SOURCE: "Collingwood on Corrupt Consciousness," in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XL, No. 4, Summer, 1982, pp. 395-400.

[In the following essay, Black examines Collingwood's concept of "corrupt consciousness ' and its relationship to his theory of art.]

Taken at face value, Collingwood's theory of art seems to focus on an analysis of feeling. The work of art, in Collingwood's eyes, explicates the elements of sensibility by placing them in a self-conscious order. Such a theory of feeling is indeed fundamental to Collingwood's aesthetic; but he has an accompanying intent the purport of which is not fully revealed in his analysis of feeling. This second theory, which might be called a theory of the synthesis of feeling, is linked to the birth of perception itself. In his discussion of corrupt consciousness, Collingwood introduces what I believe to be a novel form of intelligibility. He suggests that the art-work maintains itself through a perceived relatedness that exists among the sensible qualities of the object. He presents a critique of perception itself by examining the internal relationships that generate the sensible side of our world.

In this way, Collingwood uncovers a pre-categorical, pre-conceptual order of meaning, an order of intelligibility that perhaps he himself does not fully understand. Collingwood's insight rests on his unique discovery that feeling, far from being chaotic, has a form of its own. This formal unity, which must be distinguished from a categorical synthesis, is a union not of concepts but of percepts. Collingwood's theory of corrupt consciousness is the catalyst that sets this principle of relation in motion.

I.

In his description of corrupt consciousness, Collingwood is intrigued by the following dilemma: Is there such a thing as brute sense? Or, are there only brutal interpretations of sense data? We tend to contrast our minds, our thoughts, and our conceptions with an objective sense world. There is little question that there are raw data in the world, but are these data constitutive factors in our sensible awareness of things? We find ourselves in confrontation with a world of objects. But to what extent do we ourselves fashion this sensible world? Do we sense what we cannot help but sense, or do we sense only what we have grown sensitive to? And, if one answers that sensibility is this latter, then one must ask how such a sensitivity is possible. Does this sensible maturity contrast with cognitive maturity? Does it suggest an alternative, noncognitive means for mind to draw relations among the phenomena of its world?

Great art seems to generate a new sensible given; the genius somehow creates perception anew with each work he completes. But from where does this sensible given spring? What is it about sensibility that allows for creativity? The answers to these questions seem to lie, for Collingwood, in a principle of sensible relatedness, a notion that arises, I think, as an important parallel to expressiveness, a notion implicit in the banal untruth of a corrupt consciousness.

What, then, is corrupt consciousness? How does it turn corrupt? And what does it have to do with the notion of sensible relatedness and the pre-cognitive activity of mind? To deal with these questions is to deal with the dilemma of form. It must be remembered that, for Collingwood, every form present to consciousness carries with it an implicit emotional charge. These charges might be "sterilized" or ignored by consciousness but are, in this sense, not so much nonexistent as unrecognized. Collingwood claims that this sterilization of sensa is relatively absent in the perceptions of women, children, and artists; and that it is through the perceptions of these people that the public becomes aware of the emotive character of sensation. Yet, the sights and sounds of experience generate individual feelings, feelings that are peculiar to the forms in which they arise. The feeling is revealed in terms of the form and does not exist until the form arises. Hence the artist does not know what he is trying to express until he expresses it. To put it in Collingwood's words, "until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is therefore an exploration of his own emotions. He is trying to find out what these emotions are.' Art thus produces original sensible forms but presupposes form itself as a fundamental given. Therefore, form must be distinguished from the mediation of form. The primary activity of "attention" must be distinguished from what Collingwood calls the "criteriological" activity of art. Quite simply, in order to answer the several questions that could be posed about corrupt consciousness, the corruption of consciousness must be distinguished from the birth of consciousness.

A corrupt consciousness is oblivious of its own nature. It fails in this regard to recognize something about the way in which it compares and relates feelings. A corrupt consciousness, for Collingwood, is thus bound up in its own lie. In contrast, awareness is born during the act of attention. Attention is the simplest act of consciousness. The consciousness that merely "attends" to feelings tells no lies because it makes no judgment. Through attention, consciousness sustains a feeling. But when corrupt, consciousness "disowns" the feeling it sustains; it refuses to believe that the feeling is its own. This latter act is far different from the former. In the act of attention, consciousness merely moves from the realm of sheer feeling to the awareness of form. However, in the act of corruption, consciousness works within the realm of form alone. It deals directly with the images at hand. Its action is directed against the image it is forming, not against the feeling implied by the image. When consciousness attends to a sensation, it simply pulls a sense datum into the purview of conscious life. Yet, in this act, consciousness merely holds on to the impression. It does nothing with it. It makes no claim about it. It simply retains it and fixes it before the mind. Collingwood describes the act of attending to a scarlet patch: "As I look, the red is actually fading; it is being obscured by the superimposition of its own after-image, which dulls the scarlet moment by moment. But by attending to the scarlet and neglecting everything else, I create a kind of compensation for this fading.' Attention is the activity by which consciousness gains access to the sense world and is given, in Collingwood's words, "fair sight" of the perceptual object. Assuredly, this is the most basic of acts but it is nonetheless an act. It is that act which gathers together the data requisite for cognition.

Under conditions of corruption, a principle of relation is introduced. Consciousness now intervenes among the sensations it sustains. When consciousness "disowns" a feeling, it does more than merely ignore it; it actually mediates the relation of a particular to a whole. Consciousness is now involved in an act of judgment. If I disown a feeling, I judge that feeling to be alien to my consciousness, unrelated to my experience, disconnected from my state of affairs. I fail to see, through the comparison of perceptions, the interrelatedness of certain feelings. Therefore, the error I make about the feeling lies not in the attention process per se, not in the givenness of the feeling, but in the judgment I make about the feeling. When a feeling is mine and I claim that it is not, I am not failing to attend to the feeling for I am attending to it; it already stands before me. I err, simply in the fact that I fail to recognize the feeling as my own. I fail to see its relation to my perceived experience. This is not a failure, then, to attend to feelings; it is a failure to recognize them for what they are.

Attention is formational rather than transformational. When I attend to a feeling, Collingwood claims that I give it empirical form. Feelings at the psychical level are without form and receive only subconscious expression. Raw sensation is ungraspable, since it lacks formal expressiveness. A raw sensation is simply "felt" and, unless it is particularly powerful, there is no necessary need to sustain or attend to it. I can deal with it if I so desire, or I can ignore it and turn my attention to something else. Brute sensa, therefore, stand at the nether end of perception, as the implicit condition of empirical sensibility.

II.

To this point I have tried to show how Collingwood distinguishes form from feeling and how he separates the relation of form from both of these. Feeling is the passive surrender to sensation; form is the conscious domination of raw sense; while the relation of form is the judgmental intervention among the images sustained by attentive consciousness. Collingwood has described these in his own way as: psychical experience, attention, and original expression. Thus, when dealing with form, consciousness is engaged in a relational act, an act which perceives an internal connectedness of form, an act which "mediates" perception. However, Collingwood claims that this relational act might take place abortively. One might attempt to mediate form and fail. I might remain frustrated in my effort to relate one image to another and, in effect, surrender a measure of my sensitivity. This success/failure relationship implies bipolarity. As Collingwood points out, one can succeed in one's attempt to deal with the image, or one can fail in this activity by creating a corrupt version of one's perceptual experience. There is, in other words, a right and a wrong way to imagine things.

Collingwood wants to claim that the artist, with each work he completes, creates a harmonious order of feeling by producing a coherent sensible form. When consciousness is corrupt, it denies this order of feeling; it attends to the order but does not "understand" it. In essence, a corrupt consciousness misinterprets its own interpretative activity. The activity of art is reflexive. The work of art makes an assertion about the way in which the human mind relates the disparate elements of sense. A corrupt consciousness is a consciousness replete with sense data, yet, frustrated in its efforts to set the data in a proper perceptual or imaginative order. As Collingwood points out, "the symptoms and consequences of a corrupt consciousness … are due not to functional disorder or to the impact of hostile forces upon the sufferer, but to its own self-mismanagement…"

It is not enough to claim that a corrupt consciousness simply directs attention away from some feeling it fears. It actually disavows knowledge of its feelings and misinforms itself; it fails to see that the relation it has drawn among images is inadequate or incomplete. If consciousness disowns a feeling which in point of fact is rightfully its own, its imaginative understanding of itself is incomplete and hence corrupt. It lies to itself by ommitting a truth.

Art fights corruption by constantly expanding our perceptual awareness. Art is perception in the act of discovering its own borders; it both refines and uncovers the limits of imaginative experience. Just as science maps the limits of cognitive understanding, art charts the geography of perception. With each work of art, a new aspect of this geography appears and a new dimension of perception is rendered concrete.

However, in order for this geography to appear, the awareness of sensible form must be shared. More than a private activity, this perceptual relatedness must appear as a common sensibility. It is important to remember that the artist does more than express his own feelings; he expresses the feelings of others as well. In an important passage, Collingwood states: "We know that the artist is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours. Here Collingwood claims that the sensible relatedness of things has an objective status: "If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves.' Collingwood wants to argue that a work of art is only a work of art when its meaning is, in some measure, shared. The particular meaning of a painting is not confined to the canvas alone; it is active and alive in the world, since it is shared through a culture's common perceptions. The work of art binds the sensibilities of the general public and the artist. Quite simply, the work provides a means for members of a common culture to communicate ideas that would otherwise be ineffable. Collingwood is clearly committed to such a view: "The aesthetic activity is an activity of thought in the form of consciousness, converting into imagination an experience which, apart from being so converted, is sensuous. This activity is a corporate activity belonging not to any one human being but to a community.' To the extent that a work of art communicates anything, it must arise out of a common understanding.

This common understanding, since it is born in the act of perception, both requires and implies lawfulness. The order or relation of feelings is neither reckless nor ambiguous. It is concrete and precise. It is perspectival and uniform. We might say that consciousness generates its own law each time it intervenes among images. The perceptual world that consciousness makes for itself rests on its own activity. Given Collingwood's position, the work of art justifies itself, since it renders the common sense concrete.

III.

One might now ask: How is common sensibility shared? How are the internal elements of feeling externalized in the work of art? We know that, for Collingwood, corrupt consciousness evolves out of its own mismanaged activity and that this mismanagement is writ large in culture itself. Not only the artist, but his audience as well, share in the corruption of sensibility. If this is the case, and Collingwood insists that it is, then the work of art bears the burden of binding public taste with personal sensitivity. The real question, then, is how does the work of art, the created form, the external object, express anything? The answer to this question is already implied in the notion of sensible relatedness. If the work of art renders the common sense concrete, then the story must be told in the work itself. The expressive form and the feeling it expresses must be more than incidentally bound; they must be, in the final instance, identical.

Therefore, the possibility of common sense growing corrupt must rest on a coherence theory of expression. Given Collingwood's position, the development of corrupt consciousness cannot be understood apart from the internal harmony of sense elements in the self. Since, in Collingwood's view, form and feeling arise together in sensation, the emotion expressed in a work of art is internal to the work and is identical to its form. A much less adequate view of Collingwood's theory is to say that it presents the work of art as a mere copy or transformation of some independent psychical feeling. Collingwood is quite careful to maintain that the work of art copies nothing. He insists that the artwork, being in this case the form, is in no measure independent of the feeling it conveys.'One cannot possibly decide that a certain emotion is one which for some reason it would be undesirable to express … unless one first becomes conscious of it; and doing this, as we saw, is somehow bound, up with expressing it.' As expressed feeling, the artwork is "lived" feeling. The artist strikes vitality into the world by generating the objective forms through which a culture shares its common sensitivity. Feeling cannot, in this sense, be drained from the work of art, since the shared perception of the work is the very essence of the feeling; indeed, it is even more than this, it is the feeling itself; it is the emotion in all its sum and substance. The emotion expressed in a work of art does not preexist in the psyche as such, but rather comes into form only as it is expressed.

This principle of coherence, wherein every element of a work is related to the whole that it helps sustain, is the principle on which the notion of corrupt consciousness depends. Consider a sequence of tones. As a first tone, tone A, is played and a second tone, tone B, follows in sequence, an immediate sense of bipolarity arises and an imaginative judgement is required. Either tone B is appropriate to A and expresses the feeling implicit in the sequence itself, or B is inept with respect to A and fails to add to the sequence, fails to cohere with respect to the whole. Tone B, in this second instance, works in a fashion that is counter-productive to the sequence. It fails with respect to a whole that is paradoxically incomplete. We know that tone B fails to complete the whole, since our idea of the whole arises during our attempt to express it. As Collingwood suggests, the act of creation, if it is genuine creation and not merely transformation, cannot be done by "imposing a new form on a pre-existing matter.' Form and feeling condition one another; and it is this mutual act of conditioning that we call expression.

If we return to the sequence of tones and suppose that tone B arises as inept, consciousness can do one of two things. It can move on in its search for the appropriate or coherent tone, or it can deny that such a tone exists. It can continue its search for the proper tone or it can "give it up" and remain satisfied with what it has. This latter activity of giving up the search and denying that the appropriate tone exists is self-deception. The artist often compromises in such an instance and substitutes an inadequate or inappropriate tone in place of the tone he actually needs. A composer might say that "this chord is good enough" or "this harmony will suffice" when, in effect, he has settled for an inadequate version of the chord or a sentimental rendering of the harmony.

Instead of continuing its search for form, consciousness grows stagnant and repetitive, imitative and compromising. It has substituted correspondence for coherence, emulation for originality. A stagnant consciousness is a corrupt consciousness; it is a consciousness that forsakes the pursuit of the appropriate and remains satisfied with the everyday. A corrupt consciousness disowns certain truths of the imagination because such truths appear frightening and difficult to manage. It is a consciousness which, frustrated in its attempt to be original, convinces itself of the viability of the cliche.

IV.

I suggested at the outset of this paper that there is a sense in which the expressionistic interpretation of Collingwood's aesthetic is quite correct. I have maintained, however, that such an interpretation is naive unless it is read together with the coherence theory of form found in Collingwood's description of corrupt consciousness. Collingwood's theory of art does indeed in-corporate both formal and expressionistic elements. His philosophy of art is as much a theory of feeling as it is of form. The question therefore remains: How can a work of art be both a copy and a genuinely original project? How is it that the work of art both transforms feelings and creates new feelings? Is this not a contradiction?

One must remember that, for Collingwood, consciousness is a process. He describes this process in terms of what he sees as a necessary "overlap'' of classes. In the notions of feeling and form, we have two unique classes which overlap in that they are at once different and similar. Conscious or formal expression differs in degree from psychical expression, since it transforms or reshapes psychical feelings. But this difference in degree also constitutes a difference in kind. The emotion, once expressed at the conscious level, is no longer the same emotion. A feeling that is consciously expressed is inextricably bound to the form in which it arises. Hence it cannot arise or have any reality apart from this formal expression. The feeling is thus the same and not the same. Aesthetic feeling bears a relation to psychical feeling because it is "felt" as well as perceived. Yet, because the feeling is now "perceived" as well as felt, it differs not only in degree but in kind. The aesthetic feeling is transformed, as Collingwood sometimes claims; but it is transformed at the level of consciousness itself. In this sense, the feeling is not so much copied as formed anew. It is fashioned in terms of the formal activity of consciousness, in terms of the sensible relatedness mind perceives among things.

This notion of "overlap" is perhaps more clearly expressed in Collingwood's Autobiography," … 'processes' are things which do not begin and end but turn into one another; and that if a process P1 turn into a process P2, there is no dividing line at which PI stops and P2 begins; P1 never stops and P2 never begins, it has previously been going on in the earlier for P1.' If one thinks of P1 as feeling and P2 as form in this schema, one has little trouble seeing why Collingwood's theory of art is at once expressionistic and formal. Feelings serve as a raw material for art because they serve as a raw material for mind. Psychical experience does not disappear with the intervention of consciousness; it simply appears in a new and different way. The feeling expressed by a work of art is new, since it reveals the feeling as a feeling that is related to the whole of imaginative experience. But this feeling is also transformed, since it never fully disappears when it is embraced at a different level.

I have stressed the notion of coherence in this paper, since it is sensible relatedness that makes the transformation of feeling possible. Expression in art is not so much the mimesis of feeling as the imaginative relation of feeling, a relation that differs both in degree and in kind from psychical reality. In this sense, creativity is not, nor can it ever be, the mere imitation of sensation. Creativity is not simply feeling; it is rather the impress of thought on feeling, a process that gives rise to the internal relatedness of sensible form.