Langer’s Arabesque and the Collapse of the Symbol
Berel Lang
Langer’s designation of the art work as symbol has recurred in her
writing. It can be said, in fact, that the whole of her aesthetic
theory depends finally on the questions of whether and in what sense the
term “symbol” can be legitimately applied to the art work; and any
systematic analysis of her thought must inevitably consider the manner
in which she attempts to answer those questions. That is no less the
case, if, as our title suggests, her application of the term “symbol”
ultimately fails. It is specifically with the development in her
thought leading to the “collapse of the symbol” that we will be
concerned in the following pages. In completing the theory of the art
work as symbol, Langer discovers within it a particular cognitive
content; and it is largely because of certain assumptions and oversights
in her proposal of this content that the theory as a whole encounters
difficulties.
Langer’s first book,
The Practice of Philosophy (1930), is relevant to a discussion of
the theory of the art work as symbol for the apparently perverse reason
that it refers to the art work only tangentially. Where symbolism is
mentioned, it is described in general terms that are largely indifferent
to its consequences for the theory of art. It seems from this that
Langer’s consideration of the connection between the art work and the
symbol is propagated by an early interest in the symbol alone, and that
only at a later stage in the evolution of her system does the idea of
the symbol’s congruity to the art work occur to her. This is not of
itself a criticism of the system; but her eventual qualification of the
description of art as symbol is pre-figured and underscored by the
description’s synthetic origins. What seems to occur by the time
Problems of Art appears (1957) is that an over-literal adherence to
a metaphor—the art work as a symbol of the life of feeling—is discerned,
and gradually but severely reduced; the symbol, in short, collapses.
The theory of symbolism
presented in The Practice of Philosophy recalls the work on
symbolism of Whitehead and the early Wittgenstein.2 In a proposal
reflecting this influence, Langer describes the “symbol” and “object
symbolized” as interchange-able terms. When one entity is labeled the
symbol of a second one, the reciprocal relation may be inferred; an
object symbolized is itself a symbol. There will be reasons for
asserting that one side of a relation is the symbol and the other the
object symbolized, but such reasons are extrinsic to the relation and
can be reduced to the pragmatic standard which holds the object
symbolized to be “of interest to the mind, and the other, in itself
quite worthless. . . easy to recognize and manipulate.”3 The relation thus
depends on the observer who takes note of it; part of his contribution
is to determine the relative positions of the terms involved.
The relation itself,
however, is more permanently fixed than is the position of its terms.
The principal requirement for a symbolic relation, Langer maintains, is
that there shall be a correspondence or analogy in form between the
terms of the relation. The symbolic relation “between any two things
holds just in so far as the two things are analogous” (PP, p.
115). For one entity to symbolize another, an element in one must
correspond to some element in the other, and the two systems must
themselves be circumscribed. Since it is only when we are aware of the
structure or form of a thing that it becomes available for comparison,
the process of symbolization is dependent initially on the logical
analysis of a single entity; when a second entity is discovered to be
“put together in the same way,” (PP, p. 87) the symbolic process
is consummated.
Langer’s proposals may
be understood until this point as conventional statements which are true
by definition. But two suggestions that appear in that part of the book
from which the references cited above are taken move close to the realm
of the empirical and foreshadow the difficulties which later confront
her in the approaches to a theory of art. In the first of these, Langer
suggests that there are “meanings” attributable to concrete experience
which experience can be said to symbolize, but that those meanings need
not and sometimes do not admit of verbal formulation. Insight yielded
by certain symbolic connections, Langer holds, is “incommunicable” (PP,
p. 132) by the ordinary, public means of communication; there are, so to
speak, ineffable areas which can nonetheless be symbolized, realms of
experience open to sensation and to knowledge but closed to verbal
articulation. The second proposal suggests that the content of a
symbolic act, even though it is verbally incommuni-cable, achieves a
cognitive force equal to that of any other sector of experience. Thus,
the art symbol “acts as a stimulus, puts us into rapport with a past
event, is our present experience of that event, just as a proposition
might be” (PP, p. 164). There is, judging their effects, no
difference in the grasp of their cognitive claims; the experience of
art, no less than the transactions involving other symbolic forms,
produces knowledge of a kind which is empirically determined, if not
verifiable.
The two proposals are
interrelated, and both are directly involved in the main theme of
Langer’s work. This becomes apparent as we follow the theory of the
symbol into her later books. So far as the concept of the symbol itself
is concerned, the later writings move with reasonable consistency from
the basis laid down in The Practice of Philosophy. Thus, in
Philosophy in a New Key, Langer defines the symbol by the necessary
but not sufficient condition (it must also have a perceiving mind) of
“logical analogy.”4 Again, in Feeling
and Form, she refers to the “congruence” between the symbolic form
and the object symbolized, calling it the “prime requisite for the
relation between a symbol and whatever it is to mean.”5 Her emphasis of this
point extends into the Problems of Art, in which she summarizes
the previous stipulations by defining the symbol as “any perceptible or
imaginable whole that exhibits relationships of parts, or points, or
even qualities of aspects within that whole, so that it may be taken to
represent some other whole whose elements have analogous relations.”6
But if her formal
description of the symbol remains constant, Langer’s “ontogenetic”
theory of the symbol, which is not yet developed in The Practice of
Philosophy and which arises in response to the stimulus of
Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, contributes a new
direction or “key” to its contextual possibilities. The “new key” is
described by Langer as “. . . a new general principle: to conceive the
mind still as an organ in the service of primary needs, but of
characteristically human needs. . . . The basic need, which certainly is
obvious only in man, is the need of symbolization” (NK, pp.
38-39). All ideation, all human response, proceeds not, e.g., by simple
chains of association, but by a continuous transformation of those
materials into symbolic forms (NK, p. 42). Thus, “all forms of
expressive acts—speech and gesture, song and sacrifice—are the symbolic
transformations which minds of certain species, at certain stages of
their development and communion, mutually produce” (NK, p. 49).
All levels of human activity are expressive, and the expressive forms
evolve from one stage to the next, comprehending each of man’s
activities, moving from the early stages of primitive gesture and ritual
to the more complex activities found in civilized societies. At one of
those later points, art finds a place in the progression. Once admitted
to the progression, the work of art must, Langer supposes, exhibit all
of the properties of the symbol, a move which is foreshadowed even in
her earliest book where she suggests that there exists a certain
“incommunicable insight” whose subject is “rhythms and form.” (PP,
p. 162) But the main impact of the “new key” is not felt until, in the
later books, Langer suggests that art is a symbol, and that all symbols
display certain common properties. It is in an attempt to synthesize
those two principles that Langer elaborates her theory of art.
The synthesis developed
by Langer emphasizes two distinctions. The first of them
(systematically, not chronologically) is one drawn between “sign” and
“symbol,”7 “sign” referring to
either focus of a relation established by juxtaposition. An instance of
the activity of a sign is represented in the power exercised by traffic
signals: a red light, without possessing intrinsic relevance to the
situation it commands, signifies something definite to the driver
familiar with the conventions of the road. The sign itself is
unimportant; the color of the light, for instance, might be changed to
blue and still command the same reaction. Thus, an important property
of the sign is that it is replaceable and ancillary. If, on the other
hand, a driver is reminded by the red light of blood spilt in automobile
accidents and as a consequence forgets to stop, the sign function of the
red light has been exchanged for a symbolic function. What the red
light lacks as sign and possesses as symbol is the intrinsic logical
analogy with the object symbolized. There is reason, of course, to
expect that any two entities will possess some formally analogous
elements, since analogies can be based on an indefinite number of
properties. But the common elements which might be found on any
occasion can be consciously excluded from the functional behavior of the
symbol, and thus do not necessarily interfere with its intended
activity.
Langer elaborates her
distinction between sign and symbol by schematizing the terms which each
involves. The sign comprehends a triadic relation of subject, sign, and
object; the symbol, a four-termed relation which conjoins to symbol,
subject, and object, the “concept” or what we have noted as the analogy
of structural elements (NK, p. 54). This distinction is an
elementary one, arising from the ontogenetic analysis of the symbol,
which shows, Langer claims, the range and nature of symbolic activity.
Other forms of life than man respond to signs, and man may be said to
have passed through a stage of exclusive sign-usage on the way to
acquiring his powers of symbolic expression; but the latter is an
ability peculiar to him, permitting him to handle both sign and symbol
functions.
The second distinction
applies to the general province of symbolism, and delineates discursive
from non-discursive or (as Langer calls the latter on occasion
“intensive” (PP, p. 164) or “presentational” (FF, p. 29)
symbolism. The difference between the two types of symbolism becomes
apparent in the process by which their “meanings” or structural
analogues are developed and apprehended. The structural analogue of
discursive symbolism, on the one hand, is apprehended piecemeal. Each
element of a mathematical equation, for instance, is successively
attended to and understood. Langer uses the image in describing the
discursive symbol of a clothesline on which clothes are strung side by
side. We are not obliged to take down all of them before we take down
some of them (NK, p. 81). Apprehension of presentational
symbolism, on the other hand, grasps the whole of the entity
simultaneously, assimilating “one total expression without its being
severally presented by its constituent parts” (NK, p. 191). The
languages of science and criticism, and any other use of language which
permits comprehension of a single segment without reference to all
others, employ discursive symbolism; where the entity presents itself as
an integral whole, the term “symbolism” still applies, but it is of the
different sort of “presentational symbols.” It is in this second sphere
of symbolism—and by and large constituting it—that Langer places the
work of art.
The development of
Langer’s conception of the art work can now be completed. The art work
is described as a symbol, and it must therefore share with some other
entity an analogous logical or formal pattern. It is, moreover, a
presentational symbol, and thus its pattern must be immediately
apprehensible. And finally, we are informed as to what is communicated
through the symbolic relation of which the work of art is one term. The
object thus symbolized, Langer holds, is the immediately ascertainable
realm which she calls the “life of feeling,” a “life” analogous to the
emotional phases in organic existence. “The more you study artistic
composition,” Langer writes, “the more lucidly you see its likeness to
the composition of life itself, from the elementary biological patterns
to the great structures of human feeling and personality that are the
import of our crowning works of art; and it is by virtue of this
likeness that a picture, a song, a poem is more than a thing—that it
seems to be a living form, created not mechanically contrived, for the
expression of a meaning that seems inherent in the work itself: our own
sentient Being, Reality.” (PA, p. 58) “. . . What some people
call ‘significant form,’ and others ‘expressiveness,’ ‘plastic value in
visual art’ or ‘secondary meaning’ in poetry, ‘creative design’ or
‘interpretation’ or what you will, is the power of certain qualitative
effects to express the great forms and the rare intricacies of the life
of feeling.” (PA, p. 91)
Langer derives the terms
of that symbolic relation from the rhythmic structure which
characterizes the life of feeling and expression in the work of art.
Man incorporates in his life and activities a distinctive pattern or
motion, unified and yet in process. “The most characteristic principle
of vital activity is rhythm. All life is rhythmic; under difficult
circumstances, its rhythms may become very complex, but when they are
lost, life cannot long endure.” (FF, p. 126) The art work, Langer
holds, expresses a similar principle: “All art has the character of
life, because every work must have organic character, and it usually
makes sense to speak of its ‘fundamental rhythm.’” (FF, p. 214)
The elementary structure of organic behavior is a unified pattern of
growth, of flourishing and decline, in which the organism both
participates and is an observer. The art work achieves a semblance of
the same organic behavior, and like the organism, it presents an image
of tension and resolution (NK, p. 227), of the rhythmic “forms of
life and sentience” (NK, p. 399). “All the principles of
rhythmic processes . . . must have their analogues in those of artistic
creation.” (PA, p. 53) The analogical requirements of the
symbolic relation are thus satisfied; and, as with all symbolic
relations, the perceiver achieves knowledge through it of its structure
and of the terms of its analogy.
II
What causes Langer to
pause at this point in her description of the art work as symbol is the
difficulty of specifying in an empirically verifiable form the analogy
between the expression of the art work and the life of sentience. The
prerequisite which she sets for the symbol is not only that there must
be an analogy between it and the thing symbolized, but that the means of
determining that analogy should be known. An index of correlation
between anal-ogous points in the two entities must be available, as
evidence of the supposed resemblance between art’s virtual form and the
semblance of feeling and emotion. But the discovery of such an index is
hindered and perhaps prevented by the ambiguity of the art work, by its
apparent correspondence to several sometimes conflicting emotional
analogues and perhaps to none at all. Langer is conscious of the
difficulties involved by that ambiguity; and if her attempt to answer it
in Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form is less
than adequate, her presentation in the Problems of Art seems to
go as far as she can in evolving a reply from the general thrust of her
position—so far, in fact, that her original intention seems to be
materially altered in the process.
Prior to the appearance
of the Problems of Art, Langer is consistent in her designation
of the art work as a symbol. It is true that in Philosophy in a New
Key, after a detailed discussion of music and its structure
analogical to the life of feeling, she includes in a summary of her
position an important qualification: “. . . Music has all the earmarks
of a true symbolism except one: the existence of an assigned
connotation.... Music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is
an unconsummated symbol.” (NK, p. 240, emphasis added) But
in Feeling and Form, although in the early stages she again uses
the phrase “unconsummated symbol” with reference to the art work, she
later, with a note of impatience, acts to “consummate” the symbol,
maintaining that the assigned correlation so far lacking can in
fact be attributed to the work of art (FF, p. 374). The
reservations which she had previously admitted are overcome, and a
literal description is offered of the work of art as symbol of the life
of feeling.
But there is a
difference between asserting a relation and arguing for its existence;
and the evidence which Langer calls on to support her proposal of the
symbolic relation is based largely on what seems for Langer so obvious
an analogy between the patterns of feeling and the forms of emotion
which are expressed by art that it does not need to be argued. She
writes, for instance, in Feeling and Form, appealing to an
uncertain source of empirical testimony: “Nothing demonstrates more
clearly the symbolic import of virtual form than the constant references
one finds, in the speech and writings of artists, to the ‘life’ of
objects in a picture. . . and to the picture plane itself as an
‘animated’ surface. The life in art is a ‘life’ of forms.” (FF,
p. 79) Or again, in the Problems of Art, “Another metaphor of the
studio, borrowed from the biological realm, is the familiar statement
that every art work must be organic. Most artists will not even agree
with a literal-minded critic that this is a metaphor. . . . It does not
refer to biological functions like digestion and circulation.
But—breathing? Heartbeat? Well, maybe. Mobility? Yes, perhaps.
Feeling? Oh yes, certainly.” (PA, p. 44) So far as evidence is
adduced by such statements, it is the evidence given by observers
unspecified except in the second case as artists. For the rest—and
those passages are by no means unique8—we have the simple
reiteration of her position, with no appreciable effort to determine the
grounds of the experience described, a procedural tactic which is
perhaps as much a consequence as a cause of the systematic objection she
is eventually forced to admit. The assertion she makes predicates
certain characteristics of the work of art; but the evidence she
presents for the assertion refers not so much to the structural
character of art as to the response of the perceiver, and usually of a
special perceiver at that.
A number of peripheral
arguments advanced by Langer in the process of building this description
of the art work as symbol seem equally oblique. She attempts, for
example, to convince her readers of a dilemma from which the only route
of escape is provided by her theory. Thus, referring to Hanslick’s
criticism of the emotive theories of art, she suggests that Hanslick and
his followers must themselves finally choose between music as
“significant or meaningless,” (NK, p. 237; cf. FF, p. 52)
the latter term being used pejoratively and clearly determining the
issue’s outcome in her own mind; “significant” she takes to imply art as
a symbolic form. An additional example of tendentious reasoning appears
in her comments on the analogy between music and feeling, which conclude
in an effort to make a virtue of what looks to be at best harsh
necessity: “It is a peculiar fact that some sad and some happy
conditions may have a very similar morphology. At first sight, that
looks paradoxical; but it really has perfectly good reasons which do not
invalidate the notion of emotive significance, but do bear out the
right-mindedness of thinkers who recoil from the admission of specific
meanings. For what music can reflect is only the morphology of feeling,
and it is quite possible that some musical forms may bear a sad and a
happy interpretation equally well.”9 The reason, we are
told, why it is difficult to assign emotive meanings is not because of
inadequacies in our indices or in our apprehension, but because of
ambiguities in the work itself which encourage a variety of
interpretations.
Such efforts to
establish what Langer takes to be the cognitive content of art are less
than convincing. Quite apart from the objections which have been
suggested, however, it is unfortunate that she should spend so much of
her effort away from and in effect undercutting more fundamental parts
of her theory. Even before the question arises of how we can verify the
supposed analogue, we have to take account of the assumption underlying
its derivation, which holds that there are certain “unspeakable” things
which are no less real for the fact that they cannot be verbalized or
even specified; and that those things are revealed by the work of art.
There is, Langer suggests, an entire realm of “life” which can be
cognized and which, because of its importance, ought to be known,
but which cannot be articulated in the forms available to discursive
language.10 In Feeling and Form
she even describes quite graphically what it is that cannot be
articulated: “There is a great deal of experience that is knowable, not
only as immedi-ate, formless, meaningless impact, but as one aspect of
the intricate web of life, yet defies discursive formulation, and
therefore verbal expression; that is what we sometimes call the
subjective aspect of experience, the direct feeling of it—what it is
like to be waking and moving, to be drowsy, slowing down. . . . Such
directly felt experiences usually have no names—they are named, if at
all, for the outward conditions that normally accompany their
occurrences.” (FF, p. 21)
Now, assuming that
to be the case, it may be less distressing that a precise correlation of
the art work and the symbolized life of feeling cannot be effected: any
such correlation is apodictically precluded by one of its prospective
terms. The very attempt to justify the correlations by way of proofs
which refer the parts of the art work to categories like “sad” or
“happy” (as Langer did above) is foredoomed and ultimately irrelevant:
if discursive formulation is impossible, then to speak of music as “sad”
or “happy” at all is misleading and futile. But the matter
unfortunately cannot be allowed to rest with that. It might be further
argued that the objection initially raised has only been deferred, since
once we admit that there may not be a specific correlation between the
symbol and object symbolized, we are forced to ask what evidence could
be presented for the very existence of the ineffable. “Effable” proofs
have been represented as necessarily inadequate; and we are thus
confronted with an assertion which precludes the possibility of its
verification.
Langer’s anticipation of
this criticism, and one of the most interesting though generally
neglected aspects of her thought, appears in her description of
intuition. It is through intuition that the observer establishes his
initial rapport with both discursive and non-discursive symbols and the
objects they symbolize. Unlike several other terms she employs,
“intuition” is consistently used by Langer to refer to the process of
immediate apprehension, distinct from and prior to the understanding and
not subject to judgments of either truth or error.11
There is nothing
mystical about intuition; it is the hypothetical basis of all judgments,
enabling the judgments to be made, and acting, on Langer’s comparison, a
part similar to that of Locke’s “natural light.” We are aware of its
activity because of its consequences—we recognize the “felt life” and we
are aware of the special nature of the work of art, just as we know that
language as it appears on the printed page, even before we grasp it
conceptually, is more than simply an “arabesque of serried inkspots”
(PA, p. 67).
Langer’s use of the term
“intuition,” moreover, is univocal. Although at one point in the
Problems of Art she attempts to distinguish between “artistic” and
“discursive” intuition (PA, p. 166), a more characteristic
tendency favors a single definition for both of them. She maintains,
for instance, that “intuition is the basic process of all understanding,
just as operative in discursive thought as in clear sense perception and
immediate judgment. . . .” (FF, p. 29) This unified theory,
however, is not without problems of its own, because the process of
intuition which results in the apprehension of both discursive and
non-discursive symbolism is in one sense held to be identical for both
of them; yet it must also provide grounds for asserting a distinction
between them. What we have seen to be identical, however, was the
accomplishment of intuition; the fact, in other words, that
intuition enabled understanding to operate with respect both to
discursive and to non-discursive symbolism. That does not imply that
the machinery of intuition is the same in both cases, and an important
internal difference appears between the two, precisely in that respect.
The concept of abstraction is relevant here, since abstraction is
fundamental to the process of intuition, and intuition is the inclusion
of abstraction as a characteristic of all apprehension. “There is no
sense in trying to convey reality pure and simple.” (PA,
p. 92) Assigning to abstraction the role of extracting from reality the
cognitive elements which are to be symbolically apprehended or
projected, Langer asserts that there are at least two alternative paths
followed by abstraction: one, employed by science, moves inductively to
increasingly general categories, and the other attempts to make its
subject concrete and functions in the production and appreciation of
art. The former proceeds from a sequence of individual entities to a
concept which incorporates their common characteristics (cf., e.g.,
PA, p. 177). Articulation, on the other hand, makes no effort to
found itself in the parsing and correlation of general characteristics,
but works rather so to simplify an entity that its structure or form
“shines forth” in the totality immediately apprehended by artistic
intuition. (The two modes of abstraction are apparently supposed to
occur for both creator and observer, during the production of the art
work as well as during its apprehension.) It is, to return to an
earlier point, on the basis of intuition thus analyzed and found to
underlie the two forms of abstraction, that Langer discovers the life of
feeling in art. Accordingly, evidence for the existence of either the
pattern of emotion referred to or of its “unspeakable” nature must
depend on a systematic testing of the processes of intuition and
abstraction.
Langer, though not
repudiating prima facie her early position, modifies it by the
time she hints at the two forms of intuition in Problems of Art;
and with those modifications her position assumes its latest form. We
recall that Langer claimed that one entity symbolized a second one when
a structure common to both was known. That structure, or concept, was
taken to be the “meaning” of the entity, the concept being considered
apart from the individual conceptions of it by either the artist or the
observer (NK, pp. 61, 71). The concept itself is a necessary
ingredient of the aesthetic transaction, although it tends to disappear,
overwhelmed by the blanketing conceptions of those who create it or
those who perceive it. Most important, however, it is supposed to
exist; in the case of art, the concept is that of feeling which thus
provides the cognitive content of the experience of art.
The methodological
difficulties which threaten such a position have been anticipated here;
they were formulated effectively and in a form to which Langer gave
serious consideration by Ernest Nagel’s review of Philosophy in a New
Key.12 Nagel points out in
his essay that Langer’s use of the terms “symbol” and “meaning,” with
reference to the work of art and the life of feeling respectively,
distorts the accepted usage of the terms and even, it might now be
added, what Langer herself intended by them. In acknowledging the
cogency of Nagel’s remarks, Langer, tentatively in Feeling and Form
(cf., e.g., p. 29) and with more conviction in the Problems of Art
(cf., e.g., p. 127), attempted to replace the term by others—in the case
of “meaning,” for instance, by “import”13 and “significance”14—at once more general
and more vague. The shift is naturally reflected in her dealings with
the notion of abstraction, and it becomes increasingly clear that what
Langer calls “the life of feeling” after this point is no longer
referred to; it is rather embodied or expressed in the art work in
such a way as to produce in the observer a characteristic sense of
“vital import.” The art work and its “meaning” are not to be
distinguished; the art work no longer symbolizes.
III
This move is more than
simply a shifting of semantic furniture. The basic distinction which
Langer persistently affirmed between “sign” or “signal” and “symbol”
collapses, and, at least so far as the art work is concerned, becomes
irrelevant. The collapse is necessitated by the aspects of the
distinction on which Langer placed most weight, not because the
distinctions were “wrong,” but because they were unable to meet the
demands made of them. In the definition given by Philosophy in a New
Key, for instance, a distinction had been drawn between the
three-termed relation of the sign and the four-termed relation of the
symbol. That implied that the symbol—as opposed to the sign—possessed
an intrinsic connection to the concept or analogy of form. But Langer
herself recognizes finally that if she is consistent in her usage, the
symbol in its failure as a description of the art work is not so
different from the sign after all: both move in steps from one entity to
another or others, and the fact that the symbol takes an additional step
in that process emphasizes rather than denies the effects of the
referral. Langer admits as much when she writes in Problems of Art
that “a genuine symbol is only a sign; in appreciating its meaning our
interest reaches beyond it to the concept” (PA, p. 133). And
with that recognition, Langer’s thought experiences a crisis. The
“symbol,” which was supposed to make provision for all that needed to be
said about the work of art, has to be discarded. The structure in terms
of which the art work had been defined is threatened, and the theory of
which it is a part hangs in the balance.
The threat, though, does
not produce the repercussions in Langer’s thought which might be
anticipated. What Langer is apparently even more firmly convinced of
than her characterization of the art work as symbol is the proposal
which she had added to it, that the work of art is an expression of the
concept of feeling. So she concludes the passage cited immediately
above by describing the properties of that relation which she continues
to uphold. “But a work of art does not point us to a meaning beyond its
own presence. What is expressed cannot be grasped apart from the
sensuous or poetic form that expresses it. In a work of art we have the
direct presentation of a feeling, not a sign that points to it.” (PA,
pp. 133-34) Such a statement attempts to overcome the limitations which
Langer has now admitted in the theory of the work of art as symbol. The
art work does not refer, as the term “meaning” would suggest it
does, to an independent concept; rather it incorporates in itself the
“life of feeling,” the charged emotional pattern that Langer presents as
the distinctive ingredient of art.
The
implication is clear, however, that this development can not dispel the
objections raised against Langer’s earlier designation of the art work
as symbol. She continues even now to base the particularized import of
the work of art and its cognitive content on her idea of intuition.
That idea, because its sole means of verification rests finally on the
individual experience of the spectator, is bound to face objections not
very dissimilar from those which confronted the theory of the
art-symbol. What emerges from such a theory, one can predict, will be
less a consensus than a conflict. Opinions may be quite clear at times,
for instance, on the emotional analogue presented by a particular art
work—but there is no apparent necessity for agreeing that such an
analogue must be recognized before one can appreciate the
distinctiveness of the generic art work. One may discover in art a
variety of analogues aside from that of emotion, or then again, if we
are to listen to many sophisticated opinions, instances where no
analogues to emotion or to anything else are evident. We see the
probability of this divergence clearly in Langer’s impression that
Schumann’s Arabesque “achieves a feeling of elaborated thought where no
thought really has beginning or end, or of motion in a maze yet without
dizziness.” (PA, p. 88) Her description may strike us as
apposite—but surely there are many possibilities of interpretation, both
metaphoric and literal, which it leaves unnoticed: the sense of “motion
in a maze” is a highly personal image. We are not certain that
“feeling” is the primitive term which Langer has taken it to be; and
although there is admittedly no reason, so long as we restrict ourselves
to reports from individual experience, for categorically denying that
feeling is the distinctive quality conveyed by the art work,
neither is there any apparent basis for categorically affirming it.
There is, moreover, no possibility of moving further in the analysis or
of reducing the difficulties, since the method by which they are
produced is the one to which Langer has restricted herself.
The
sequence of Langer’s argument thus begins and ends in the experience of
the perceiver who is informed by the work of art of a pattern of
emotion. The argument rests finally on the individual judg-ment; and we
must suppose, so long as we are unwilling to grant special priority to
Langer’s response, that her description applies specifically to her own
reaction to art rather than to a universal or necessary response. This
would not constitute a serious objection if Langer also demonstrated
that her reaction had grounds in the objective structure of the work of
art; such a move would reveal at least the potential generality of her
own judgment. But Langer does not deal very fully with these issues.
Her thinking on art assumes as its first task the discovery in art of
the qualities which make it a symbol; and one has the sense that out of
those beginnings, Langer presses an analysis of what the aesthetic
transaction would be if the art work were a symbol—an effort
which is seriously threatened when she discovers that the art work is
probably not a symbol at all. The strain is underscored by the attempt
in Feeling and Form to distinguish among the art media, a project
which could be fruitful if the ontology of the art work were adequate,
but which seems there a labored and often arbitrary variation on the
basic—and arbitrary—theme that art communicates to the perceiver a
semblance of the life of feeling. It may be, as Langer claims, that the
encounter with the work of art offers to the perceiver an important and
distinctive mode of knowledge. Such an hypothesis would significantly
extend the scope of cognitive relevance beyond the “discursive”
symbolism to which it is often arbitrarily restricted. But support for
the proposal must be found in the structure of the art work as well as
in reports on aesthetic experience. Until we know why knowledge
acquired from art takes the form assigned it by Langer, we must hesitate
at her description of that form. And the collapse of the symbol makes
the relevance of her discussion of art’s cognitive significance more,
not less, problematic.
Notes
1
Work on this essay was supported by a grant on the Lucius
N. Littauer Foundation.
2
Cf. especially A. N. Whitehead,
Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect
(Cambridge, 1928), Ch. 2.
3 The Practice of Philosophy,
(New York, 1930), p. 124. Cited hereafter as PP.
4 Philosophy in a New Key
(Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 139. Cited hereafter as NK.
5 Feeling and Form (New York,
1953), p. 27. Cited hereafter as FF.
6 Problems of Art (New York,
1957), p. 20. Cited hereafter as PA.
7 The distinction between sign and
symbol is first drawn in NK, pp. 31 ff. In FF, p. 26,
Langer replaces “sign” by “signal” so that both symbols and signals may
be grouped under the general heading of “sign.”
8 Cf., e.g., FF, pp. 28, 59,
78; NK, pp. 100, 245; PA, pp. 53, 58.
9 NK, p. 238; cf. also the
criticism of C. C. Pratt, NK, p. 245.
10 Cf. NK, pp. 282 ff., where
Langer opposes Carnap on this point.
11 Cf., e.g., PP, pp. 44, 45;
FF, pp. 378, 397; PA, pp. 61, 66.
12 Reprinted in E. Nagel, Logic
without Metaphysics (Glencoe, Ill., 1956).
13 Cf. FF, p. 52; PA,
pp. 67, 127.
14 E.g., FF, p. 32; PA,
pp. 34 ff.
