I'm philosophy professor and Overthink podcast co-host Ellie Anderson.
And as part of a series on aesthetics and philosophy of art, I'm talking
about Suzanne Langer's essay, Feeling and Form Today, from 1953.
Langer is best known for her philosophy of the symbolic nature of art, which she
actually derived from her theory of music.
So she started off by working a lot on music and then developed a
general theory of art from there.
For her, the definition of art is as follows. If you'd like to follow along,
I'm using this aesthetics anthology, for this as well as some other videos.
In this playlist.
She says that art is the creation of forms, symbolic of human feeling.
For her significant form is the essence of art.
And so let's break this down a little bit.
What does it mean to say that art is the creation of forms
symbolic of human feeling?
Well, her analysis of this is rooted in her conception of expression.
Expression, she says, usually means expression of signs or signals.
For matters of fact, we might think about the expression of feelings.
We might think about the expression of beliefs, of social conditions,
of neurosis or of the unconscious, but those kinds of expressions
are not themselves artistic.
Properly speaking, artistic expression is rooted in the expression of a
concept or idea through symbol.
For instance, music, she thinks is a symbol of human feeling.
It certainly can express feeling, but it needs to do through.
It needs to do so through the medium of symbolism.
If I just decide one day that I'm having a bad day and I want to write a
song about it, and I just like write a song that's just like, blah, there's my
feelings, that song's probably not gonna resonate with a lot of people because it's
not gonna have gone through this symbolic, we might even say purification.
It's not a word that she uses, but I think that that could be a relevant, term here.
We have to put our feelings into the language of symbolism, and this would go
for music as well, even when that music doesn't have lyrics to it in order for
it to be properly speaking artistic.
And so I think Langer's view here is really interesting for accounting for the
fact that human feeling is an essential starting point for art, but the art itself
isn't a sheer expression of feeling.
It has to go through this mediated process.
So recall that her definition of art is the creation of forms, symbolic of
human feeling, signals and symbols are two of the terms that she's using here.
Symbols according to Langer, present a concept or idea.
And this is different from a signal which makes us notice an object or situation.
So signals point to something else, but this is different from symbols.
to say that a minor key is symbolic of sadness, isn't to say that it points to sadness.
It is to say that it presents sadness as a concept or idea.
And so there is a unity or coherence to the symbol that
you don't have in the signal.
I noted that her general theory of art as the creation
of forms symbolic of human expression is rooted in her scholarship on music.
She says that music is patterned sound.
That's how she defines music, which I think is a really
interesting definition of it.
Music involves tonal analogs of emotional life.
And so when you listen to a song, she thinks that you are experiencing
an analog of emotional life.
This analog of emotional life doesn't stimulate or signal feeling,
but symbolically expresses it.
And so it may be that it does also for you, as you as an individual listener,
are listening to it, that you feel your emotions stimulated or signaled.
But for Langer, that is not properly speaking part of
the artistic function of the piece of music.
Intrinsic to the artistic function of music is the symbolic expression of it.
We might say that the feeling is in the work.
It's not referring back to the creator or even back to you, the listener.
Music expresses the pattern of life itself.
So in saying that it's an analog of emotive life, a tonal analog,
she is saying that music expresses the pattern of life and that it has
a symbolically significant form.
In doing so, keep in mind she's writing in 1953, which is a lot more recent
than some of the other thinkers of aesthetics that are compiled in this book.
And so she is also writing after the advent of a lot of experimental kinds
of music that we see in the 19 hundreds.
Music according to her, also has a dynamic structure that can express the
vital experience or the feeling of life.
And so music, of course, is a temporally stretched medium.
And as such, it has this dynamic structure, which she thinks perhaps
better than artistic media that are not stretched out in time can render the
vital experience or the feeling of life.
This is different from language for her, which is also a symbolic and
articulate form, because music's elements she thinks are not words.
The elements of language have fixed associations and reference, but
music does not have vocabulary.
And so sure there is some music with lyrics, but according to Langer, I think,
um, those lyrics would be ancillary to the music as artistic medium themselves.
Music for her really is a symbolic form that expresses
feeling, that is independent of the words as elements.
So even if it has words, the elements of the music itself
on her view are not the words.
And in this vein, I wanna read a quote from Langer.
This is from page 319.
If music patterned sound had no other office to, than to stimulate and soothe
our nerves, pleasing our ears as well combined foods please our palates.
It might be highly popular, but never culturally important.
Our interest in music arises from its intimate relation to the all-important
life of feeling, whatever that may be.
And again, the function of music is not the stimulation of feeling,
but the expression of it and the
mechanism for this is the dynamic structure of music.