An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the

same feeling–this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by

means of certain signs, hands onto others feelings he has lived through, and

that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them.^11

Like Wordsworth, Tolstoy emphasizes that an artwork is a made thing–a
product of human activity, not a mere pleasing natural object–and a thing
made with a purpose: the communication of feeling that has been“lived
through”within the framework of ordinary life. The feeling must be“evoked
in oneself”(“recollected in tranquility”), not simply suffered, and it must be
embodied in the arrangement of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms
expressed in words that is the work. Art is“not a service of Beauty,”^12 for
that service too easily, even typically, degenerates into class-bound, decadent
worship of spectacle, exemplified for Tolstoy by opera, a“counterfeit”^13 art
that furthers a“stunting of human life”and makes those devoted to it“dull
to all the serious phenomena of life and skillful only at rapidly twisting their
legs, their tongues, or their fingers.”^14 The office of art is rather to call our
attention to ordinary life, real life, and how it is appropriate to feel about it,
not to fob us off with either decadent titillation or narcotic, vapid prettiness.
The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood, in developing his own expres-
sion theory of art, likewise stresses the difference between passive and
narcotic response to a putative“aesthetic quality” in things and active
engagement on the part of an audience with art as expression.

Aesthetic theory [i.e. the philosophy of art] is the theory not of beauty but of

art. The theory of [artistic] beauty...is merely an attempt to construct an

aesthetic on a“realistic”basis, that is, to explain away the aesthetic activity

by appeal to a supposed quality of the things with which, in that experience,

we are in contact; this supposed quality, invented to explain the activity,

being in fact nothing but the activity itself, falsely located not in the agent but

in his external world.^15

Instead of looking for an art-relevant formalqualityin things, we should in
theorizing turn our attention to what we actually and actively do with art,

(^11) Leo Tolstoy,What is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), p. 51.
(^12) Ibid., p. 131. (^13) Ibid., pp. 131, 133. (^14) Ibid., p. 10.
(^15) R. G. Collingwood,The Principles of Art(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 41.
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