Collingwood’s expressivism

Collingwood's version of expressivism is expressly based on both an admiration for Croce's aesthetic and an awareness of the defects to which everyday expressivism is prone. In The Principles of Art, he repudiates most of the features of the everyday version of expressivism. Art, in his view, is not concerned with the arousal of emotion at all. Indeed, he draws a sharp distinction between art proper, and the use of art to arouse feelings and emotions. One instance of this is the use of art for purposes of amusement or entertainment, something already considered in Chapter 1. Another is the arousal of emotion with an eye to bringing about practical effects. Perhaps a little oddly, Collingwood calls this 'art as magic'. The sort of thing he has in mind is the way that A. C. Benson's poem 'Land of Hope and Glory' set to music by Elgar is often used at political rallies to rouse patriotic feeling (though Collingwood's own example is not this but the poems of Rudyard Kipling).

Neither of these is art proper, because they use the media of art (paint, poetry, music and so on) as means. Art can be used in this way of course - in advertising and propaganda for example; when it is, it is reduced to a kind of technology or craft, a device for doing something else that need not be in any way artistic. If emotional stimulation is the sum of what art has to offer, art can be replaced by other forms of magic and amusement without significant loss. The value of a craft, a means to an end, resides entirely in its products, so that other means to the same end will do just as well. Computer graphics programs can replace cartographers, for example, so if the artists were craftsmen like cartographers, in principle they too could be dispensed with. It is a presupposition of Collingwood's philosophy of art that the nature and value of art has to be explained in a way that makes it of unique value. Without cartography the world is a poorer place only so long as there is not some other technique for producing good maps. Without art the world would be a poorer place, and nothing could make good the loss.

The simple version of expressivism, then, is mistaken in the emphasis it lays on emotional stimulation. This is just one important mistake. Another is its supposition that the relevant emotion is one that pre-exists the work of art and is to be found independently in the life of the artist. That is to say, Collingwood thinks it is wrong to imagine that a work of art is merely the translation into paint, music or words of an emotional experience the artist has had before ever the work of creation has begun. According to Collingwood, the original emotion is nothing more than an indeterminate 'psychic disturbance'. This indefinite experience is gradually identified and refined in the process of creating the work until the artist can recognize it as the emotion it is. An example might be a general uneasiness that is gradually identified as anger, rather than, say, anxiety. It is also wrong to sup- pose that even this vague 'psychic disturbance' must be temporally prior to artistic activity. The activity of feeling and the activity of creating, though 'not identical . . . are connected in such a way that . . . each is conditional upon the other' (Collingwood 1938: 304), which is to say that neither can be isolated or identified without the other. In other words, we can only identify the emotion when it has come to realization through the work of art.

Towards the end of The Principles of Art Collingwood adapts to his own use the terminology of 'impressions and ideas' made famous by David Hume. An 'impression' is a sense experience of any kind - a sound, a sight, a smell - and an 'idea' is a concept which has intellectual but not sensual content. According to Collingwood, each act of imagination has an impression, or sensuous experience, at its base, which by mental activity is converted into an idea. 'Every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raised to the imaginative level by an act of consciousness' (Collingwood 1938: 306). He means by this that the sensual and emotional experience contained in a work of art is not 'raw' felt experience, but experience mediated by the thought and imagination of the artist.

A major objection to naive expressivism, we saw, is its inability to accommodate the importance of imagination. In Collingwood's aesthetic, by contrast, imagination plays a central role. In fact, art proper as he describes it has two equally important elements, expression and imagination. It is by imaginative construction that the artist transforms vague and uncertain emotion into an articulate expression. The process of artistic creation is thus not a matter of making external what already exists internally, which is how the simple model construes it, but a process of imaginative discovery. And since the psychic disturbance with which it begins is the artist's, art is a process of self-discovery. Herein, in fact, lies it peculiar value - self- knowledge.

Art is not a luxury, and bad art is not a thing we can afford to tolerate. To know ourselves is the foundation of all life that develops beyond the mere psychical level of experience. . Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art. It is important to each one of us that in making them, however much he deceives others, he should not deceive himself. If he deceives himself in this matter, he has sown in himself a seed which, unless he roots it up again, may grow into any kind of wickedness, any kind of mental disease, any kind of stupidity and folly and insanity. Bad art, the corrupt consciousness, is the true radix malorum [root of evil]. (Collingwood 1938: 284-5)

This is a striking panegyric to the value of art, and attributes very great importance to it. Two thoughts spring to mind, however. If 'every utterance and every gesture' is a work of art, this, on the face of it, leaves 'art' in the more restricted sense in which it is commonly understood, of no special interest or value; anyone and everyone is an artist. Furthermore, if the end of art is self-knowledge, knowledge of our own emotional states, artistic creation seems to be of consequence only to its creator and art becomes a form of introspection. The implication of both points is that we no longer seem to have any reason to devote special attention to a Leonardo or a Shakespeare. Their works are not unique expressions of emotion and, in any case, as such, they are primarily of value to the artists themselves.

Both these inferences are natural, but nonetheless mistaken. Collingwood is aware that his account of art and the artist may easily be construed in this way, and as a result he devotes a whole chapter to the relation between artist and community. In it he argues that it is not 'what I feel' that the artist identifies and articulates, but 'what we feel'.

The artist's business is to express emotions; and the only emotions he can express are those which he feels, namely his own. . . . If he attaches any importance to the judgement of his audience, it can only be because he thinks that the emotions he has tried to express are . . . shared by his audience. . . . In other words, he undertakes his artistic labour not as a personal effort on his own private behalf, but as a public labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs. (Collingwood 1938: 314-15)

To this extent Collingwood shares Kant's supposition of a sensus communis, and it is for this reason that art is socially important. It is not merely artists, but the whole community of which they are a part, that come to self- knowledge in their work. This is why 'Art is the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness' (Collingwood 1938: 336). Second, it is wrong to think that the work of art consists in a material object - a painting or a book. This is not because some works of art are not obviously material at all - a dance for instance - though that is an important objection, but because, being acts of imagination, works of art must be recreated in the minds of their audience. This claim has sometimes been interpreted in rather startling ways - as though it implied that art is all in the mind. But Collingwood is making the point that since, for instance, the same poem can appear in many different books, and the same piece of music can be played at different times and on different instruments, the work of art cannot be identified with its physical manifestation. It can only be said to exist if it exists in the active apprehension of a work by an audience. Collingwood expressly rejects any conception of audience as passive spectator: 'Art is not contemplation, it is action' (Collingwood 1938: 332), and the function of the audience is 'not a merely receptive one, but collaborative' (Collingwood 1938: 324). This is one of the very few points in which he concurs with Gadamer, whose theory otherwise he must regard as mistaking art proper for art as amusement.