Repetition and Newness as Double Bind

The principle concept in Gayatri Spivak's new anthology, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, is that of the 'double bind'. The notion of a double bind encompasses dichotomies like such as man vs woman, planet vs globe, modern vs traditional. In other words, a double bind appears to be something like a Kantian antinomy: the point at which two perfectly logical but incompatible ideas cannot be synthesized any further. A double bind is thus a position between two concepts that cannot be further synthesized or made any more compatible with one another.

Spivak claims that the humanities are the disciplines that commonly seek to resolve double binds. This is evident in disciplines like the study of gender or post-colonial studies. In both instances the humanities seek to mitigate the divide between the concepts of man and woman, or the notion of Otherness. Spivak uses Schiller as a prime example of the way in which aesthetic or humane education usually attempts to synthesize or overcome a double bind. Spivak quotes Schiller's claim that aesthetic philosophy often fails because "either the investigation did not start with a sufficiently strict distinction, or it was not carried through to a pure and complete synthesis" (Quoted in Spivak, 2012, 19).

According to Spivak this attempt at synthesis is an inadequate way to deal with a double bind. Rather than pushing for ultimate synthesis, Spivak argues, one should seek to 'play' a double bind. One must try to navigate an antinomy not through synthesis, but through a sort of balancing act that arrives at something new. One must 'ab-use' the double bind that one is presented with.

Spivak chooses to use the term 'ab-use', which is entirely different from abuse. This notion of ab-use comes through most clearly as a way of using other people's ideas. To 'ab-use' an idea is to approach it knowing that you are going to distort it in the process of using it. You know that you will never completely or accurately engage with the idea as the author intended, so you approach it with the idea of making an intentional mistake. You use the idea, but you distort it in the process, bending it to your own purposes. In essence, you decide to live in a double bind by bending it to your own purposes.

For Spivak, the ultimate form of playing the double bind today comes from the ab-use of the European Enlightenment. She believes that post-colonial peoples need to find a way to reinvent the Enlightenment, to ab-use the Enlightenment "to expand the scope of this by an 'intended mistake': to bequeath a geography to it" (Ibid., 20). In other words, Spivak wants to "make the Enlightenment open to a(n) (ab)-use that makes room for justice, because it takes away the absoluteness of guarantees and secures it from the moderant satire of a Candide?" (Ibid., 21). Damn you and your damn parenthetical silliness, Spivak.

Moreover, Spivak claims that this double bind can also be rendered in terms of "the contradiction between planetary poiesis (imaginative making) and a named faith with an inherited record" (Ibid., 346). The problem is between making something new in the present out of the materials that we have inherited from the past.

This double bind of present and past is a huge one for me.

For Spivak too.

Unfortunately, I am out of time.

I have to go meet a friend.

But I intended to tell you how there is a way to collapse the double bind of past and present into another double bind: that of repetition and newness.

Because this is really the problem with the relationship between past and present. How is one to go on creating something new (the present-becoming-future) while still staying true to tradition (past-becoming-present)?

To me, this is a false problem.

Nothing will ever stay the same. We live in a Heraclitan world. Everything moves and nothing stays still.

Theory, too, must move with the world. As Spivak says, "All communicated action, including self-communicated action, is destined for errancy. This is so commonsensical a point that it is almost not worth making. Yet it is so hard to make this enter into theory. In order to conserve felicitous cases, we seem to be obliged to ignore destinerrancy" (Ibid., 28). I believe with Zizek and DeLanda's reading of Deleuze, combined with my reading of Collingwood and Clausewitz, I can create a theory that accommodates the movement of the world. A theory of practice that will train people's minds to operate with the mechanisms and technologies of the present, like Spivak wishes to do, but without a firm structure that could lead to a sort of doctrinaire self-deception. Instead, I propose Collingwoodian-Clausewitzian science of human affairs.

I believe this type of theory needs to hinge on the double bind of repetition and newness. That is, the paradoxical idea that newness can only emerge through repetition.

In order for this to be clear I will have to adequately explain historical thinking. I will have to explain simulation theory of mind and how historical thinking is about simulating past thoughts in the context of your present mind. I will have to explain how this simulation amounts to a repetition, and how that repetition can only lead to something new. I'll have to show that history is a branch of literature. I'll have to show that being a form of literature is partakes primarily of narrative. I'll have to demonstrate the capacity of narrative to not only generate understanding, but to generate our selves as well.

The double bind that an aesthetic education must deal with, I believe, is not the one of Enlightenment and the Other's ab-use of it. Nor is it the tension between tradition and modernity. Both of these are indispensable concepts, unavoidably real double binds.

But it seems to me that they both collapse into a larger double bind: That of Repetition and the New.

All of this will hopefully become much clearer in my essay on historical morality and the science of human affairs as anti-regularian morality.

Zizek On Retroactive Freedom And Changing One's Destiny: The Imagination And Choice

I am approaching the end of Zizek's In Defense Of Lost Causes. It is very long and very difficult and I am struggling to appreciate it as a whole. I will be studying it for a while when I am done reading it. But right now I want to hone in on one of Zizek's claims and try to tease it out a little bit.

The notion I want to explore is Zizek's claim that " 'Freedom' is thus inherently retroactive: at its most elementary, it is not a free act, which, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me" (IDOLC, 314). Now, what does this mean precisely? I once came up with this idea of 'retroactive freedom' on my own. But I meant something different than what Zizek means.

In order to parse this idea I'm going to look a little more closely at the paragraphs where Zizek expounds these ideas. I'll then make some references to Deleuze's work that Zizek cites. I'll then try to connect it to my reading of Collingwood. And finally I'll try to bring the whole thing together and explain how this notion of retroactive freedom fits into Zizek's larger goals for In Defense Of Lost Causes.

This notion of retroactive freedom is contained in a subsection called 'the act'. In that section Zizek seems to be trying to explain how it is that radical emancipatory politics could be realized, how we could make a push for utopia. He says that his definition of utopia is not some "simple imaginary impossibility," but is "utopia in the more radical sense of enacting what, within the framework of the existing social relations, appears as 'impossible' [...]." (310, his italics). So what Zizek is stressing in his definition of utopia is its relational character: it is about making radical change within an already existing world, it is grounded in concrete history and circumstances.

But placing this emphasis on the relational character of revolutionary action prompts questions about the relationship between choice and historical causality/momentum. Zizek warns against "the positivist vision of history as an 'objective' process which determines in advance the possible coordinates of politics interventions; within this horizon, it is unimaginable that a radical political intervention would change these very 'objective' coordinates and thus, in a way, create the conditions for its own success" (311). Zizek asserts, on the contrary, that we should not understand history in this linear objective way, but rather as something in which people are capable of acting within. Revolutionary action, however, has a retroactive character: "An act proper is not just a strategic intervention into a situation, bound by its conditions – it retroactively creates its own conditions.... The properly dialectical solution to the dilemma of 'Is it really there, in the source, or did we only read it into the source?' is thus: it is there, but we can only perceive and state this retroactively, from today's perspective" (311-312). What this means is that revolutionary action has to decided which past legacies, which historical determinants, it will use as a basis for action.

Zizek then clarifies this idea with a discussion of the nature of choice and action in general. He discusses Deleuze and Kant, "for whom I am determined by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will determine me.... in other words, we retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine us, or, at least, the mode of this linear determination. 'Freedom' is thus inherently retroactive...." (314). Zizek puts it more clearly when he says "This, perhaps, is the most succinct definition of what an authentic act is: in our ordinary activity, we effectively just follow the (virtual-fantasmatic) coordinates of our identity, while an act proper is the paradox of an actual move which (retroactively) changes the very virtual 'transcendental' coordinates of its agent's being.... while the pure past is the transcendental condition for our acts, our acts not only create an actual new reality, they also retroactively change this very condition" (315). This idea seems somewhat clear to me. It seems like a very nice way to resolve the obvious problem of historical determinism by explaining how choice operates within its confines. It reminds me of what I called 'meta-strategic thinking' in my Society's Implicit War essays. Zizek makes this relationship between determinism and choice crystal clear at the end of the section 'the act'. He argues that "although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny.... Destiny and free action (blocking the 'if') thus go hand in hand: freedom is at its most radical the freedom to change one's Destiny" (316). We are free to 'choose our destiny' because we don't have one simple destiny: we have a variety of different experiences that provide us with multiple perspectives that we can choose among. We are thus free to choose among possible 'destinies'. Hopefully I'm writing clearly about this idea, because it makes sense in my head.

But now I would like to ask how this would be possible on a subjective level, what it would look like, what it would feel like on a personal level. And I think that Collingwood's definition of the imagination goes a long way in explaining how this would be possible. Collingwood defines the imagination as the space between sensations and ideas in which we can consciously manipulate traces of our past experience. When we try to imagine the color red, all we are doing is using consciousness to prolong the life of our experience of seeing read. Collingwood believes that as we have sensations they are swept away in the flow of sensation and experience and can be swept beneath the surface and forgotten completely. But if we are capable of exerting consciousness we can prolong the life of sensations and keep them in our minds for a longer amount of time. This capacity of consciousness to extend the life of past sensations, for Collingwood, is the imagination.

Now when Zizek's notion of retroactive freedom meets Collingwood's definition of the imagination, the implications should be obvious: it is through the imagination that we are capable of 'choosing our destiny'. As I said above, the reason we are able to do this is because we have a huge array of experiences that provide us with many possible ways of thinking and acting. In short, we are not determined in the singular, but deal with a constellation of potential determinants. So what faculty of the mind would allow us to single out one of these determinants and make it the impetus for our action? The answer should be obvious: the imagination is the mental faculty that would allow us to single out one of those determinants as the best course for our action to take.

This is what Zizek means when he said "I am determined by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will determine me...." or when he said "in our ordinary activity, we effectively just follow the (virtual-fantasmatic) coordinates of our identity, while an act proper is the paradox of an actual move which (retroactively) changes the very virtual 'transcendental' coordinates of its agent's being." If we just live unreflectively then we will just follow our destiny, but if we decided to act then we will single out a course of action that is also embedded in our experience, but may have been overshadowed by an experience that was previously more determinate.

In my life, for example, I have experiences with both anger and compassion. It might be really easy for me to lapse into anger and cynicism. I could be furious and bitter and angry with people. But I also have experiences with being silly and playful, being friendly. Both of those things are coordinates of my being that I could follow. But I would like to think that I can choose which one of those coordinates, which one of those destinies I will follow. Furthermore, it is my imagination, my consciousness, that can single out one of those destinies as more worthy. Thus I will choose among my determinants, and thus I will take action, and thus I will change my destiny.

Interesting stuff. I told myself I wanted to try and understand how this stuff fits into the larger picture of In Defense Of Lost Causes, but I don't think I can do that right now. It is enough to have clarified Zizek's notion of retroactive freedom and to have linked it so soundly with Collingwood's definition of the imagination.

Over and out.

Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change In The Art of Life Part I.3

Part I.3. Art and Language

14. Art as Language: How Much Of Expression Can be Artistic?

15. The Technical Theory of Language

16. Consciousness In Language, Emotion, and Thought

17. Art, Language, and Reenactment: How Does Language Work?

18. Reenactment, Empathy, and Simulation Theory: Collingwood Anticipates Goldman and Frith

19. Consciousness In Art, Language, and Zen

20. Social Interaction as the Imaginative Expression of Emotions

Part I.3. Art And Language

Now that I have negatively defined art, and positively defined art as the imaginative expression of emotions, I would like to add some nuance to this definition. In particular, I need to deal with one of Collingwood’s most confusing and interesting conclusions: that all art is essentially language. That whenever we use the imagination to express our emotions, we are engaging in a form of linguistic expression.

Frankly, this is one section that I am not very confident about. But I will nonetheless do my best to tackle it.

I plan on handling it in seven sections. First I want to give a general introduction to this idea that all art is language. The purpose of the first section is to introduce the most important question of this entire series of essays: if all art is language, then how much of our daily expression can be artistic? I’ll then take a look at what Collingwood calls ‘the technical theory of language’ so that I can begin to parse apart this issue. After that I’ll try to look more closely at the relationship between language and thought. Then I’ll try to integrate Collingwood’s notion of ‘reenactment’ into this analysis. Reenactment is an idea that Collingwood introduces in The Idea of History, but which is very relevant to his analysis of language and thought in The Principles of Art. After that I’ll explain how Collingwood’s analysis of language predicts contemporary views that I have seen in the work of Alvin Goldman and Chris Frith. After that I'll try to begin making the connection to Zen by highlighting the role of consciousness in art, language, and Zen. Finally I’ll try to bring all of this together in the section ‘Social Interaction as the Imaginative Expression of Emotions’. In that final section I will really begin pushing this question about how much of our daily social lives can become artistic.

14. Art as Language: How Much Of Expression Can be Artistic?

As I have said, Collingwood concludes that if art is indeed the imaginative expression of emotions, then art must always be some form of language. If art is language, we must therefore ask ourselves: What is language?

The short answer is that every expressive gesture is a form of language. That every part of our expression, our tone, our body language, our hand gestures, that all of it matters and is a part of language. So in this section I want to start analyzing language so that I can start establishing what I will eventually fully claim in Part III: That we can become existential aestheticians, that all of our social lives can become a work of art. But in order to get there I first need to undertake a more general analysis of language and art as language. So the first question I will ask is, How can language be so diverse a phenomenon so as to encompass all expressive gestures? How is it that we can understand language as not simply words, “but in a wider sense in which it includes any activity of any organ which is expressive in the same way in which speech is expressive” (235).

I think the best way to begin this discussion is to make a distinction between language as a broad phenomenon and symbolism as a specific function of language. Collingwood defines language as a broad category that encompasses every gesture that is either expressive or communicative. “In its original or native state,” he argues, “language is imaginative or expressive: to call it imaginative is to describe what it is, to call it expressive is to describe what it does. It is an imaginative activity whose function is to express emotion. Intellectual language is this same thing intellectualized, or modified so as to express thought” (225). A symbol, on the other hand, is a specific form of language that has been decided (at least implicitly) to signify a certain thing. Collingwood draws on the ancient Greek distinction between symbol and language to corroborate his argument. He says that for the Greeks a symbol was “something arrived at by agreement and accepted by the parties to the agreement as valid for certain purpose” (225). The agreement that constitutes a symbol, however, is no longer as explicit as it may have been for the ancient greeks. In our culture it seems that things are simply believed to be what it is that we call them. A dog, for example, is simply a dog. We have no sense that the word dog is an implicitly decided upon symbol that signifies the many species of dogs that we know. Or a chair is simply a chair. We have lost touch with the fact that language is not simply symbolism, that language is not simply words.

I think that making this distinction between language and symbol goes a long way in explaining how language is not simply words, but a larger phenomenon of expressive and communicative gestures. It just seems that our culture is so overrun by words and symbols. The meaning of the plethora of our symbols has been so subtly and implicitly decided over the last centuries that we don’t recognize the consensual nature of their use. Words and symbols only work the way they do because society implicitly decides to use them in those ways. Culture seems to have reached such a critical mass that symbols circulate without being under anybody’s control. They morph and change all the time. But we don’t seem to make the distinction between language and symbolism very often. In short, I am worried that people think confuse “language in general with intellectualized language or symbolism” (226). So, now that I have told you the difference between language and symbolism, hopefully freeing language from a conception that associates it primarily with words and symbols, let me elaborate this definition of language as gestures.

So how is it that language could be every form of expressive and communicative gesture? I still am not very clear on this issue. And it sure is a shame that I’m trying to write on it at this particular moment. But I suppose one thing I can say is that Collingwood stresses that the process of speaking, of gesturing, of using language, is a process in which we are both speaker and hearer. My discussion of the imagination in the previous chapter made it clear that when we express ourselves through language we raise our emotions from the purely psychical level and give them a new coloring at either the imaginative or the intellectual level of experience. The same thing holds true for language in general: “A person expressing emotions... is treating himself and his audience in the same kind of way; he is making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what he is doing to himself” (111). This means that language, just like art, is both about expressing ourselves and exploring ourselves (as I explained in Part I.2.7). Furthermore, language as expressive and explorative has something to do with consciousness: Collingwood says expression “is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also has something to do with consciousness: the emotion expressed is an emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious” (109). Thus Collingwood’s analysis of art that I presented in section I.2 proves to be consistent with his analysis of language as a more general phenomenon. Just like art, language is imaginative in that it involves the transformation of psychical experience into imaginative levels through the work of consciousness.

Collingwood’s claim that art is a form of language is thus becoming slightly clearer to me. But I apologize that I am not able to explicate this more carefully. But it makes sense that speech and words would only be one form of language. And Collingwood thankfully draws the full implications from this idea: that every expressive bodily gesture is a form of language. “Every kind of language,” he argues, “is in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages” (244). I like this idea that dance is the essence of language. I have seen Nietzsche say something about how a philosopher should want to be a great dancer or something like that. So enough for the fundamental claim that language is a larger phenomenon than speech and words and encompasses all gestures.

I would now like to take a moment to compare Collingwood’s analysis of language to some contemporary neuroscience. Collingwood’s definition of language as gestures lines up with UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni’s. In Mirroring People, Iacoboni speculates that the language center in the brain (Broca’s area) is directly next to the motor cortex because there is a strong relationship between speaking and gesturing. Collingwood agrees. He says that “gestures of painting and so forth are themselves in the nature of language” (227). Collingwood again lines up with Iacoboni in that he treats language as something that is goal based. Meaning that naturally language is not used in conjunction with certain grammatical rules, but rather to express a certain goal. Collingwood gives the example of a child who is learning to speak for the first time. Imagine, Collingwood says, that every time the child’s mother removes its hat the mother says ‘Hatty off!’. Now, eventually the child will begin to replicate this sound so that when it takes its own hat off it will say something like ‘hattiaw!‘. Now are we to consider a child’s phrase like ‘hattiaw‘ to be a piece of language? The answer is of course. But clearly it lacks the qualities of symbolism, it lacks the qualities of speech that has been conditioned by social consensus. Instead, the child’s utterance of ‘hattiaw‘ is more simply expression that is expressing the accomplishment of a certain goal, the goal of removing its hat. As Collingwood says, “It would be nearer the truth, in denying that ‘hattiaw’ is a symbol, to call it an expression” (228). Collingwood’s analysis of language as gestures lines up with Iacoboni’s analysis in two ways: first, they both regard language not as essentially words, but as gestures, and second, they both regard language as goal oriented in that it expresses the accomplishment of certain ends.

Collingwood, however, goes beyond Iacoboni in his concern for how language is analyzed in society at large. Collingwood believed that associating language primarily with words could have negative consequences for how we behave in society. While this is something I’ll have to explore later in this essay, I will that I think Collingwood was concerned with properly defining language because if we associate language simply with words then we are limited the ways that we have to express ourselves and the ways that we are able to think. Furthermore, I think that Collingwood may have been concerned with the way that generalization desensitized us.

In conclusion, bodily gestures and utterances are the true forms of language, and “any theory of language must begin here. if we begin by studying the result of these further modifications, the language we use for expressing our thoughts concerning the world around us and the structure of thought itself, and take this highly developed and highly specialized form of language as representing the universal and fundamental character of language as such, we shall get nowhere.” Because “beneath all the machinery of word and sentence lies the primitive language of mere utterance, the controlled act in which we express our emotions” (236). The theory of language has serious implications for how we express ourselves and how we live. Collingwood believed that by identifying language simply with words we were succumbing to the dangers of the technical theory of language. Now I would like to turn my attention explicitly to the technical theory of language and why it is dangerous in Collingwood’s eyes.

15. The Technical Theory of Language

Collingwood believes that if art is to be defined as a form of language, we must have an adequate definition of language. As I said above, he posits that language is not simply words and symbols, but every bodily gesture that is expressive and communicative. But this positive definition of language is not enough. This is because another theory of language, which Collingwood calls ‘the technical theory of language’, was already commonplace during his time. The technical theory of language is much like the technical theory of art that I explained in Part I.1. According to the technical theory of art, artistic expression is primarily a matter of craft: it is simply about converting raw materials into a finished product, and understand the process of art simply has to be about understanding its technical components. The technical theory of language similarly maintains that language is a craft, it is something that has essential properties, and that we simply need to breakdown and analyze the constituent parts of language. The technical theory of language essentially holds that language is a grammatically or logically analyzable system of signs that can be used to craft certain meanings. Further, the technical theory of language identifies language primarily with words. Under the technical theory of language, language loses much of its dynamism and its expressive power.

This is in stark contrast to the theory of language as gestures. Because if language is all the manifold gestures we use, then we cannot believe that it is simply words, as the technical theory believes. Furthermore, Collingwood believes that the technical theory of language denies the living component of language. According to Collingwood, languages cannot be rigidly analyzed and systematized because they are in constant change through their interaction with the rest of society. This is why Collingwood believes that grammar is more of a sham science then we might be aware: "The grammarian's real function... is not to understand language, but to alter it: to convert it from a state (its original and native state) in which it expresses emotion into a secondary state in which it can express thought" (257). In other words, we are missing out on the richness of language if we understand it only as words that need to be grammatically systematized so that they can be properly put towards craft. We need to embrace a larger definition of language in which it is genuinely expressive. Collingwood, however, was not very hopeful about his contemporaries approach to the theory of language: “Failing these helps, and misled by the modern practice of silent reading, logicians fling themselves headlong in hordes, like lemmings; and suicidally discuss the import of ‘propositions’ such as ‘the king of Utopia died last sunday’, without stopping to ask: ‘In what tone of voice am I supposed to say this? The tone of a person beginning a fairy tale, in which case I hand the job over to an aesthetician; of the tone of a person state a fact of which he wishes to convince his audience...?” (265-6). For Collingwood, the technical theory of language, just like the technical theory of art, was the main idea to be refuted. Rather than being an analyzable and systematizable set of ‘phrases’ or ‘propositions’, language, for Collingwood, was a diverse phenomenon that had been restricted and pigeonholed by the technical theory of language. These views led Collingwood to argue as such: “‘The proposition’, understood as a form of words expressing thought and not emotion, and as constituting the unit of scientific discourse, is a fictitious entity.” (266). In other words, grammatical rules do not exist before we say that they exist. Language is rather a living and breathing form of expression that fluctuates and flows throughout communities. But the technical theory of language had managed to numb us to the richness of language. Language is not an objective phenomenon that can be systematized, but is rather “an activity; it is expressing oneself, or speaking” (254). But the technical theory of language helps us believe that words were the only form of language we had, and that they followed a rigid and expressible logic of their own. In conclusion: “A grammarian is not a kind of scientist studying the actual structure of language; he is a kind of butcher, converting it from organic tissue into marketable and edible joints” (257).

I think that Collingwood’s attack on the technical theory of language is very important. By refuting the most popular conception of language in his time (and possibly ours), Collingwood hoped to liberate our capacity for expression from a limiting definition of language. I think that this idea still has very serious implications. Later in this essay I’ll be connecting this idea to two issues I think very important: 1. status functions and the structure of our thinking, and 2. our culture’s condition of knowledge-saturation and the theory-theory of mind. In both instances I will be talking about the ways that language provides us with an overly-structured experience that prevents us from being creative or expressive. I will be talking about these issues as the technical theories of life, politics, and society.

But now I would like to move on and talk about the relationship between language, emotions, and thought as it applies to all of this.

16. Consciousness In Language, Emotion, and Thought

Now when it comes to the relationship between language and thought there are three important things I need to discuss. First, the way that language is capable of expressing emotion. Second, the way that language expresses thought, which is also connected to the relationship between emotion and thought. And third, the way that language changes and alters our emotions and thoughts. I’m not sure what I want to accomplish by discussing these things, except that there is a definite connection between all three of these things.

So the first issue: language and the expression of emotions. It should be clear from the other parts of this section that language is essentially all about expressing emotions. Whenever we express our emotions we are using language. And this always has to do with our bodies and the way that we use them to make gestures of any kind. But a question arises for me: If the expression of our emotions is always language, is there any threshold at which our actions are or are not language? The answer is yes. And Collingwood’s answer revolves around the role of consciousness. Collingwood says that in order for the expression of our emotions to constitute language we must have an awareness of our emotions. By being aware of our emotions, by dominating them and turning them from sensations into imagination we can express them bodily: “the bodily acts which express these emotions, instead of being simply automatisms of our psycho-physical organism, are experienced in our new self-consciousness as activities belonging to ourselves, and controlled in the same sense as the emotions they express. Bodily actions expressing certain emotions, in so far as they come under our control and are conceived by us, in our awareness of controlling them, as our way of expressing these emotions, are language” (235).

This seems to get tricky for me. How is it that bodily expression of emotions only becomes language under the supervision of consciousness? Well, I think it makes sense. This doesn’t mean that we don’t express our emotions in some way if we are not conscious of them. We express our emotions all the time without exerting any kind of consciousness. But consciousness augments the way we express things. This was made clear in Part I.2.12 ‘Imagination, Consciousness, and Art’. When we direct consciousness towards our emotions we raise them to the imaginative or intellectual level and we change them into something new. This is why expression is also exploration. So this leads me to another one of Collingwood’s interesting claims that might make sense now: that there are no unexpressed emotions. This seems paradoxical at first. But Collingwood says that “what are called unexpressed emotions are emotions at one level of experience, already expressed in the way appropriate to that level, of which the person who feels them is trying to become conscious: that is, trying to convert into the material of an experience at a higher level, which when he achieves it will be at once an emotion at this higher level and an expression appropriate to it” (239). Meaning that when we express our emotions at the purely physical and psychical level they exist in one way. And if we then use consciousness to elevate them to the level of language, whether it be imaginative or intellectual language, we are changing the emotions and thus expressing new emotions that have correlates in lower levels of our experience. In this way there can be no such thing as an unexpressed emotion: every emotion gains a new quality when it is expressed in new ways, they are either expressed at the lower psychical level that is appropriate, or they undergo the transformation into imagination/idea and they gain expression at that level. In short, the expression of emotions becomes language when our consciousness is engaged in the process of transforming our emotions into higher order experiences.

But what about thought? What is the relationship between thought and language? What is the relationship between emotions and thought? Well, the former question is easier to answer: thoughts are emotions that have been raised and transformed into higher levels of experience through the work of consciousness. When we direct our consciousness towards our emotions we are able to intellectualize them and we can thus express them. Language as Collingwood defines it, however, does not necessarily deal with these intellectualized thoughts. “Language in its original nature,” he argues, “expresses not thought in this narrower sense, but only emotions; though these are not crude impressions, but are transmuted into ideas through the activity of consciousness” (252). So then, it seems clear enough that thoughts and emotions go hand in hand. Thoughts are emotions that consciousness has grappled with and has made them into something new.

But what about thought and language? Well, I don’t think Collingwood has as much to say about this. Or maybe he does and I have misread him. But for now I want to quickly say that language has the tendency to structure thought. When we declare something to be a certain way we change the way we perceive it. Again, I’ll be discussing this far more in depth when I get to the section on status functions and neuroplasticity and all that other stuff.

So what about art? What does all of this business about language, emotions, and thought have to do with art? Well, it means that artistic expression (which is always linguistic) happens as a result of consciousness. That when we use consciousness to transmute our emotions into imagination or intellect we are providing ourselves with the fodder that we need for our artistic expression. This is why there is a direct relationship between thought, emotions, and art (i.e. language): “Even if art never expresses thought as such, but only emotion, the emotions it expresses are not only the emotions of a merely conscious experient, they include the emotions of a thinker; and consequently a theory of art must consider the question: how, if at all, must language be modified in order to bring the expression of these emotions within its scope” (252). So all conscious expression of emotions is language, all art is the conscious expression of emotions, and all art is therefore language. But language also interacts with thought and emotions. Our emotions provide the original impetus for something, but once consciousness changes them they become something new: either imagination or idea. When we change emotion into imagination or idea we then change the way that original emotion is expressed and feels in our mind. So language, emotions, and thoughts all effect one another. Emotions are expressed through language, emotions are modified by thoughts and are thus expressed differently by language, and language then changes our emotions and thoughts, and our artistic expression is changed every step of the way.

Now I want to turn to a more specific problem about the how of language.

17. Art, Language, and Reenactment: How Does Language Work?

Now that I’ve taken the time to parse the relationship between language, emotions, thoughts, and art, I want to take up a more specific question: if art is language, how do people understand a work of art, and how do we understand language more generally? In other words, I now want to discuss the how of linguistic expression and communication. How does it work?

Collingwood’s views on the functioning of language revolve around two key things: the nature of words themselves, and the nature of the mind. As for words as a medium, Collingwood believes that they are elusive, that they are not technical by their nature, and that they are therefore not a consistent or reliably analyzable form of communication. As for minds, Collingwood believes they are essentially inaccessible: we can never know the true content of another person’s mind. So where does this leave us? How do we use the limited medium of words in order to access the unknowable world of other minds? Well, the answer is contained in Collingwood’s notion of the reenactment of thought. What words offer us is evidence of another person’s thoughts that we can use to reconstruct or reenact those very same thoughts for ourselves. Let me buttress these arguments about words, minds, and reenactment in turn with a little bit of textual evidence.

Now Collingwood discusses words as a limited medium that always has shortcomings and vagaries. It is never 100% clear what a word means, what it refers to, and if we have understood it properly. "The proper meaning of a word...,” he argues, “is never something upon which the word sits perched like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship's stern. Trying to fix the proper meaning in our minds is like coaxing the gull to settle in the rigging, with the rule that the gull must be alive when it settles: one must not shoot it and tie it" (7). Because language is a living and changing thing we have to recognize that we are not using language to directly refer to or label things. Instead we are engaging in a sort of pointing, a suggestion to a certain kind of meaning. This is why the "way to discover the proper meaning [of a word] is to ask not, 'What do we mean?' but, 'What are we trying to mean?' " (7). Words never contain an essential meaning. They are hints, clues, attempts to express something that were think or feel. And Collingwood’s definition of art and language accounts for this inherent uncertainty of nature.

Collingwood’s definition of art and language also grapples with the inherent inaccessibility of other people’s mental states. For it is the inaccessibility of other minds, our inherent subjective confinement, our inevitable solipsism, that forces language to have to indirect and suggestive qualities that Collingwood identifies. Language has to ‘point’ to things’ because only our own minds are accessible to us. Collingwood makes this point quite clear: “The nature of a person’s ‘mentality’ is in itself completely unknowable” (62). Language is therefore something that must overcome this inherent disconnect between minds.

So how does language manage to bridge the solipsistic gulf? The answer is contained in Collingwood’s notion of the ‘reconstruction’ or ‘reenactment’ of thought. Collingwood believes that language enables us to feel peoples emotions and thought for ourself. He believes that there is no direct imparting of knowledge from one person to another, but rather a process in which the hearer is forced to replicate the thoughts being expressed by the speaker. This is why he claims that a persons mind “is only knowable in its manifestations, the ways in which he thinks and acts” (62). We can only gain evidence of other people’s thoughts, never the thoughts themselves. And thus understanding other people’s minds comes back to replicating their thoughts for ourselves: “Now, if one person says something by way of expressing what is in his mind, and another hears and understands him, the hearer who understands him has that same thing in his mind” (118). Collingwood is even clearer on this point later in the book: “We are apt to think of [the relation between speaker and hearer] as one in which the speaker ‘communicates’ his emotions to the hearer. But emotions cannot be shared like food or drink, or handed over like old clothes. To speak of communicating an emotion, if it means anything, must mean causing another person to have emotions like those which I have myself” (249). Emotional and intellectual communication therefore comes down to an extended form of empathy in which we must think and feel things for ourselves. Collingwood, however, uses the term ‘sympathy’ to signify this process of reconstructing thought. “The relations between sentient organisms as such,” he claims, “are constituted by the various modes of sympathy which arise out of psychical expression of their feelings” (248). In The Idea of History Collingwood will later introduce the notion of ‘reenactment’ of thought. With this term he is trying to communicate the active process of reconstruction and re-experiencing that the listener has to go through if he wants to understand another person’s mind. Collingwood takes this idea to its full implication when he says, "Understanding what some on 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). It is what we hear and feel in our own minds, and not the minds of the speaker, that lets us understand what is going on in the speakers mind. This is why the “experience of speaking is also an experience of listening” (247). In short, my understanding of other minds depends entirely on my ability to reconstruct other people’s thoughts and feelings for myself.

This indirectness of language and the inaccessibility of language also applies to artistic expression and appreciation. Collingwood makes the connection between all of language and artistic language in particular when he says that “the listening which we have to do when we hear the noises made by musicians is in a way rather like the thinking we have to do when we hear the noises made, for example, by a person lecturing on a scientific subject” (140). When we are trying to access the meaning of a work of art we have to engage in this same process of reconstructing an experience for ourselves. In particular, we are trying to gain access to what Collingwood calls the ‘total imaginative experience’ of the artist. Meaning that we are trying to access all of the sensations and feelings that the author was feeling: mental, emotional, intellectual, physical, so on. Everything. This means that it is up to us, and our capacity to reconstruct an experience, to appreciate art. “If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear,” Collingwood argues, “the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves” (118). If we are incapable of feeling what the artist felt then we will not be able to understand others. This applies not only to poetry, but to music as well: “what is written or printed on music-paper is not the tune. It is only something which when studied intelligently will enable others (or himself, when he has forgotten it) to construct the tune for themselves in their own heads” (135). And again, Collingwood stresses the importance of being an active listener. Unless we are willing to expend effort we will not be able to grasp difficult concepts or appreciate great works of art: “The music, the work of art, is not the collection of noises, it is the tune in the composer’s head. The noises made by the performers, and heard by the audience, are not the music at all; they are only mens by which the audience, if they listen intelligently (not otherwise), can reconstruct for themselves the imaginary tune that existed in the composer’s head” (139). In short, artistic expression has to be understood in the same way that ordinary language is understood: by engaging a process of recreating the thought, feelings, or imaginary object in the mind of the speaker or artist.

This means that when we engage with art we are not simply passive recipients, but become artists ourselves in the process. “Hence,” Collingwood claims, “when someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet’s words, which have thus become his own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by that fact that he makes us poets. We know that he is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours” (118). If we are to seriously engage with art we need to recognize our role as collaborates, as artists ourselves.

In conclusion, it is now clearer that art is indeed a form of language both in terms of expression and understanding. When we want to express ourselves through ordinary or artistic language we have to exert consciousness to raise our emotions to an expressible level. Furthermore, what we are trying to reconstruct in the case of artistic expression is the total imaginative experience of the artist. All of this hinges on the idea that minds are by their nature inaccessible, that language must therefore be an indirect process of communication, and that we must engage in a process of active listening so that we can reconstruct in our own mind the thoughts and feelings being expressed by the speaker.

Now I would like to explain how Collingwood’s argument about language as required the reconstruction or reenactment of thought largely anticipated two contemporary thinkers: Alvin Goldman and Chris Frith.

18. Reenactment, Empathy, and Simulation Theory: Collingwood Anticipates Goldman and Frith

Collingwood’s analysis of language and its relationship to minds and art is very compelling. Especially because two contemporary thinkers have corroborated his arguments in substantial ways. By comparing Collingwood to these two contemporary thinkers I hope to do two things. First, I hope to introduce theory of mind more explicitly into the issues of art, zen, and insurrection. Because while Collingwood heavily discusses minds and their properties, he does not explicitly expound a theory of mind. Second, I hope to introduce contemporary neuroscience into the argument because it adds scientific weight to his claims about minds and their engagement with art. So first I’ll start by summarizing Alvin Goldman’s work on simulation theory of mind and explaining how Collingwood’s work on art, language, and minds largely anticipate Goldman’s theory of mind. After that I’ll turn to Chris Frith’s work to explain how Collingwood’s views anticipated the findings of contemporary neuroscience. In particular, I’ll explain how Collingwood anticipated the notion of ‘mental modeling’ and the existence of mirror neurons.

So, I believe that Collingwood’s discussion of art, language, and minds anticipates many of the conclusions that Alvin Goldman reaches in Simulating Minds. Goldman’s main purpose in that book is to create a comprehensive theory of mind that can answer the basic questions in philosophy of mind. The major questions are “(1) how do people mindread others–that is, attribute mental states to others? (2) How do people mindread themselves? (3) How is the mindreading capacity, or skill, acquired? (4) What are the contents of people’s concepts of mental states? How do they conceive the difference between belief and desire, anger and disgust?” (Goldman, 21). Goldman believes that he is capable of synthesizing the dominant theories of mind into a coherent answer of those major questions. The two major competing theories in contemporary theory of mind are simulation theory and theory-theory. Simulation theorists maintain that mindreading is accomplished by internally simulating other people’s thoughts for ourselves–that mindreading depends on an extended form of empathy. Theory-theorists, on the other hand, believe that mindreading is accomplished by the existence of tacit psychological theories. Theory-theorists claim that we rely on these unconscious psychological theories to make inferences about how other people are thinking and acting. Goldman advocates a simulation-theory hybrid in which simulation is seen as the primary means of mindreading. Since it is hard to deny the existence of tacit psychological theories, however, Goldman must make room for them in his account of simulation theory. Goldman thus concludes that tacit theories exist as an aid to the simulation process, and that they never serve as a primary means of mindreading. Later in this essay, in Part IV, I’ll have a lot more to say about this, because I suspect that pure theory-theory mindreading might be possible. But for now I am just summarizing Goldman’s work.

Goldman’s claims about simulation theory are heavily documented. But there are two Goldman’s distinction between two distinct forms of mindreading demonstrates the major pieces of evidence that he relies on. Goldman believes that we can distinguish between low-level and high-level simulational mindreading. Low-level simulational mindreading, he believes, is accomplished primarily by mirror neurons. High-level simulational mindreading depends on what he calls the ‘Enactment-imagination’ (E-imagination for short). Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that are activated both when we perform an action and when we see another person perform that same action. Mirror neurons are the part of the brain primarily responsible for empathy. Every time we see someone make a facial expression our brain internally mirrors/simulates the performance of that facial expression, which then communicates the proper emotion to the limbic system. Mirror neurons require no conscious recognition and operate entirely through emotional mirroring or contagion. Mirror neurons, therefore, are the main thing involved in what Goldman calls low-level simulational mindreading. The E-imagination is the primary thing that is involved in high-level simulational mindreading. High-level mindreading is different from low-level mindreading in that it is accessible to consciousness, and can account for more abstract things than basic emotions. The E-imagination refers generally to the phenomenon of experiencing something when we imagine it. When we imagine wind on our skin, for example, we feel a slight tingling. Or when we imagine pain, we can feel our skin contract with the pain. The existence of the E-imagination can be confirmed both phenomenologically and neurologically. Not only do we feel these sensations when we imagine things, but brain scans confirm that the imagination draws on the same parts of the brain that are involved in actual experience. There is huge overlap, therefore, between imagination and actual experience. When it comes to the use of the E-imagination for simulational mindreading, Goldman says that it involves a three step process. First there is the process of hearing a person speak, followed by a process of simulating that person’s thoughts based on what they said or did, and finally a process of projecting those simulated thoughts onto the speaker.

That is a sloppy rundown of Goldman’s claims about simulation theory of mind. I would now like to explain how Collingwood’s analysis of art and language largely anticipates Goldman’s findings.

I think there are two way in which Collingwood’s analysis anticipates Goldman’s explication of simulation theory. First, Collingwood uses the term ‘emotional contagion’ to describe how people interact. This anticipates Goldman’s claim about low-level simulation working primarily with mirror neurons and emotional contagion. Second, Collingwood discusses language primarily in terms of ‘reconstruction’ or ‘reenactment’ of another person’s thoughts. These terms come very close to the notion of simulation. Goldman even cites Collingwood’s use of the term reenactment, but he quickly moves on and gives it very little analysis. Collingwood, therefore, seems to anticipate both low- and high-level simulational mindreading.

Collingwood anticipates the language of low-level simulational mindreading when he refers to “emotional contagion.” He says that we do not need to be aware or conscious to communicate with others but hat there “is a kind of emotional contagion which takes effect without any intellectual activity; without the presence even of consciousness. This is a familiar fact, alarming becomes it seems so inexplicable, in man. The spread of panic through a crowd is not due to each person’s being independently frightened, nor to any communication by speech; it happens in the complete absence of these things, each person becoming terrified simply because his neighbour is terrified” (230). He says that this applies to all psychical experience: “Thus the mere sight of some one in pain, or the sound of his groans, produces in us an echo of his pain, whose expression in our own body we can feeling in the tingling or shrinking of skin areas, certain visceral sense, and so forth” (231). As I said, this anticipates Goldman’s discussion of low-level simulational mindreading and the existence of mirror neurons, as well as hinting at the existence of the E-imagination.

Collingwood calls this phenomenon ‘sympathy’. I find it interesting that he doesn’t use the term empathy. But I have seen a historian who analyzes Collingwood’s use of the term sympathy and explains that there were cultural events taking place that prevented him from using the word empathy. But I believe that when he speaks of emotional contagion and sympathy he is referring to something like empathy and simulation. “This ‘sympathy’ (the simplest and best name for the contagion I have described),” he argues, “exists visibly among animals other than man, and between animals of different species” (231). Collingwood therefore seems to be in line with Goldman’s claims about low-level simulational mindreading. He describes the idea of emotional contagion and seems to hint at the existence of mirror neurons. Further, he uses the term sympathy to designate the notion of empathy/simulation that Goldman describes.

Collingwood’s analysis of language also lines up with Goldman’s claims about high-level simulational mindreading. Collingwood describes language as something in which knowledge or understanding is never directly imparted, but rather hinted at and suggested. Language, for Collingwood, always requires an element of simulation, an active listening and reconstruction of thought: “We must think of communication not as an ‘imparting’ of thought by the speaker to the hearer, the speaker somehow planting his thought in the hearer’s receptive mind, but as a ‘reproduction’ of the speaker’s thought by the hearer, in virtue of his own active thinking” (140). Collingwood uses the example of a scientific lecture. He says that a scientist speaks not to directly give us access to his knowledge, but to guide us down a path in which we can understand things like he does: “The noises are meant to assist us in achieving what he assumes to be our purpose in coming to hear him lecture, that is, think this same scientific thesis for ourselves” (140). Collingwood clearly believed that spoken language functioned primarily in terms of subjective reconstruction of thought, which rhymes strongly with Goldman’s claims about high-level simulational mindreading. This idea applies not only to spoken language, but also to written work. “The written or printed book,” Collingwood asserts, “is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression” (243). Thus in the realms of emotions, speech, and reading, Collingwood believes that simulation plays a crucial role in the relations between minds.

Collingwood’s analysis of language even lines up with the three step process that Goldman identifies. Recall that Goldman says that language works first by giving us evidence of someone’s thoughts, followed by a simulation of those thoughts and ending with a projection of those thoughts onto the speaker. Collingwood describes this exact same process when he says, “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 someone 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). It is clear that Collin

Collingwood’s simulationesque analysis of emotions and language is fully applicable to his analysis of art as a form of language. In other words, he believes that the simulative elements of language can also be found in the appreciation of artistic works. Collingwood describes how the full appreciation of a work of art, which he described as reconstructing the artists ‘total imaginative experience’ cannot be complete with paying attention to what are called ‘tactile values’. Meaning that we have to think about the actual movements of the artist’s body and how he expressed himself in those ways. To me this implies a relationship between mirror neurons and artistic appreciation. If we look at a painting we would be able to imagine the movements that the artist made to construct those images, and we would likely be activating our mirror neurons. This is why it would be important to think about the whole of our bodies as we looked at a painting or heard a piece of music. Collingwood explains how one professor “taught his pupils... to look in paintings for what he called ‘tactile values’; to think of their muscles as they stood before a picture, and notice what happened in their fingers and elbows” (146). Collingwood makes this relationship between art and the total imaginative experience more explicit when he says that “the spectator’s experience on looking at a picture is not a specifically visual experience at all. What he experiences does not consist of what he sees. It does not even consist of this as modified, supplemented, and expurgated by the world of the visual imagination. It does not belong to sight alone, it belongs also... to touch” (146-47). He says that the artist “is thinking... of distance and space and mass: not of touch sensations, but of motor sensations such as we experience by using our muscles and moving our limbs. But these are not actual motor sensations, they are imaginary motor sensations.... what we get from looking at a picture is not merely the experience of seeing, or even partly seeing and partly imagining, certain visible objects; it is also, and in Mr. Berenson’s opinion more importantly, the imaginary experience of certain complicated muscular movements” (147). I am sorry for all of these long quotations. But they are driving home such an interesting point. To draw such a close connection between the appreciation of painting and the contemplation and imagination of the movements required to create is very important. It seems that Collingwood was naively, tacitly in touch with the existence of mirror neurons. A final quotation to drive this point home: “Let us look at it from the point of view of the artist.... When he painted it, he was in possession of an experience quite other than that of seeing the coulours he was putting on the canvass; an imaginary experience of total activity more or less like that which we construct for ourselves when we look at the picture” (149). It is about the entire bodily movement and expression of the artist, not simply the visual component.

Collingwood’s analysis of art and language therefore lines up with Goldman’s analysis of simulation theory in three ways. He is aware of both low-level and high-level components of simulational mindreading. And he takes it further by applying this analysis specifically to art.

Collingwood’s work also rhymes with a contemporary neuropsychologist by the name of Chris Frith. In his book Making Up The Mind: How The Brain Creates Our Mental World Frith argues that the brain is fully responsible for our perception of the world and explains how the brain operates primarily by creating models of the world. In particular, I think Collingwood and Frith line up on the issue of how people understand one another. Frith is adamant that minds cannot have direct access to one another, and must therefore understand one another in another way. He says that this is achieved primarily by matching mental models. As a conversation progresses we become more or less certain that me and the other person have the same thoughts in our minds. Frith argues that during a conversation “I have two things in my mind: (1) my idea and (2) my model of your idea. I can compare them directly. If they are similar, then I have probably communicated my idea to you successfully. If they are different, then I certainly haven’t” (Frith, 171). Furthermore, that speaking is about attempting to match mental models: “I don’t just choose my words because of what they mean; I choose my words to suite the person I am talking to. The more I talk to someone, the better an idea I get of what words will suit – just as I get a better idea of how to perceive the world around me the more I look at it” (Frith, 171). Collingwood addresses the same issue of understanding between minds and reaches a similar conclusion to Frith. Collingwood admits we can never be certain of another persons mind, and that the “only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other to be talking nonsense” (251). Collingwood also seems to think that conversation proceeds when people are able to match their mental models of one another. The connections between Collingwood and Frith go deeper because Frith vaguely rehashes empathy and simulation theory. But that would be redundant.

To wrap up this section, I believe that Collingwood’s analysis of language should be identified with contemporary work on simulation theory of mind and neuropsychology on mental modeling. Collingwood seemed ahead of his time in his understanding of how language worked and how minds were able to overcome their inherent confinement. It is always through a process of reconstruction or reenactment, he believed. This rings so strongly with the notion of simulation it can be a bit hard to stomach. Furthermore, Collingwood applies this analysis of language to the idea that art is language. He shows that in both art and language we are trying to reconstruct another person’s experience for ourselves. With language in general it can be any type of experience that we are reconstructing. But with art it is a total imaginative experience of expression, thought, movement and everything else.

In sections 14-18 I have completed a substantial task of Part I.3. I have talked about how language is not simply a matter of speaking and using words, but is in reality a larger phenomenon that encompasses all gestures that are consciously used to express ourselves. I then broke down the technical theory of language to show that language cannot be simply identified with words and grammatical or logical structuring. I then traced out the relationship between language, emotions, and thoughts, concluding that consciousness was the key factor that made it possible for us to express anything at all whether it be thoughts or emotions; I concluded that language must be the conscious expression of either emotion or thought. From there I moved on to address the specific issue of how language works. I claimed that Collingwood’s notion of reenactment was crucial to understanding his entire conception of language and communication. I then explained how it is fully in line with simulation theory of mind as described by Alvin Goldman and Chris Frith. To put it in a nut shell, in the last five sections, I have told you that language and art are both processes by which we consciously express our thoughts or feelings, thus making it possible for other people to reconstruct our thoughts and feelings in their own minds. Art must be language because it is all about this work of consciousness, this attempt to consciously express our experiences and make it possible for other people to simulate them. From here I have two more things to do: I want to give the issue of consciousness a brief look so that I can tie this all to Zen, and finally I need to talk about social interaction and how it can become an art form. That will finish Part I. Finally.

19. Consciousness in Art, Language, and Zen

As I said above, consciousness is the key factor in all of language, and in art, which is a form of language. I find this emphasis on consciousness to very curious, very curious indeed. Why is consciousness such a powerful thing? Why does language require consciousness? Is all that is required for us to be artistic is conscious expression? Is that all it takes? Why is it that consciousness has the power to elevate our actions from mere actions to expressive language and potentially art?

I ask all these questions because in this entire series of questions I am trying to work out a few major questions: Is it possible for all of existence, all of our actions, all of our words, our entire lives, to become a work of art? Is it a philosophically defensible to see existence itself as an art form? And can Zen perhaps help us to live that constantly artistic life?

I guess all this emphasis on consciousness makes me think of Zen quite a lot. With Zen and Buddhist mindfulness the key factor is attention, awareness, and consciousness. When we pay attention, when we exert our consciousness, we are attempting to live mindfully. So if Collingwood says that movement and action becomes language and art when consciousness is directed at our expression, wouldn’t this mean that our lives could become language and art if we were taking pains to constantly direct our consciousness towards ourselves? Wouldn’t it be a pretty clear conclusion, then, that mindfulness would be the way to enact an artistic existence? To me the answer seems like a yes. But a shaky and yet to be clearly defined yes. This will be the topic of many more sections to come. And in Part III I’ll be delving fully into this question of ‘becoming an existential aesthetician’. So in the final section of Part I I would like to address this question a bit more

20. Social Interaction as the Imaginative Expression of Emotions

So i really just want to vaguely delve into this idea that all of our life could become a work of art. If art is defined as the imaginative expression of our emotions, which involves a process in which we use our consciousness to raise our emotions from a level of mere sensation to a level of imagination and ideas, then would it be possible for this process to take place every day? I think so. And I think that Collingwood hints at this stuff.

For one thing, once Collingwood says that art is fundamentally language it seems obvious that all of linguistic lives could become artistic. Furthermore, because all of our social life revolves around language (in one way or another) it seems obvious and crucial that our social lives would become an object of artistic expression. And if consciousness really is the key factor in art, then wouldn’t a conscious social existence be the way to live an artistic life? I think this long quotation demonstrates this idea: “The activity which generates an artistic experience is the activity of consciousness. This rules out all theories of art which place its origin in sensation or its emotions, i.e. in man’s physical nature: its origin lies not there but in his nature as a thinking being. At the same time, it rules out all theories which places its origin in the intellect, and make it something to do with concepts. Each of these theories, however, may be valued as a protest against the other; for as consciousness is a level of experience intermediate between the psychic and the intellectual, art may be referred to either of these levels as a way of saying that it is not referable to the other” (273). If art is something that exists between the world of emotions and ideas, that is fundamentally connected to consciousness, then couldn’t this process have a place in every day social life? I think so. I really am truly starting to believe in this idea of the artistic life. I believe that it would be possible to become an existential aesthetician. This final quotation, I think, shows that Collingwood also has faith in the universal importance of art. Everyone can use it: “The scientist and historian and philosopher must go to school with the man of letters, and study to write as well as writing can be done. The literary man must go to school with the scientist and his likes, and study to expound a subject instead of merely exhibiting a style. Subject without style is barbarism; style without subject is dilettantism. Art is the two together” (299). Can we all bring the two together? Can we all consciously express ourselves with attention to both subject and style?

Concluding Part I.3 And All Of Part I

Part I of this essay is far longer than I thought it might be. First I want to summarize what I did in Part I.3, and then want to try and summarize what I have told you in the last 70 pages, in all of Part I. In part I.3 I was trying to deal with Collingwood’s claim that all art is essentially a form of language. So I had to ask a series of questions about what is language, how does it work, and how does it work in art and life? I ended up agreeing with Collingwood’s conclusion that language is not simply words but a larger phenomenon in which every expressive action and gesture is a form of language. I did not anticipate, however, that consciousness would be as crucial of a concept as it is. Because Collingwood believes that without consciousness we do not have language. An action or a gesture doesn’t become language unless we direct our consciousness towards our expression. After determining this crucial role of consciousness I undertook the questions of how language itself works. I explicated Collingwood’s notion of ‘reconstruction’ or ‘reenactment’ of thought. Basically, language never communicates something directly because minds never have direct access to one another. Language, instead, is a series of hints that allow us to reconstruct another person’s experience for ourselves. I then explained how this notion anticipates twenty-first century work by Alvin Goldman and Chris Frith. Both of these thinkers believe that minds engage primarily in terms of simulation and modeling. I believe Collingwood anticipated many of their views. I then had two sections where I discussed the possibility that all of our lives could become a work of art. I tried to explain how consciousness was the key factor in art, language, and Zen Buddhism. I therefore think that by living a conscious life we might be bringing ourselves closer to living an artistic life. I then briefly delved into the idea further. I think that social interaction is primarily about language. So what if we could talk about language as a conscious thing, and then turn our lives into art?

And as for Part I as a whole, I was trying to grapple with Collingwood’s definition of art in its nuance. I began with section I.1. ‘Negatively Defining Art’. In that section I explained how art is not the same as craft, it is not the same as magic, and it is not the same as amusement. Meaning that it is not a simple process of converting raw materials into a finished product (craft), it is not meant to create emotions that are useful in daily life (magic), and it is not meant to create emotions that simply entertain us (amusement). I then tried to break down Collingwood’s definition of art in section I.2. ‘Positively Defining Art’. In that section I tried to explain how art is the imaginative expression of our emotions. I talked about expression and the imagination in turn. Expression is a process that is both expressive and explorative. When we exert our consciousness on our raw emotions we change them, we transform them from the psychical level into the imaginative level and the intellectual level. So it is not simply expressing something that is there, it is also creating something new out of rawer emotions. I then explained how the imagination is the space between sensations and ideas. Again, consciousness is the key thing in the imagination. When we direct our conscious effort towards our emotions we are able to change them into the imaginative level in which we can manipulate them. They retain much of their sensory quality, they still look or feel or taste, but they are under our conscious control and lose their immediacy. By the end of this section it was clear that art was a process by which we use consciousness to raise our emotions to the imaginative level in which they can be expressed in new ways. Art is thus the imaginative expression of emotions. Finally in I.3. ‘Art and Language’ I tried to explain how art is a form of language. I explained how language is a large phenomenon of expressive gestures. Then ran down the relationship between language, emotions, thought, and consciousness. Consciousness is the key factor in language. When we exert our awareness on our thoughts and our emotions we are able to express them as language. I then explained how language works. And then explored vaguely the idea that all of our lives could become artistic. I already summarized I.3 above, so feel free to look up 1 paragraph.

From here I have four more parts planned. In Part II I’ll try to explain precisely why art is useful. In Part III I’ll try to explain how to become an existential aesthetician, taking this idea to its full logical conclusion. In Part IV I’ll try to integrate this into the notion of intellectual insurrection. And in Part V I’ll try to explore how existential aesthetics can become a political act that would spread the intellectual insurrection to others, hopefully making it a part of social change.

In Preparation For Weirdness

I'm so embarrassed by the weird things I'm capable of writing.

I'm so afraid of expanding the flow of evidence in the economy of my imagination.

But I'm going to start writing weird stuff.

Just a warning. I worry about how this will effect how people see me, or how I see myself.

But I have weird things to say. And I want to just say weird things.

Also Mr. Might Remind You challenged me to see who can write weirder stuff.

I'm resolved to win.

Please see my writing of November 10th and October 23rd for a more elaborate statement about why I worry about my writing.

But this is to prepare for weird writing.

Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change In The Art of Life Part I.2

Part I.2. Positively Defining Art

I'm not completely satisfied with my writing in this section. But I am doing this writing to reveal the shortcomings of my understanding of Collingwood. I think I did an okay job. But it is has been tough. But anyways, this is the section where I try to explain what it means for art to be 'the imaginative expression of our emotions'. I tried to do this by first breaking down the idea of emotions and their expression, followed by an analysis of the imagination as Collingwood describes it, and finally a statement on art as the creation of imaginary objects. Here is a table of contents for this section of my longer essay:

Part I.2. Positively Defining Art

6. Art is Imaginative Expression of Emotions

7. Expression as Exploration of our Emotions

8. Intellectual Emotions

9. Expression and Craft

10. The Imagination

11. The Imagination as the Space Between Sensations and Ideas

12. Imagination, Consciousness, and Art

13. Art as the Creation of Imaginary Objects

6. Art is Imaginative Expression of Emotions

So now I’ve come to the moment where I need to tell myself what art is, and what a theory of art has to look like. So Collingwood’s first question I want to tackle is: What is art? He answers that art is the imaginative expression of our emotions. The second question is: What does a theory of art deal with? He believes that people have too often assumed that the theory of art should deal with the notion of beauty. In reality, he asserts, aesthetic theory is not concerned with the issue of beauty but with the issue of art and its creation. In short, that aesthetic theory must deal with the aesthetic activity. “[A]esthetic theory,” he argues, “is the theory not of beauty but of art. The [theory of art as the] theory of beauty... is merely an attempt to construct an aesthetic on a ‘realistic’ basis, that is, to explain away the aesthetic activity by appeal to a supposed quality of the things with which, in that experience, we are in contact; this supposed quality invented to explain the activity, being in fact nothing but the activity itself, falsely located not in the agent but in his external world” (41). In other words, aesthetic theory should deal with how individual minds are able to create objects that we find aesthetically pleasing. We should not treat the aesthetic objects as if though they were some inherently beautiful or artistic thing that we should focus on. But we should rather recognize that works of art only represent the work of art that has already been created inside the mind of the artist. In short, aesthetic theory should not with the beauty that we perceive within the artistic object, but should deal with how minds are able to produce creative, expressive, and imaginative things. Art theory should help us understand how artists are able to imaginatively express their emotions.

Now this definition sounds rather bald. What does it mean that art is the imaginative expression of our emotions? Well, in order to answer this question I’ll chase Collingwood’s logic. I’m going to talk about emotions and their expression, what that means, and how Collingwood describes it. After that I’m going to take up the question of the imagination. Having discussed the nature of emotional expression, and having defined the imagination, I’ll hopefully be able to define art proper. After that I’ll move on to how art is essentially a form of language.

7. Expression as Exploration of our Experiences and Emotions

Now, as I said, Collingwood believes that art is a mental process in which we imaginatively express our emotions. So in this section I want to deal with the idea of expressing our emotions. More specifically, I want to deal with how the expression of our emotions can simultaneously be the exploration of our emotions. This reminds me of a well known phrase that I associate with Flannery O’Connor, but the same idea is more famously attributed to E.M. Forster. But anyways, O’Connor said “I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I have to say.”

Collingwood maintains the same thing about expression: it is both an expression and an exploration of what we feel. Collingwood believes that expression is also exploration because our emotions exist on multiple levels of our mind. There is the bare level of sensory experience, which he calls the psychical level. There is the fully thought out version of our feelings, which is the intellectual level. And between those two is what Collingwood calls the imaginative level.

Furthermore, Collingwood believes that our emotions are transformed as they reach these various stages by acts of awareness, by our conscious effort. So an emotion, therefore, goes through several different stages in its life. It begins as crude sensation at the psychical level, is then transformed to the level of imagination by consciousness, and is then fully intellectualized and turn into the level of an idea.

The emotion, however, acquires a new quality at every stage of its life. Collingwood describes this transformation of emotions as such: “There is emotion there before we express it. But as we express it, we confer upon it a different kind of emotional colouring; in one way, therefore, expression creates what it expresses, for exactly this emotion, colouring and all, only exists so far as it is expressed” (152). It is the conscious transformation of our emotions from crude sensa into imagination that confers this new quality upon them. He is even clearer about this when he says that “the agent, by thus expressing it, discovers himself to have been feeling independently of expressing it. This is the purely psychical emotion which existed in him before he expressed it by means of language.... In another way it expresses an emotion which the agent only feels at all in so far as he thus expresses it” (274). Expression as exploration, therefore, is a process by which we use our consciousness to discover our purely psychical emotions by transforming them into imaginative or intellectual emotions.

This transformation of emotions through acts of consciousness thus makes it possible for the expression of our emotions to also be the exploration of our emotions. Collingwood says that initially the artist “is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement.... 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” (109). The artist has no real understanding of his emotions at first because they exist simply at the psychical level. They do not yet have a corresponding imaginative or intellectual life. But by exerting our awareness on our emotions we can convert them to the imaginative or intellectual level and thus express them. This is how expression “makes us, as well as the people to whom we talk, understand how we feel” (110). This explorative component of expression is why “the artist has no idea what the experience is which demands expression until he has expressed it. What he wants to say is not present to him as an end towards which means have to be devised; it becomes clear to him only as the poem takes shape in his mind, or the clay in his fingers” (29). Artistic expression is an essaying or assaying of sorts, a setting out into the unknown spaces of our own emotions.

But it is not an undirected exploration. The transformation of emotions from the psychical to the imaginative level has to be facilitated by a genuine effort to express ourselves. This is why Collingwood places so much emphasis on the power of consciousness. By consciousness Collingwood essentially means awareness, or attention. He believes that by directing our attention to our emotions we can begin to transform them from the purely psychical level to the higher levels of the mind. “When we become conscious of [sensation],” he says, “it is still the very same colour and the very same anger. But the total experience of seeing or feeling it has undergone a change, and in that change what we see or feel is correspondingly changed” (207). Directed conscious effort has to play a crucial role in art. In fact, Collingwood believes that it is art’s specific business to use consciousness to express and explore these lower levels of our minds. Without conscious artistic effort we would never discover those emotions which exist at the purely psychical. “Therefore, art finds in purely psychical experience a situation of the type with which it is essentially deals, and a problem of of the kind which its essential business is to solve. This might seem to be not only a problem such as art exists to solve, but the only problem which it can solve” (293). Art proper, in other words, is the conscious attempt to express our emotions, which, also involving a transformation of our emotions, becomes an exploration of our emotions.

This idea of expression as conscious exploration of our emotions is corroborated by another of Collingwood’s claims: that what the artist’s expresses/explores is completely necessary. There is no process of selecting what to express. The artist has an unavoidable drive to express his experiences. “In art proper there is no such thing [as selection]; the artist draws what he sees, expresses what he feels, makes a clean breast of his experience, concealing nothing and altering nothing” (56). This is why the “artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotions, says, ‘I want to get this clear.’ It is no use to him to get something else clear, however like it this other thing may be. Nothing will serve as a substitute. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing” (114). The artist feels this drive to express himself because he craves the catharsis that comes along with artistic expression:“as expressed, he feels it in a way from which this sense of oppression has vanished. His mind is somehow lightened and eased” (110). An artist, according to Collingwood is someone who feels the urgency of their experiences, and cannot go on without attempting to express the emotions he acquires from his experieces. An artist, therefore, expresses/explores his emotions based on the flow of his experience: “He is creating it at a certain point in his life, and he could not have created it at any other point, not any other at that point.... it is because each is created to express an emotion arising within him at that point in his life and no other” (287). But this expression, again, is also an act of exploration. It is an active and conscious grappling with experience: the artist “records there not the experience of looking at the subject without painting it, but the far richer and in some ways very different experience of looking at it and painting it together” (308). It is something that we both do, and observe ourselves doing. It is both an expression and an exploration. We are learning what we feel by seeing what we produce.

To conclude this section and to move on, the aesthetic activity is simultaneously a process of expressing and exploring our emotions. Expression involves this element of exploration because our emotions exist in multiple forms: the psychical, the imaginative, and the intellectual. Collingwood believes that the aesthetic activity is about transforming psychical emotions into imaginative emotions. Furthermore, it is consciousness, awareness, that transforms raw psychical emotions into imaginative emotions that can be expressed. Lastly, artistic expression has to be the conscious grappling with the emotions that are produced by our experiences. This is why Collingwood believes that artistic expression follows necessarily from the life of the artist; this is why artistic expression is not selective, but rather necessary. “Thus,” Collingwood argues, “two statement are both true, which might easily be thought to contradict each other: (1) it is only because we know what we feel that we can express it in words; (2) it is only because we express them in words that we know what our emotions are. In the first, we describe our situation as speakers; in the second, our situation as hearers of what we ourselves say. The two statement refer to the same union of idea with expression, but they consider this union from opposite ends” (249-50). From here I would like to deal with the notion of ‘intellectual emotions’. By discussing intellectual emotions I hope to explain how every stage of mental life still retains an emotional charge. After that I want to deal with the relationship between artistic expression and craft. That will conclude my look at the emotional component of art as ‘the imaginative expression of emotion. After that I’ll turn my attention to the specific issue of defining the imagination.

8. Intellectual Emotions

So I want to address the issue of intellectual emotions. Seeing as how I’ve told you that art is essentially the transformation of purely psychical emotions into higher level emotions, I need to address those higher level. As I said, Collingwood believes that consciousness has the ability transform psychical emotions to two other levels. The middle stage would be the imaginative level, and the highest stage would be the intellectual level. The imaginative level is where Collingwood believed that artistic expression took place. But Collingwood also believed that, just as a psychical emotion are transformed into an imaginative emotions, so can they be transformed into intellectual emotions. So here I just want to explain how every intellectual idea also expresses its own unique emotion. In sections 6-9 I am simply trying to deal with emotional expression as a phenomenon, and I therefore have to explain how emotions are expressed at the psychical, imaginative, and intellectual level. Due to the importance of the imagination, however, I am reserving my discussion of imaginative expression for sections 10-13.

So what does it mean to say that intellectual thoughts have their own unique emotions? Well, I suppose it means exactly what it sounds like. I think one good way to clarify this is to call out our overly general way of classifying emotions. We typically say that we feel ‘angry’ or ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ or ‘depressed’. We have so many categories with which to generalize that we may not realize how very specific our emotions can be. That being the case, wouldn’t it make sense that intellectual thoughts would come with their own unique emotions. Collingwood puts it this way: “Intellect has has its own emotions. The excitement which drove Archimedes from his bath naked through the streets was not a generalized excitement, it was specifically the excitement of a man who had just solved a scientific problem. But it was even more definite than that. It was the excitement of the man who had just solved the problem of specific gravity” (267). Or another example: “the emotions of mathematicians find expressed in their symbols are not emotions in general, they are the peculiar emotions belonging to mathematical thinking” (268). To think of emotions only in their most general forms is to miss the crucial point that we experience a wide variety of emotions that are unique based on what causes them to be felt. The intellect, thus, has its own emotions.

But as I said, these intellectual emotions often have psychical and imaginative counterparts. Psychical emotions exist at one level and have their appropriate mode of expression (i.e. psychical reactions like facial expressions), “but intellect has its emotions too, and these must have an appropriate expression, which must be language in its intellectualized form” (266-7). So the previous discussion of how expression of our emotions is an exploration of our emotions applies to the level of the intellect. When we are able to articulate something intellectually we are in essence creating a new intellectual emotion that has been drawn from the lower levels of emotional experience. Intellectual writing, therefore, is the conscious transformation of psychical emotions into intellectual emotions.

It is important to note, however, that the intellectual emotion and the initial psychical emotion to not become separated: they remain conjoined. “If it is once granted that intellectualized language does express emotion, and that this emotion is not a vague or generalized emotion, but the perfectly definite emotion proper to a perfectly definite act of thought, the consequence follows that in expression the emotion that act of thought is expressed too. There is no need for two separate expression, one of the thought and the other of the emotion accompanying it. There is only one expression” (267). They are not separate forms of expressing oneself. They are the same. It is the expression of a lower emotion through its transformation into an intellectual emotions.

But, interestingly, it still retains a distinct intellectual meaning. This, however, has to do with a distinction between language and symbolism. Language is our immediate expression of our emotions. While symbolism, on the other hand, is a form of expression that comes about only through discourse that settles the meaning of certain intellectual terms. Language is individual and organic, while symbolism is communal and socially constructed. “Language in its intellectualized form,” therefore, “has both expressiveness and meaning. As language, it expresses a certain emotion. As symbolism, it refers beyond that emotion to the thought whose emotional charge it is” (269). Collingwood also ties this emotional nature of intellectual language to the distinction between what we say and what we mean: “‘What we say’ is what we immediately express.... ‘What we mean’ is the intellectual activity upon which these are the emotional charge, and towards which the words expressing the emotions are a kind of finger-post, pointing for ourselves in the direction from which we have come, and for another in the direction to which he must go if he wishes to ‘understand what we say’, that is, to reconstruct for himself and in himself the intellectual experience which has led us to say what we did” (269).

Collingwood seems to think that the emotional element of intellectual thought is very important. He tries to debunk the idea that abstract, intellectual thought, somehow distances us from the world of emotions. In An Autobiography Collingwood attacks idealist philosophers for claiming that moral philosophy has nothing to do with actual moral practice. Collingwood believes this to be absolutely detestable. He asserts instead that moral philosophy should be intimately related with the moral and political realities of the world. This explains why he advocates the idea that intellectual language can and indeed must carry an emotional charge: “The progressive intellectualization of language, its progressive conversion by the work of grammar and logic into a scientific symbolism, thus represents not a progressive drying-up of emotion, 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). This idea that intellectual thought conveys types of emotions, therefore, has significant political implications. If we think of intellectual thought as disconnected from the world of emotions than we must accept that it can have no real bearing on the social and political world, which is driven by emotions, of course. But if we recognize that intellectual thought expresses its own types of emotions, then the intellect suddenly becomes a powerful source of social change. In short, if the intellect communicates its own emotions, then the intellect is capable of exerting meaningful change in the social world of emotions.

The idea of intellectual emotions also has significant implications for artistic expression. Just because artistic expression happens primarily at the middle, imaginative level, that doesn’t mean that the intellect has nothing to contribute to emotional expression. “Art... might contain nothing that is due to intellect,” Collingwood claims, “and yet certain works of art might contain much that is due to intellect, not because they are works of art, but because they are works of a certain kind; that is, because they express emotions of a certain kind, namely, emotions that can arise only as the emotional charges upon intellectual activities” (293). Intellectual activities may create brand new emotions that can then be communicated artistically. If we were to intellectually contemplate our social situation, for example, we may discover things about it that would paint our experience in a new light. And with our access to these new intellectual emotions we may be capable of creating imaginative works of art that would express these newly found intellectual emotions in a new way. In fact, this intellectually understanding the world might be the best way to take steps towards artistic expression. This is because “the emotional life of the conscious and intellectual levels of experience is far richer than that of the merely psychical, therefore,... it is only natural that the emotional subject-matter of works of art should be drawn mostly from emotions belonging to these higher levels” (294). If we draw on the emotions of the intellect we will have a more complex way of expressing our sense of the world. Collingwood uses the of Shakespeare. Why was his work so important? How did it express so much? Collingwood believes that it was precisely Shakespeare’s intellect that allowed him to express himself as he did: “The emotion expressed in [Shakespeare’s] plays are thus emotions arising out of a situation which could not generate them unless it were intellectually apprehended” (295). The emotions created by intellectual activity, therefore, provide the artist with a rich body of emotions that he can then express imaginatively in his art.

Just to wrap up this section, I’d like to restate what this is all about. According to Collingwood, the emotions and the intellect are not at odds. Rather, emotions exist at every level of thought and experience. They are more immediate and basic at the psychical level, and acquire a new richness and complexity at the imaginative and intellectual level. Poets and other artists, therefore, do not simply express raw psychical emotion, but more complex forms of emotions that are generated by intellectual and imaginative activity. Collingwood argues that the “poet converts human experience into poetry not by first expurgating it, cutting out the intellectual elements and preserving the emotional, and then expressing this reside; but by fusing thought itself into emotion: thinking in a certain way and then expressing how it feels to think in that way” (295). Thought and emotion become one. Or again: “Poetry, then, in so far as it is the poetry of a thinking man and addressed to a thinking audience, may be described as expressing the intellectual emotion attendant upon thinking in a certain way” (297). Because intellectual thoughts have their own emotions, poetry and art can become the expression of these unique and higher forms of emotions. The intellect has its own emotions. They become different when they are transformed into the intellectual level. And when they reach this level they can allow us to express ourselves in different and new ways. The intellect and emotions belong together.

Now let me break down the relationship between expression and craft. After that I will turn to the imagination as a specific issue.

9. Expression and Craft

Now, seeing as how art can be defined as a conscious transformation of psychical emotions into an imaginative expression, I feel that I have to reckon with the relationship between expression and craft, the relationship between art proper and craft. Recall Collingwood’s definition of craft that I presented in Part I.1. Craft is the deliberate transformation of a raw material into a finished product. Craft in the pure sense involves the execution of a clear plan, and a clear distinction between means and ends. I already explained how art cannot be mere craft. That does not mean, however, that art and craft do not overlap at certain points. So right here I want to try and flesh out how exactly artistic expression and craft overlap. The major questions are these: what, if any, elements of craft apply to art proper? Is there a distinction between means and ends? If not, then what is the role of technique in art?

As for the issue of means and ends, Collingwood is fairly explicit that the distinction does not apply to arts. But given what I said in the previous section, wouldn’t it seem that emotions are the raw material that are converted into art? Collingwood’s answer is no. He admits that “there is in art proper a distinction resembling that between means and end, but not identical with it” (108). And that “the poet’s labour can be justly described as converting emotions into poems. But this conversion is a very different kind of thing from the conversion of iron into horseshoes” (23). It is not a straightforward process of turning a raw material into a finished product. Even if we do admit that emotions are the raw material that are converted, by what process are they converted? Take the example of a poem’s construction: “Suppose the poem is a short one, and composed without the use of any writing materials; what are the means by which the poet composes it?... If one looks at the matter seriously, one sees that the only factors in the situation are the poet, the poetic labour of his mind, and the poem” (20). While it may appear that there is a way to think of artistic expression in terms of means and ends (i.e. in terms of craft), it becomes clear that it is a more of a meandering, more free process than any craft could be. That while art and craft overlap, they are not the same thing. Or, as Collingwood says: “A building or a cup, which is primarily an artifact of product of craft, may be also a work of art; but what makes it a work of art is different from what makes it an artifact” (43).

That the creative process cannot be identified with a process of craft is due to two aspects of artistic expression. First, creative processes are never direct, they are never general, but are rather indirect, specific, and individual. When a poet expresses his emotions he does not do it by explicitly talking about them. He finds other ways of using language that express them. “A genuine poet,” Collingwood claims, “in his moments of genuine poetry, never mentions by name the emotions he is expressing” (112). The poet rather takes great lengths to individualize his emotions: they don’t label them, they don't refer to them, they express them in other ways.

Even if the poet’s use of language involves some elements of craft, what makes him a good poet is different from what makes him a good word smith. As Collingwood says, “however necessary it may be that a poet should have technical skill, he is a poet only in so far as this skill is not identified with art, but with something used in the service of art” (27). In other words, while the artist may delve into the realm of craft in order to create the artistic artifact, it is not this craft that makes him an artist. On the contrary, it is the purely mental activity, the activity which takes place before any type of craft is engaged in and before any type of artifact is created that truly makes him an artist. This is why it can fairly be said that what artists really do is create imaginary objects. The crafting of an artifact is meant only to represent the imaginary artifact that he has already created in his mind. The true work of art, therefore, is the imaginary object within the artist’s head, and not the externally crafted artifact.

The second aspect of art that precludes it from being defined as a craft is that the means of expression only become clear through the process of expression. Art, therefore, does not fit the clear definition between means and ends that craft requires. Collingwood is very adamant that the means of expression have to be created through the very process of expressing ourselves. Expression no doubt involves “a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which appropriate means can be thought out in the light of our knowledge of its special character. Expression is an activity of which there can be no technique” (111). My discussion of expression as exploration should make it clear that to express emotions is to set out into the darkness. It is to know that you feel something at the psychical level, but to know that you must work to transform it into something that can be expressed, something imaginative or intellectual.

To wrap up this section, art certainly overlaps with craft at times, but it is clear that they are far from synonymous. “The patterns are no doubt real;” Collingwood says, “the power by which the artist constructs them is no doubt a thing worthy of our attention; but we are only frustrating our study of it in advance if we approach it in the determination to treat it as if it were the conscious working-out of means to the achievement of a conscious purpose, or in other words technique” (29). The artistic process is something that happens entirely in the head of the artist and therefore does not require any sort of craft. Even when art has to utilize craft or technique, it still differs significantly from pure craft. The creation of an artistic object is never specific and pre-planned like a craft. It is always a unique and individualistic crafting that is only realized during the process of expression. Art, therefore, utilizes some elements of craft, but is fundamentally different in that its means and ends are never clear, it is never general, and it is never a clear process but always an exploration.

Throughout the last three sections I have been dealing with art as a process of expressing emotions. I explained how expression is also explorative, how it involves different types of emotions (psychical, imaginative, and intellectual), and that it involves but is fundamentally different from craft. Throughout these sections I regularly made reference to the imagination and its role in art. So now I would like to take up the question of the imagination explicitly. Because Collingwood defines art as the imaginative expression of emotions, and I have already dealt with the expressive part, I’ll now explain what it means to imaginatively express emotions.

10. The Imagination

Defining and understanding the imagination is crucial to Collingwood’s definition of art. This is evident by the fact that he devotes all of Book II of The Principles of Art (111 pages) to creating a viable theory of the imagination. He says that the imagination is in need of “a more thorough study than it has yet received, both for its own sake... and for the sake of its place in the general structure of experience as a whole, as the point at which the activity of thought makes contact with the merely psychic life of feeling” (171). While the imagination is crucial to art and is therefore analyzed in order to provide a clear definition of art, Collingwood also believed that it is a mental faculty that is indispensable to all social life. The scope of Book II, therefore, goes far beyond the immediate task of The Principles of Art. While he utilizes his definition of the imagination primarily to define art proper, he also provides insights that are far more general. I, therefore, will spend the next four sections explicating his definition of the imagination and specifying its relationship to art proper.

The first thing to note is the general importance of the imagination. Collingwood believes that the imagination is something involved in almost all ordinary perception: “A person who could really see, but could not imagine, would see not a solid world 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). In The Idea of History Collingwood discusses what he calls the ‘a priori imagination’, by which he means forms of imagination that our mind undertakes naturally in order to fill in gaps in evidence and information. It is similar to what Kant called the perceptual imagination. Looking at my table, for example, I know that it has an underside and that there are two legs supporting the back of it. It doesn’t matter that I can’t actually see those things, because my mind automatically fills in those gaps via the a priori imagination. Another example, have you ever thought you saw a person in a dark room and it turned out no one was there? The mind is naturally constructive, it creates our mental world, as Chris Frith, a neuropsychologist, would say. Furthermore, Collingwood notes that the imagination is not only creative, it is also inhibitive: “We disimagine... a great deal which actually we see and hear. The street noises at a concert, the noises made by our breathing and shuffling neighbours, and even some noises of the performs, are thus shut out of the picture unless by their loudness or in some other way they are too obtrusive to be ignored” (143). Later in this essay I’ll discuss how Collingwood anticipates Frith’s discussion of how the brain models reality. But for now just recognize that Collingwood’s arguments about the imagination speak to issues of all perception, and though are presented in order to define art proper, are intended to have far reaching implications.

Now let me move on to the specifics of Collingwood’s definition of the imagination. First I want to tackle the idea that the imagination is ‘the space between sensations and ideas’. After that I’ll discuss ‘art as the creation of imaginary objects’. And finally I’ll discuss the relationship between art, consciousness, and the imagination. Onward.

11. The Imagination as the Space Between Sensation and Ideas

Now Collingwood’s analysis of the imagination begins by distinguishing between feeling and thinking. It is intuitively obvious to us that feeling is one activity and that thinking is another. Feeling is characterizing by an uncontrollable flux of sensations and emotions. While thinking, on the other hand, is characterized by what Collingwood calls ‘the bipolarity of thought’, by which he means a sense of thinking well or not thinking well. In short, feeling is a rapid and constant flux of emotions, while thinking is a process that is either clear or unclear, but is always an obvious process of thought about something.

After contrasting thinking and feeling Collingwood asks whether or not we are familiar with a form of experience that falls somewhere between feeling and thinking. Is there a mental space that is sort of like feeling, yet is under our control, and is still distinct from thinking? The answer is yes. Collingwood says, “let us suppose that there are these other things, and that in certain way they are very much like sensa, but differ from sensa chiefly in not being wholly fluid and evanescent; so that any one of them may be retained in the mind as an object of attention after the moment of sensation is past, or anticipated before it occurs” (170). Collingwood believes that the imagination is this middle ground between feeling and thinking. We have the ability to conjure up the sensation of read, but we aren’t actually experiencing red at that moment. But somehow we are able to recall it enough and experience it in a similar way. Or, as Collingwood says: “There must... be a form of experience other than sensation, but closely related to it; so closely as to be easily mistaken for it, but different in that the colours, sounds, and so on which in this experience we ‘perceive’ are retained in some way or other before the mind, anticipated, recalled, although these same colours and sounds, in their capacity as sensa, have ceased to be seen and heard” (202). It is these deliberately conjured sensations that Collingwood says he “shall try to show that there is a special activity of mind correlative to them, and that this is what we generally call imagination, as distinct from sensation on the one hand and intellect on the other” (171).

Collingwood’s fundamental claim about the imagination is, therefore, that it is the space between sensations an ideas. He claims that “as an activity or manifestation of freedom, then, imagination seems to occupy a place intermediate between the less free activity of mere feeling and the more free activity of what i generally called thought. Our task is to define this intermediate place” (197-8). Or again, that it is “a distinct level of experience intermediate between sensation and intellect, the point at which the life of thought makes contact with the life of purely psychical experience” (215). It is the space where sensations can be purposefully manipulated by conscious thought. Collingwood seems to believe that “thought seems in this case simply to discover what was there independently of it, almost as if we were thinking about the anatomical structure and functioning of our body, which would no doubt exist and go on whether we thought or not.... it seems that our sensuous-emotional nature, as feeling creatures, is independent of our thinking nature, as rational creatures, and constitutes a level of experience below the level of thought” (163). It is the imagination that bridges the gap between this world of conscious thought and pure sensual experience.

Collingwood’s analysis of the imagination bears many similarities to the contemporary philosopher Alvin Goldman’s. Alvin Goldman believes that the imagination can be divided into two categories. He distinguishes between the suppositional-imagination and the enactment-imagination, S- and E-imagination for short. S-imagination refers to when we use the word imagine to simply mean ‘suppose’. Goldman says that “S-imagination is typically formulated with a ‘that’-clause, ‘X imagines that p’, where p can refer, unrestrictedly, to any sort of state-of-affairs. To S-imagine p is to entertain the hypothesis that p, to posit that p, to assume that p. Unlike some forms of imagination, S-imagination has no sensory aspect; it is purely conceptual” (Goldman, 42, in Nichols, 2006). The most important thing is that S-imagination lacks sensory qualities. The E-imagination, on the other hand, is defined by its ability to evoke or enact the qualities of sensory experience. When we imagine the feeling of wind, for example, we can almost feel wind on our skin. Or when we imagine pain we can cringe simply by imagining pain. The E-imagination, Goldman believes, is the primary and essential form of the imagination. Furthermore, he argues that the S-imagination may be nothing more than a species of the E-imagination in which the experience being enacted is one of belief.

Goldman’s analysis of the imagination as something that allows us to consciously enact the qualities of sensory experience lines up nicely with Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is the space between sensations and ideas. It is the imagination that allows us to experience the color red in our minds eye even though we are no longer experiencing it directly. Collingwood believes it is this ability to consciously recreate sensations that we have experienced in the past, this ability to use the imagination to manipulate sensory experience without elevating to the level of the intellect, that makes artistic expression possible.

So now that I have vaguely told you about the scope of the imagination, and how the imagination can be characterized as the space between sensations and ideas in which we consciously recall and manipulate sensa, I’d like to talk about art and consciousness as it relates to the imagination.

12. Imagination, Consciousness, and Art

So, if the imagination, as the space between sensations and ideas, is responsible for the creation of art, the question becomes, How? How does the imagination work to create artistic expression? How does one go about utilizing the imagination in this way? The short answer is this: consciousness. It is the power of the mind to exert attention, to consciously create or hold onto sensations, that allows the imagination to be the means of artistic expression. If we didn’t have consciousness, then how would we be able to utilize the imagination? We probably couldn’t. Consciousness, is therefore the crucial thing that allows us to imaginatively express our emotions; consciousness is what makes artistic expression possible.

Collingwood’s definition of consciousness is the first thing that needs to be addressed. Consciousness for Collingwood is not a self-awareness of the mind, it is not a sort of meta-cognition, or any sort of intellectual or rational form of thought. It is rather a bare and raw awarness of the mind. Collingwood’s definition of consciousness centers around the idea of directed attention. “This act of appreciating something,” he argues, “just as it stands, before I can begin to classify it, is what we call attending to it” (203). To exert consciousness on something is to simply pay attention to it, to extend the life of a sensation in the flux of thoughts and emotions. It is consciousnesses task, therefore, to isolate and extend certain thoughts and feelings to prevent them from being lost in the flux of sensual experience. Furthermore, Collingwood believes that it is awareness that truly changes how we engage with artistic expression. This is because pure sensory experience is rapid and can just continue to exist in a constant flux. But if we exert conscious awareness we change the way that we experience sensation. Collingwood communicates this by saying: “Seeing and hearing are species of sensation; looking and listening are the corresponding species of attention” (204). It is one thing to see, another to look, on thing to hear, another to listen.

But what does consciousness do to our emotions and sensations? And how exactly does it change them into the imaginative level? Collingwood believes that consciousness is capable of dominating our emotions, getting a grip on them, controlling them, and thus allowing them to be expressed in new ways. Collingwood believes that by exerting consciousness on our emotions we can pin them down and clarify them, call them out of the dark and make them show themselves.“Consciousness...,” he claims, “dominates feeling. Now feeling as so dominated, feeling as compelled to accept whatever pace consciousness gives it, focal or peripheral, in the field of attention, is no longer impression, it is idea. Consciousness is absolutely autonomous: its decision alone determines whether a given sensum or emotion shall be attended to or not. Yet he is not free to choose whether he shall exercise this power of decision or not. In so far as he is conscious, he is obliged to decide; for that decision is consciousness itself” (207). In other words, consciousness sorts the emotions of the mind and makes them into a new and understandable thing. Directed awareness is capable of changing our emotions from pure sensory experience, ‘impressions’, into clearly formulated imaginative or intellectual feelings, ‘ideas’. When Collingwood says that ‘decision is consciousness itself’, he means that the act of conscious awareness is complete in itself: we either succeed at directing consciousness towards our feelings, becoming aware of them, or we fail in our effort and we remain unaware of our emotions and sensations. We either successfully use consciousness to transmute impressions into ideas or we fail: “If a given feeling is thus recognized, it is converted from impression into idea, and thus dominated or domesticated by consciousness. If it is not recognized, it is simply relegated to the other side of the dividing line: left unattended to, or ignored” (217).

In short, consciousness is directed mental attention that clarifies the quality and extends the life of sensations. Collingwood is very explicit about this point. When we dominate our feelings with consciousness, he says we “become able to perpetuate feelings (including sensa) at will. Attending to a feeling means holding it before the mind; rescuing it from the flux of mere sensation, and conserving it for so long as may be necessary in order that we should take note of it” (209). Again, this is a conversion of raw sensation into an imaginative feeling: “The activity of consciousness... converts impression into idea, that is, crude sensation into imagination.... Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness” (215).

Collingwood believes that it is the successful use of consciousness and the domination of feelings by consciousness that allows them to be fully expressed. “To become fully conscious” of anger, for example, he argues, “means becoming conscious of it not merely as an instance of anger, but as this quite peculiar anger. Expressing it, we saw, has something to do with becoming conscious of it; therefore, if being fully conscious of it means being conscious of all its peculiarities, fully expressing it means expressing all its peculiarities” (113). Without the act of consciousness turning sensation into an imagination aesthetic expression would be impossible: “It is thus the psychic emotion itself, converted by the act of consciousness into a corresponding imaginative or aesthetic emotion” (274). Again: “Every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raise to the imaginative level by an act of consciousness” (306).

To wrap up this section, consciousness is the crucial factor in artistic expression. Artistic expression is contingent upon us directing our conscious awareness towards our emotions. Once we have used consciousness to transform our crude sensations to the higher levels of imagination and intellect we will be able to understand and express them in new ways. In short, artistic expression is impossible without the work of consciousness. We need consciousness to transform our sensations into imagination and ideas. As Collingwood argues, “there is always a distinction between what transmuters (consciousness), what is transmuted (sensation), and what it is transmuted into (imagination)” (307).

I would like to quickly compare this to an idea that I had a little while ago, which I think is a logical extension of Collingwood’s thinking, and one that he may have articulated himself, had he had the time before his early death. In The Idea of History Collingwood argues that it is consciousness that allows us to understand historical thought. And that when we have successfully understood other people’s thoughts we ‘encapsulate’ those thoughts within our own time and mind. So, what if consciousnesses transformation of sensation into idea can reasonably be called the encapsulation of our own thought? We take a loose set of ideas, our emotions and sensations, and we use consciousness to turn it into a firmer set of ideas that are expressible in aesthetic ways, or in purely intellectual ways. In either case, that is what this section is trying to explain. Since imagination is the space between sensations and ideas, and because art is expressed primarily through the imagination, I need to ask, how does the mind turn sensations into aesthetic expression? And the answer is consciousness. Directed mental effort transforms our sensations and emotions into imaginative ideas that can then be expressed. We use consciousness to encapsulate our fog like emotions, and we turn them into solid marbles that are graspable and communicable.

Now that I have dealt with the imagination in general, and explained how consciousness is the crucial factor, let me explain how art is the creation of imaginary objects.

13. Art as the Creation of Imaginary Objects

Now art is often identified with the physical artifact that is produced. The painting, the poem, the sculpture; all of these things are typically to be thought of as the work of art. But if art is instead defined as the imaginative expression of emotions, we have to ask what the real work of art is. Because Collingwood is adamant that the external artifact is not the work of art. It is instead the mental, imaginary thing that the artist has created. The artifact exists only because the mental thing is already created.

Collingwood expounds this claim by first asking, What is the aesthetic thing that the artist creates? “We shall find that it is two things,” he says. “Primarily, it is an ‘internal’ or ‘mental’ thing, something... ‘existing in his head’ and there only: something of the kind which we commonly call an experience. Secondarily, it is a bodily or perceptible thing... whose exact relation to this ‘mental’ thing will need very careful definition” (37). The mental thing should be regarded as “‘the work of art proper’” while the physical piece of art is simply “incidental to the first” (37). This means that it is not essential that the bodily work of art created in order for the aesthetic process to have taken place, or to be complete. Indeed, this is because we are “familiar with a kind of activity productive of results and under the agent’s voluntary control, which has none of the special characteristics of craft” (127-128). Collingwood believes that this imaginative construction of the mind is art proper, “and our ordinary name for [it] is creation” (129).

Collingwood elaborates this claim about the mental nature of creation by making a comparison to engineering and building. He begins with the example of an engineer who has a plan to build a bridge. He has perhaps made a drawing or written up a plan, but that doesn’t matter. What really matters is what the plan is in his mind. “Making a plan for a bridge is not imposing a certain form on a certain matter; it is a making that is not a transforming, that is to say, it is a creation.... a person making a plan need not be carrying out a plan to make that plan” (133). In other words, plans and ideas are created in the mind and exist primarily in the imagination.

The same thing applies to the creation of art: “The actual making of the tune is something that goes on in his head, and nowhere else” (134). “Hence, the making of 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). It does not need to be externalized in order for the artistic creation to be complete: “the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation, a tune is an imaginary thing. And the same applies to a poem or a painting or any other work of art” (139). And as I have been saying, the work of art is complete when it exists in the mind of the artist. The imagination is the place where creation happens and that is where it is completed. Collingwood says that the artist’s “business is not to produce an emotional effect in an audience, but, for example, to make a tune. This tune is already complete and perfect when it exists merely as a tune in his head, that is, an imaginary tune” (139). Art is, therefore, primarily the creation of imaginary objects that are then externalized. “The work of art proper is something not seen or heard, but something imagined” (142).

Art, therefore, is the imaginative expression of emotions. We first have experiences and emotions, which then come under the focus of our conscious awareness. By focusing our consciousness on them we change them, we raise them from the level of mere sensation to the level of imagination. By transforming them from sensation into imagination we create the work of art proper within our mind. Only then, once we have transformed our emotions, do we begin to create the work of art proper, which in turn further transforms our expression (since expression also has an element of exploration). “At the level of imaginative experience,” Collingwood says, “the crude emotion of the psychical level is translated into idealized emotion, or the so-called aesthetic emotion, which is thus not an emotion preexisting to the expression of it, but the emotional charge on the experience of expressing a given emotion, felt as a new colouring which that emotion receives in being expressed” (274). By focusing our consciousness on our emotions we both explore and express them, resulting in the creation of imaginary objects, imaginary tunes or pictures, which we then further explore in the process of externalizing them. It seems that artistic expression is thus a three phase transformation: the transformation of emotions into imagination, and the transformation of imagination into the externalized object, which in turns transforms our imagined artistic object again. At the end of the day, however, the imaginary object alone is the work of art proper.