The Artistic Expression of Feeling
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The Artistic Expression of Feeling Gary Kemp 1 Received: 11 December 2019 / Revised: 21 May 2020 / Accepted: 28 July 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms (distinguishing mood as well), and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting the discussion to the art of painting (and drawing), I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth. Keywords Aesthetics . Expression . Art . Emotion . Feeling . Dewey . Croce . Collingwood .
Langer . Berenson . Ducasse . Bosanquet . Gallese
We must not suppose that we first have a disembodied feeling, and then set out to find an embodiment adequate to it. In a word, imaginative expression creates the feeling in creating its embodiment, and the feeling so created cannot be otherwise expressed, but cannot otherwise exist, that in and through the embodiment which imagination has found for it. (Bosanquet 1915 p. 34) I think that the recent theory of artistic expression has displayed a somewhat misleading tendency of concentrating on facts or statements of the form ‘the work expresses E’, * Gary Kemp [email protected]
1
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Philosophia
where ‘E’ is an abstract singular term indicating an emotion. The problem is not that the thing expressed may be something altogether different from a mental state or process, as when it is said that the famous picture by Delacroix expresses the collective triumph of political liberty. Nor is the problem that in many cases, indeed many of the most captivating cases, the content expressed is too rarefied or idiosyncratic to admit of verbal capture, or that in many cases E must be particular rather than general, or that successful reference to the emotional content of a work requires an indexical or demonstrative referring to the work. These things are often true, and no one, except perhaps a follower of Nelson Goodman (1968), would deny them; versions of these points recur often in writing on artistic expression since Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic of 1902 and presumably earlier. The problem is that this tendency—even where the expressive content of a work of art is restricted to affective mental states and processes—has led to an
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