The Role of Aesthetic Emotion in R. G. Collingwood's Conception of Creative Activity

Abstract

In strong or radical sense, creation of a work of succeeds, as Kant said, in exhibiting originality that is exemplary and unteachable. The creative artist generates new and valuable outcomes. He or she accomplishes this in a way that is neither predictable before it occurs nor traceable to prior rules-to prior necessary and sufficient conditions. ' Thus, how a creator knows precisely which element (color, line, texture, image, melody, harmonic support, etc.) to select and which to reject during creative act seems answerable only after fact, and then only in terms of our judgment that what selected works within finished whole. And we face a puzzle when we try to look within subtleties and complexities of creative processes and wonder how an artist worked out outcome. R. G. Collingwood faced this puzzle because he affirmed strong view of creativity, although in a different form, and because he tried to explain what happens in creative processes in The difference in form in which he assumed radical creativity lies in what is ordinarily called the expression theory of art. The criticisms that have been directed toward this theory, although various, fail to address subtleties of Collingwood's version of it. This is not place to develop this point. Yet it is important to make it in context of puzzle of artist's selections and rejections that infuse creative act, because one of subtleties of Collingwood's conception of as expression of centers on claim that bad art results when an artist attempts to express and fails. In this paper, we will examine two comments in Collingwood's The Principles of Art that illuminate what he meant or, in his terms, was trying to mean.2 It is likely that he did not clarify this to himself and he may not have fully recognized its value in accounting for artist's awareness of when he or she goes wrong or makes a right choice in act of creating. These comments concern role of in awareness an artist has of propriety or impropriety (the truth or corruption) of what is being expressed as it is being expressed. We shall offer two claims about function of emotion: (1) Collingwood suggests that term aesthetic emotion has two senses, general (applying to all instances in which imaginative expression occurs) and specific (applying uniquely to individual character of each imaginative expression), and (2) first sense of indicates a way in which it, in context of its second sense, can function as a guide during and at completion of an artist's activity of expressing him or herself imaginatively.