R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) was primarily a philosopher ofhistory, a metaphysican and archaeologist, and considered his work inaesthetics—the principal work being hisThe Principles ofArt (1938)—as secondary (for more about his generalphilosophy, see the entry onRobin George Collingwood). But the work in aesthetics has enjoyed a persistent readership thatcontinues into the present. In the years after WWII he was probablythe most widely read and influential aesthetician to have written inEnglish since Addison, Hutcheson and Hume (not counting Ruskin as anaesthetician), and to this day continues to make his way intoanthologies as a principal proponent of the expressive theory of art.In the field of the philosophy of history, Collingwood famously heldthe doctrine of ‘Re-enactment’: since the subject is humanbeings in action, the historian cannot achieve understanding bydescribing what happened from an external point of view, but mustelicit in the reader’s own mind the thoughts that were takingplace in the principal actors involved in historical events.Similarly, the aesthetic procedure is one whereby the artist andspectator jointly come to realize, to come to know, certain mentalstates (see Guyer 2018). Art is fundamentally expression. Collingwoodsaw two main obstacles to general understanding and acceptance ofthis: First, the word ‘art’ has surreptitiously acquiredmultiple meanings among ordinary folk which should be disentangled;second, a philosophical theory of the phenomenon of expression isneeded to show that it is an essential part of the life of the mind,not just a special activity that poets go in for. (Collingwoodactually published an earlier theory of art inOutlines of aPhilosophy of Art, but came to regard that theory as mistaken,superseded by the one inPrinciples of Art; what follows, andall references, concern the latter only).

• 1. Art as Craft, Magic, Representation and Amusement
  • 1.1 Art as Craft
  • 1.2 Art as Representation
  • 1.3 Art as Magic
  • 1.4 Art as Amusement
• 2. Art as Expression
• 3. Art as Imaginative Creation
• 4. A Theory of Expressive Imagination
• 5. Language
• 6. Practical Consequences: Art and Artists
• 7. Practical Consequences: The Artist and the Community
• 8. Problems
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Art as Craft, Magic, Representation and Amusement

There are four concepts of human activity which are commonly called‘art’, but which according to Collingwood, should besharply distinguished from what he calls ‘art proper’. Theimplication is that those things are improperly so-called, that is,are commonly but wrongly called art. Since today the tendency inaesthetics is to insist that all things called ‘art’ arerightly so-called, it is important emphasize this fact; theInstitutional Theory of Art, and the Theory of Mass Art, would nodoubt be viewed by Collingwood as pernicious linguistic confusions.But in fact it is worse than this. Art proper is often found withinthe context of those other things; even particular works of art(proper) may at the same time be instances of those things.Furthermore, it is not as if ‘art’ once had the truemeaning appertaining to art proper, and then got extended to theseother things; the word has always been more or less subject to atleast some of these confusions. The task, then, is to distinguish theconcept from those of many other competing related human activities,and to claim that it alone deserves to be called art.

1.1 Art as Craft

The first of these things that is easily confused with art proper hasthe recommendation of having been espoused by Plato and Aristotle.This is the ‘technical’ theory of art, or the theory thatart is craft (from the Greek word ‘technê’), bywhich we mean a fully worked out theory of crafts such as watchmaking,joinery, carpentry and so on. In fact, the theory of craft, along withthe thesis that art is not craft, suffices to show that art proper isa distinct activity from the other three things, by showing that theyare essentially crafts.

The term ‘craft’ refers to activities which typicallyexemplify the following six characteristics. None is individuallynecessary, but the less of them that an activity exemplifies, the lesssense there is in calling it a craft: (1) The applicability of adistinction amongst actions as means and actions as ends; a baker, forexample, whips the egg whites in course of mixing the batter, for theeventual end of baking a cake. (2) A distinction between planning andexecution; a carpenter, for example, may draw up a plan for a table,and then in a separate action or set of actions construct a table. (3)In planning, ends precede means in that the latter are chosen for thesake of the former, but in execution the means precede the end. (4) Wecan distinguish between raw material and finished product. (5) Adistinction can be drawn been form and matter. (6) Crafts stand inthree sorts of hierarchy: (a) The raw material of one craft is thefinished product of another; for example the sawmill produces plywood,which is in turn the raw material for builders. (b) One craft has asits end product the tools which are employed as means in another. (c)Some trades work in concert to bring about the finished product; forexample, the manufacture of a computer may involve separablemanufacture of the chip, the hard disc, the monitor and so on, so thatthe final assembly is ‘only the bringing together of theseparts’.

The point is not that works of art never display any of thesefeatures; the point is that some works of art involve none of them,without its detracting from their status as art. Therefore the essenceof art cannot have to do with any features correctly treated by atheory of craft. A pure case might be the poet for whom the poemsimply comes to mind, unbidden, without its being written down or evensaid aloud. There is no distinction to be drawn between planning andexecution in such a case, and none between actions as means andactions as ends. (If the poet had in mind something analogous to ablueprint for the poem, he would already have composed it.)

That takes care of (1)–(3), and (6) (a)–(c). What of (4)?It might be tempting to think of the words as the raw material, thepoem as the finished product. But T. S. Eliot for example did notchoose the words needed forThe Wasteland and then proceed toarrange them into the poem. The poet can, however, be conceived as‘converting emotions into poems’; but this is ‘avery different kind of thing’ from, say, the pasta maker’sconversion of flour into spaghetti. Collingwood simply leaves thispoint hanging, because it would require his own positive account ofart as expression to explain it; that will come later. (He alsoneglects the possibility that the raw material of the poet is simplythe language as a whole.)

Finally, the distinction between form and matter as it applies to artis not the sort required by (5). That distinction requires that theself-same matter be capable of having different forms placed upon it;if we cannot identify the matter in the first place, then thedistinction cannot get a grip.

It bears repeating that the claim is not that no works of art have anycraft-like features; it simply that any definition of art in terms ofthose features would exclude some unimpeachable works of art (29). Orrather, success in being craft is strictly immaterial to its beingart; no craft-featuresmake an object into a work of art.Collingwood is well aware that for example an opera requires a greatdeal of planning, technique, raw materials, and so on. And because ofthis, he is well aware that the craft-theory is widely if implicitlyheld, and devotes a lively excursus to its modern manifestation,namely ‘Art as a Psychological Stimulus’. This is theaccount of art whereby it is the craft (or ‘technique’) ofmanipulating certain objects (paint, sound, words and on) so as tobring about psychological states in the audience, which in turn areknown, or least knowable, in advance. But this is to assimilate worksof art to mere means; Collingwood is quite serious in his denial ofthis. The artist is not ‘a purveyor of drugs’ (34).

1.2 Art as Representation

Although as we will see in a moment Collingwood holds that there ismore to it than this, representation is, in the first instance, therelation that a portrait bears to its sitter. It is plainly a matterof skill, of technique, since one can envisage a successful outcomebefore undertaking it. So art cannot be representation (or‘mimesis’, in any straightforward sense). But the theorythat it is is so venerable and influential that it demands separateattention. (Not, however, because of Plato and Aristotle; Collingwoodholds that despite popular opinion, they did not hold it!).

Collingwood advances a very liberal notion of representation, suchthat a great deal more artefacts than one would initially think couldrightly qualify as representative. For the standard for fidelity isnot resemblance, but that the feeling evoked by the artefact resemblesthat evoked by the original. Representation comes in three,overlapping degrees. The first is that of the ordinary photograph, orpaintings and the like which attempt that sort of literalness. Thesecond is that whereby the painter – he mentions van Gogh– ‘leaves out some things that he sees, modifies others,and introduces some which he not does see in his sitter at all’(53–4). At the extreme, he may paint mere patterns, for example,of a dance, leaving out the dancers. The third is ‘emotionalrepresentation’, which represents the inner aspect of emotion,but which is nevertheless distinct from expression. Some types ofmusic, on this view, represent the mind undergoing its experiences,such the feeling of ‘lying in deep grass on a summer’s daywatching clouds drift across the sky’ (56). Collingwood does notsay what the exact difference is between representation andexpression, but I assume that it depends first of all on whether ornot the artist has a clear conception of what he is trying torepresent; if he does, then his activity is craft, not art proper. Aswe will see below, this is not implausible because the artist, atleast according to Collingwood, does not literally know the expressivecontent of his artwork in advance of expressing it. It would be inkeeping with Collingwood’s approach to add that the expressedcontent isindividual, whereas represented contents arealwaysgeneral; perceptually quite different works canrepresent exactly the same thing.

1.3 Art as Magic

Collingwood takes pains to analyze the notion of magic becauseproperly understood, magic is much more closely intertwined with artproper than one would have thought; nevertheless, it too falls prey tothe master argument: it is a kind of craft, and art is not craft.

Magic is not, contra the prevailing anthropology of the time, mere badscience—‘superstitious’ false beliefs like that ofnot walking under ladders because of the evil that will surely follow.Nor is it explicable as Freudian neurosis, which assumes that everysociety employing magical practices is to that extent sick. Magic isthe ritualized representation of useful emotion, not for the sake ofcatharsis, but for the practical value of the emotion. The war-dance,for example, instills courage by dint of drums and spears, andfrightens the enemy should he catch a glimpse. Of course false beliefsmay play a role, which the theory of magic-as-bad-science seizes upon;the rain dancer may think he increases the probability of rain. Butthat is a ‘perversion’ of magic; the true magical effectis the reinforcement of hope and hard work that a drought puts to thetest. The Freudian theory regards the representation as omnipotentwish-fulfilment and therefore fails to account for this latter effect,which indeed Collingwood supposes to be vital to any healthy society.Happily, our society, or our societies, are replete with magicalphenomena. Religion, patriotism, sport, social customs such as dinnerparties, weddings, funerals, dances, and so on all involve in one wayor another ritualized actions that are undertaken at least partly formagical reasons. (Of course magical phenomena are probably on thewane.)

Art proper is often bound up with magical ‘art’, andindeed it is common amongst critics to confuse them. Religiousart—say a twelfth-century crucifix—may be aestheticallyfine as well as induce a pious awe in the mind of the believer. Butthe fact that a suitably kitschy product may also serve the latterpurpose shows that the magical effect can be aimed at independentlyfrom the aesthetic (admittedly, Collingwood underestimates the problemof disentangling these purportedly different responses—for somepeople, only an aesthetically fine thing can generate strong piousemotions; perhaps Collingwood can allow that some art proper may beinstrumentally necessary for the achievement of magical ends).Frequently, the particular form of this mistake is to think that anattitude towards the subject-matter embodied in a work is rightlytaken as the object of purely aesthetic criticism. Thus it is commonto hear for example of a play praised for taking a salutary view ofsexual politics and would therefore encourage the sexes to get onbetter; to say so is to say that the play is very good at whatCollingwood is calling ‘magic’, but is neither here northere as regards its status as art.

1.4 Art as Amusement

The aim of amusement art is to stimulate an emotion by ‘makebelieve’ means, and to discharge it. If the emotion is intendedto remain undischarged—if the aim is that the audience shouldleave the theatre indignant at global warming for example—thenthe work is one of magic; if the emotions it evokes are intended to be‘earthed’, the work is one of amusement. Most ofliterature and drama are actually amusement—not only for exampleThackeray but most of Shakespeare are included. But remember thatamusement and art proper can co-exist, i.e., in the same work (inShakespeare’s case, the same work is often actually a bundle ofworks, some magical, some amusement, and some, at least in favourablecases, of art proper). Collingwood stresses—in 1938—therise of decadent amusement works, especially pornography but also forexample the case of literature or film appealing to our love ofimaginatively dwelling amongst the upper classes. And he warns of adanger they present to our society (or rather of the danger of theconditions that give rise to an ever growing demand for them); that iswhat Plato meant to proscribe in his famous banishment of the‘artist’ from his republic, and Collingwood sees Plato ashaving foretold the eventual doom of Greco-Roman civilisation. Now allthis is by the way; amusement is craft, not art. But the points heraises in this connection are important to his main subject, because acertain tradition wrongly identifies the success-conditions of arts ofamusement as the standard of taste for art proper. Hume, for example,wrote as if the criterion for success in a work of art is theexcitation of pleasure in suitably refined individuals. But pleasurehas a name; the ‘artist’ who busies himself with arousingthat particular emotion is merely a craftsman.

2. Art as Expression

If art proper is not the stimulation of preconceived emotion, and notthe representation of it either, then what precisely does it mean tosay that, nevertheless, art is the expression of emotion? The key isto remember that art is not craft—Collingwood assumes that thereader will accept this, once it is pointed out—and hence thedistinction between means and ends does not, strictly speaking, apply.Nor does the distinction between planning and execution. Instead,Collingwood writes in a passage that is often quoted, when a personexpresses an emotion, he is

conscious of … a perturbation or excitement which he feelsgoing on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in thisstate, all he can say about his emotion is: ‘I feel … Idon’t know what I feel.’ From this helpless and oppressedcondition he extricates himself by doing something which we callexpressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do withthe thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It alsosomething to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is anemotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longerunconscious. It also has something to do with the way in which hefeels the emotion. As unexpressed, he feels it in what we called ahelpless and oppressed way; as expressed, he feels in a way from whichthis sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightenedand eased (109–10).

The following three points emerge from this. 1. To express is tobecome conscious of an emotion: that is why the distinctionbetween plan and execution cannot be applied. 2. Expressionindividualises; rather than describing the emotion in wordswhose signification is in principle general, the expression is aintrinsic feature of the utterance, of the ‘utteranceitself’ (although he does not credit him, this is an evidentexample where Collingwood follows Croce). Thus we cannot speak of theemotion embodied in a work of art as if it were the content which theart provides the form. 3. The ‘lightening’ of whichCollingwood speaks is not that of catharsis, which provides an outletfor the emotion and may take place without its agents being consciousof it at all. It is the achievement of clarity, of focus of mind,which may indeed intensify what is felt rather than attenuate it(though typically it does not).

This last point suggests that there is such a thing as an‘aesthetic emotion’, but it ‘is not a specific kindof emotion pre-existing to the expression of it’ (117). Instead,it is an ‘emotional colouring which attends the expression ofany emotion whatever’ (ibid.) Expression, in thissense, must be sharply distinguished from the betrayal of emotion;one’s tears may be said to ‘express’ one’ssadness, or stamping one’s feet ones anger, but these can occurwithout the making lucid and intelligible of the emotion that isrequisite for expression in Collingwood’s sense. Betrayal caneven occur that is wholly unconscious; one can blush without noticingit. The relation between expressive object and emotion is that ofembodiment or realization, not of inference.

3. Art as Imaginative Creation

To conceive art as the craft of emotional stimulation orarousal—whether for the sake of amusement or magic—is toregard the material work of art as the intended means towards apreconceived end. The falsity of that conception—assuming thatart is essentially the expression of emotion—shows that the workof art as not anartifact at all (so artworks are notartifacts; Collingwood was aware that language sometimes suggeststheoretical mistakes). Instead, the artistic process is a specializedtype of making that Collingwood callscreation: to createsomething is to make it non-technically, but ‘consciously andvoluntarily’ (128), and hence intentionally. The creator‘need not be acting in order to achieve any ulterior end; he notbe following a preconceived plan; and he is certainly not transforminganything that can be properly be called a raw material’(129).

Now take for example a lecture given on a scientific topic. There are,in Collingwood’s view, actually at least two things: The lectureas a created thing, and the lecture as a particular sound-event. Theformer may be complete in advance of, or indeed without ever, beinguttered or written down: the actual speech-event, as a sequence ofnoise, enables a suitably equipped listener to reconstruct the createdthing is his own mind, therefore to grasp its scientific content, butis inessential to it. And so it is with works of art. A tune, forexample, needn’t be sung, played or written down in order toexist. Thus Collingwood:

I have already said that a thing which ‘exists in aperson’s head’ and nowhere else is alternatively called animaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is thereforealternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a caseof creation … Hence the making a tune is an instance ofimaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or apicture, or any other work of art. (134)

Collingwood is not supposing that every work of art could in point offact exist only people’s minds; of music, for example, he writes‘[P]erhaps no one can do that [possess himself of the music]unless he does hear the noises’ (140; of course there are someprima facie counterexamples to this; later Beethoven, forexample). The human imagination is typically too weak; in most caseswe have to depend on the ‘bodily’ work of art for sensoryhelps. But in principle, the ‘total imaginativeexperience’ that constitutes the proper work of art must beconceived as only contingently related to the bodily work.

What precisely is the motivation for this move, the conception of thework of art as imagined or ideal object? Leave aside the special casesof music and poetry, which Richard Wollheim notes have the specialfeature that they can be written down (see Wollheim 1972). Why notconceive painting, for example, as the creation of certain paintedobjects? This would be consistent with the thesis that painting is anot craft. The answer given by Collingwood is clear, but leads totrouble when we consider the question of interpretation. An experienceof a painting involves a great deal that no one would say is ‘inthe painting’, which is, after all, a nearly flat canvas withpaint on it. Not only do we see things that are not really present,but for example we have impressions of space and mass, perhaps bymeans of what Berenson called ‘ideatedsensations’—those which involve imaginary motor orkinaesthetic sensations. These phenomena are not literally features ofthe canvas, but they are in some sense features of the work. SoCollingwood, in brief, includes within the work of art proper all thatwould normally be ascribed to the (correct) interpretation—the(correct) experience—of the artwork. But there is no reason toaccept this, any more we should include all the relationalfacts—sowing, fertilization, watering and so on—thatcontribute to a growing plant to the plant itself. On contrary, theposition makes it impossible for two spectators to disagree on theinterpretation of a work. Irrespective of the concern with the privacyof the experience, if they attribute different properties to theobject—that is, they find different properties in theirrespective total imaginative experiences—they are simplyconcerned with different objects, and their verdicts are compatible.We could set the artist’s own experience as a criterion ofunderstanding the work, but that would make his death significant inway that we do not actually recognize, and would run against the grainof Collingwood’s antipathy to aesthetic individualism and the‘cult of genius’, discussed below. As a matter ofspeculation, Collingwood perhaps thought that aesthetically relevantproperties—expressive properties—have to be intrinsicproperties of the work of art; in that case, perhaps his conclusiondoes follow. But it is much more satisfactory to hold that what we arearguing over when we disagree over the expressive properties of a workof art is the same object.

4. A Theory of Expressive Imagination

Not a great deal hangs on that thesis, at any rate. A great deal morehangs on the thesis that art essentially exercises the expressiveimagination. The difference between the imagined lecture and the tuneis that the content of the lecture is verbal and cognitive, and bringsthose departments of mind into play; whilst the tune, among otherthings, brings the emotional department of the mind much more vividlyinto play. The substance of Collingwood’s view is largelydependent on his account of this distinction.

At the most basic level Collingwood distinguishes thinking fromfeeling. The objects of each, respectively, are thoughts and‘sensa’: ‘sensa’ is Collingwood’s namefor all the data of the senses—of touch, smell, sight, and soon. Thoughts can be true or false, justified or not, where sensa haveno such duality: they are felt or not felt, but cannot contradict eachother. There is sense in which sensa can be said to be real or unreal,true or false (for example in hallucination), but this not anintrinsic feature of sensa themselves; that distinction applies onlyto thoughts involving them. A first point that is directly relevant tothe theory of expression is that probably all sensa have an emotional‘charge’. Thus for example every colour carries with it acertain emotional quality. Not that they are invariably experiencedwith their particular emotional charge; the charge is more like adisposition to be experienced a certain way, under certaincircumstances. Children or artists are more likely to experience them;educated adult Europeans, Collingwood says, tend to have rather‘sterilized’ experience.

Sensa are occurrent phenomena, and therefore fleeting (222): If I hearthe bell striking the hour of four, the experience comprises manypassing sensa, each no sooner generated than gone. But if I am to beaware of them as a process extended in time with particularmorphology, I must retain the sound of the bell, along with thesilences in between. The objects that I so retain cannot be the sensathemselves. Instead, the faculty of ‘conscious attention’generates ‘ideas’ corresponding to the sensa, and whichare retained. Sensa alone—or sense data, orimpressions—are never sufficient for consciousness. Collingwoodcites Kant approvingly in the connection; noting that we have alwaysto ‘fill in’ occurrent perception to generate a completeworld of 3-D objects, he writes:

Moreover (this is a point Kant has made), it is only so far as Iimagine them that I am aware of the matchbook as a solid body at all.A person who could really see, but could not imagine, would see not asolid world of bodies of bodies, but merely (as Berkeley has it)‘various colours variously disposed’. Thus, as Kant says,imagination is an ‘indispensable function’ for ourknowledge of the world around us. (192)

When one is conscious of a feeling of anger, one is aware of it asone’s own. By becoming conscious of it—therefore not ofthe sensation of anger but the anger transformed byconsciousness—what we feel ‘is correspondinglychanged’ (207); the ‘effect of this experience … ismake them less violent’ (209). And another word for this isimagination. ‘We become able to perpetuate feeling … atwill’ (209). ‘Imagination is thus the new form whichfeeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness’(215). With this level of consciousness comes the beginning ofself-consciousness; ‘it is assertion of ourselves as the ownersof our feeling’ (222; feeling that is ‘as modified byconsciousness’). But imagination, since it deals not with sensabut with their ideated analogues, is a type of thought, and with theintroduction of thought comes the possibility of error. Thus if thebasic action of the consciousness is to think ‘This is how Ifeel’, its denial is ‘This is not how I feel’ (216).The possibility of such disowned feeling is the possibility of false,or corrupt consciousness (217).

Thought is established by the intellect, but there are two, separableroles of thought called ‘primary’ and‘secondary’. Its primary role is to ‘apprehend orconstruct relations’ (216) amongst ideas, as just described (infact Collingwood thinks in such relations the relata are fused in anew idea comprising a ‘peculiar colouring or modification of theold’ (223)). The secondary role is to apprehend or construct‘relations between acts of primary intellection’; by thisCollingwood means conceptions of the past, future, the possible etc.,and presumably all that content of human thought which can not beaccounted for in terms of the imagination.

5. Language

That Collingwood has a theory of language might seem tangential to histheory of art, but in fact it is integral to it. ForCollingwood’s approach to it comes not from the theory ofreference and truth as in Frege or Russell, but from the point of viewwhich regards language as fundamentally or in the first instanceexpressive behaviour. Concepts of referential semantics—as a‘symbolism’ in Collingwood’sterminology—become applicable only later, with a certain degreeof sophistication is attained. ‘In its original or native state,language in imaginative or expressive … It is imaginativeactivity whose function is to express emotion.’ (225). Of course‘imaginative’ must be understood in the broader sense justdescribed, denoting all consciousness of ideated analogues ofsensation or feeling. From this angle, we can speak of the‘totality of our motor activities’ as a ‘parentorganism’ (247), from which every type of ‘language(speech, gesture, and so forth)’ is an ‘offshoot’(246).

At the most fundamental level, at the ‘psychic’ level asCollingwood calls it, various sorts of bodily activity are said topsychically express an underlying emotional charge on a sensum;cringing or flinching express fear, for example. At this stageconsciousness of the imagination is not involved—only sensa;this level is shared with animals, and is ‘completelyuncontrollable’ (234). With the consciousness of ideas comes‘emotions of consciousness’, which require language fortheir expression. A cry from a child, for example, may be eitherpsychic or imaginative, depending whether it is involuntary orvoluntary. If it is voluntary, it is the work of the consciousimagination, and thus in the most rudimentary sense linguistic.

It is essential to Collingwood’s view that there are not,paradoxical as it sounds, any unexpressed emotions. A psychicalemotion, on one hand, simply has its being in its expression; anemotion of fear must show up somewhere, whether by cringing, shying orflinching, an increase in pulse or blood pressure, a tightness of thechest, or something else bodily or physiological. On the other hand,if someone tries but fails to express an emotion, the emotion at mostremains ‘shut up’ in the psychic level; in order to beconscious of the emotion, ‘the same consciousness whichgenerates these emotions converts them from impressions into ideasgenerates also and simultaneously their appropriate linguisticexpression.’(238). There is no other way to be conscious of anemotion; to express an emotion is to be conscious of it.

Collingwood’s remarks about the relation between speaker andhearer are of special interest not just to aestheticians but tophilosophers of mind interested in knowledge of other minds. Avoluntary cry is underpinned by a self-conscious imaginative act; andhowever rudimentary it is, self-consciousness is at once theconsciousness of others. ‘[A]s persons’, writesCollingwood, ‘they construct a new set of relations betweenthemselves, arising out their consciousness of themselves and oneanother; these are linguistic relations.’ (248).

The relation of the listener and speaker to an expressive act istotally symmetric:

The hearer, therefore, conscious that he is being addressed by anotherperson like himself … takes what he hears exactly as if it werespeech of his own: he speaks to himself with the words that he hearsaddressed to him, and thus constructs in himself the idea which thosewords express. At the same time, being conscious of the speaker as aperson other than himself, he attributes that idea to this otherperson. Understanding what some one says to you is thus attributing tohim the idea which his words arouse in yourself; and this impliestreating them as words of your own. (250).

Remember, again, that we are talking of theexpressivedimension of language, not the referential dimension (about which morein a moment). To understand another person’s emotions isprecisely to adopt the person’s expressive language asone’s own, imaginatively experiencing the ideas as if they wereone’s own (that is, as if they expressed one’s ownemotion; of course the ideas, as analogues of sensation, arenecessarily one’s own). This aspect of Collingwood, of thenecessary publicity of language and meaning, can be stressed as apotential way out of the threat of the seeming privacy of the work ofart as mentioned above, in connection with p. 134 of thePrinciples.

There is however one evident mistake in Collingwood’spresentation. Sensa are, as we’ve seen, fleeting. But no idea‘can be formed as such in consciousness except by a mind whosesense-emotional experience contains the corresponding impression… at that very moment.’ (251). This cannot be right. Tounderstand Othello, we don’t have to actually have an impressionof jealousy; we only need to have the idea. In fact, by what we saidin section IV, there are no impressions (sensa) of jealousy at all;jealousy is an emotion of consciousness. The solution, which as far asI can see is consistent with everything else Collingwood says, issimply to erase the requirement that the listener must undergoanything at the psychical level, the level of sensa,coevallywith expression (we leave open the question of whether it must havehappened to one in the past).

Earlier, we said that thought involving relations is the domain ofthought in its ‘secondary’ role, the realm of intellect.Thoughts delivered by the imagination are ‘seamless’:

Thus what I imagine, however complex it may be, is imagined as asingle whole, where relation between the part are present simply asqualities of the whole.

‘Analytical thought’—intellect, thought in itssecondary role—may begin with the same experience, but insteadof being ‘an indivisible unity it becomes a manifold, a networkof things with relations between them’ (253). Collingwood alsocharacterises the intellect as the domain of concepts, and ofgeneralisation (273, 281).

Now one might be tempted to suppose that thoughts as grasped by theintellect are roughly the same as propositions, in the sense intendedby analytical philosophers. But Collingwood holds that the propositionis ‘a fictitious entity’ (266), and devotes a long passageto excoriating that tendency in philosophy. Every actual episode ofthought is performed with its own particular degree and character ofemotion; there is no such thing as the thought shorn of its emotionalhusk. All mental activity has some emotional character, includingintellectual activity. The cry of ‘Eureka’ said to haveaccompanied Archimedes’ discovery of a principle of hydrostaticsis but an extreme example. Thuslanguage is expressive ofemotion even in its scientific use. This applies even to mathematicalsymbols and technical symbols. Insofar as they areused, theyautomatically acquire the expressive character of the underlyingthoughts. Thus Collingwood says: ‘Symbolism is thus intellectuallanguage; language, because it expresses emotions; intellectualized,because adapted to the expression of intellectual emotions’(269). In ‘poeticizing’ such language, Collingwood doesnot intend to demean it; presumably the aim is to do justice to therarefied air of pure intellect:

The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressiveconversion by the word of grammar and logic into a scientificsymbolism, thus represents not a progressive drying-up of emotions,but its progressive articulation and specialization. We are notgetting away from an emotional atmosphere into a dry, rationalatmosphere; we are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressingthem. (269)

Nevertheless, Collingwood’s account of language, needless tosay, is radical; he is quite serious in his denial of the possibilityof what earlier I called a theory of the purely referential dimensionof language, which generalizes about truth-conditions of sentences inabstraction from their use:

… we are concerned with a modification of language, not atheory of it. Its assumptions are neither certainly nor probably, norever possibly, true. They are, in fact, not assumptions, butproposals; and what they propose is the conversion of language intosomething which, if it could be realized, would not be language atall. (262)

6. Practical Consequences: Art and Artists

With his theory of language in place, Collingwood takes the theory ofart to be complete. At the end of section III we said that Collingwooddefines Art as imaginative expression, assuming that readers willagree once they have the mistakes of the technical or craft theorypointed out for them. He then poses a particular theory of mind inwhich imagination and expression are built into the structural fabricof the mind, so that every intentional mental act is in some sense anact of an expressive imagination. That includes linguistic acts. Infact, properly understood, language encompasses all expressive actswhatsoever, and every linguistic act is one way or another anexpressive act. Language and art become interchangeable (274).‘Every utterance’, Collingwood says, ‘and everygesture that each one of us makes is a work of art’ (285).Collingwood next turns to ‘practical’ questions, of whichwe will consider two: the relation of art to artists, and relationbetween the artist and the community. In answering them, we willconsider some questions naturally arising from the preceding.

If all activity is in that sense ‘artistic’, then it isnatural to wonder whether the theory has anything to tell us aboutart, that is, the peculiar business of the painter, the poet,the musician and the like. Of course, most activity is undertaken witha some purpose in mind or other, in which case it is craft, howeverhum-drum the theory of it might be. For example, I just ate an orangewhich I took from a bowl; the theory of what I did could be writtendown in a practical guide to eating oranges. But surely I wasconscious of eating the orange; by Collingwood’stheory, then, was I not expressing something? In that case, by thesame theory, just by being conscious, was I not engaged in art? And isthat not absurd?

Collingwood says nothing in direct reply to this worry, but I think itobvious that the reply would be this. In so far as I was conscious ofthe orange, it is true that I was involved in expression. But thisconscious experience was un-sustained, fleeting, and lacking in depth(307). Furthermore, it took place in a mind that was busy with otherthings, and which was dominated by an overarching purpose, namely toeat the orange, whose sub-tasks include selecting it, peeling it,putting a section in my mouth, trying not spill too much juice, and soon; all this would be written down in my practical guide to eatingoranges. Life, then, is full of ‘artworks’, but they aremostly shallow, unworthy of comment. However, there are times whenconsciousness settles on something, such that the mental activity doesapproach the character of art, in the proper sense of the word.Sitting in a park, for example, we might dwell on the look of an oaktree, or suddenly think of an original stanza of poetry, or a snatchof melody. These are instances of imaginative expression, and arecloser to what we should ordinarily call a work of art. But they arelikely to be lost, unless some record of the experience is made. The‘artist’, then, is one who has these experiences ofconsciousness more deeply than the average person, and who hasmastered the practice of preserving them.

But the act of ‘preserving them’ has to be understood in aspecial sense. ‘There is no question’, says Collingwood,“of ‘externalizing’ an inward experience which iscomplete in itself and by itself” (304). Collingwood is denyingthat a painter could in point of fact dispense with the medium, evenif in principle he could (in sense of ‘could in principle’in which a man might run a hundred miles per hour). Instead, although‘you see something in your subject, of course, before you beginto paint it’ (303), the ‘experience develops itself anddefines itself in your mind as you paint’ (ibid.). Thework of art develops by means of positive feedback between paintingand experience. What develops is the ‘total imaginativeexperience’ that Collingwood identifies as the work of art,strictly speaking (304). Again, the work of art proper is not to beidentified with the ‘bodily work’—the paintedcanvas, the sculpted bust—but with the experience of it. What istrue that in point of fact the imaginative experiences requires thebodily work; the human imagination is not able to hold within itanything approaching the richness made available by the plastic arts.In particular, the ‘outward element’—the bodilywork—provides the sensuous content or impressions out of whichthe conscious imagination generates ideas, constituting the‘total imaginative experience’ (see Davies 2008 for moreon this issue).

7. Practical Consequences: The Artist and the Community

‘Theoretically’, Collingwood says, ‘the artist is aperson who comes to know himself, to know his own emotion’(291). Despite this, however, Collingwood is anxious to show this doesnot entail aesthetic solipsism, as if the artist need not ever concernhimself with others. Quite the opposite: necessarily the artisticachievement is collaborative, involving the audience and otherartists.

Collingwood begins his account of the relation between artist andspectator by saying that a spectator understands a given work justinsofar as his imaginative experience is identical with that had bythe artist in creating it. This can never be known with certainty, butso it is with all understanding of language (remember that‘language’ in Collingwood’s usage means allexpressive behaviour). It is also piecemeal: ‘Understanding… is a complex business, consisting of many phases, eachcomplete in itself but each leading on to the next’ (311).Collingwood does speak ofidentity of understanding, butreally his real account is more fluid. First, he accepts that anyutterance is endlessly interpretable; there no such thing as‘the’ meaning of a work (ibid.). Second, theaudience’s role is collaborative, in the sense that the artistis concerned to express emotions that are mutually held; failure inthis may rightly cause the artist to doubt whether he expressedanything, and suffers instead from a ‘corruption ofconsciousness’ as explained earlier. The audience, then,actively participates in re-creating the imaginative experience. Thissecond point flows from his conception of art as a language:

The child learning his mother tongue, as we have seen, learnssimultaneously to be a speaker and to be a listener; he listens toothers speaking, and speaks to others listening. It is the same withartists. They become poets or painters or musicians not by someprocess of development from within, as they grow beards; but by livingin a society where these languages are current. Like other speakers,they speak to those who understand. (317)^[1]

Collingwood further dilutes the air of aesthetic solipsism byobserving that the artist never works alone; on the one hand theartist freely borrows from what has already been achieved, and on theother, at least in the performing arts, the players have their ownessential role. A work of art is collaborative, not simply thecreation of an individual; the ‘cult of individual genius’is totally misplaced and indeed pernicious.

8. Problems

Collingwood’s theory is generally lumped together with that ofBenedetto Croce as an expressive and idealist theory. There are ofcourse differences, but the established picture is not inaccurate. Andtogether with Croce’s theory, Collingwood’s has a fataldefect (without questioning the starting-point, that the essence ofart to be expressive): In identifying the artwork with what we wouldnormally think of as the experience of the artwork, he makes nonsenseof the idea that the spectatorinterprets the artwork, andcan do so more or less accurately; that different people can argueabout the self-same work of art. It has become a truism that theartist is no better placed than the audience to interpret a workrightly, a truism that Collingwood, with his fulminations againaesthetic individualism, would agree. But then the various imaginativeexperiences have nothing to conform to, if artwork and experience andhence artwork and interpretation cannot be separated. That would befatal to the theory; however, it is not clear that anythingsubstantial would be lost, if Collingwood were simply to identify thework of art with the ‘bodily work’, therebyre-establishing room for interpretation to operate. This would seem tosit better with his idea that art is on a level with language, wherelanguage is a public phenomenon.

An apparent further defect in Collingwood’s case in particularis his account of language. It is full of admirable insights, but itis probably misconceived from back to front. The insistence thatlanguage is always expressive is dogmatic, and leads Collingwood todeny that there is any categorical distinction between poetry andscientific writing, which many may take as areductio adabsurdum (298). And more seriously so far as his philosophy ofart is concerned, one might wonder about his account of consciousnessas tied to language. According to it—the theory ofimagination—merely to attend to something is thereby toexpress it, and furthermore is to do somethinglinguistic. Even if we allow Collingwood his generalisednotion of language as appertaining to gesture and so on, surely therehas to be a separation between consciousness or attention andexpression. As C. J. Ducasse pointed out, it seems that when we lookat a vase full of flowers, do we not create a “work ofart” unless we draw or paint it (Ducasse 1929, 52–54).

Finally, it is hard to swallow whole Collingwood’s distinctionbetween art and craft. The consequences are too severe. For example,Collingwood, rigorously applying the distinction, says that insofar ashis activity is art in the proper sense, an artist, since he has noidea what he is to express until he expresses it, cannot set out towrite, say, a tragedy (116).^[2] There is something right in the idea that that the artist cannot‘plan and execute’ an inspiration. But the distinctionCollingwood is after is surely not so cut and dried as that. He needsat any rate a more selective weapon to attack his bugbear of amusementart.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

For a more complete bibliography of Collingwood’s writings, seethe Bibliography in the entry onCollingwood.

• Collingwood, R. G., 1938,The Principles of Art, London:Oxford University Press.
• Collingwood, R. G., 1925,Outline of a Philosophy of Art,London: Oxford University Press.
• Croce, B., 1922,Aesthetic: As science of expression andgeneral lingustic, D. Ainslie (trans.) Revised edition. New York:Macmillan.

Secondary Literature

• Allen, R., 1993, “Mounce and Collingwood on Art andCraft”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 33(2):173–176.
• Anderson, D. R. and C. Hausman, 1992, “The Role of AestheticEmotion in R G Collingwood’s Conception of CreativeActivity”,Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,50(4): 299–305.
• Burgin, G., 2015, “Danto’s error”,Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 22(1):37–49.
• Davidson, D., 2001,Subjective, Intersubjective,Objective, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Davies, D., 2008, “Collingwood’s‘Performance’ Theory Of Art”,The BritishJournal of Aesthetics, 48(2): 162–174.
• Dilworth, J., 1998, “Is Ridley Charitable toCollingwood?”,The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, 56(4): 393–396.
• –––, 2004, “Artistic Expression asInterpretation”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 44(1):10–28.
• Dönmez, D., 2015, “Collingwood and Art Proper: FromIdealism to Consistency”,Estetika: The Central EuropeanJournal of Aesthetics, 52(2): 152–164.
• Ducasse, C. J., 1929,The Philosophy of Art, New York:Dial.
• Grant, J., 1987, “On Reading Collingwood's Principles ofArt”,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,46(2): 239–248.
• Guyer, P., 2018, “Re-enactment, Reconstruction and theFreedom of the Imagination: Collingwood on History and Art”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 26(4):738–758.
• Hausman, C., 1998, “Aaron Ridley’s Defence ofCollingwood Pursued”,The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, 56(4): 391–393.
• Hopkins, R., 2017, “Imaginative Understanding, AffectiveProfiles, and the Expression of Emotion in Art”,Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 75(4): 363–374.
• Hospers, J., 1954, “The Concept of ArtisticExpression”,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,55: 313–44.
• Kemp, G., 2003, “The Croce-Collingwood Theory asTheory”,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,61(2): 171–193.
• –––, 2012, “Art as Expression: Croce andCollingwood”, in A. Giovanelli (ed.),Aesthetics, The KeyThinkers, London: Continuum.
• Kobayashi, C., 2008, “British Idealist Aesthetics,Collingwood, Wollheim, and the Origin of Analytic Aesthetics”,Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic andCommunications (Volume 4), Riga: University of Latvia.
• Lord, T., 2011, “Anti-realism in R.G. Collingwood’sTheory of Art as Imagination”,Idealistic Studies,41(1–2): 45–54.
• Witsher, N., 2018, “Feeling, Emotion and Imagination: InDefence of Collingwood’s Expression Theory of Art”,British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 26(4):759–781.
• Ridley, A., 1997, “Not Ideal: Collingwood’s ExpressionTheory”,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,55(3): 263–272.
• –––, 1998a,R.G. Collingwood: A Philosophyof Art, London: Phoenix.
• –––, 1998b, “Collingwood’sCommitments: A Reply to Hausman and Dilworth”,The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56(4): 396–398.
• –––, 2002, “Congratulations, it’s aTragedy: Collingwood’s Remarks on Genre”,BritishJournal of Aesthetics, 42(1): 52–63.
• Wertz, S., 1995, “The Role of Practice inCollingwood’s Theory of Art”,Southwest PhilosophyReview: The Journal of The Southwestern Philosophical Society,11(1): 143–150.
• Winchester, I., 2004, “Collingwood’s Notion of a Workof Art”,Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 10:62–70.
• Wittgenstein, L., 1953,Philosophical Investigations, R.Rhees (ed.), G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell.
• Wollheim, R., 1972, “On on Alleged Inconsistency inCollingwood’s Aesthetics”, inCritical Essays on thePhilosophy of R.G. Collingwood, M. Krausz (ed.), Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
• –––, 1980,Art and Its Objects,2^nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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