Richard Wollheim (1923-2003) was a British philosopher whose work made significant contributions to our understandings of the fields of aesthetics and psychoanalysis, while at the same time developing a distinctive set of ideas about what it means, and what it is, to live the life of a person.
Wollheim’s body of work, from the late 1950s until the turn of the millennium, is at once remarkably consistent and difficult to sum up. Its main thread is the question of what living is like as an embodied mind that develops and changes over the course of a life. Accordingly, prominent themes in his work include memory, identification, personality formation, the emotions, and expression. From psychoanalysis – he published a monograph on Freud in 1971 before turning to the work of Melanie Klein as his major touchstone – Wollheim gets the basic insight that none of these processes is straightforward or readily separable from the others. Artworks provide an especially intense record of their complex and singular interrelations, as Wollheim demonstrates, often quite audaciously, in his 1987 book, Painting as an Art.
Nominally an analytic philosopher, or at least of that parish, Wollheim’s work is in truth highly ecumenical, and draws from both analytic and Continental schools. Perhaps this is related to his early work on idealism: Wollheim’s first book was a study of F. H. Bradley in 1959. The Thread of Life, from 1984, is best described as Wollheim’s version of existentialist philosophy, and accordingly is framed by a discussion of Søren Kierkegaard’s insight, that ‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.’ The Thread of Life sought to give an account of what Wollheim called ‘the leading of [lives] or the way in which they are led’, from an original philosophical standpoint which could integrate the living of the life and the understanding of it, which he would come to regard as entailing one another. Wollheim would finally apply this insight to the case of his own early life, in the posthumously-published Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (2004).
In his obituary essay for Wollheim, Malcolm Budd writes that ‘Richard was one of the most original, creative and courageous philosophers of his time. […] He was the greatest aesthetician of his generation and his contribution to the philosophy of his favourite art, painting, dwarfs all others.’ Wollheim was also undoubtedly the most original philosophical thinker to engage with psychoanalysis on its own terms, while at the same time bringing psychoanalysis into relation with art.
The Wollheim Centenary Project for the 2023-24 academic year begins in the centenary of Wollheim’s birth, and its programme will mark his unique contribution by presenting an inquiry into the mutual interconnections of his philosophy of mind, of art, and of psychoanalysis. Pivotal to the programme is The Presence of Absence, an exhibition of collages by the artist Patrice Moor, whose work invites reflection in the terms of Wollheim’s thought.
The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project 