“No cognitive theory of aesthetic experience can explain why one should
desire to listen to a symphony again, any more than one should wish to
reread a scientific treatise or repeat a successful experiment.”^85 When,
however, we take into account the importance of artistic acts and points of
view, this desire becomes transparent. In reading and rereading (hearing and
rehearing, etc.) a work, we take up an authorial point of view, and we
participate–as Collingwood rightly emphasized–in how a subject matter
is experienced in feeling by an authorial subject. Through this participation,
we can ourselves progressively explore contours of feeling and their aptness
to their objects.
In favor of physiognomic similarity views, however, it must be conceded
that the achievement of a point of view in relation to a subject matter and its
expression in a work cannot be a matter only of“psychic”action independent
of media of art and their histories of use. Having a point of view–a way of
looking at things–and associated emotions presupposes participation in a
socially shared space or pattern of reasons for taking an interest in things
under a description. Having a point of view is not simply a matter of being in
a physicotemporal location. It is rather a matter offroma location identifying
and attending to things under a description. When queried, one must be able
to some extent to saywhatone is attending to–a cup, a birdsong, a slip, a
face–andwhyone construes the object of attention as one does. That is, one
must be able to some extent to paraphrase the content of one’s attention.
Attention to objects is not purely a matter of physiological response; it is a
socially learned achievement. Collingwood himself makes this point in
developing his own theory of expression beyond its initial presentation as
an individual psychodynamic theory into a theory of expression as an
achievement of the extension and rearticulation of communal patterns of
attention and response.^86
Hence psychodynamic and physiognomic similarity theories of expression
can be usefully integrated with one another, when we come to realize both
that conceptual recognitive consciousness is not itself purely an individual
psychic phenomenonandthat attending to a subject and responding with(^85) Scruton,Art and Imagination, p. 226.
(^86) See Collingwood’s discussion of attention inPrinciples of Art, especially pp. 203–06,
225 – 28, and 234–41, and his final argument that conceptual or recognitive conscious-
ness cannot be a purely individual achievement, pp. 250–51.
102 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art