Is art uncontrollable madness or a tool for organizing emotions and promoting social bonding?

Art is the expression and communication of human emotions, and while it’s often viewed as an irrational activity by some, others, like Tolstoy and Collingwood, interpret it positively. They believe that art plays an important role in exchanging or organizing emotions.

 

Art is often seen as the embodiment of human emotions. It allows us to express our complex inner feelings in visual, auditory, or literary form, which can help us unburden ourselves and connect with others. Throughout history, art has been seen as a window into our most primal and authentic emotions, but this association between art and emotion has also been used to reveal its negative side. Art was often seen as an irrational, uncontrolled, and even insane activity. For example, artists sometimes challenge social norms or order, creating unconventional works that don’t conform to common moral standards. Art was perceived as something unstable, dangerous, and beyond reason.
However, there is also a long tradition of positive interpretations of the connection between art and emotion. They believe that art has the power to enrich the human spirit and change society for the better. Tolstoy and Collingwood are two of the most prominent representatives of this position.
In Tolstoy’s view, just as thoughts need to be communicated to others, so do emotions. Art is the main means of communicating emotions to others. Artists think about the emotions they want to express, and then convey them through their work so that others can empathize with them. For Tolstoy, art is not just an expression of emotions, but an important medium for creating an inner bond between human beings through the exchange of emotions. However, the emotions that are conveyed must be of high quality and capable of leading a society in a good direction. Solidarity and brotherhood are such emotions. In this context, Tolstoy appreciated labor songs and folk tales, while he negatively evaluated the music of Liszt and the nihilistic poetry of Baudelaire. A piece of art that expresses good emotions well can touch the whole society, even the whole world, and contribute to the development of the world.
Collingwood, on the other hand, disagreed with Tolstoy. Collingwood believed that art that conveys a sense of solidarity or brotherhood to society can have a negative effect. As evidenced by totalitarian mass rallies, the use of artistic effects to convey a sense of solidarity can sometimes reinforce irrational demagoguery. Through these examples, Collingwood warned that art does not necessarily convey only positive emotions, and can sometimes stir up negative emotions to the detriment of society. Linking art to emotions in a Tolstoyan fashion is a departure from his earlier criticisms of art, so Collingwood is more interested in the internal aspect of organizing emotions than the external aspect of communicating them.
According to Collingwood, just as language is a means of organizing an individual’s thoughts, art is a means of organizing an individual’s emotions. Just as we need to practice organizing our thoughts, so do we need to practice organizing our emotions. In everyday life, we often feel embarrassed when we lose our temper or burst into tears because we feel like we’ve overdone it. However, anger or sadness is not something that can be organized by opening a notebook and reasoning logically. Thoughts are organized like prayer beads, but emotions come in bursts and fogs. These human emotions are best organized through art that resembles them. Just as Beethoven organized the turbulent events of his life in his “Fate” symphony, sometimes soaring and sometimes meandering, we can do so in our own appropriate artistic way. And when our emotions are organized through art, even if we don’t need to communicate them to others, art has done its job.
Despite their differences, both Tolstoy and Collingwood defended the value of art, noting the positive association between art and emotion. Their theories contributed to our understanding of Romantic art, which was particularly stormy and turbulent, and marked an important milestone in the process of establishing emotion as an essential element of art. Ultimately, art is the embodiment of emotion, serving as a medium for exploring and expressing the deepest depths of human existence, and its importance is emphasized by its ability to balance reason and emotion to enable a holistic understanding of human experience.