## 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 be
sharply distinguished from what he calls 'art proper'. The
implication is that those things are improperly so-called, that is,
are commonly but wrongly called art. Since today the tendency in
aesthetics is to insist that all things called 'art' are
rightly so-called, it is important emphasize this fact; the
Institutional Theory of Art, and the Theory of Mass Art, would no
doubt be viewed by Collingwood as pernicious linguistic confusions.
But in fact it is worse than this. Art proper is often found within
the 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 true
meaning appertaining to art proper, and then got extended to these
other things; the word has always been more or less subject to at
least some of these confusions. The task, then, is to distinguish the
concept 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 has
the recommendation of having been espoused by Plato and Aristotle.
This is the 'technical' theory of art, or the theory that
art is craft (from the Greek word 'techne'), by
which we mean a fully worked out theory of crafts such as watchmaking,
joinery, carpentry and so on. In fact, the theory of craft, along with
the thesis that art is not craft, suffices to show that art proper is
a distinct activity from the other three things, by showing that they
are essentially crafts.



The term 'craft' refers to activities which typically
exemplify the following six characteristics. None is individually
necessary, but the less of them that an activity exemplifies, the less
sense there is in calling it a craft: (1) The applicability of a
distinction amongst actions as means and actions as ends; a baker, for
example, whips the egg whites in course of mixing the batter, for the
eventual end of baking a cake. (2) A distinction between planning and
execution; 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 the
sake of the former, but in execution the means precede the end. (4) We
can distinguish between raw material and finished product. (5) A
distinction can be drawn been form and matter. (6) Crafts stand in
three sorts of hierarchy: (a) The raw material of one craft is the
finished product of another; for example the sawmill produces plywood,
which is in turn the raw material for builders. (b) One craft has as
its end product the tools which are employed as means in another. (c)
Some trades work in concert to bring about the finished product; for
example, the manufacture of a computer may involve separable
manufacture of the chip, the hard disc, the monitor and so on, so that
the final assembly is 'only the bringing together of these
parts'.



The point is not that works of art never display any of these
features; the point is that some works of art involve none of them,
without its detracting from their status as art. Therefore the essence
of art cannot have to do with any features correctly treated by a
theory of craft. A pure case might be the poet for whom the poem
simply comes to mind, unbidden, without its being written down or even
said aloud. There is no distinction to be drawn between planning and
execution in such a case, and none between actions as means and
actions as ends. (If the poet had in mind something analogous to a
blueprint 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, the
poem as the finished product. But T. S. Eliot for example did not
choose the words needed for *The Wasteland* and then proceed to
arrange them into the poem. The poet can, however, be conceived as
'converting emotions into poems'; but this is 'a
very different kind of thing' from, say, the pasta maker's
conversion of flour into spaghetti. Collingwood simply leaves this
point hanging, because it would require his own positive account of
art as expression to explain it; that will come later. (He also
neglects the possibility that the raw material of the poet is simply
the language as a whole.)



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



It bears repeating that the claim is not that no works of art have any
craft-like features; it simply that any definition of art in terms of
those features would exclude some unimpeachable works of art (29). Or
rather, success in being craft is strictly immaterial to its being
art; no craft-features *make* an object into a work of art.
Collingwood is well aware that for example an opera requires a great
deal of planning, technique, raw materials, and so on. And because of
this, he is well aware that the craft-theory is widely if implicitly
held, and devotes a lively excursus to its modern manifestation,
namely 'Art as a Psychological Stimulus'. This is the
account of art whereby it is the craft (or 'technique') of
manipulating certain objects (paint, sound, words and on) so as to
bring about psychological states in the audience, which in turn are
known, or least knowable, in advance. But this is to assimilate works
of art to mere means; Collingwood is quite serious in his denial of
this. 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 is
more to it than this, representation is, in the first instance, the
relation that a portrait bears to its sitter. It is plainly a matter
of skill, of technique, since one can envisage a successful outcome
before undertaking it. So art cannot be representation (or
'mimesis', in any straightforward sense). But the theory
that it is is so venerable and influential that it demands separate
attention. (Not, however, because of Plato and Aristotle; Collingwood
holds that despite popular opinion, they did not hold it!).



Collingwood advances a very liberal notion of representation, such
that a great deal more artefacts than one would initially think could
rightly qualify as representative. For the standard for fidelity is
not resemblance, but that the feeling evoked by the artefact resembles
that evoked by the original. Representation comes in three,
overlapping degrees. The first is that of the ordinary photograph, or
paintings and the like which attempt that sort of literalness. The
second 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 'emotional
representation', which represents the inner aspect of emotion,
but which is nevertheless distinct from expression. Some types of
music, on this view, represent the mind undergoing its experiences,
such the feeling of 'lying in deep grass on a summer's day
watching clouds drift across the sky' (56). Collingwood does not
say what the exact difference is between representation and
expression, but I assume that it depends first of all on whether or
not the artist has a clear conception of what he is trying to
represent; if he does, then his activity is craft, not art proper. As
we will see below, this is not implausible because the artist, at
least according to Collingwood, does not literally know the expressive
content of his artwork in advance of expressing it. It would be in
keeping with Collingwood's approach to add that the expressed
content is *individual*, whereas represented contents are
always *general*; perceptually quite different works can
represent exactly the same thing.


### 1.3 Art as Magic



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



Magic is not, contra the prevailing anthropology of the time, mere bad
science--'superstitious' false beliefs like that of
not walking under ladders because of the evil that will surely follow.
Nor is it explicable as Freudian neurosis, which assumes that every
society employing magical practices is to that extent sick. Magic is
the ritualized representation of useful emotion, not for the sake of
catharsis, but for the practical value of the emotion. The war-dance,
for example, instills courage by dint of drums and spears, and
frightens the enemy should he catch a glimpse. Of course false beliefs
may play a role, which the theory of magic-as-bad-science seizes upon;
the rain dancer may think he increases the probability of rain. But
that is a 'perversion' of magic; the true magical effect
is the reinforcement of hope and hard work that a drought puts to the
test. The Freudian theory regards the representation as omnipotent
wish-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 magical
phenomena. Religion, patriotism, sport, social customs such as dinner
parties, weddings, funerals, dances, and so on all involve in one way
or another ritualized actions that are undertaken at least partly for
magical reasons. (Of course magical phenomena are probably on the
wane.)



Art proper is often bound up with magical 'art', and
indeed it is common amongst critics to confuse them. Religious
art--say a twelfth-century crucifix--may be aesthetically
fine as well as induce a pious awe in the mind of the believer. But
the fact that a suitably kitschy product may also serve the latter
purpose shows that the magical effect can be aimed at independently
from the aesthetic (admittedly, Collingwood underestimates the problem
of disentangling these purportedly different responses--for some
people, only an aesthetically fine thing can generate strong pious
emotions; perhaps Collingwood can allow that some art proper may be
instrumentally necessary for the achievement of magical ends).
Frequently, the particular form of this mistake is to think that an
attitude towards the subject-matter embodied in a work is rightly
taken as the object of purely aesthetic criticism. Thus it is common
to hear for example of a play praised for taking a salutary view of
sexual politics and would therefore encourage the sexes to get on
better; to say so is to say that the play is very good at what
Collingwood is calling 'magic', but is neither here nor
there as regards its status as art.


### 1.4 Art as Amusement



The aim of amusement art is to stimulate an emotion by 'make
believe' means, and to discharge it. If the emotion is intended
to remain undischarged--if the aim is that the audience should
leave the theatre indignant at global warming for example--then
the work is one of magic; if the emotions it evokes are intended to be
'earthed', the work is one of amusement. Most of
literature and drama are actually amusement--not only for example
Thackeray but most of Shakespeare are included. But remember that
amusement and art proper can co-exist, i.e., in the same work (in
Shakespeare's case, the same work is often actually a bundle of
works, some magical, some amusement, and some, at least in favourable
cases, of art proper). Collingwood stresses--in 1938--the
rise of decadent amusement works, especially pornography but also for
example the case of literature or film appealing to our love of
imaginatively dwelling amongst the upper classes. And he warns of a
danger they present to our society (or rather of the danger of the
conditions that give rise to an ever growing demand for them); that is
what Plato meant to proscribe in his famous banishment of the
'artist' from his republic, and Collingwood sees Plato as
having foretold the eventual doom of Greco-Roman civilisation. Now all
this is by the way; amusement is craft, not art. But the points he
raises in this connection are important to his main subject, because a
certain tradition wrongly identifies the success-conditions of arts of
amusement as the standard of taste for art proper. Hume, for example,
wrote as if the criterion for success in a work of art is the
excitation of pleasure in suitably refined individuals. But pleasure
has a name; the 'artist' who busies himself with arousing
that particular emotion is merely a craftsman.


## 2. Art as Expression



If art proper is not the stimulation of preconceived emotion, and not
the representation of it either, then what precisely does it mean to
say that, nevertheless, art is the expression of emotion? The key is
to remember that art is not craft--Collingwood assumes that the
reader will accept this, once it is pointed out--and hence the
distinction 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 person
expresses an emotion, he is



> 
> conscious of ... a perturbation or excitement which he feels
> going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this
> state, all he can say about his emotion is: 'I feel ... I
> don't know what I feel.' From this helpless and oppressed
> condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call
> expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with
> the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also
> something to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is an
> emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer
> unconscious. It also has something to do with the way in which he
> feels the emotion. As unexpressed, he feels it in what we called a
> helpless and oppressed way; as expressed, he feels in a way from which
> this sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened
> and eased (109-10).
> 



The following three points emerge from this. 1. To express is to
*become conscious* of an emotion: that is why the distinction
between plan and execution cannot be applied. 2. Expression
*individualises*; rather than describing the emotion in words
whose signification is in principle general, the expression is a
intrinsic feature of the utterance, of the 'utterance
itself' (although he does not credit him, this is an evident
example where Collingwood follows Croce). Thus we cannot speak of the
emotion embodied in a work of art as if it were the content which the
art provides the form. 3. The 'lightening' of which
Collingwood speaks is not that of catharsis, which provides an outlet
for the emotion and may take place without its agents being conscious
of 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 kind
of emotion pre-existing to the expression of it' (117). Instead,
it is an 'emotional colouring which attends the expression of
any emotion whatever' (*ibid.*) Expression, in this
sense, must be sharply distinguished from the betrayal of emotion;
one's tears may be said to 'express' one's
sadness, or stamping one's feet ones anger, but these can occur
without the making lucid and intelligible of the emotion that is
requisite for expression in Collingwood's sense. Betrayal can
even occur that is wholly unconscious; one can blush without noticing
it. The relation between expressive object and emotion is that of
embodiment or realization, not of inference.


## 3. Art as Imaginative Creation



To conceive art as the craft of emotional stimulation or
arousal--whether for the sake of amusement or magic--is to
regard the material work of art as the intended means towards a
preconceived end. The falsity of that conception--assuming that
art is essentially the expression of emotion--shows that the work
of art as not an *artifact* at all (so artworks are not
artifacts; Collingwood was aware that language sometimes suggests
theoretical mistakes). Instead, the artistic process is a specialized
type of making that Collingwood calls *creation*: to create
something is to make it non-technically, but 'consciously and
voluntarily' (128), and hence intentionally. The creator
'need not be acting in order to achieve any ulterior end; he not
be following a preconceived plan; and he is certainly not transforming
anything 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 lecture
as a created thing, and the lecture as a particular sound-event. The
former may be complete in advance of, or indeed without ever, being
uttered or written down: the actual speech-event, as a sequence of
noise, enables a suitably equipped listener to reconstruct the created
thing is his own mind, therefore to grasp its scientific content, but
is inessential to it. And so it is with works of art. A tune, for
example, needn't be sung, played or written down in order to
exist. Thus Collingwood:



> 
> I have already said that a thing which 'exists in a
> person's head' and nowhere else is alternatively called an
> imaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore
> alternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case
> of creation ... Hence the making a tune is an instance of
> imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or a
> picture, or any other work of art. (134)
> 



Collingwood is not supposing that every work of art could in point of
fact 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 some
*prima facie* counterexamples to this; later Beethoven, for
example). The human imagination is typically too weak; in most cases
we have to depend on the 'bodily' work of art for sensory
helps. But in principle, the 'total imaginative
experience' that constitutes the proper work of art must be
conceived as only contingently related to the bodily work.



What precisely is the motivation for this move, the conception of the
work of art as imagined or ideal object? Leave aside the special cases
of music and poetry, which Richard Wollheim notes have the special
feature that they can be written down (see Wollheim 1972). Why not
conceive painting, for example, as the creation of certain painted
objects? This would be consistent with the thesis that painting is a
not craft. The answer given by Collingwood is clear, but leads to
trouble when we consider the question of interpretation. An experience
of a painting involves a great deal that no one would say is 'in
the painting', which is, after all, a nearly flat canvas with
paint on it. Not only do we see things that are not really present,
but for example we have impressions of space and mass, perhaps by
means of what Berenson called 'ideated
sensations'--those which involve imaginary motor or
kinaesthetic sensations. These phenomena are not literally features of
the canvas, but they are in some sense features of the work. So
Collingwood, in brief, includes within the work of art proper all that
would normally be ascribed to the (correct) interpretation--the
(correct) experience--of the artwork. But there is no reason to
accept this, any more we should include all the relational
facts--sowing, fertilization, watering and so on--that
contribute to a growing plant to the plant itself. On contrary, the
position makes it impossible for two spectators to disagree on the
interpretation of a work. Irrespective of the concern with the privacy
of the experience, if they attribute different properties to the
object--that is, they find different properties in their
respective total imaginative experiences--they are simply
concerned with different objects, and their verdicts are compatible.
We could set the artist's own experience as a criterion of
understanding the work, but that would make his death significant in
way that we do not actually recognize, and would run against the grain
of Collingwood's antipathy to aesthetic individualism and the
'cult of genius', discussed below. As a matter of
speculation, Collingwood perhaps thought that aesthetically relevant
properties--expressive properties--have to be intrinsic
properties of the work of art; in that case, perhaps his conclusion
does follow. But it is much more satisfactory to hold that what we are
arguing over when we disagree over the expressive properties of a work
of 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 more
hangs on the thesis that art essentially exercises the expressive
imagination. The difference between the imagined lecture and the tune
is that the content of the lecture is verbal and cognitive, and brings
those departments of mind into play; whilst the tune, among other
things, brings the emotional department of the mind much more vividly
into play. The substance of Collingwood's view is largely
dependent on his account of this distinction.



At the most basic level Collingwood distinguishes thinking from
feeling. The objects of each, respectively, are thoughts and
'sensa': 'sensa' is Collingwood's name
for all the data of the senses--of touch, smell, sight, and so
on. Thoughts can be true or false, justified or not, where sensa have
no such duality: they are felt or not felt, but cannot contradict each
other. There is sense in which sensa can be said to be real or unreal,
true or false (for example in hallucination), but this not an
intrinsic feature of sensa themselves; that distinction applies only
to thoughts involving them. A first point that is directly relevant to
the theory of expression is that probably all sensa have an emotional
'charge'. Thus for example every colour carries with it a
certain emotional quality. Not that they are invariably experienced
with their particular emotional charge; the charge is more like a
disposition to be experienced a certain way, under certain
circumstances. 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 hear
the bell striking the hour of four, the experience comprises many
passing sensa, each no sooner generated than gone. But if I am to be
aware of them as a process extended in time with particular
morphology, I must retain the sound of the bell, along with the
silences in between. The objects that I so retain cannot be the sensa
themselves. Instead, the faculty of 'conscious attention'
generates 'ideas' corresponding to the sensa, and which
are retained. Sensa alone--or sense data, or
impressions--are never sufficient for consciousness. Collingwood
cites Kant approvingly in the connection; noting that we have always
to 'fill in' occurrent perception to generate a complete
world of 3-D objects, he writes:



> 
> Moreover (this is a point Kant has made), it is only so far as I
> imagine 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 a
> solid 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 our
> knowledge of the world around us. (192)
> 



When one is conscious of a feeling of anger, one is aware of it as
one's own. By becoming conscious of it--therefore not of
the sensation of anger but the anger transformed by
consciousness--what we feel 'is correspondingly
changed' (207); the 'effect of this experience ... is
make them less violent' (209). And another word for this is
imagination. 'We become able to perpetuate feeling ... at
will' (209). 'Imagination is thus the new form which
feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness'
(215). With this level of consciousness comes the beginning of
self-consciousness; 'it is assertion of ourselves as the owners
of our feeling' (222; feeling that is 'as modified by
consciousness'). But imagination, since it deals not with sensa
but with their ideated analogues, is a type of thought, and with the
introduction of thought comes the possibility of error. Thus if the
basic action of the consciousness is to think 'This is how I
feel', 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, separable
roles of thought called 'primary' and
'secondary'. Its primary role is to 'apprehend or
construct relations' (216) amongst ideas, as just described (in
fact Collingwood thinks in such relations the relata are fused in a
new idea comprising a 'peculiar colouring or modification of the
old' (223)). The secondary role is to apprehend or construct
'relations between acts of primary intellection'; by this
Collingwood means conceptions of the past, future, the possible etc.,
and presumably all that content of human thought which can not be
accounted for in terms of the imagination.


## 5. Language



That Collingwood has a theory of language might seem tangential to his
theory of art, but in fact it is integral to it. For
Collingwood's approach to it comes not from the theory of
reference and truth as in Frege or Russell, but from the point of view
which regards language as fundamentally or in the first instance
expressive behaviour. Concepts of referential semantics--as a
'symbolism' in Collingwood's
terminology--become applicable only later, with a certain degree
of sophistication is attained. 'In its original or native state,
language in imaginative or expressive ... It is imaginative
activity whose function is to express emotion.' (225). Of course
'imaginative' must be understood in the broader sense just
described, denoting all consciousness of ideated analogues of
sensation or feeling. From this angle, we can speak of the
'totality of our motor activities' as a 'parent
organism' (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 as
Collingwood calls it, various sorts of bodily activity are said to
psychically express an underlying emotional charge on a sensum;
cringing or flinching express fear, for example. At this stage
consciousness of the imagination is not involved--only sensa;
this level is shared with animals, and is 'completely
uncontrollable' (234). With the consciousness of ideas comes
'emotions of consciousness', which require language for
their expression. A cry from a child, for example, may be either
psychic or imaginative, depending whether it is involuntary or
voluntary. If it is voluntary, it is the work of the conscious
imagination, 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 psychical
emotion, on one hand, simply has its being in its expression; an
emotion of fear must show up somewhere, whether by cringing, shying or
flinching, an increase in pulse or blood pressure, a tightness of the
chest, or something else bodily or physiological. On the other hand,
if someone tries but fails to express an emotion, the emotion at most
remains 'shut up' in the psychic level; in order to be
conscious of the emotion, 'the same consciousness which
generates these emotions converts them from impressions into ideas
generates also and simultaneously their appropriate linguistic
expression.'(238). There is no other way to be conscious of an
emotion; to express an emotion is to be conscious of it.



Collingwood's remarks about the relation between speaker and
hearer are of special interest not just to aestheticians but to
philosophers of mind interested in knowledge of other minds. A
voluntary cry is underpinned by a self-conscious imaginative act; and
however rudimentary it is, self-consciousness is at once the
consciousness of others. '[A]s persons', writes
Collingwood, 'they construct a new set of relations between
themselves, arising out their consciousness of themselves and one
another; these are linguistic relations.' (248).



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



> 
> The hearer, therefore, conscious that he is being addressed by another
> person like himself ... takes what he hears exactly as if it were
> speech of his own: he speaks to himself with the words that he hears
> addressed to him, and thus constructs in himself the idea which those
> words express. At the same time, being conscious of the speaker as a
> person other than himself, he attributes that idea to this other
> person. Understanding what some one says to you is thus attributing to
> him the idea which his words arouse in yourself; and this implies
> treating them as words of your own. (250).
> 



Remember, again, that we are talking of the *expressive*
dimension of language, not the referential dimension (about which more
in a moment). To understand another person's emotions is
precisely to adopt the person's expressive language as
one's own, imaginatively experiencing the ideas as if they were
one's own (that is, as if they expressed one's own
emotion; of course the ideas, as analogues of sensation, are
necessarily one's own). This aspect of Collingwood, of the
necessary publicity of language and meaning, can be stressed as a
potential way out of the threat of the seeming privacy of the work of
art as mentioned above, in connection with p. 134 of the
*Principles*.



There is however one evident mistake in Collingwood's
presentation. Sensa are, as we've seen, fleeting. But no idea
'can be formed as such in consciousness except by a mind whose
sense-emotional experience contains the corresponding impression
... at that very moment.' (251). This cannot be right. To
understand Othello, we don't have to actually have an impression
of jealousy; we only need to have the idea. In fact, by what we said
in section IV, there are no impressions (sensa) of jealousy at all;
jealousy is an emotion of consciousness. The solution, which as far as
I can see is consistent with everything else Collingwood says, is
simply to erase the requirement that the listener must undergo
anything at the psychical level, the level of sensa, *coevally*
with expression (we leave open the question of whether it must have
happened to one in the past).



Earlier, we said that thought involving relations is the domain of
thought 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 a
> single whole, where relation between the part are present simply as
> qualities of the whole.
> 



'Analytical thought'--intellect, thought in its
secondary role--may begin with the same experience, but instead
of being 'an indivisible unity it becomes a manifold, a network
of things with relations between them' (253). Collingwood also
characterises the intellect as the domain of concepts, and of
generalisation (273, 281).



Now one might be tempted to suppose that thoughts as grasped by the
intellect are roughly the same as propositions, in the sense intended
by analytical philosophers. But Collingwood holds that the proposition
is 'a fictitious entity' (266), and devotes a long passage
to excoriating that tendency in philosophy. Every actual episode of
thought is performed with its own particular degree and character of
emotion; there is no such thing as the thought shorn of its emotional
husk. All mental activity has some emotional character, including
intellectual activity. The cry of 'Eureka' said to have
accompanied Archimedes' discovery of a principle of hydrostatics
is but an extreme example. Thus *language* is expressive of
emotion even in its scientific use. This applies even to mathematical
symbols and technical symbols. Insofar as they are *used*, they
automatically acquire the expressive character of the underlying
thoughts. Thus Collingwood says: 'Symbolism is thus intellectual
language; language, because it expresses emotions; intellectualized,
because adapted to the expression of intellectual emotions'
(269). In 'poeticizing' such language, Collingwood does
not intend to demean it; presumably the aim is to do justice to the
rarefied air of pure intellect:



> 
> The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive
> conversion by the word of grammar and logic into a scientific
> symbolism, thus represents not a progressive drying-up of emotions,
> but its progressive articulation and specialization. We are not
> getting away from an emotional atmosphere into a dry, rational
> atmosphere; we are acquiring new emotions and new means of expressing
> them. (269)
> 



Nevertheless, Collingwood's account of language, needless to
say, is radical; he is quite serious in his denial of the possibility
of what earlier I called a theory of the purely referential dimension
of language, which generalizes about truth-conditions of sentences in
abstraction from their use:



> 
> ... we are concerned with a modification of language, not a
> theory of it. Its assumptions are neither certainly nor probably, nor
> ever possibly, true. They are, in fact, not assumptions, but
> proposals; and what they propose is the conversion of language into
> something which, if it could be realized, would not be language at
> all. (262)
> 


## 6. Practical Consequences: Art and Artists



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



If all activity is in that sense 'artistic', then it is
natural to wonder whether the theory has anything to tell us about
*art*, that is, the peculiar business of the painter, the poet,
the musician and the like. Of course, most activity is undertaken with
a some purpose in mind or other, in which case it is craft, however
hum-drum the theory of it might be. For example, I just ate an orange
which I took from a bowl; the theory of what I did could be written
down in a practical guide to eating oranges. But surely I was
*conscious* of eating the orange; by Collingwood's
theory, then, was I not expressing something? In that case, by the
same theory, just by being conscious, was I not engaged in art? And is
that not absurd?



Collingwood says nothing in direct reply to this worry, but I think it
obvious that the reply would be this. In so far as I was conscious of
the orange, it is true that I was involved in expression. But this
conscious experience was un-sustained, fleeting, and lacking in depth
(307). Furthermore, it took place in a mind that was busy with other
things, and which was dominated by an overarching purpose, namely to
eat the orange, whose sub-tasks include selecting it, peeling it,
putting a section in my mouth, trying not spill too much juice, and so
on; all this would be written down in my practical guide to eating
oranges. Life, then, is full of 'artworks', but they are
mostly shallow, unworthy of comment. However, there are times when
consciousness settles on something, such that the mental activity does
approach 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 oak
tree, or suddenly think of an original stanza of poetry, or a snatch
of melody. These are instances of imaginative expression, and are
closer to what we should ordinarily call a work of art. But they are
likely to be lost, unless some record of the experience is made. The
'artist', then, is one who has these experiences of
consciousness more deeply than the average person, and who has
mastered the practice of preserving them.



But the act of 'preserving them' has to be understood in a
special sense. 'There is no question', says Collingwood,
"of 'externalizing' an inward experience which is
complete in itself and by itself" (304). Collingwood is denying
that a painter could in point of fact dispense with the medium, even
if 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 begin
to paint it' (303), the 'experience develops itself and
defines itself in your mind as you paint' (*ibid.*). The
work of art develops by means of positive feedback between painting
and experience. What develops is the 'total imaginative
experience' that Collingwood identifies as the work of art,
strictly speaking (304). Again, the work of art proper is not to be
identified with the 'bodily work'--the painted
canvas, the sculpted bust--but with the experience of it. What is
true that in point of fact the imaginative experiences requires the
bodily work; the human imagination is not able to hold within it
anything approaching the richness made available by the plastic arts.
In particular, the 'outward element'--the bodily
work--provides the sensuous content or impressions out of which
the conscious imagination generates ideas, constituting the
'total imaginative experience' (see Davies 2008 for more
on this issue).


## 7. Practical Consequences: The Artist and the Community



'Theoretically', Collingwood says, 'the artist is a
person who comes to know himself, to know his own emotion'
(291). Despite this, however, Collingwood is anxious to show this does
not entail aesthetic solipsism, as if the artist need not ever concern
himself with others. Quite the opposite: necessarily the artistic
achievement is collaborative, involving the audience and other
artists.



Collingwood begins his account of the relation between artist and
spectator by saying that a spectator understands a given work just
insofar as his imaginative experience is identical with that had by
the artist in creating it. This can never be known with certainty, but
so it is with all understanding of language (remember that
'language' in Collingwood's usage means all
expressive behaviour). It is also piecemeal: 'Understanding
... is a complex business, consisting of many phases, each
complete in itself but each leading on to the next' (311).
Collingwood does speak of *identity* of understanding, but
really his real account is more fluid. First, he accepts that any
utterance is endlessly interpretable; there no such thing as
'the' meaning of a work (*ibid.*). Second, the
audience's role is collaborative, in the sense that the artist
is concerned to express emotions that are mutually held; failure in
this may rightly cause the artist to doubt whether he expressed
anything, and suffers instead from a 'corruption of
consciousness' as explained earlier. The audience, then,
actively participates in re-creating the imaginative experience. This
second point flows from his conception of art as a language:



> 
> The child learning his mother tongue, as we have seen, learns
> simultaneously to be a speaker and to be a listener; he listens to
> others speaking, and speaks to others listening. It is the same with
> artists. They become poets or painters or musicians not by some
> process of development from within, as they grow beards; but by living
> in 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 by
observing that the artist never works alone; on the one hand the
artist freely borrows from what has already been achieved, and on the
other, at least in the performing arts, the players have their own
essential role. A work of art is collaborative, not simply the
creation 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 of
Benedetto Croce as an expressive and idealist theory. There are of
course differences, but the established picture is not inaccurate. And
together with Croce's theory, Collingwood's has a fatal
defect (without questioning the starting-point, that the essence of
art to be expressive): In identifying the artwork with what we would
normally think of as the experience of the artwork, he makes nonsense
of the idea that the spectator *interprets* the artwork, and
can do so more or less accurately; that different people can argue
about the self-same work of art. It has become a truism that the
artist is no better placed than the audience to interpret a work
rightly, a truism that Collingwood, with his fulminations again
aesthetic individualism, would agree. But then the various imaginative
experiences have nothing to conform to, if artwork and experience and
hence artwork and interpretation cannot be separated. That would be
fatal to the theory; however, it is not clear that anything
substantial would be lost, if Collingwood were simply to identify the
work of art with the 'bodily work', thereby
re-establishing room for interpretation to operate. This would seem to
sit better with his idea that art is on a level with language, where
language is a public phenomenon.



An apparent further defect in Collingwood's case in particular
is his account of language. It is full of admirable insights, but it
is probably misconceived from back to front. The insistence that
language is always expressive is dogmatic, and leads Collingwood to
deny that there is any categorical distinction between poetry and
scientific writing, which many may take as a *reductio ad
absurdum* (298). And more seriously so far as his philosophy of
art is concerned, one might wonder about his account of consciousness
as tied to language. According to it--the theory of
imagination--merely to attend to something is thereby to
*express* it, and furthermore is to do something
*linguistic.* Even if we allow Collingwood his generalised
notion of language as appertaining to gesture and so on, surely there
has to be a separation between consciousness or attention and
expression. As C. J. Ducasse pointed out, it seems that when we look
at a vase full of flowers, do we not create a "work of
art" unless we draw or paint it (Ducasse 1929, 52-54).



Finally, it is hard to swallow whole Collingwood's distinction
between art and craft. The consequences are too severe. For example,
Collingwood, rigorously applying the distinction, says that insofar as
his activity is art in the proper sense, an artist, since he has no
idea what he is to express until he expresses it, cannot set out to
write, say, a tragedy
 (116).[2]
 There is something right in the idea that that the artist cannot
'plan and execute' an inspiration. But the distinction
Collingwood is after is surely not so cut and dried as that. He needs
at any rate a more selective weapon to attack his bugbear of amusement
art.