WOLLHEIM, RICHARD
(1923–2003)

Richard Arthur Wollheim, an English philosopher, was born in London. After service in World War II, where he rose to captain, he returned to Balliol College, Oxford, first to continue the study of history (in which he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1946), then philosophy, politics, and economics (in which he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1948). He was Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, 1963–1982; professor of philosophy at Columbia University, 1982–1985; Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, 1985–2002; and professor of philosophy and the humanities at the University of California at Davis, 1989–1996. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986; and was vice-president of the British Society of Aesthetics, 1968–1993, and president, 1993–2003. His writings focused principally on two subjects: art and human psychology. He made outstanding contributions not just to general but also to substantive aesthetics, above all the philosophy of painting. His unrivalled knowledge of psychoanalytic theory enabled him to write a masterly account of Sigmund Freud's thought and endowed his work in the philosophy of mind with its distinctive character. The strength of his contributions to the advancement of psychoanalytic theory were recognized in the profession by the honors accorded him by the British Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association, among others. He died in London.

Aesthetics

Wollheim's aesthetics is marked by its psychological orientation, manifest in his account of the nature of art, artistic meaning, pictorial representation and artistic expression. In his works, Wollheim argued that art is a form of life (in Ludwig Wittgenstein's sense), artistic activity and appreciation requiring the existence of practices and institutions, art being an essentially historical phenomenon, the changes to which it is inevitably subject affecting the conceptual structure that surrounds it. The aim of artists is, he maintained, to endow their work with a meaning determined by the intentions that guide their activity; the distinctive function of the spectator is to grasp that meaning, to retrieve those intentions, which is achieved, if the artist fulfilled them, by engaging with the work and undergoing the experience the artist intended it to provide.

This psychological account of artistic meaning and understanding is applied to the art of painting in what is perhaps Wollheim's masterpiece, Painting as an Art, which maintains that great art is, as is the socialism he embraced throughout his life, rooted in the assumption of a common human nature. A painting's meaning (each painting having one and only one meaning), which is visual, is revealed in the experience induced in an adequately sensitive and informed spectator who looks at the surface of the painting as the fulfilled intentions of the artist led him or her to mark it. He distinguished five principal kinds of primary pictorial meaning achievable by a work: representational, expressive, textual, historical, and metaphorical; he identified what he characterized as secondary meaning, which is what the act of giving a picture its primary meaning meant to the artist; and he illustrated these categories with a remarkable series of challenging interpretations of works by some of the painters he most admired.

He elucidated two other central issues, the nature of pictorial representation and of artistic expression, in psychological terms, each exploiting a species of perception. Pictorial representation is a function of "seeing-in," a perceptual experience which consists of two aspects, the configurational being the seeing of a marked surface, the recognitional being the seeing in this surface of something—a plane of color, perhaps—in front of or behind something else. Artistic expression, at least that involved in the art of painting, is a function of "expressive perception," a perceptual experience with three aspects, the first representing the world as "corresponding" to an affective condition, the second being an affect in the viewer that is "of a piece" with the corresponding condition, and the third being a revelation or intimation of the origin, either of the experience itself or of the kind to which it belongs, in so-called "complex" projection.

Wollheim also advanced an account of the ontology of art. He argued that the fundamental distinction within works of art is between individuals and types, some works of art being individuals, the rest types. Furthermore, every work of art belonging to the same art belongs to the same category, type or individual as the case may be, and, for all works of art, the identity of a work of art is determined by the history of its production.

Psychology

His investigation of the question, What is it to lead the life of a person?, claims a fundamental status for the nature of the process that mediates between a person and the life he or she leads—the leading of a life. This process is constituted by interactions between a person's past, present, and future, and to elucidate this Wollheim presented a typology of the mind, distinguishing mental dispositions from mental states, and proceeds to examine their interactions as well as those among the various systems of the mind, the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The aim is to outline a philosophy of mind of a kind that psychoanalytic theory requires and it is studded with profound observations of human life that even those sceptical of psychoanalysis stand to benefit from. His study of the emotions, which he "repsychologized," attributing to them psychological reality, represents them as mental dispositions that cause their manifestations, assigning them a particular role within the psychology of the person—that of providing the person with an attitude to the world. He sketched and then developed in great detail a characteristic history, one the recognition of which is essential to understanding what an emotion is.

This proceeds from the "originating condition" of emotion—the satisfaction or frustration of a desire, actually or merely believed in or prospective—through the "precipitating factor," to the transformation of the "originating condition," the experience of satisfaction or frustration being "extroverted," the "precipitating factor" being perceived to correspond to the experience and becoming the object of an emotion, and then, finally, to internal and external manifestations of the emotion and other outcomes. Two of the so-called moral emotions, shame and guilt, which are given extended treatment, are represented as deviating from this characteristic history, incorporating the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy as an essential ingredient of their nature.

See also Art, Expression in; Art, Representation in.

Bibliography

works by richard wollheim

Sigmund Freud. New York: Viking, 1971.

On Art and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

The Thread of Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Painting as an Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.

The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

On the Emotions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1999.

works about richard wollheim

Hopkins, Jim, and Anthony Savile, eds. Psychoanalysis, Mind, and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.

van Gerwen, Rob, ed. Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Malcolm Budd (2005)