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Collingwood: The Great Philosophers (The Great Philosophers Series)

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First off, it should be noted that in spite of the title this little guide doesn't offer an overview of Collingwood's life or thought. It's an attempt to grapple with and make sense of, rather, the core contentions developed in one of Collingwood's most widely read but widely misunderstood books, The Principles of Art.

The writing is exemplary for its clarity, elegance, and precision. It covers more ground and offers more illumination than most lengthy philosophical commentaries, and does it in just over 60 pages. Without simply paraphrasing or summarizing, Ridley identifies the central insights of Collingwood's text, and manages both to make them clear and to show how they could be and have been misunderstood. Collingwood's contentions about "art proper" aren't attempts to define the "essence" of art, but are aimed rather to show precisely the extent to which generalizations about art are useless. An artwork manages to be not a "certain kind of thing" but a "certain thing" - an expression that communicates precisely a unique feeling for how things are. Moreover, the specificity of the work of art has an ethical and political lesson, that teaches us about the dangers of a certain kind of willful confusion, whereby we allow ourselves to forego getting clear about our actual situation and allow instead for our thoughts to be taken over by cliches and slogans.

Collingwood's "expressive theory of art" is easily dismissed, and often is by contemporary writers on aesthetics, if it is read to mean that art takes the generic feelings of the artist and manages to give them a sensuous form so that the audience can share them, or if it is read as an attempt to define art by identifying characteristics by which all and only artworks can be readily picked out, or when his idealism is misunderstood to imply that the true work of art is mental and separate from the specific sensible medium by which it is made public. Ridley's aim here is to show that Collingwood's approach cannot so easily be dismissed, and that in spite of some obscurities introduced into the text by Collingwood's broader philosophical commitments, his work remains relevant not only to aesthetics but to education and ethics. Essential reading for anyone interested in Collingwood, and specifically his philosophical aesthetics; highly recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy and especially in how to write illuminating philosophical commentary.