SOURCE: "On Reading Collingwood's Principles of Art," in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, Winter, 1987, pp. 239-48.

[In the following essay, Grant finds that Collingwood's ideas concerning art significantly vary throughout the course of his treatise The Principles of Art.]

Perhaps no work of English aesthetics in this century has been more disputed than Collingwood's Principles of Art. On one extreme it is insisted that Collingwood's chief and leading doctrine is that the work of art is something exclusively mental in nature, something whose physical and publicly accessible embodiment is aesthetically extraneous. On the other extreme, while it is granted that Collingwood believed the work of art to be something "mental," it is denied that he believed it to be something "exclusively" mental. Art, for Collingwood, it is held, is something which is "unintelligible" apart from physical and publicly accessible behavior.

The sharp divergence of opinion suggests what is true, i. e., that the text of the Principles, while enviable for its precocity, is rife with chaos and confusion. Yet regrettably it may also be thought to suggest what is false, that the controversy about what Collingwood meant is insoluble. Collingwood's thesis is obscured by frequent changes of mind, to be sure. But as I shall endeavor very shortly to show, the changes are not in every case indiscriminate and unwitting. We read in Book I that the work of art is something "(as we commonly say) 'existing in his [the artist's] head' and there only"; and in what has become the usual way of reading the Principles, the trick has been to square this assertion with Collingwood's evident approbation in Books II and HI for the doctrine that the work of art is in some sense a "bodily" and "publicly accessible" thing or activity. But this way of reading the Principles, I wish to insist, is entirely wrong. Whatever Collingwood's "definition" or "theory" of art, and however plausible or implausible that definition may be, it is most certainly not a definition that is stated in Book I. I wish now to examine this and other related assumptions.

I.

It is well known that Collingwood begins his famous work with the question, "What is art?" In his Autobiography Collingwood calls the question-form a "vague portmanteau-phrase covering a multitude of questions but not precisely expressing any of them.' But in the Principles the question is immediately divided into two "stages.' The purpose of the first stage, says Collingwood, is to "review the improper senses of the word 'art'… so that at the end of it we can say not only 'that and that and that are not art, ' but also 'that is not art because it is pseudo-art of kind A' and 'that, because it is pseudo-art of kind B.'" The purpose of the second stage is to address "the problem of definition.' "Definition," Collingwood particularly notes, "must come second, and not first, because no one can even try to define a term until he has satisfied himself that his own personal usage of it harmonizes with the common usage.' "Definition," he goes on to say, "means defining one thing in terms of something else…," "constructing … a 'theory' of something …," and "having a clear idea of the thing" and "its relations to other things as well."

The avowed purpose of this strategy is first to settle on the sense or senses in which the word "art" is to be used and second, having done this, to investigate the nature of the activity to which "art" so defined refers. It is not immediately clear how "proper" and "improper" usages are to be distinguished or what sort of investigation into the nature of art Collingwood envisages. But for the present let us notice a distinction that we are likely to overlook. An attempt to state the meaning of a word, whether by description, stipulation, or some other method, is ordinarily called a "definition.' By "definition" in other words we commonly mean the definition of words, and what Collingwood describes as settling on a proper usage of the word "art" we are inclined to think a "definition" of "art.' But particular attention must be drawn to the fact that Collingwood himself uses the word "definition" in a different sense, not as a statement of the meaning of a word but as an investigation into the nature of the thing (activity, process, concept, word, etc.) to which a word may refer. Wherever ambiguity threatens, let us call definition in this sense "real definition," a definition whose purpose it is to state in one way or another—by a whole range of methods that philosophers do not always distinguish (analysis, synthesis, division, classification, etc.)—the nature of a thing. The quite different activity of defining words we may call "verbal definition.'

I shall have reason, very shortly, to modify and to make more precise this tentative description of the two stages into which Collingwood divides his answer to "What is art?" But setting aside for the moment this task, let us consider a much simpler matter: the precise locations in the text of the Principles of what I have defined in a preliminary way as Collingwood's "verbal" and "real" definitions of art. Alan Donagan's answer, which I take to be the generally accepted one (certainly it is the only explicit one), is that Collingwood's verbal definition, or account of "proper usage," consists of a brief history of the word "art" up to the present usage "in the modern European critical tradition" and comes in the introduction prior to Book I. What Collingwood calls his "definition" of art (and what I have called, tentatively, a "real" definition) is then presumed to begin at the outset of Book I.

This reading seems to me open to two objections, the second of which is fatal. First, the brevity of Collingwood's verbal definition, as Donagan construes it, is incompatible with Collingwood's declared purpose. Admittedly, an account of usage or verbal definition need not be a lengthy affair. It may consist for example of an arbitrary assignment of meaning or of a brief report of established usage. But Collingwood promises that his account of usage will tell us not merely in what senses the word "art" is and ought to be used, but also in what senses it ought not to be used and, most important, why. Contrary to Donagan, an account of "proper usage" for Collingwood consists not merely of a brief lexical or historical description of various usages, but of something else as well: a critical examination of the theory or theories of art that underlie these usages.

Now if Collingwood's account of usage is, in its nature, something that cannot be brief, then it seems unlikely that it can be contained in the brief space of Collingwood's introduction to the Principles. Indeed, Donagan shows himself aware of this.'Despite his historical narrative of how the aesthetic usage of the word 'art' emerged, he [Collingwood] did not explain how he discriminated that usage from its fellows.' Donagan then devotes considerable space to supplying what he takes to be the missing explanation, an explanation which, evidently, he thinks implicit in what for him is Collingwood's "definition" of art in Book I. But here arises my second objection; for the assumption that Collingwood's account of usage is confined to the introduction prior to Book I and that his "definition" of art begins in Book I seems to me entirely dubious. No feature of the Principles has more entirely escaped notice than the one to which I am about to draw attention. The argument of Book I, I submit, is not Collingwood's attempt to construct a "definition" or "theory" of art, as virtually all Collingwood's readers have supposed, but nothing more nor less than the promised account of "proper usage" itself. The point is made frequently throughout Book I, but for reasons of space I shall cite only one instance of it.

[W]e are still dealing with what are called questions of fact, or what in the first chapter were called questions of usage, not questions of theory. We shall not be trying to build up an argument which the reader is asked to examine and criticize, and accept if he finds no fatal flaw in it.… We shall be trying as best we can to remind ourselves of facts well known to us all: such facts as this, that on occasions of a certain kind we actually do use the word art or some kindred word to designate certain kinds of things.…

The work of constructing a "definition" or "theory" of art, in turn, comes not in Book I of the Principles but in Books II and III.

The empirical and descriptive work of Book I left us with the conclusion that art proper, as distinct from amusement or magic, was (i) expressive (ii) imaginative. Both these terms, however, awaited definition: we might know how to apply them (that being a question of usage, or the ability to speak not so much English as the common tongue of European peoples), but we did not know to what theory concerning the thing so designated this application might commit us. It was to fill this gap in our knowledge that we went on to the analytical work of Book II. (italics mine).

Citing as conclusive evidence Collingwood's contention in Book I that the work of art is something made "in the mind, and there only," many writers, perhaps the majority, have defended what may be called the "CroceCollingwood" interpretation of the Principles. But others, attempting to reconcile Books II and III with Book I, have insisted, on the contrary, that Collingwood specifically denies that art has no "bodily" and "publicly accessible" existence.'Assimilating Collingwood's views to those of Croce," writes one commentator, "runs the risk of seriously misreading The Principles of Art (and very likely Collingwood's major works as well).' But if what I have said is true, all such quibbles and disputes may be seen to rest, at least in part, on a premise that is demonstrably unwarranted; for if Book I is not a definition of art in the first place, it is obviously false to suppose that everything said in the later books needs to be shown to be compatible with Book I.

II.

The traditional reading of Collingwood's Principles may, however, be resurrected on another point. It will not have escaped the reader's notice that even if, as I have argued, what Collingwood calls his "definition" or "theory" of art does not come until Books II and HI, Collingwood's actual strategy is quite different. For a theory is propounded in Book I, surely. An aesthetic doctrine—we may call it the "mental-only" doctrine—is implied more or less directly in Collingwood's analysis of what he calls "proper usage.' It is thus that the following commentators, for example, have written:

We must appreciate that it is an essential feature of the Croce-Collingwood thesis that not only can the artist make works of art to himself, but that he may be in the situation in which he can only make works of art to himself.

And—here is perhaps the most distinctive characteristics of the Croce-Collingwood theory—when the part process is completed in the artist's mind; when the final artistic intuition is present to his consciousness, the process of expression is also complete: for the intuition is the expression.

For evidence of what Wollheim and Hospers are saying it is only necessary to turn to Book I itself where, in spite of admitting, for example, the existence of "colours there in painting," Collingwood insists that all such "sensuous parts" do not exist "objectively" in the work of art, which is to say independently of a perceiving subject, but are always "imagined" or, as he is wont to say, "solely in the artist's head.' Therefore, it may confidently be asserted, let us simply assume that Book I is a "definition" of art. Indeed, let us assume that it is a "definition" in precisely the sense that Collingwood himself defines the word "definition" in his Essay on Philosophical Method, that is to say, as a "real definition" as opposed to analysis of a word, term, or expression.

How should I reply to this way of reading Collingwood? Should I abandon my thesis that there is nonetheless a good reason for thinking Book I an account of usage as opposed to a "definition"? Certainly not. The distinction between Collingwood's account of usage in Book I and his definition of art in Books II and HI, I suggest, may be cogently and faithfully reconstructed as a distinction between two species of verbal definition: one essentially restrictive and based on established critical usages, the other essentially nonrestrictive and based on established philosophical usage. Turning first to Collingwood's account of usage in Book I, the notoriously indefinite and confusing meaning of "art," Collingwood tells us, is not to be legislated according to a "private" rule, but is to be adopted by an analysis of conceptions underlying the word in established critical usage. We must, as Collingwood expresses it, settle on a meaning that both "fits onto common usage" and, at the same time, "clarifies" and "systematizes" ideas we already possess. Note, especially, that "clarification" and "systemization" mean, in this instance, arriving at a stipulation the application and logical consequences of which are at least clear (even if queried in Collingwood's later account) and which does not transgress the usage of art critics and other knowledgeable persons.

Proceeding in this way Collingwood ousts from the entangled set of usages of which the established critical usage of "art" consists what he calls the "distorting" idea that a work of art is something susceptible to an exhaustive analysis per genus et differentiam and adopts precisely the opposite idea, i. e., that art is something whose individuality defeats analysis in this sense. And all this is done, again, without at any point stepping outside of what is in Collingwood's view the realm of established critical usage. The argument of Book I may thus, to this extent, be likened to a disjunctive syllogism based on—or "restricted" to—various established usages of the word art. The syllogism begins with the disjunctive premise "we mean by 'art' in established critical usage one of two things—'craft' or 'expression.'" The craft alternative is then eliminated, leaving only one other established usage, that according to which art is "expression.'

Now if this description of Book I is roughly true, then Donagan's explanation of what makes critical usage the "proper" usage for Collingwood cannot be correct. To be sure, Collingwood begins by assuming the existence of an established critical usage, as Donagan insists. But it is certainly false to say that he assumes such usage to be "aesthetically proper," leaving the way open, as it were, to construct (in Book I) what Donagan calls a "definition of the word 'art'" when it is used "aesthetically.' Collingwood's approach is exactly the opposite: it is assumed, precisely, that critics are not exempt from the ambiguities and false implications that plague the common usage of "art.' Only once various kinds of "art falsely so called" are "cleared away," Collingwood tells us, can the proper usage of the word art be brought to light.'We [critics and the like] are apt nowadays to think about most problems including those of art, in terms of economics or psychology," writes Collingwood, "and both ways of thinking tend to subsume the philosophy of art under the philosophy of craft.…' Old usages "cling to our minds like drowning men, and so jostle the present meaning that we can only distinguish it from them by the most careful analysis.'

More important for present purposes, the foregoing brings clearly to light the distinction Collingwood means to draw between his account of usage in Book I and his definition of art in Books II and III. In contrast to the argument of Book I, the argument of Book II is, precisely, unrestricted by the established usage of critics and the like. The verbal and conceptual territory in which Book II operates, Collingwood tells us, is bounded only by established philosophical usage and conceptions.

In Book II, therefore, I shall make a fresh start. I shall try to work out a theory of imagination and of its place in the structure of experience as a whole, by developing what has already been said about it by well-known philosophers. In doing this I shall make no use whatever of anything contained in Book I.

Indeed, in "developing what has already been said," Collingwood frequently has cause to go quite beyond the realm of established philosophical usage to stipulate entirely new meanings for old words and even to invent entirely new words. Thus the word "imagination" is wrenched from its established range of meanings in philosophy to denote an "act of attention" in which the momentary flux of immediate and undifferentiated sensation, "charged with emotion" is fixed long enough to form, for example, an idea of this particular grief, this particular warmth, this particular pain, and so on. Similarly, the word "language" is completely redefined to denote the "bodily expression of emotion" that accompanies all such acts of attention or "imagination.' Last but not least, the term "psychical expression" is freshly minted to denote the "involuntary" and "wholly unconscious" bodily acts, the "distortions of the face" expressing "pain," "slackening of the muscles and cold pallor of the skin" expressing "fear," and so on, that are said to accompany the sentient being's immediate experience of sensuous flux.

Fortunately, I am under no obligation to unravel the intricacies of this elaborate homespun terminology. My purpose is merely to show that there is an obvious and legitimate distinction between Collingwood's account of "proper usage" and his "definition.' The former, I suggest, aims at narrowing or "restricting" an established and already relatively specialized critical usage; the latter, at refining and even at altering established philosophical usage to the end of constructing a philosophical theory of art. There is no deadly rivalry between these "theories"; indeed, neither counts as Collingwood's definitive position. Book I identifies what is the established usage of "art," at least, what is that part of it for which no demonstrable falsehoods can be found; Book II analyzes the word from a philosophical perspective; Book III is then, as Collingwood puts it, the "union" of these. That is to say, it is an account of what, in light of philosophical analysis, the established usage of "art" ought to look like. Thus Book III, we may say, is a new, improved "theory" of art: not a "philosophical" theory exactly, but an attempt to provide, in light of philosophical analysis, a new conceptual underpinning for the work of artists, performers, and audiences in England "here and now.' Essentially, then, established usages and conceptions undergo revision twice: first in Book I in which demonstrable falsehoods (vestiges of craft theory) are removed; second in Book III in which the philosophical implications of Book II are brought to bear. And it is the result of these revisions that counts as Collingwood's definitive theory. It is perhaps, more than anything else, I suggest, in failing to appreciate this fact that readers have fallen prey to the imprecision and ambiguity in Collingwood's use of the words "definition" and "theory" and have mistaken his account of usage in Book I for his "definition" or "theory" of art.

III.

The misconception to which I have called attention, however, is by no means fatal to traditional assumptions. For it will be insisted that even if Books II and HI are independent of Collingwood's analysis of established usage in Book I, ultimately they serve merely to confirm and to perfect tendencies of thought already implicit in that analysis. The trump is the following passage from Book III.

[A] work of art in the proper sense of that phrase is not an artifact, not a bodily or perceptible thing fabricated by the artist, but something existing solely in the artist's head.… No reader, I hope, has been inattentive enough to imagine that … this doctrine has been forgotten or denied.

This passage obviously lends considerable weight to the view that it is Collingwood's purpose to defend without possibility of appeal the "mental only" theory of art throughout the Principles. Against this, what have I to say in defense of my interpretation?

I should begin by noticing, quite apart from this passage, that I am not alone in the view that Collingwood changes his mind in Book III.'In Book III Collingwood quietly relinquished the sense of 'imaginary' in which an imaginary object exists only in the head," writes Donagan. But I should want to go further than Donagan here. I should want to say, first, by reference to Book II, not merely that the mental only line is "relinquished," but also that it is replaced by almost the contrary position. Art is "language," argues Collingwood in Books II and III, and "language" he particularly stresses is something which is "bodily" in nature.

[L]anguage is simply bodily expression of emotion, dominated by thought in its primitive form as consciousness.

Every kind of language is in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that dance is the mother of all languages.

[E]very kind or order of language (speech, gesture, and so forth) was an offshoot from an original language of total bodily gesture.… each one of us, whenever he expresses himself, is doing so with his whole body, and is thus actually talking in this "original" language of total bodily gesture.

And I should want to say, second, in reference to Book III, that far from being "quiet," the change is explicitly avowed in the following explicit criticism of Book I.

On the theory of art propounded in this book, the audience seems at first sight to become inessential. It [the audience] seems to disappear altogether from the province of art as such.… If the implications of the expressive theory had been completely grasped in the case of the artist, there would have been no need to fall back on the technical theory in discussing his relation with his audience.

In Book I the process by which emotions are clarified and expressed is said to be an entirely internal affair: "a work of art may be completely created when it has been created as a thing whose only existence is in the artist's mind.…' "The actual making of the tune is something that goes on in the head, and nowhere else.…' Its physical and publicly accessible counterpart is thus conceived of as something which is not the work of art, but merely something that conveys the work of art to the outside world by standing for it: "what is written or printed on the music paper is not the tune," we are told.'It is only something which when studied intelligently will enable others (or himself, when he has forgotten it) to construct the tune for themselves in their own heads.' And since it is not necessary to the existence of a work of art that it be made public, the artist has an audience "only in so far as people hear him expressing himself, and understand what they hear him saying.'

But all this changes in Book II and ipso facto in Collingwood's translation of the results of Book II into the more ordinary nomenclature of artists, performers, and audiences in Book III. The making of a work of art, says Collingwood, is a bodily activity from its inception. Art is language and language "simply bodily expression of emotion," "a specialized form of bodily gesture," and so on. There is no question of having to "externalize" it in order to make it publicly accessible. As Collingwood expresses it, there is no need "to fall back upon the technical theory" in order to explain how works of art are made publicly accessible. And elsewhere: "There is no question of 'externalizing' an inward experience which is complete in itself and by itself. There are two experiences, an inward and imaginative one called seeing and an outward or bodily one called painting, which in the painter's life are inseparable, and form one single and indivisible experience …'

Of course this hardly settles matters. Collingwood changes his mind to be sure. But what of the puzzling passage I cited at the outset? The fact of the matter is that it is precisely having asserted the "indivisibility" of the imaginative and the bodily experience that Collingwood goes on to insist that the mental-only doctrine from Book I has "not been forgotten or denied.' Thus we should say not that Collingwood changes his mind in a manner that is conscious and deliberate but, quite the opposite, that he changes it in a manner that renders his theory inconsistent. Richard Wollheim writes:

In book I of the Principles of Art Collingwood asserts that the work of art is something imaginary: it exists in, and only in, the artist's head or mind. In book III he denies that the relation of the audience is non-existent or inessential. Collingwood goes on to say that these two views—one an assertion, the other a denial—which jointly constitute his aesthetic, are not inconsistent: though superficially they might seem so.

But let us read further. The important question, Collingwood goes on to say, is whether the "solely" mental-only work may yet be "somehow necessarily connected" with the bodily work. And in the pages that follow, Collingwood reviews his definition of art (Book II) and is drawn ineluctably to the conclusion that there is indeed a "connection" and, what is more, that it is a connection in light of which the mental-only doctrine cannot be sustained.

The work of artistic creation is not a work performed in any exclusive or complete fashion in the mind of the person whom we call the artist. That idea is a delusion bred of individualistic psychology together with a false view of the relation not so much between body and mind as between experience at the psychical level and experience at the level of thought, (italics mine)

Thus, significantly, Collingwood's attempt to resurrect the mental-only doctrine proves abortive. But more needs to be said than this, surely, lest Collingwood's argument should appear only more perversely erratic and irremedably inconsistent than before. Why, having defended throughout Book II the view that art is something bodily in nature, should Collingwood even contemplate the idea that it is something "solely" in the head? And why, having contemplated it, does he then abandon it?

The answer to the first question is this: that Collingwood's description of art as something both "bodily" and "inward" or "imaginative" in nature is equivocal, and equivocal in a way that lends superficial plausibility to the doctrine that the work of art exists "in the head.' The "bodily" work and its "imaginative" counterpart, Collingwood insists, are "indivisible" and yet, curiously, are "two experiences," not one. The work of art, he says, is something that "exists solely in the head" and yet, at base, something that is "necessarily connected with" its bodily counterpart. Collingwood seems to want to have it both ways. He wants to say (and this is especially clear in the second example) that the "bodily" work is a necessary condition for the occurrence of the mental work but is not the mental work (or work of art proper) itself—an interpretation which echoes the doctrine of Book I. But he also wants to say something quite different: that far from belonging to two quite separate worlds, res cogitans and res extensa, the mental and bodily work are two aspects—the "psychical" and the "imaginative"—of one and the same thing—"experience"—a position that is consistent with Collingwood's definition of art in Book II.

Collingwood, I say, is not immediately aware of the difference between these two sorts of statements; and it is in this unfortunate context that the opportunity presents itself to suggest that there is yet a grain of truth in "common usage," a sense in which it is compatible with the philosophical work of Book II. Certainly there is such a sense. We should not identify the work of art with "fabrication" or mere physical exemplification; nor should we suppose that "imagination" is an activity in any sense directed towards an end which is known in advance, as in craft. These two things remain quite true in Book III, but they do not justify, obviously, the assertion that the work of art is something "solely" mental in nature.

But turning now to the second question, ultimately Collingwood is aware of an inconsistency in his position. As he expresses it, the idea that the work of art is something "solely" or "exclusively" mental implies "a false view of the relation not so much between body and mind as between experience at the psychical level and experience at the level of thought.' The reference here is, of course, to the definition of art as "language" and, as such, as something intrinsically "sensuous" or "bodily.' What is "sensuous" or "bodily" at the "psychical level"—our immediate experience of the world—Collingwood reminds us in Book III, is not "left behind," as it were, by the act of attention which makes us aware of it. Rather, the bodily component is retained at the higher "imaginative" level, but now in the form of "language" or "art.' It is thus, I suggest, that we are urged to think of the work of art not as an amalgam or interaction of two separate worlds, the "mental" work existing in the artist's head and its exemplification existing somewhere else in an entirely distinct physical mode, but as a relationship holding between the "sensuous" and "imaginative" levels of experience, which in respect to their "matter," as Collingwood expresses it, are one and the same thing.' We may say with Collingwood and, what is more, in agreement with Book I, that the work of art is "wholly and entirely imaginative," that it is something which is made "deliberately and responsibly" and yet without a plan. But as Collingwood ultimately stresses, this does not entitle us to say that it is something made "exclusively" in the head.

We continue to feel of course that a distinction between the mental and the physical is in some sense warranted—indeed Collingwood himself continues to suppose it—and it is by no means clear on Collingwood's monistic account of "experience" how this distinction is to be made, if at all. But I do not think my thesis is dented. The contention that Collingwood consciously and deliberately changes his mind about the mental-only doctrine of Book I is not, after all, incompatible with the fact that his new theory is not precisely worked out. Nor is it inconsistent with the fact that he initially sees a partial or superficial consistency between the provisional doctrine of Book I and the more definitive doctrine of Books II and HI. To be sure, Collingwood may be justly criticized for being vague and imprecise and, as a result, for providing grist for the mills of numerous irreconcilable interpretations. But if my reading has warrant, in one important respect all these interpretations may be called into question. For it is clear that the dualistic tendency to see the mental and bodily aspects of the work of art as completely different entities is consciously and deliberately abandoned, and with it the doctrine that the work of art or imagination is something done exclusively in the head.

IV.

My account of Collingwood's argument may be thought open to one final objection. I have suggested that Collingwood rules out entirely the place of technique in art. But the opposite view is widely held. As one commentator expresses it: "Collingwood always stressed that technique was necessary to art, where technique is understood as the control which enables an artist to create exactly what he wants.' Donagan advocates a qualified version of the view, saying that Collingwood believed craft to be "necessary" for the "best" art. This interpretation, I wish briefly to show, is undoubtedly false.

To be sure, Collingwood appears in his commentary on the theory of "poetic" or "artistic" technique to concede that technique or skill is, at the very least, a necessary condition of the best art if not, indeed, a necessary condition of any work of art "whatever.' It should be clear on closer examination, however, that the matter is not quite as simple as this. When proponents of the theory of poetic technique say that craft or technique is necessary, what they are really saying, according to Collingwood, is two things. In one sense they are using the words "technique," "craft," and "skill" to mean a "directed process" or "an effort … directed upon a certain end," saying that these things are necessary to art. But in another sense, which in Collingwood's view they do not clearly distinguish from the latter, they mean to say that "craft" is an activity in which specific plans are laid out in advance and precisely followed, and that craft in this sense is necessary to art.

Now when Collingwood writes that it is quite true that craft or skill is a necessary condition of art, initially he does not say to which sense of the word craft he means to give his approval. And this perhaps has misled many readers. The key word "skill" in this context must be allowed "to pass for the moment unchallenged," he writes; and the assertion that "craft" is necessary, he says, is true, but "true" when "properly understood.' But the matter is soon cleared up. Collingwood goes on to argue against the doctrine that craft or skill is necessary in the second sense, that is, as a means of achieving a specific end, and for the proposition that it is necessary in the first sense, that is to say, as an "effort" or "directed process" which is conscious and deliberate but unplanned. "What he [the artist] wants to say," Collingwood concludes, "is not present to him as an end towards which means have to be devised; …'

But further qualification needs to be made. Properly speaking, we are told, "craft," "technique," "skill," and the like are words which should not be used to refer to the "directed" but "unplanned" nature of art. The latter is "no doubt a thing worthy of our attention; but we are only frustrating our study of it in advance if we approach it in the determination to treat it as if it were the conscious working-out of means to the achievement of a conscious purpose, or in other words technique.' "Technique" used in its proper sense must, in other words, refer to something which is planned. We are compelled to conclude, therefore, that "technique" in its proper sense, or "the control which enables an artist to create exactly what he wants," is not, for Collingwood, a necessary condition of art.

But there is yet a further point in need of clarification.'[T]he description of the unwritten poem as an end to which his technique is a means is false," writes Collingwood, except in those instances where "the work of art is also a work of craft.' Just as the joiner "knows the specifications of the table he is about to make" so the artist, where he is also a craftsman, we are told, knows the specifications of the work of art he is about to make. Collingwood seems to be admitting here the necessity of technique—at least in those cases where, as he puts it, "the work of art is also a work of craft.' But we should examine this position more closely. Collingwood sharply distinguishes between "making" in the sense in which the craftsman makes, which he calls "fabricating," and "making" which is unique to the production of works of art. Making in the latter sense is not "fabricating" but "creating," that is, making without foreknowledge of the outcome or making which is "conscious and voluntary" but "non-technical." Now, to be sure, the artist who typically makes in the latter sense can also, if he is competent to do so, "make" in the quite different sense in which the craftsman does. But an artist who chooses to specify exactly how a work of art is to be made must be presumed, in Collingwood's view, already to have created it: "the artist has no idea what the experience is which demands expression until he has expressed it." Fabrication, or making in the sense in which the craftsman makes, therefore, is extraneous to "creating" and should on no account be thought necessary to it. No doubt things "created" can also be, in a manner of speaking, things "fabricated," but we must conclude that what makes such things the one, for Collingwood, is a separate matter from what makes them the other."Expression," as Collingwood puts it, "is an activity of which there can be no technique."

Collingwood is open to criticism, no doubt, because we surely do use "craft," "technique," and like terms quite legitimately to refer to things which cannot be made according to exact specifications. This is obvious, for example, where the thing being made is a dugout canoe, an apple pie, or a leather shoe. No one tree, apple, or piece of leather is identical to any other; so we can never know precisely, that is, we can never specify exhaustively, what the end result of working with such material will be. We are very often compelled to revise our plans in midstream. But to return to the point at issue, if we feel such criticisms apt, it is only because Collingwood uses the word "technique" in a sense that obliges him precisely to deny that it is a necessary condition of art.

v.

In his Essay on Philosophical Method, Collingwood writes that philosophical thinking is a "dialectical process where the initial position is modified again and again as difficulties in it come to light." Certainly, we can say this much about the Principles, that having stated his position in a provisional way—before he has established the truth, adequacy, and relevance of its premises—Collingwood is later compelled to revise it. We read in Book I, for example, that "the actual making of the tune is (as we commonly say) something that goes on in his [the artist's] head and there only." But all this is revised in Book II, and it is not until Book III that we are given—again in the nomenclature of artists, audiences, and performers—what Collingwood thinks a definitive and practically applicable theory of art. There we read that the work of art is, precisely, not something that is "performed in any exclusive or complete fashion in the mind of the person whom we call the artist." It is to statements such as these, not to the argument of Book I, that readers who wish to understand Collingwood's "definition" or "theory" of art must give their unaccustomed attention.

Of course, above all else we should want to know whether Collingwood is right, a question that I have not here sought to address. But if my argument has warrant, most of the criticisms offered by critics against Collingwood's theory miss the mark, being not criticisms of his definitive position, but criticisms of the various tentative positions that precede it. To that extent my reading may be viewed as urging that the key question, whether Collingwood was right, be examined afresh.