Aesthetics

art, mind and community

Elizabeth Behnke

Edward Casey

Evans

pp. 97-119

in: Gary Browning, Rethinking R. G. Collingwood, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

Collingwood's The Principles of Art shows how art contributes to the development of mind and the enrichment of the community. Within The Principles of Art, Collingwood rethinks the conditions of artistic achievement so as to highlight how art necessarily achieves both these goals simultaneously. Mind, for Collingwood, is not the exclusive property of particular individuals. Rather, an individual develops his or her capacities for rational thought and action, qualities of the mind, by inter-acting with others. Collingwood emphasizes the necessarily social side of experience. "Individualism conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and to exhibit his nature in whatever works are appropriate to it. But a man, in his art as in everything else, is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself. As artist, he is a speaker; but a man speaks as he has been taught; he speaks the tongue in which he was born."¹ While art necessarily is a social activity in which artistic expression turns on social connections at every turn, Collingwood also sees it as essential to the development of mind. Mind develops via rational thought and action. The development of rationality, for Collingwood, is a process of making sense of experience and enabling human beings to free themselves from the grip of merely received and delimited experience.