In today’s context, where the concepts of art and craft (technology) have become distinct, art must possess clear characteristics that differentiate it from craft. If this distinction is not clearly demonstrated, art may unconsciously lose its unique nature and become indistinguishable from craft. Collingwood develops his argument by explaining the features of art to establish this separation.
From Collingwood’s perspective, art is essentially the “imaginative expression of emotion,” with expression and imagination serving as the two pillars that define art. Imagination indicates what art is, while expression shows what art does. In Collingwood’s system, expression and imagination should not be understood in their conventional senses. To comprehend them properly, it is necessary to distinguish between “emotion at the level of sensation” and “emotion at the level of imagination.” The focus of art lies in the latter.
Of course, where there is emotion at the imaginative level, there is always emotion at the sensory level, since the former takes the latter as its material or raw substance. When combined with the meaning of expression, emotion at the imaginative level can be called imaginative expression. This forms a hierarchy with psychological expression, where imaginative expression can be said to express the same material as psychological expression but in a different form.
In Collingwood’s framework, a person attempting to express an emotion is aware that they have some emotion but is not precisely conscious of what it is. In this state, they seek to escape from a powerless and repressed condition, which can be seen as an effort to clarify an uncertain emotion. Through this effort, the vague emotion acquires concrete expression. While escaping this powerless and repressed state through emotional expression resembles catharsis (purification) at first glance, these two should not be equated. Emotional purification lightens the mind by removing the emotion, whereas emotional expression involves becoming more clearly conscious of the emotion. Emotional expression is not about erasing the emotion but exploring its precise reality.
Emotional expression is often directed towards someone and thus might be thought to intend to evoke that emotion in the other. However, emotion arousal is not the same as emotional expression. Arousal has the purpose of provoking a specific emotion in the object, but expression urges the object to explore the subject’s own emotion. That is, the target of arousal may have emotions different from the arouser, but the target of expression cannot tolerate such difference. In this regard, the person expressing the emotion indirectly conveys it to the other through their own emotional expression rather than delivering it directly.
On the other hand, emotional expression cannot be equated with describing emotion. Describing emotion reveals the current emotion in terms of a general concept and therefore does not explore the unique nature of the current emotion. Collingwood’s concept of emotional expression importantly involves the intellectual operation or intellectual exploration of the person expressing it, which is further emphasized by the concept of imagination—a distinct characteristic defining art.
Even accepting that the artist’s activity is known through the artwork, it is rare to assert that it is essentially the same as creating everyday objects, since everyone recognizes a difference between ordinary objects and artwork. This leads to the idea that the artist’s interest lies not in producing familiar objects but in creating something new through imagination. However, even visible objects may emerge through an imaginative process. Collingwood illustrates this with the examples of a civil engineer and a musician: a real bridge can be seen as the realization of the engineer’s imaginary design, while a musician, like an engineer, engages in imaginative activity in producing new melodies. But these two cannot be equated. When a bridge is built, the design is instantiated by the bridge, whereas music is already complete in the musician’s imagination before being transcribed into a score.
A musician’s imaginative emotional expression affects the audience, who share the musician’s emotion by encountering the work. If the musician expresses emotion through imagination, the audience similarly expresses their own emotion through imagination. At this point, one might question why the audience’s emotional expression is imagination. This is because the audience’s act of appreciation should be understood not as merely hearing the sound created by the musician but as reconstructing it as their own sound. As Collingwood points out, artworks are not something seen or heard but something imagined.
To firmly grasp the mental activity of imagination in emotional expression, it is necessary to understand the concept of imagination more concretely. When imagination occurs, there is a tendency to think of emotion as limited to a particular sense—for example, music as dependent on hearing and visual art as reliant on vision. Collingwood critiques such reductive associations as improper understandings of the imagination in which emotion is expressed. Emotional expression through imagination should be a full-body imaginative experience.
This understanding of imagination directly connects to Collingwood’s meaning of language. His concept of language includes everyday language and academic language as well as the primal language that underlies these. In his system, language is an imaginative activity expressing emotion, which is nothing other than the nature art must possess. Collingwood’s view of art as language contains a critique of conventional art perspectives: art cannot be properly understood as crystallized symbols or concrete objects. Art is a full-body activity based on imagination, and symbols or objects distort such a concept of art.
Collingwood’s statement that artworks are not art relates to this context. Art is a full-body experience; artworks are the withering of that experience and thus lose vitality. From one viewpoint, artworks can be seen as the link between artist and audience, serving as the sole channel for the artist’s emotion—an idea accepted in contemporary thought. Yet, such acceptance is distinct from the question of defining art’s nature. An important prerequisite in the artist-audience relationship elicited by artworks is that the nature of art must not be compromised. Here, the emphasis is that the audience must also reveal their own emotions through imagination.
Summary
Art is the imaginative expression and imaginative consciousness of emotion. The artist expresses their emotions through the artwork, and the audience clarifies vague emotions through the artwork. Both artist and audience must engage in the process of imagination during emotional expression. This imagination must be a full-body imaginative experience, not limited to any particular sense. Artworks themselves are not art; art refers to this imaginative experience acting much like a language.