our emotions and attitudes toward the affairs of life more actively into the
forefront of consciousness. The majesty of these returning thoughts consists
in their having a certain command over us and our aspirations and resent-
ments. They areouremotions and attitudes, as complex as the affairs of life
in which we are engaged, and they variously nurture, inhibit, and otherwise
inhabit both what we do and how we do it: with patience and love, or with
resentment and bitterness, among many other shades of possibility. The fact
that these returning thoughts are alienated from us consists in our having
failed to acknowledge them, having failed quite wholly to feel them and to
accept them as our own. To the extent that we have failed to do this, our
emotions and attitudes are not integrated with our practices, and we live less
than fully coherently and fluently.
Hence Collingwood’s neo-Spinozist view of the function of expression,
developed as Collingwood himself develops it in quasi-Hegelian, communal-
ist terms, correctly specifies the central function of artistic expression. It
brings into consciousness and clarifies, on behalf of a people caught up in a
shared and contested way of life, what in that way of life is worth caring
about in which specific ways: with pride or love or bitterness or disgust.
“What the artist has to utter,”as Collingwood puts it,
is not, as the individualist theory of art would have us think, his own secrets.
As spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs. The
reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own
heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one
subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come
from that ignorance the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has
already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s
medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.^118
Dewey makes a similar point when he observes that artistic expression
involves the“progressive organization of‘inner’and‘outer’material in
organic connection with each other.”^119 The outer material includes not only
the materials of art–paint, words, bodily motions, stone, and so on–but also
the material of life: the tangled ensemble of contested and changing cultural
routines through which human life is reproduced. The outer materials of art(^118) Collingwood,Principles of Art, p. 336.
(^119) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 75.
112 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art