Essays in the Philosophy of Art

R. G. Collingwood

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528766845
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Idéalisme en philosophie

Published posthumously in 1964, this volume contains a fantastic collection of essays by R. G. Collingwood on the subject of art and it's relationship with philosophy. Robin George Collingwood, FBA (1889 – 1943) was an English historian, philosopher, and archaeologist most famous for his philosophical works including "The Principles of Art" (1938) and the posthumously-published "The Idea of History" (1946). This fascinating volume will appeal to those with an interest in Collingwood's seminal work, and is not to be missed by students of philosophy and art. Contents include: "Ruskin not a Philosophical Writer", "Ruskin's Attitude towards Philosophy", "On the Philosophy of Non-Philosophers", "Logicism and Historicism", "Ruskin as Historicist", "The Anti-Historicism of Ruskin's Contemporaries", "The Unity of the Spirit: Corollaries and Illustrations", "Ruskin and Browning", etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume today in an affordable, modern edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Outlines of a Philosophy of Art

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

August 1924

THIS BOOK aims at doing two things: stating a general conception of art, and developing its consequences. The general conception here maintained is not new; it is one already familiar from the works of Coleridge, Croce, and many others; it is the view that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination. But when one has arrived at such a conception, the question is what to do next. One may advertise its merits by applying it to numerous examples and showing how neatly it fits them; but this soon degenerates into a conjuring trick which the audience has seen through. Or one may criticize other people’s views; but this is apt to be a mere washing of dirty linen in public. Or one may frankly begin talking about something else, and fill up the book with observations on art and artists. There remains a more difficult course: to develop the conception itself in such a way as to lay bare the implications contained in it. This is perhaps the only course that deserves the name of philosophy. For philosophy lives in its own details; and it ought to treat each detail as a fresh problem, with a place of its own in the general body of philosophical thought, and not as another lock to be opened with the same skeleton key, or as one which for that very reason is not worth opening.

There are certain subordinate conceptions contained within the general conception of art: the sublime, the comic, and the forms of beauty in general; the antitheses of nature and art, formal art and naturalistic art, classical and romantic art, genius and taste, matter and form; notions like that of technique; distinctions between the various so-called arts; and the like. To reduce these to so many cases of art, and to leave it at that, is to fall a victim to the skeleton-key habit, to convert the philosophy of art into a night in which all cows are black. These conceptions have their own value in their own place, and it ought to be possible not only to admit this fact in the abstract but to demonstrate it by showing what their place is: which means showing them to be involved in the conception of art as such, to be distinctions into which that conception articulates itself.

The greater part of the following essay is an attempt to carry out this programme. The general conception of art and of its place in life, here stated in the first and last chapters, has been formulated in the writer’s book called Speculum Mentis; but the other chapters are concerned with these detailed articulations, which the plan of the earlier work perforce excluded.

The result is no more than an outline. Comparatively few of the possible topics have been discussed, and those as briefly as possible, with little in the way of illustration or explanation; while criticism and reference to the history of the subject have been altogether excluded. But the attempt to cover much ground in few words is an attempt always worth making; and if the result is found worth reading, the reader as well as the writer must thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, without whose invitation the book would not have been written.

1THE GENERAL NATURE OF ART

§ 1The Problem

The word art has in ordinary usage three senses. First, it means the creation of objects or the pursuit of activities called works of art, by people called artists; these works being distinguished from other objects and acts not merely as human products, but as products intended to be beautiful. Secondly, it means the creation of objects or the pursuit of activities called artificial as opposed to natural; that is to say objects created or activities pursued by human beings consciously free to control their natural impulses and to organize their life on a plan. Thirdly, it means that frame of mind which we call artistic, the frame of mind in which we are aware of beauty.

This is not a mere linguistic accident or an ambiguity in the word art. There is a real relation between the three things enumerated above, which is revealed by the fact that the first is the sum of the second and third. Art, in the sense in which we call sculpture or music an art, differs from art in the sense in which agriculture or navigation is an art in one point only: namely in being controlled or dominated by art in the sense of the awareness of beauty.

Since the controlling element in the so-called “arts” of sculpture, music and the rest is the awareness of beauty, the central notion in the philosophy of art is the notion of a specific activity by which we apprehend objects as beautiful. Fundamentally, fine art is this apprehension of beauty. Where this is present, it will find out a way to create objects which shall express itself; where it is absent, no degree of technical skill in the creation of objects will take its place or conjure it into existence. The awareness of beauty is at once the starting-point and the culmination, the presupposition and the end, of all art. His awareness of beauty is the initial impulse in obedience to which a painter begins to paint a picture; it is by this same awareness that he decides, at every moment of the process, what to do to his picture next; and it is simply an enlargement and a sharpening of the same awareness that constitute, either for him or for anyone else, the value of the picture when it is done.

The philosophy of art is the attempt to discover what art is; and this involves not an examination of the world around us in order to discover and analyse instances of it, as if it were a chemical substance, but a reflection upon our own activities, among which art has its place. But if there are three different activities that go by the name of art, which of these do we propose to investigate? The answer is, that if the three senses of the word art are connected by a real and necessary bond, the philosophy of art cannot confine itself to any one of them, to the exclusion of the others. It must begin by studying that which is most fundamental, the awareness of beauty; it must go on to study the distinction between the natural and the artificial, and to show how this distinction arises; and it must end by studying that special form of production in which the artificial object is a work of art. And it must justify this programme by showing that its three parts are connected in such a way that they cannot be understood separately.

But art is only one of a number of activities; and to answer the question what art is can only mean placing it in its relation to our other activities. Hence the only possible philosophy of art is a general philosophy of man and his world with special reference to man’s function as an artist and his world’s aspect of beauty.

In this case, as in all other cases, the form and order of the exposition must in a sense invert the form and order of inquiry. In trying to arrive at an understanding of any activity, one must begin with a mass of experience relative to that activity; and this experience cannot be acquired by philosophical thinking, or by scientific experiments, or by observation of the activity in other people, but only by a long and specialized pursuit of the activity itself. Only after this experience has been acquired is it possible to reflect upon it and bring to light the principles underlying it. To expound the philosophy of an activity is to expound these principles in their general character and their implications; and such an exposition may deceive unwary readers into thinking that the writer is trying to deduce the features of a certain field of activity altogether a priori and in abstraction from actual experience, when he is really trying to communicate his reflections upon his own experience to readers who have been through the same experience themselves.

§ 2Art in its Generic Nature

For the present, then, art is to mean the special activity by which we apprehend beauty. This implies that there are various activities of which we have experience, and that art has certain features in common with them all and others peculiar to itself; to determine its general nature therefore involves distinguishing its generic nature on the one hand and its specific nature on the other. Definition, according to the principles of formal logic, must proceed by genus and differentia.

It is important to make this distinction at the outset, because reflection upon activities like art or religion very often frustrates itself by confusing a generic with a specific feature. Every activity is in certain ways very much like any other; and people who are trying to describe their own experience of art, religion, science and so forth constantly select for emphasis features due not to the special character of the activity but to the fact that they have had special experience of it. For instance, religion is described as giving knowledge of ultimate reality, which is precisely what artists claim for art, scientists for science, and philosophers for philosophy; or as giving a sense of victory over one’s lower nature, of peace, of security, which are feelings involved in any activity whatever, provided it is pursued earnestly and successfully; and so forth. The same error, upon a larger scale, appears in the attempt to equate various activities with the three aspects of the mental life which are distinguished by analytic psychology: cognition, conation and emotion. This threefold distinction has a very real value, but it becomes a fantastic mythology if it is mistaken for a distinction between three activities which can exist separately, or of which one can predominate over the other, or of which one can undergo a modification without producing corresponding modifications in the other.

In every field of activity there is a theoretical element, in virtue of which the mind is aware of something; there is a practical element in virtue of which the mind is bringing about a change in itself and in its world; and there is an element of feeling, in virtue of which the mind’s cognitions and actions are coloured with desire and aversion, pleasure and pain. In no case is any one of these elements active without the others; they are correlative elements in every act and every experience, and make up a single indivisible whole. But the theoretical element is not always knowledge in the strict sense of the word; knowledge is the highest form of theoretical activity, not equivalent to that activity in general: and in the same way moral action, though the highest form of practical activity, is not found wherever practical activity is found. And each specific form of theory, practice or feeling involves corresponding forms of the other two elements, and cannot exist in the absence of these.

Merely in virtue of its generic character as an activity, therefore, art is at once theoretical, practical and emotional. It is theoretical: that is, in art the mind has an object which it contemplates. But this object is an object of a specific kind, peculiar to itself; it is not God, or natural law, or historical fact, or philosophical truth; and because it is specifically different from the object of religion or science or history or philosophy, the act of contemplating it must also be a specifically peculiar kind of act. Art is practical: that is, in art the mind is trying to realize an ideal, to bring itself into a certain state and at the same time to bring its world into a certain state. But this ideal is not expediency or duty, and the mind’s activity in art is therefore not a utilitarian or a moral activity. And again, art is emotional: that is, it is a life of pleasure and pain, desire and aversion, intertwined, as these opposite feelings always are, in such a way that each is conditioned by the felt or implied presence of the other. But these feelings are in the case of art tinged with a colour of their own; the artist’s pleasure is not the pleasure of the voluptuary or the scientist or the man of action, but a specifically aesthetic pleasure.

Art, religion, science, and so forth, which are here treated as species of a genus called activity, are in reality related to one another in a way which is not exactly that of co-ordinate species. This point will be taken up again and dealt with more fully in the last chapter. For the present it is sufficient to point out that the logic of genus and species is at this stage of the inquiry used as the first approximation to a truth which it does not exhaust.

§ 3Art in its Specific Nature:
Theoretically, as Imagination

In art there are always a subject and an object, a contemplator and something contemplated. But the subject’s activity, the object’s nature, and the character of the relation between them have certain peculiarities which distinguish the case of art from other cases. What the subject does is to imagine: the object is an imaginary object, and the relation between them is that the individual or empirical act of imagining creates the object. In knowledge, on the other hand, the object is real; and the relation between them is that the empirical act of knowing presupposes the object and does not create it. This may be said without prejudice to the idealistic view that there is an absolute or transcendental sense in which knowing creates its object; for no idealist is so innocent as to confuse knowledge with imagination and to suppose that what we generally call knowing is simply imagining.

The object, in the case of art, is an imaginary object, not a real object. Shakespeare’s printed text is a real object, and really lies before me; but to contemplate the tragedy of Hamlet is not to perceive this printed book but to “see” Hamlet himself as Shakespeare “saw” him. This “seeing” is the contemplation of a human character, human words, human actions; but the character, words, and actions of an imaginary human being. No doubt the story of Hamlet is derived from that of Olaf Cuaran; but Hamlet himself is not Olaf Cuaran but an imaginary person ultimately suggested by Olaf Cuaran. Consequently our own attitude towards Hamlet is that we do not know him, we imagine him. If we say that we know Hamlet to have killed his uncle, what we mean is either that we imagine him doing so, which is true, or that we know that Shakespeare imagined him doing so, which is also true, or that Hamlet was a real person who really did kill his uncle, which is untrue. Further, the Hamlet that we imagine is created by our act of imagining him; the Hamlet that Shakespeare imagined, by Shakespeare’s act of imagining him; and these two Hamlets, though they may resemble each other, are not identical. Whereas the London that I know and the London that you know are the same London, and this London does not depend for its existence on your personal acquaintance with it, nor yet on mine.

But Hamlet would be neither more nor less of a great tragedy if, as might conceivably have happened, Olaf Cuaran had been just the kind of man, and had said and done just the things, that Shakespeare imagined Hamlet being and saying and doing. In that case the object would be real, and our imagining would apparently give place to knowing. But if art is imagining, does it not follow that the result would not be art?

It would follow, if the imaginary and the real excluded one another; and we certainly do use the word imaginary with a definite implication of unreality. But if I imagine Kubla Khan’s palace in “Xanadu,” this act is none the less an act of imagination because Shantu is a real town in China; nor would it be any the less an act of imagination if it happened that the real Kubla Khan had really built such a palace there. To imagine an object is not to commit oneself in thought to its unreality; it is to be wholly indifferent to its reality. An imaginary object, therefore, is not an unreal object but an object about which we do not trouble to ask whether it is real or unreal. The imaginary is not the opposite of the real, but the indifferent identity of the real and its opposite. Thus Shakespeare embodies history and fiction side by side in certain of his plays, but the plays are not mixtures of history and art, truth and beauty: they are art through and through, because the history and the fiction meet on equal terms; for the purposes of the play the distinction between them is non-existent.

And yet we are quite right to oppose the imaginary to the real. For the real is only real as it stands in the real world; and a fragment of history embedded in a work of fiction, by losing its real context and acquiring a fictitious context, becomes itself tainted with fiction. A lie that is half a truth becomes a lie throughout, because the false half infects the true half and twists it into a misrepresentation of the facts. Hence a work of art which indifferently includes fact and fiction becomes, by that mere indifference, pure fiction, though no doubt a fiction founded on fact.

To imagine is to refrain from making a distinction which we make whenever we think: the distinction between reality and unreality, truth and falsehood. Therefore imagining is not a kind of thinking, nor is thinking a kind of imagining, for each negates the specific nature of the other. Yet these two different activities are not wholly unrelated. Thinking is making a distinction between truth and falsehood; but this presupposes a phase of consciousness in which this distinction is not made. That which we deny or think false must be first imagined, or there is nothing to deny: that which we assert or think true must first be imagined, or else we could not ask whether it was true without assuming that it was true. Hence the relation between imagination and thought is that thought presupposes imagination, but imagination does not presuppose thought.

§ 4The Primitiveness of Art

This fact is of crucial importance for the attempt to determine the place of art in life as a whole. As thinking presupposes imagining, all those activities whose theoretical aspect takes the form of thought presuppose art; and art is the basis of science, history, “common sense,” and so forth. Art is the primary and fundamental activity of the mind, the original soil out of which all other activities grow. It is not a primitive form of religion or science or philosophy, it is something more primitive than these, something that underlies them and makes them possible.

This doctrine of the primitiveness of art runs counter to a certain view which was very widespread in the nineteenth century and still affects a great deal of our ordinary thinking: the view of art as an aristocratic activity, a higher and more specialized type of consciousness than perception of the “common-sense” world or religious or scientific thought. This notion encouraged a certain habit of self-adulation among artists, which went to great lengths in the aestheticism of the later nineteenth century; and it would be difficult to quarrel with such an attitude if the philosophy on which it was founded were true, and if art really were a more highly-developed and logically advanced activity than others; for in that case the artist would certainly be a spiritual aristocrat, related to other people as a mature man to children.

On the other hand, the doctrine of the primitiveness of art is slowly forcing itself upon us as we come to know more of the mental life of children and savages. We find that children who are quite incapable of advanced scientific and philosophical thinking constantly show a high degree of artistic power. Most children can extemporise verses and songs better than their elders; many of them invent excellent stories and draw in a peculiarly forcible and expressive way; and all without exception are at home in a region of imaginative make-...