Not Ideal: Collingwood's Expression Theory

Abstract

It is time something was done to defend Collingwood. As an aesthetician, he is widely associated with the so-called Ideal theory of art, itself widely regarded as untenable. He is also associated with an Expression theory of art: he gives an account of what artistic expression is; and he holds that such expression, wherever found, is definitive of art, or, as he puts it, of proper. Collingwood himself certainly regarded the relevant chapters of The Principles of Art'-the one on imagination (where the socalled Ideal theory is said to be set out) and the one on expression-as complementary parts of the same whole. But, if the relations between the two are not properly understood, it is all too easy to identify the former with its most apparently objectionable aspects and then to dismiss the Expression theory as somehow dependent upon them. The desuetude into which Collingwood's account of expression has fallen among recent aestheticians2 is almost certainly due to this-a state of affairs perhaps reinforced by Richard Wollheim's powerful demolition of the so-called Ideal theory in Art and its Objects.3 But Collingwood's aesthetics, as I hope to show, cannot be so easily dismissed. What I want to do here is to advance two lines of defense. One of these shows that Collingwood's Expression theory is a thoroughly valuable theory whose legitimacy depends upon nothing that is illicit in his so-called Ideal theory (I take up this line of defense in section III). The other shows that Collingwood ought never to have been seen as espousing the so-called Ideal theory in the first place, no matter how easily some of his remarks might lend themselves to that construction (this line is explored in section II). In effect, I am urging that we read The Principles of Art more carefully and more charitably.4 At the minimum, I think I can show that if the author of the rest of Book I of that work intended his chapter on art as imagination to be a statement of the so-called Ideal theory, then he did so in a spirit of inexplicable perversity. And I am fairly confident that I can show that if one takes his Expression theory seriously, and if one makes a (careful, charitable) effort to see how it might fit in with the chapter on imagination, the temptation to read Collingwood as defending the so-called Ideal theory at all should evaporate.