Collingwood's Everyday Aesthetics

Any adequate account of aesthetic experience must be able to accommodate the pervasiveness of aesthetic experiences in everyday life. While writers on everyday aesthetics have frequently taken inspiration from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, my aim in this article is to show that there is another work in the history of the discipline that provides a much better account of the diversity of everyday aesthetic experiences: R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. Whereas Dewey limits aesthetic experience to the fulfilment of an interaction with an aspect of the world, Collingwood identifies it with an imaginative activity that affords a conscious awareness and understanding of the felt character of one’s experiences in their individuality. Not only, I argue, does this capture the diversity of aesthetic experiences, but it also provides a more informative account of what makes those experiences aesthetic than its more recent competitors.