are also various ways of conceiving of how expressiveness enters into a work
of art. Theories of artistic expression can be usefully divided into three main
groups: psychodynamic theories, physiognomic-similarity theories, and
“working-through”theories.
Collingwood’s psychodynamic theory
InThe Principles of Art, Collingwood develops a rich psychodynamic theory of
mental processes that may occur or be undertaken in relation to emotion.
For Collingwood, every state of awareness possesses an emotional charge. At
the level of brute sensate awareness, without conceptualization, this emo-
tional charge comes immediately welded to a sensum or quality of one’s
experiential field.Feelingis Collingwood’s term for this immediate unity of
sensum and emotion.^57 This immediate emotional charge is invariably
discharged in bodily reaction. For example, one might unthinkingly brush
one’s hand against a hot oven and immediately feel a sensed quality (heat
and resistance) coupled with pain and then all but instantaneously jerk
away. Sensate creatures in general have these kinds of responses to their
environment.
Above the level of immediate, nonconceptual consciousness, however,
Collingwood distinguishes two further levels: conceptual consciousness and
thinking. In conceptual consciousness we focus our awareness on an object
or event that we have learned to identify as a kind of thing, through having
assimilated patterns of attention from others. For example, in conceptual
consciousness one will see that object as abookor acup, or one will hear the
rain outdoorsas rainor the passing caras a car, over and above immediate
sensory awareness. In thinking, one considers relations among fully formed
judgments, including deductive following from, inductive evidence for, con-
tradiction, consistency, and overall coherence.
At each of these more than simply sensate levels of consciousness,
emotions are likewise welded to mental activity and its product. In seeing
a tree or hearing a birdsong recognitively, we feel something or other, and
sotooforthinkingaboutproblemsinphysicsorthefactorsthataffectthe
growth of an economy. These emotions of consciousness and emotions of
thought are not, however, immediately discharged in bodily activity.
(^57) See Collingwood,Principles of Art, pp. 160ff.
Expression 93