Abstract
Collingwood follows Plato and Vico in saying that there is a special affinity between art and childhood. Art is the natural form of experience of those who have had little experience, such as children and primitive peoples. Moreover, it is the matrix out of which all more sophisticated forms of experience develop.
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References
Speculum Mentis, p. 59.
See Collingwood, “The Place of Art in Education”, in Donagan, ed., pp. 199-200. “The distinction between poetry and prose is the key to the distinction between education and life.” Ibid., p. 199. Cf. Speculum Mentis, p. 67.
Speculum Mentis, p. 60.
Speculum Mentis, p. 61.
Speculum Mentis, p. 63.
Speculum Mentis, p. 64.
Speculum Mentis, p. 67.
Speculum Mentis, p. 71.
Speculum Mentis, p. 79.
Speculum Mentis, p. 81.
Speculum Mentis, p. 83.
Speculum Mentis, p. 111.
Speculum Mentis, p. 115.
Speculum Mentis, p. 116.
Speculum Mentis, p. 119. Here Collingwood remarks that holiness “is a feature generally recognized by modern students of religion”. From the description that follows, he appears to have in mind especially Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Das Heilige (Göttingen, 1917), tr. John W. Harvey, The Idea of the Holy (London, 1923).
Speculum Mentis, p. 120.
Speculum Mentis, p. 120.
Speculum Mentis, p. 120.
Collingwood remarks that what is now commonly known as propagandistic art, such as patriotic songs and posters, may by aesthetic standards be inferior art. But these “forms of quasi-religious art which express the common aspirations of a nation, a school, or a political party” are ritualistic. In other words, creators of such works can no more exercise complete freedom in their choice of theme or stylistic devices than a religious man can change his creed. Speculum Mentis, p. 122.
Collingwood is rare among English philosophers in having taken an interest in Freup as early as 1923. A preceding appreciative article by H. Wildon Carr, “The Philosophical Aspect of Freud’s Theory of Dream Interpretation”, Mind, 23 (1914), 321-334, went almost unnoticed. A more characteristic view is that of John Laird, “Is the Conception of the Unconscious of Value in Psychology? ”, Mind 31 (1922), 433-442. Laird concludes that the notion of “unconscious consciousness” is a contradiction in terms (Ibid.,p. 442) and hence of no use. Laird (1887–1946) was an adherent of British empirical psychology and continued throughout his career to insist upon the interdependence of philosophy and scientific psychology.
Speculum Mentis, p. 94.
He does not here give instances of these superstitions. For Collingwood’s later views on psychoanalysis, see “Aesthetic”, in McDowell, ed., The Mind (1927) esp. pp. 236-237 and 238-239. He says here: “I regard Freud as one of the greatest men of our age, and his works as almost perfect examples of scientific method and dispassionate analysis.” Ibid., pp. 236-237. One wonders just which works of Freud Collingwood had read! Most likely he has in mind the clinical papers, and not such works as Totem and Taboo (1913), which he criticizes later in The Principles of Art, pp. 62-64 and esp. p. 77, note. This criticism of Totem and Taboo is renewed in An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 118. A further reference to psychoanalysis occurs in The Principles of Art, pp. 220-221, where Collingwood interprets Freud’s work as a magnificent moral endeavor. He speaks of psychoanalysis as “an enterprise that has already won a great place in the history of man’s warfare with the powers of darkness”. Ibid., p. 221.
Speculum Mentis, p. 96.
Although Collingwood does not explain what the purposes inherent in dreams may be, he appears to accept the view of psychoanalysis that they represent an effort to redress some balance which the mind in its waking state has tended to neglect.
Speculum Mentis, p. 92.
Collingwood’s anxiety over the moral condition of his contemporaries grew, rather than declined after 1925. In The Principles of Art (1938), he concludes an analysis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” with the following portrait of modern man: The poem [”The Waste Land”] depicts a world where the wholesome flowing water of emotion, which alone fertilizes all human activity, has dried up. Passions that once ran so strongly as to threaten the defeat of prudence, the destruction of human individuality, the wreck of men’s little ships, are shrunk to nothing. No one gives; no one will risk himself by sympathizing; no one has anything to control. The Principles of Art, p. 335. This emphasis on emotion recurs throughout Collingwood’s post-1933 works. In this regard, compare the passage from The First Mate’s Log (1940), quoted supra, Ch. I, note 47. Together with this focus on emotion, which may be discerned also in The New Leviathan, Chs. 4-5 and 7-11, Collingwood seems to have undergone a renewed interest in religion. He came to view religion as the motive-force in the life of a civilization: It [religion] is the only known explosive in the economy of that delicate internal-combustion engine, the human mind. Peoples rich in religious energy can overcome all obstacles and attain any height in the scale of civilization. “Fascism and Nazism”, Philosophy, 15 (1940), 176.
Freud, The Future of an Illusion, W. D. Robson-Scott, tr. (London, 1928), p. 98.
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© 1967 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Johnston, W.M. (1967). Art and Religion as Elementary Forms of Experience. In: The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9481-5_10
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