Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both reject the Romantic notion of the artist summoning up his private ruminations and reflections to share them with the world. In his own way, each thinker postulates a communion that occurs between the artist and his public. Both advocate breaking the barrier between artist and public and allowing the public to have a hand in the creation of art howbeit in very different ways. To understand their arguments, it’s essential to understand that both hold art has little to do with mimesis. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured according to the wishes of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expressing” (p. 17).
Merleau-Ponty also sees art as essentially a communicative enterprise. In the prologue to Sense and Non-Sense, he writes: “[T]he work of art begins to transmit an uninterrupted message.” But it becomes clear that his views on the matter are a far cry from Collingwood’s. “But the meaning of the work for the artist or the public cannot be stated except by the work itself: neither the thought which created it nor the thought which receives it is completely its own master” (p. 4). Thus, there is no message standing behind the artwork that can be divorced and independently toted around. The proof is in the pudding.
Who’s an artist? “The artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most men take part without really seeing it and who make it visible to the most ‘human’ among them” (18). Again, we detect the quasi-religious register of what he’s saying. The communion undertaken is almost mystical in its effectiveness and uniqueness and ineffability. Regarding this transformative originality, Merleau-Ponty writes: “he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before…‘Conception’ cannot precede ‘execution’….he returns to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built in order to know it” (p. 19).
Collingwood lingers on Eliot and calls “The Waste Land” the one great English poem of the century. He even returns to it at the end of the book and his reading of the poem furnishes Collingwood an elegiac and powerful coda. Merleau-Ponty looks to Cézanne’s paintings for an explanation of his life and theory of art. He focuses on the artists constant doubts regarding the success of his art. For since he was not omniscient, how could he hope to create universally valid work that expresses the world? He essayed to encapsulate the whole of experience in a brush-stroke.
As an example of “pure poetry“The Waste Land,” as an example of “pure poetry” teaches us what art must contain if it is to rise above the levels of entertainment and magic. “It must be prophetic” in the sense that it tells the audience “the secrets of their own hearts.” Here, Collingwood shatters romantic notions of what art means to artist. In doing so, he brings art into a more kinetic and alive symbiosis with the audience. “What he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets.” Rather, the artist becomes the “spokesman of his community.” He is necessary because “no community altogether knows its own heart and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come from that ignorance, the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness” (pp. 335-6).
On the one hand, the example he makes of the “Waste Land” shows that “pure” art acquires meaning when the prophetic potential of the poet is realized. Is this way, art functions – ought to function – as social critique. Thus, while Collingwood seems to ennoble the audience, he also diminishes their import. The prophetic function of the poet is part of what makes art “pure,” but it also deprives the public of any choice in the matter. The public remains an anonymous receiver of the poet’s condemnation and the cure. It’s tough medicine to swallow.
For Collingwood, then, the artist is to take on the role as a “public spokesman” who both diagnoses society and provides the antidote. The antidote is in the work of art itself. “Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness” (p. 336). Art, thus, is imbued with a critical social function in Collingwood’s system. The implication of this interpretation is that the antidote to a dead society is more art. Collingwood makes art curative. Could there be a more direct interaction between art and audience?
Collingwood uses “The Waste Land” to show that art must become prophetic if it wants to be more than merely entertainment or magic. It must condemn and warn and tell the audience the “secrets of their own hearts.” Here, we learn that the artist must be a man of his time and it touch with his public in a way that puts him in position of prominence. This is very different from what Merleau-Ponty has in mind. Yet Merleau-Ponty would agree with Collingwood when he goes against the Romantic concept of the artist by saying that, “what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets” (p. 335).
To be certain, Collingwood allows that letting the audience share in the aesthetic experience is potentially enriching for a said work of art. Following from his earlier arguments, Collingwood writes: “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 one in which an entire community participates: the artist or collective of artists, all his forbearers and the audience. These relations “strengthen and enrich” his work. Thus the audience is “not merely receptive, but collaborative too” (p. 324). But as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty takes the idea of audience-participation much further, by postulating that the audience’s interaction with the artwork is essential if it meaning is to be revealed.
There is a striking similarity in the optimism of both Merleau-Ponty and Collingwood. Both feel that art is capable of transforming society. For Collingwood, this is a curative function that art performs through behaving like prophecy. For Merleau-Ponty, the example of Cézanne, succeeding despite all his doubts, gives man hope. We can win if we accurately measure our “dangers and our task.”
In discussing Cézanne’s project, Merleau-Ponty’s language has an almost-religious quality at times. In distinction to Collingwood, he considers art to express the ineffable. As he writes: “The meaning of a work of art or of a theory is as inseparable from its embodiment as the meaning of a tangible thing – which is why the meaning can never be fully expressed” (p. 3): “Cézanne felt powerless because he wanted to express everything and yet was not God, as not omnipotent. He wanted to ‘make visible how the world touches us” (p. 19). Furthermore, Cézanne was impelled to express the meaning that lay hidden in objects: “Cézanne merely expressed what they (the objects{ wanted to say” (p. 21).
As such, Cézanne’s paintings express something hitherto unsaid. “The painter captures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things” (pp. 17-18). This is a move that Collingwood seems to resist. Instead, he writes that the poet more generally represents an experience. “The poet converts human experience into poetry not by first expurgating it, cutting out the intellectual elements and preserving the emotional, and then expressing this residue; but by fusing thought itself into emotion: thinking in a certain way and then expressing how it feels to think in that way” (p. 295). The ideal state that we reach is the “total imaginative experience.”
Fascinatingly enough, in discussing the “total imaginative experience,” Collingwood – writing ten years before Merleau-Ponty - takes Cézanne as his exemplar: “Cézanne began to paint like a blind man,” and showed the world that painting wasn’t a visual art since “Man paints with his hands, not with his eyes” (p. 144). But while they both hold Cezanne in high esteem, their views on how the audience partakes of the aesthetic experience have some crucial differences.
Though he claims that it’s impossible to read an artist’s work off his life, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t go as far as some later thinkers will. Ingeniously, he says that instead of reading an artist’s works off his life, we read his life off his works: “If Cézanne’s life seems to us to carry the seeds of his work within it, it is because we get to know his work first and see the circumstances of his life through it, charging them with a meaning borrowed from his work” (p. 20).
Merleau-Ponty seems to afford the public more power and decision-making authority than Collingwood. By empowering the audience’s role for the success of the artist and the artwork, Merleau-Ponty situates the artwork halfway between the creator and the receiver. In contrast, Collingwood is content to let art be the intellectualizing of emotion, which therefore makes it possible for Eliot to so effectively communicate society’s own secrets to itself.
His project, therefore, to “make visible how the world touches us” amounts to another perspective on viewing the world, if one with a strong affinity to philosophy. Though Merleau-Ponty doesn’t explicitly advance a relation-theory between the two in this essay, his entire project for this essay can be interpreted as a move to turn art into philosophy: to derive a metaphysics from art. Indeed, the implications that art holds for him indicate that a metaphysics lies behind every theory of painting (too strong!). But whereas Merleau-Ponty endorses and works off of this linkage, (this is perhaps just an axiom of his) Collingwood – also aware of its force – attempts to differentiate art from philosophy.
Cézanne’s work is rich with interpretive possibility. It can have radical even cataclysmic implications: for instance revealing “the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself” (p. 16). \This is the sort of radical meaning that a Cézanne painting can have and we understand. Art is far from impotent. As Collingwood says of the “Waste Land”: it expresses “the idea (not his alone) of the decay of our civilization, manifested outwardly by the breakdown of social structures and inwardly as a drying up of the emotional springs of life” (295), Merleau-Ponty finds similarly chilling meaning into Cézanne’s work: however, whereas it matters little to Collingwood whether or not this meaning is successfully communicated (it only matters what Eliot wrote with the intention of communicating), the artwork isn’t complete for Merleau-Ponty until its meaning has been successfully communicated.
A good reader or critic who follows the “obscure clarity” of a particular artist’s style, will discover “what the artist wanted to communicate” (pp. 19 -20). But he goes even further and suggests that the audience takes part in the work’s creation: “The painter can do no more than construct an image: he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives” (p. 19-20).
The most crucial point is that Cézanne for Merleau-Ponty isn’t the prophet that Eliot is for Collingwood. Rather, Cézanne is less of a preacher and more of a guide. The artist has been brought down to a very base, human level. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, is breaking from the Romantic tradition even more forcefully than Collingwood.
Where Eliot is a preacher, Cézanne is a visionary guide. In both of these cases, freedom is what allows the artist to communicate with his public. Furthermore, the logical consequence of this is that through the artwork, freedom is communicated to the public. By communicating freedom to the public, the artist endows them with the critical apparatus to appreciate his work. The relation between art and public couldn’t be more collaborative. “Yet, it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom, with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to
wait for the proof of his worth” (p. 25). For Collingwood reading Eliot, the only option in the face of the death of civilization is to create more art. For Merleau-Ponty interpreting Cézanne, in the face of potential failure, the only option is to strive to create.
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Bibliography:
Collingwood, R.C. The Principles of Art
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Sense and Non-Sense
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