks itself what there was in A that laid it open to B’s influence, or what there was in A which made it capable of borrowing from B. An historian of thought who is not content with these cheap and easy formulae will not see Hegel as filling up the chinks in eighteenth-century thought with putty taken from Plato and Aristotle." Idea of Nature, 128

Claudio Guillen

to ascertain an influence is to make a value judgment, not to measure a fact. The critic is obliged to evaluate the function or the scope of the effect of A in the making of B, for he is not listing the total amount of these effects, which are legion, but ordering them. Thus "influence" and "significant influence" are practically synonymous.

Very interesting insights from Hyrkkänen (2009):

• according to the influence model, to explain some element of the thought of a writer A is to maintain that A has been influenced by an earlier writer B, i.e. A has adopted an element into his thinking from the works of B, or from discussions with B, or, indirectly, via C, or in some other way.
• According to Hermerén, the influence model is misused if research is ‘totally dominated by the search for influences’ – if, in other words, ‘the billiard ball model of artistic creation’ is followed.
• Adopting an influence entails reflecting on alternatives, which is a process of weighing more or less consciously the available influences.
• If we perceive an adopted influence as an answer to a question, or more generally, as a solution to a problem, it becomes understandable why human beings are receptive only to some but not to all possible influences.
• The cases of Vico and Hegel illustrate how people set apart by time can be reunited by similar problems they happen to share. Moreover, for the very reason that human beings may share similar problems, they may arrive at similar solutions.
• ...it would be more promising to try to explicate and understand the reasons for the similarity of problems.
• In the case of independent invention, the interpreter has to consider or imagine the alternative solutions to the problem the inventor had in mind. In the case of an influence being adopted, the task of interpretation is to understand why the agent happened to select a certain influence from the available alternatives. In both cases, the central task of the interpretation is to answer the question of why an idea has, more or less consciously, been adopted.

Concepts (The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood by William M. Johnston, p. 87)

• Intellectual debts
• Source of stimulus for his own philosophizing
• parallels and similarities of doctrine
• ideas traceable to x
• "Collingwood ask us to focus not on what was borrowed, but on what led the borrower to select what he did. Intellectual borrowing tells us something about the borrower only if we go on from there to examine how it fits into the body of his thought. A corollary of this view, which Collingwood does not spell out but which he implies throughout his analyses of other men's thought, is that to borrow is to interpret... It was the multiplicity of his interests and his command of many fields of learning which made Collingwood "capable of borrowing" from Croce, Gentile, and Vico. It was his almost unique intellectual versatility which "laid [Collingwood] open to their influence." p. 87
• "If the source of specific ideas in Collingwood is obscure, the inspiration behind his life-work is clear. He is the fully-educated man, full according to the ideal of John Ruskin... One might say of Collingwood, as of Ruskin, that he is himself the greatest influence on his own thought." p. 89-90

References

• Hyrkkänen's All History is, More or Less, Intellectual History: R. G. Collingwood’s Contribution to the Theory and Methodology of Intellectual History.
• Claudio Guillen's The Aesthetics of Literary Influence, p. 38-39