ABSTRACT
It is widely believed that the essence of art is the expression of feeling or emotion, a view often simply assumed to be true by students, critics and even very great artists. Thus Tolstoy in What Is Art? asserts that “art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them” (Tolstoy 1930: 123). I shall call this view “expressivism.” If we think of expressivism as resting on an inductive generalization about works
of art, it confronts this difficulty: many artworks are not obviously of this kind. The music of Grieg and Tchaikovsky, the paintings of van Gogh and Manet, and the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth are examples that seem to count in its favor, but mainly because their creation was itself inspired by expressivism. By contrast, the music of Bach and Handel, the paintings of Picasso and Klee, or the poetry of Milton and Pope are much less easily characterized as “expressions of emotion.” These alternative examples do not disprove expressivism as a philosophical theory of art, however. They simply show that it is not so obviously true as is often supposed, that it needs philosophical support, and warrants critical examination. The two most celebrated exponents of philosophical expressivism are the Italian
philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), and the British philosopher who took inspiration from him, R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) This chapter will outline and examine Croce’s theory of art, Collingwood’s amendment of it, and look at some recent criticism and defenses.
