when we engage with it properly as expression. The proper experience of art
“arises from within; it is not a specific reaction to a stimulus proceeding from
a specific type of external object”;^16 it is, rather, an active grasping of what is
expressed, a recapitulation of and participation in the artist’s working
through of feeling in relation to subject matter. To suppose otherwise is to
confuse art with amusement and spectacle–a confusion that is all too
common in the modern industrial world.
A way of life can die when people become unable to confront it, to feel
toward it, and to believe in it, but instead fall into boredom and the pursuit of
distractions from life. Collingwood argues that this kind of loss of emotional
commitment to a way of life is what brought about the downfall of the
Roman Empire. He then claims that we are ourselves not much better off.
We live in a world in which most of what goes by [the] name [of art] is
amusement...[A long-growing and deep-seated conviction that its own way of
life was not worth preserving–the disease that felled Rome] is notoriously
endemic among ourselves. Among its symptoms are the unprecedented
growth in the amusement trade, to meet what has become an insatiable
craving; an almost universal agreement that the kinds of work on which the
existence of a civilization like ours most depends (notably the work of
industrial operatives and the clerical staff in business of every kind, and even
that of the agricultural laborers and other food-winners who are the prime
agents in the maintenance of every civilization hitherto existing) is an
intolerable drudgery; the discovery that what makes this intolerable is not the
pinch of poverty or bad housing but the nature of the work itself in the
conditions our civilization has created; the demand, arising out of this
discovery, and universally accepted as reasonable, for an increased provision
of leisure, which means opportunity for amusement, and of amusements to
fill it; the use of alcohol, tobacco, and many other drugs, not for ritual
purposes, but to deaden the nerves and distract the mind from the tedious and
irritating concerns of ordinary life; the almost universal confession that
boredom, or lack of interest in life, is felt as a constant or constantly recurring
state of mind; the feverish attempts to dispel this boredom either by more
amusement or by dangerous or criminal occupations; and finally (to cut the
catalogue short) the discovery, familiarmutatis mutandisto every bankrupt in
last stages of his progress, that customary remedies have lost their bite and
that the dose must be increased.^17(^16) Ibid., p. 40. (^17) Ibid., pp. 104, 96–97.
80 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art