the music precisely what it is.”^96 Against this Mitchell Green has objected
that postulation of a musical persona or implied composer is not mandatory;
sometimes, perhaps, we can identify with and follow musical developments
only insofar as we are evolutionarily wired to respond to contours of emo-
tions.^97 This objection, however, perhaps underrates both the role of con-
scious development of musical intricacies during the process of composition
and the role of the listener’s imaginative following of that development.
With Levinson, Jenefer Robinson accepts the importance of conscious devel-
opment of musical intricacies but then argues against Levinson that the
persona in question must be that of a real agent, the composer, not some-
thing merely postulated by a listener. Echoing Collingwood and Sircello, she
argues that“expression in its fullest sense [is] as achievement by an artist, not
a mode of experiencing by a reader or listener.”^98
But how, exactly, is this achievement managed? Drawing in detail on
recent psychological research, Robinson argues that physiological changes
and behavioral dispositions lie at the root of expression. Confronted with
something in its environment, an organism carries out a noncognitive“affect-
ive appraisal...that occurs very fast, automatically, and below the level of
awareness [and is] an immediate instinctive reaction,”^99 as in being startled
by a loud noise. This affective appraisal may be and often is followed by“a
further more discriminatingcognitiveappraisal or monitoring of the situ-
ation”which“alters the nature of the experiencefeeding back upon bodily
changes, action tendencies, and affective appraisals.”^100 Distinctivelyartistic
expression then occurs when an emotion initiated by an affective appraisal is
not only had and expressed in behavior, but that expression in behavior also
takes place intentionally, through the working of materials in a medium, in
such a way that the emotion is individuated, articulated, brought to con-
sciousness, and clarified for both the artist and for anyone who imaginatively
follows the process of expression that has issued in the work.^101 Here, as in
Collingwood, an initial bodily feeling state–what Collingwood calls a feeling(^96) Jerrold Levinson,“Musical Expressiveness,”inThe Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical
Essays(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 90–125 at p. 125.
(^97) Mitchell Green,Self-Expression(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 204, 202.
(^98) Robinson,“Expression Theories,”p. 207.
(^99) Jenefer Robinson,Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 41, 61.
(^100) Ibid., pp. 59, 402. (^101) Ibid., pp. 270–71.
106 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art