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

Abstract

In the strong or radical sense, the creation of a work of art 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 the creative act seems answerable only after the fact, and then only in terms of our judgment that what was selected works within the finished whole. And we face a puzzle when we try to look within the subtleties and complexities of creative processes and wonder how an artist worked out the outcome. R. G. Collingwood faced this puzzle because he affirmed the strong view of creativity, although in a different form, and because he tried to explain what happens in creative processes in art. The difference in the 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 the subtleties of Collingwood's version of it. This is not the place to develop this point. Yet it is important to make it in the context of the puzzle of the artist's selections and rejections that infuse the creative act, because one of the subtleties of Collingwood's conception of art as the expression of emotion centers on the 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 the artist's awareness of when he or she goes wrong or makes a right choice in the act of creating. These comments concern the role of aesthetic emotion in the awareness an artist has of the propriety or impropriety (the truth or corruption) of what is being expressed as it is being expressed. We shall offer two claims about the function of aesthetic emotion: (1) Collingwood suggests that the term "aesthetic emotion" has two senses, general (applying to all instances in which imaginative expression occurs) and specific (applying uniquely to the individual character of each imaginative expression), and (2) the first sense of aesthetic emotion indicates a way in which it, in the context of its second sense, can function as a guide during and at the completion of an artist's activity of expressing him or herself imaginatively.