The Principles of Art

This is a classic of philosophy of art, but the Case Press version is a very short abridgement - do not purchase it. This edition is also misleadingly advertised in that it nowhere tells you that it is not the whole book, although I suppose if you read carefully you can note that the book they are selling you is only 18 pages, much shorter than Collingwood's original.

I decided to read R.G. Collingwood's The Principles of Art (1938) to move toward rounding out my reading of Collingwood, having recently completed his Autobiography and his The New Leviathan (reviews forthcoming on both). I started The Principles of Art thinking I might learn about beauty in music, painting, or literature and some such. Having read a good deal of Collingwood by now, I should have known better.Collingwood is not a systems thinker in the way of many great philosophers, such as Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, to name but a few in the history of philosophy who have constructed philosophic edifices with a room for every major issue. No, Collingwood isn't a system builder, but his is a systematic thinker. When he approaches a topic, be it history (The Idea of History) or civic life (The New Leviathan) or art, he lays his foundations very deep, sufficient to support the heavy weight of argument that he places upon those foundations. For instance, in The Principles of Art, he considers the history of analyzing sensation (Hobbes to Kant) and the innate expressiveness possessed by every human being and how that innate expressiveness prompts the unique human capacity for language.In the first part of the book, Collingwood distinguishes art from craft, and he discusses the creations that we often refer to as art but that he excludes from the domain of art, such as amusement and magic. "Magic"? Yes, magic. But here we learn from Collingwood the archeologist and folklorist that magic isn't for the manipulation of creation by some mystical force (although some few may have believed this), but he describes it as an enactment of rituals to arouse certain emotional responses from those performing or observing the rituals. Magic uses a representation of reality to arouse emotions important for various undertakings. Collingwood's argument is an intriguing and persuasive understanding of what we would otherwise consider irrational and useless behavior.Collingwood's explication of magic is but one of the distinctions and definitions that Collingwood makes in the first section of the book. Early on we're introduced to the carefully drawn distinctions that he makes with his lucid prose. Indeed, I'd like to quiz Collingwood about his writing: Is it art? Or is it a craft? Is all rhetoric a craft driven by the end of exhortation? In any event, he writes engagingly (except when he drops in obscure Latin phrases), and his use of everyday examples and metaphors makes his prose not only readable but entertaining.But while the first part of the book is intriguing, it's only a prelude to deep dive found in Part II. In the second part of the book, he delves into issues of sensation, emotions, imagination, experience, attention, consciousness, thought, intellect--and then the foundations of language! He also discusses what he describes as "the corruption of consciousness" (shades of Aristotle, Sartre (who published later), and C. Terry Warner here). But we can follow Collingwood through this palace of complex terms because he constructs his arguments brick-by-brick on top of his deep foundations. He thereby creates a substantial work of . . . well, art, even if he would disagree with my use of the term. As readers of his work on history might not be surprised to learn, he concludes that art is found in the mind of the artist who seeks to express (not just arouse) emotions. All art--and not just literature--is an expression of emotions that uses a form of expression, a language, if you will. he argues that language grows out of expression and that art is a language of expression (whether words, music, painting, etc.). His contention strikes me as brilliant and insightful.In the third part of the book, Collingwood ties up some loose ends. He refers only rarely to actual works of art, although he does spend some time discussing and praising T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as an exemplary work from the time Collingwood was beginning his career as an academic philosopher.I could go on at some length about this book, as I've only given the briefest tour of Collingwood's creation that I think merits careful study. A student of philosophy tells me that Collingwood is considered outdated in his analysis of these issues. Perhaps so. I'm not in a position to judge because I'm not widely read in this field. But even if so, I contend that Collingwood has laid down too many fundamental and fortified arguments to ignore. If there are more persuasive thinkers writing about these issues, I want to read them. In the meantime, I'll appreciate and benefit from this Collingwood masterpiece.

It came in good condition and fast.

This version of Collingwood's Principles of Art is not acceptable. There is no Table of Contents, so if you're looking for a specific chapter, you just have to scroll and scroll and scroll. Even worse: Chapters VIII through XIII seem to be missing entirely.

This is an excellent book. I have been using it in my lectures and tutorials

I gave this 3 stars because he had some interesting points, but for the most part I didn't get a lot of what he was saying. I was annoyed by how he would sum up a point in Greek, or French - with no translation. Maybe I should know those languages, but I don't, so I missed out on much. I wanted there to be a more succinct explanation of what he was analyzing. I kept waiting for it to be stated as such, but it didn't occur. This book did not help me to solidify my definition of art, if anything, I am all the more confused. I am a visual artist and therefor I see the big picture. Analyzing is not my strength, so I will leave the analyzing to those of you for whom it is.

I'm reviewing ISBN 978-1-4733-0265-5. I don't know what this is, but, as other reviewers have said, it's not Collingwood's Principles of Art. That book comprises approximately 350 pages. This seems to be a reprint of some kind of 18-page lecture, but there's absolutely no original publication data, so it's not possible to tell without doing archival research. (When somebody reprints an extremely old text and sells it on Amazon, it's simply shameful not to include the original publication information.) This little booklet, which is about as thick as a brochure you'd get at a national park, absolutely should not be sold as Collingwood's Principles of Art, and I'm going to have to figure out how to return it.

Great scholarly book for a serious art scholar.

This order does not have any worth to reader.Who all will read this book, quite often admirer of Art such as Artist, Professor, etc. They all demand the main book. this 5-6 page booklet have no use. This is misleading product with waste f money and time to wait for order.

Meine Bewertung bezieht sich nicht auf Collingwoods Werk, sondern auf den konkreten Artikel, der der Artikelbeschreibung nicht entspricht. Es handelt sich hierbei nicht um das gesamte Buch in Taschenbuchformat, sondern um eine drastisch zusammengekürzte, 7 Seiten umfassende, unpaginierte Version.

I'm afraid to say that I've not read a weaker theorisation about the nature of art since reading Tolstoy's 'What is Art?'. Collingwood says in the introduction that there are two typical problems with answers to this question - there are authors who know art when they see it, but can't theorise cogently about it; or authors who can theorise cogently, but don't actually know what they are talking about. Collingwood seems to be a rare example of both...So here we are: "What the artist is trying to do is to express a given emotion... A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. [p282]... Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art. [p.285]" To arrive at such a vacuous conclusion after nearly 300 pages sure should have been a warning sign to the author that they'd lost the plot somewhere along the line.

This is more like a flyer rather than a real book, It is thinner than a magazine and so small you'll need a magnifying glass to be able to read it.This is a flyer, not a book.

I thought it was worth mentioning, since I'm not seeing anything on the page except the page count, which isn't something I ordinarily think to compare. This particular edition is not the entirety of Collingwood's Principles of Art, but rather some sort of severely abridged version. As far as I can tell, it is a sufficient summary of everything he covers in the actual book, but if you're wanting the full text, check out one of the other options available to you.