www.quondam.com/77/7603.htm

The Idea of History, etc.

5/10

Such as objector might begin by saying that the whole conception is ambiguous. It implies either too little or too much. To re-enact an experience or re-think a thought, he might argue, may mean either of two things. Either it means enacting an experience or performing an act of thought resembling the first, or it means enacting an experience or performing an act of thought literally identical with the first. But no one experience can be literally identical with another, therefore presumably the relation intended is one of resemblance only. But in that case the doctrine that we know the past by re-enacting it is only a version of the familiar and discredited copy-theory of knowledge, which vainly professes to explain how a thing (in this case an experience or act of thought) is known by saying that the knower has a copy of it in his mind. And in the second place, suppose it granted that an experience could be identically repeated, the result would only be an immediate identity between the architect and the person he was trying to understand, so far as that experience was concerned. The object (in this case the past) would be simply incorporated in the subject (in this case the present, the architect's own thought); and instead of answering the question how the past is known we should be maintaining that the past is not known, but only the present. And, it may be asked, has not Croce himself admitted this with his doctrine of the contemporaneity of history?
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 283.

enactment
2000.02.18 11:36

Brian asks (lauf-s): I wonder what the limits of reenactment are... where does reenactionary architecture begin and end?

lauf-s replies: It seems logical that no reenactment occurs without an enactment ocurring first... reenactment's most inescapable limit is that it can never be as original as that which it reenacts.

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