collingwood on art and fantasy

Royal Institute of Philosophy

Collingwood on Art and FantasyAuthor(s): Peter LewisSource: Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 250 (Oct., 1989), pp. 547-556Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3751610 .

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Collingwood on Art and Fantasy PETER LEWIS

In Art and Its Objects, Richard Wollheim devotes considerable space to attacking a theory he calls the Croce-Collingwood Theory of Art.1 According to this theory, as Wollheim presents it, an artist's capacity to create works of art consists in his being able to elaborate images or intuitions in his own mind, irrespective of whether there is any means of publicly externalizing them in the form of paintings, poems, sym- phonies, etc. Wollheim argues, I think rightly, that this conception of artistic creation is absurd. But it can also be argued that neither Croce nor Collingwood ever espouses this absurd theory.2 I will not develop that argument in this paper; instead, I want to draw attention to an aspect of Wollheim's discussion which concerns the relations between Collingwood's aesthetic and concepts of psychoanalysis.

After demonstrating the absurdity of the Croce-Collingwood theory, Wollheim introduces Freud's comparison of the artist and the neurotic. Both the artist and the neurotic find substitute gratifications for their desires in fantasy; and yet, we are told, the neurotic is recognized by his continuing to remain in the world of his fantasy, whereas the artist, in Freud's words, 'finds a path back to reality'. Wollheim interprets Freud to mean by this that in making his work of art the artist renounces the immediate gratification of fantasy by making an object which 'can become a source of shared pleasure and consolation' for other people. And, Wollheim maintains, it is precisely this feature of art as renunciation which is totally denied by the Croce- Collingwood theory because it does not allow, except incidentally, for the artist's having to produce a work in a medium for an audience.3

However apposite Wollheim's discussion may be to the so-called Croce-Collingwood theory, it is important to realize that it constitutes a grave injustice to the theory of art developed by Collingwood in The Principles of Art.4 For, as I hope to show, not only does Collingwood

1 R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1980), sections 22, 23, 50, 53.

2 For the argument with respect to Collingwood, see R. Sclafani, 'Wollheim on Collingwood', Philosophy 51, No. 197 (July 1976).

3 Wollheim, ibid., section 50. 4 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1938).

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Discussion

present his view of art as imagination by explicitly contrasting it with a view of art as fantasy, and in so doing highlights weaknesses in Freud's view of art; but he also attempts to explain how psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy, and such like, can be utilized to account for bad art within the framework of his own reinterpretation of traditional views of art as both disinterested and expressive. Moreover, though the articulation of these features of Collingwood's theory requires the denial of the absurd conception of artistic creation which Wollheim sketches, the fact that the fantasies of the neurotic are themselves elaborated within a medium which allows for the possibility of externalization demon- strates that that denial is not in itself sufficient to explain how art can involve the renunciation of fantasy.

I present Collingwood's ideas in two parts, the first concerning the distinction between art and non-art, the second concerning the distinction between good art and bad art.

I

In section 4 of Chapter 7, Collingwood draws a distinction between imagination proper and make-believe. The point of the distinction is that imagination is, while make-believe cannot be, constitutive of art proper; make-believe is constitutive of what Collingwood calls amusement art (p. 79).

Collingwood has essentially two criteria for distinguishing imagination from make-believe: first, a relation to reality; second, a relation to desire.

Concerning the first relation, the relation to reality, Collingwood says, 'a make-believe situation can never be a real situation, and vice versa' (p. 135); by contrast, 'imagination is indifferent to the distinction between the real and the unreal ... the imagined object or situation or event is something which need not be real and need not be unreal. .' (p. 136).

Concerning the second criterion, the relation to desire, Collingwood points out that there is usually a motive for any act of make-believe, viz. 'the desire for something which we would enjoy or possess if the make- believe were truth'; by contrast, 'imagination is indifferent . . . to the distinction between desire and aversion' (p. 137).

Collingwood illustrates make-believe with the following example. 'If, being hungry, I "imagine" myself to be eating, this "bare imagination of a feast" is a make-believe situation which I may be said to create for myself imaginatively . . .' (p. 135). And he adds a few lines later, 'Dreaming consists to a great extent (some psychologists say altogether) of make-believe in which the dreamer's desires are thus satisfied; day- dreaming even more obviously so . . .' (p. 136).

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He provides the following example of imagination proper. If, on looking out of a window, my view of the lawn is obscured by the window-frame, I may imagine 'the grass going on where [the] mullion hides it from my sight' and I may imagine 'a lawn-mower standing on that part of the lawn' (p. 136). Now, Collingwood says, it so happens that 'the hidden part of the lawn is really there' just as I imagine it, but the lawn-mower is not really there. Nevertheless, according to Colling- wood, 'I can detect nothing, either in the way in which I imagine the two things, or in the ways in which they respectively appear to my imagination, which at all corresponds to this distinction' (loc. cit.).

It is evident from these two examples that make-believe is not, as Collingwood initially suggests, something distinct from imagination. The example of a make-believe feast is specified in terms of imaginatively creating a situation. So make-believe is a form of imagination. As Collingwood subsequently puts it, 'Make-believe presupposes imagination, and may be described as imagination operating in a peculiar way under the influence of peculiar forces' (p. 137). By contrast, then, we can appreciate that what Collingwood calls imagination proper is simply visualizing, for example, an object or event or state of affairs, which may or may not actually exist, and attending to it without in any way considering whether it does or does not actually exist.

Since the imagination/make-believe distinction is the ground of the art/non-art distinction, we can see how Collingwood is re-presenting from the point of view of the creative artist the traditional notion of disinterestedness, taken by Kant and subsequent writers as a criterion of the aesthetic attitude. This strand in Collingwood's thought is displayed most clearly in his earlier essay 'Aesthetic'5 in which he employs Edward Bullough's concept of psychical distance (or the principle of a psychological picture-frame, as Collingwood elucidates it) to explicate imagination as 'a kind of attitude towards objects in which we do not use the concepts of reality or unreality'.6 And this in turn helps to clarify a further point, that imagination is a state of mind which is achieved, and, once achieved, has to be preserved by an effort of will. For imagination is, as it were, always in danger of collapsing into make- believe, of succumbing to 'the influence of peculiar forces', the most potent of which is desire.

Not any case of imagination under the influence of desire will count as make-believe. Thus, in choosing a new pair of curtains for the bedroom, my wife might visualize how the curtains on display in the store would look when placed alongside the existing colour-scheme in

5R. G. Collingwood, 'Aesthetic', in The Mind, J. S. McDowall (ed.) (London: Longmans, 1927).

6 Collingwood, ibid., 232.

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the bedroom. Although prompted by desire, the desire to avoid a colour-clash, the aim of the imaginative project is accuracy or truth, which means that the content of the imaginative act is sensitive to beliefs about the real character of the objects which enter into the imagined state of affairs. In make-believe, however, imagination is dominated by, and not merely prompted by, desire. When I imagine myself taking on all-comers at snooker, eventually demolishing the opposition at the World Championships, any facts or beliefs which might interfere with the imaginary fulfilment of my desire for success are overlooked. Desire runs ahead of belief: objects and events are represented in imagination as I would have them be, rather than as they are or would be in reality. The content of the imaginative act is structured by desire. This is well described by Collingwood: 'Out of the numerous things which one imagines, some are chosen, whether consciously or unconsciously, to be imagined with peculiar complete- ness or vividness or tenacity, and others are repressed, because the first are things whose reality one desires, and the second things from whose reality one has an aversion. The result is make-believe, which is imagination acting under the censorship of desire; where desire means not the desire to imagine, nor even the desire to realize an imagined situation, but the desire that the situation imagined were real' (p. 137).

Once again we see Collingwood re-presenting from the point of view of the creative individual the traditional requirement of the autonomy, as opposed to the heteronomy, of the judgment of taste. Hence, make- believe is the core of pseudo-art, rather than art proper, just because the resulting work of amusement art is manufactured in accordance with a preconceived and non-aesthetic end, viz. the arousal of emotion in the audience (pp. 78-79). 'It is', says Collingwood, 'the motive of all those sham works of art which provide their audiences or addicts with fantasies depicting a state of things in which their desires are satisfied' (p. 137). And as confirmation he refers his readers to Hollywood.

It is in the light of Collingwood's re-working of traditional aesthetic notions that we can appreciate his criticism of psychoanalytic theories of art. Collingwood claims that '. . . the confusion between art and amusement has been both reflected and reinforced by a confusion between imagination and make-believe, which culminates in the attempt of the psychoanalysts to subsume artistic creation under their theory (certainly a true theory) of "fantasies" as make-believe gratifications of desire. This attempt is admirably successful so long as it deals with the art, falsely so-called, of the ordinary popular novel or film, but it could not conceivably be applied to art proper. When the attempt is made to base an aesthetic upon it (a thing which has happened lamenta- bly often) the result is not an aesthetic but an anti-aesthetic' (p. 138).

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Although Collingwood does not here mention Freud by name, the reference to the 'ordinary popular novel' indicates that he might have been alluding to Freud's well-known paper, 'Creative Writers and Day- Dreaming'.7 For in that paper Freud begins his analysis of the creative or imaginative writer by concentrating not on 'the writers most highly esteemed by the critics, but [on] the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories ... [which] have the widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes' (p. 149). Their characteristic egocen- tricity ('each of [these stories] has a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of a special Provi- dence' (loc. cit.)) and unreality ('The fact that all the women in the novel invariably fall in love with the hero can hardly be looked on as a portrayal of reality' (p. 150)) leads Freud to compare them with day- dreams and fantasies in which a person fulfils a wish that he cannot fulfil in real life, with the crucial difference that 'the writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal-that is, aesthetic-yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies' (p. 153).

There is without doubt a close correspondence between Colling- wood's account of amusement art in terms of make-believe gratifications of desire and Freud's analysis of popular stories in terms of wish- fulfilling fantasy. And Collingwood appears to have been clearly aware of this. But, as the passage from Principles ofArt, p. 138, quoted above, indicates, Collingwood disputes Freud's attempt to apply his analysis to the whole range of literature or to what Collingwood calls art proper. And, if you compare Ian Fleming's James Bond novels or Mills and Boon romances with, say, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Collingwood's position is appealing. In the works by James and Tolstoy, there is a complexity in the imagined characters and situations, a sensitivity to details and attention to subtleties of motivation, which make them poor fuel for fantasies. The central characters in these stories cannot be regarded as heroes or heroines in the same way that James Bond is the hero of Ian Fleming's stories: instead of triumphing through disasters, they are, on the contrary, overwhelmed and broken.

Of course, Freud was aware of these obvious differences between different kinds of fiction. As he says, 'We are perfectly aware that very many imaginative writings are far removed from the model of the naive day-dream; and yet I cannot suppress the suspicion that even the most

7 S. Freud, 'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming', Complete Psychological Works, James Strachey (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), Vol. IX, 142-153.

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extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases' (p. 150). As an argument to persuade us that, in spite of their surface differences, literary art is essentially wish-fulfilling fantasy, this is far from convincing. A parallel argument would prove that red is essentially yellow or that night is essentially day. None the less, Freud's claim that we can conceive of a continuity of cases running from pulp fiction to literary works of art poses a challenge that Collingwood is compelled to confront. For Collingwood's distinction between imagination and make-believe, and the corresponding distinction between art proper and amusement art, is drawn in such a way as to exclude the possibility of a continuous series of transitional cases. If art is imagination as opposed to make-believe, and if imagination is never motivated by desire, whereas make-believe is always motivated by desire, then we should expect to find, not an uninterrupted series of transitional cases, but, somewhere within the series, a neat division where make-believe ends and art begins.

At any rate, the divergence of approach between Freud and Colling- wood should now be clear. According to Freud's account (as set out in 'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming'), the creative artist alters and disguises the character of his egoistic day-dreams, so-called literary works of art or great literature presumably requiring more extensive alterations and more ingenious disguises. While the artist renounces the purely private or personal pleasure of fantasizing, his work is essentially fantasy made public, institutionalized in the conventional trappings of art. This is unacceptable to Collingwood just for the reason that, in neglecting the distinction between imagination and make-believe or fantasy, it fails to acknowledge the depth of the artistic demand to renounce fantasy. According to Collingwood, art is liberation from fantasy. The artist proper, as opposed to the entertainer or amusement artist, attempts to free his imagination, and hence his work, from domination by selfish desires and personal obsessions, to eliminate the disfiguring influence of wish-fulfilment. Understood in this way, it is possible for Collingwood's theory to account for Freud's postulated series of transitional cases from pulp fiction to great literature. At one end of the series, we find the fiction of fantasy, escapist fiction, in which imagination is subordinate to desire; as we move along the series, we find a progressive diminution of the role of desire and a corresponding strengthening or enriching of the imaginative content, until we reach what Collingwood calls imagination proper, and what others, following Schopenhauer, call the impersonality of genius, manifested in the great works of literary art. For Collingwood, as for Iris Murdoch, one might say that 'art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals'.8

8 I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 59.

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II

The artist proper renounces make-believe or fantasy. His imagination is, in Kant's phrase, allowed 'free play'; for it is constrained neither by a concern for substitute gratification of frustrated desire nor by consid- erations of the reality or unreality of its contents. He is not prohibited from drawing on or exhibiting his understanding, his knowledge and his beliefs of what people and things are like, and he is not restricted to visualizing, representing or thinking of actual people, events and situations. Indeed the artist's own desires and aversions, his fantasy life, can become the subject of his art, as in the work of Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Joyce. But in these cases the artist, and his audience, confronts rather than indulges his fantasies.

However, even though the artist strives to free his imagination from external interference, it seems that he must acknowledge some con- straints if his imaginative project is not to be an arbitrary chaos. Collingwood proposes that the principle of organization is provided under the concept of the aesthetic. In his earlier writings, in Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, Collingwood understood this to imply something like organic unity. Thus, for example, he says, 'A work of art, like any work of the spirit, must be a complete and coherent whole, systematic through and through, and built upon one consistent principle . . . a work of art [must be capable of being] imagined as a whole'.9 In The Principles of Art he understands the aesthetic to involve the expression of emotion: the imaginative content of a work is shaped and unified as the articulation of a distinctive emotional attitude or point of view (see Chapter 13, section 1). This poses no threat to aesthetic autonomy, since, on Collingwood's analysis, expression is an activity which does not require knowledge of an end which is foreseen and preconceived (p. 111).

'What the artist is trying to do', says Collingwood, 'is to express a given emotion' (p. 282). Good art, then, can be nothing less than successful expression, while bad art is failure in the attempt at expression. The difference between the bad artist and the amusement artist- the artist falsely so-called-is that the latter makes no attempt at imaginative expression, but instead uses his imagination as a means to the achievement of some preconceived end, such as substitute gratification of desire. In illustration of this distinction, one could perhaps cite the writings of Ian Fleming as opposed to those of John Le Carre. It is also, I think, just such a distinction which lies behind W. H. Auden's

9 R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 61.

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well-known remark that the novels of Raymond Chandler 'should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art'.10

In Collingwood's theory, to express an emotion is to become con- scious of it in the sense of clarifying it, making its constituent thoughts and feelings lucid and intelligible. A consciousness which at some point fails to 'grasp its own emotions' Collingwood calls a corrupt consciousness, corrupt in so far as failure to bring the emotion to consciousness involves duplicitously disowning it. Since, as we have seen, bad art is failure in the attempt to express emotion, it follows that 'corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art' (p. 285).

Collingwood's combination of his theory of expression with his concept of a corrupt consciousness leads to all sorts of difficulties, though discussing them is not to my purpose now. What is more, it seems implausible to try to accommodate all that we are prepared to count as bad art by reference to bad faith in the artist; and it is perhaps significant that Collingwood provides not one example to illustrate his thesis. In concluding this paper, I would like to consider an example which suggests that Collingwood's concept of corruption of consciousness can help to explain one form that bad art can take.

Before coming to that, there is a further point pertinent to the theme of this paper. It is Collingwood's claim that what he describes as corruption of consciousness 'has already been described by psychologists in their own way' (p. 218) in such terminology as repression, projection, dissociation and fantasy-building (pp. 218-219). What is significant about this is just that, having previously rejected attempts to account for art in terms of psychoanalytic concepts, Collingwood incor- porates such concepts into the articulation of his own final theory of art. And yet there is no inconsistency. On both occasions, the emphasis is the same, to reveal the artist's commitment to the renunciation of fantasy. The artistic endeavour as such is resistant to, and antithetical to, 'the familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream':1 that is the point of the earlier discussion in Book One. But Collingwood recognizes-and this is the point of the later discussion in Book Three-that, in spite of the seriousness and sincerity of his artistic intentions, the artist is always liable to fail to realize those intentions for reasons having to do with the relations between his subject-matter and elements of his personal life.

The example I have chosen to illustrate Collingwood's view of bad art as corruption of concsciousness is to be found in F. R. Leavis's analysis of George Eliot's novels.12 While applauding, and at the same

10 W. H. Auden, 'The Guilty Vicarage', in The Dyer's Hand (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 151. 11 Murdoch, ibid., 86.

12 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972).

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time demonstrating, George Eliot's genius as a novelist, Leavis claims to detect a weakness which is exhibited in characters such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Both exhibit a kind of soul-hunger, a yearning for knowledge, beauty and goodness. And both are depicted, at least initially, as emotionally confused and immature. But Leavis argues that the novelist shares the emotional vagueness of her characters. They are presented, he claims, with tender sympathy, but also 'with a remarkable absence of criticism. There is, somewhere, a discordance, a discrepancy, a failure to reduce things to a due relevance' (p. 55). Representing as they do certain traits in George Eliot's own make-up, Leavis concludes that there is an element of self-idealization in their characterization (p. 56) and an element of self-indulgence, what Leavis interestingly calls 'day-dream self-indulgence' (p. 94)-'The emotional "fulness" represented by Dorothea depends for its exalting potency on an abeyance of intel- ligence and self-knowledge, and the situations offered by way of "objec- tive correlative" have the day-dream relation to experience; they are generated by a need to soar above the indocile facts and conditions of the real world . . . In this kind of indulgence, complaisantly as she abandons herself to the current that is loosed, George Eliot's creative vitality has no part' (p. 96).

Now one might, of course, dispute Leavis's criticism. Even so, it is as much the manner in which Leavis develops his objections, not simply their truth, which is relevant to seeing the object of his criticism as an instance of Collingwood's notion of bad art. Leavis reveals the weakness in the portrayal of Dorothea, for instance, by comparing her characterization with that of the other major figures in Middlemarch. The failure in expression is shown up against the backdrop of successful expression. As Leavis puts it, 'We have an alternation between the poised impersonal insight of a finely tempered wisdom and something like the emotional confusions and self-importance of adolescence' (p. 92). George Eliot's failure, if that is what it is, is not incompetence. It is precisely the contrast between what George Eliot is capable of and what she ends up with in the portrayal of Dorothea that provokes the charge of corruption of consciousness. For Collingwood informs us that 'Cor- ruptions of consciousness are always partial and temporary lapses in an activity which, on the whole, is successful in doing what it tries to do' (p. 283). George Eliot evidently sets out to show us what a personality such as Dorothea's can be like in the same way that she explores Casaubon's deadly academicism, Rosamond's relentless egoism and Bulstrode's moral evasions. But, Leavis alleges, she fails to bring Dorothea into focus because she fails to clarify her own thoughts and feelings about this kind of yearning soul-hunger which is also an aspect of her own self.

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Collingwood does not regard make-believe, or day-dream fantasy, as bad in itself; as the heart of amusement art, it is bad when people come to feel that it is only make-believe which makes life worth living (p. 95; cf. p. 138). But he does regard corruption of consciousness as harmful in itself. As the manifestation of self-deluding ignorance, it is the 'worst disease of mind' (p. 336), the 'true radix malorum' (p. 285). Hence his conviction that art, good art, is not a luxury (p. 285), for its discipline of imagination can deliver us from the fantasies of bad art (p. 336).13

University of Edinburgh

13 This paper was delivered to the XIth International Congress in Aesthet- ics, Nottingham, 1988. Earlier versions were read at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth; the University of Edinburgh; Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. I am grateful for the helpful comments offered at these meetings.

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