Download
1 / 12
130 likes | 289 Views
Philosophy and the Arts, Lecture 20:. Art as Language-II. The topic for today is the work of Susanne Langer. It’s curious that many (perhaps most) philosophers think her work simply mistaken-refuted by E. Nagel more than 60 years ago, while many (perhaps most) artists think she was right!.
E N D
Philosophy and the Arts,Lecture 20: Art as Language-II
The topic for today is the work of Susanne Langer. It’s curious that many (perhaps most) philosophers think her work simply mistaken-refuted by E. Nagel more than 60 years ago, while many (perhaps most) artists think she was right! Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985)
World War I was probably the last war fought between gentlemen. The bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe was the first time civilians were bombed, with the goal of total destruction! Guernica---1937!!
Saying the Un-sayable!! • Picasso could find no words to express the horror, indignation, shock, etc., that he felt, seeing civilian populations (not to mention horses, cattle..) being bombed!! This just wasn’t done!! • He expressed his feelings through his art. In Langer’s view, this is the function of art; art “says” what we cannot “say” in any other way.
Move back a bit. Early on, Langer did a general work on Philosophy, and in 1937, a text on symbolic logic.. .but he first major work was her Philosophy in a New Key, published in 1942. By that time, she was under the influence of Ernst Cassirer. By the way, note that the book has sold about 570,000 copies!! Note also that the 3rd printing of 1951 sold for 35 cents!! Her first major work!
Pardon an off-center scan, but Langer became known as a major force in the area of aesthetics with the publication of her Feeling and Form in 1953. In this book, she tried to show how each of the several arts functions as a symbol of human feeling. Whoops!
Ernst Cassirer was the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a 3-volume work published in English in 1953, but which Langer had read in German much earlier. Cassirer was the Cassirer??
Symbols?? • We know that words stand for (refer to?) things in the world. But words fail us when we try to express our emotions, our “inner” life. • Thus, in her later Problems of Art, Langer defines the role of art: ”It formulates the appearance of feeling, of subjective experience, the character of so-called ‘inner life,’ which discourse-the normal use of words-is peculiarly unable to articulate…”
Another Influence. • Remember that Bergson had said that ticks on a clock misrepresent the nature of time (“duree”). • Langer says not all arts function the same way. In her Feeling and Form, there is a chapter (7) , titled “The Image of Time,” in which she follows Bergson.
Just like Bergson? • Well, not really. Bergson tries to tell us what time is really (really) like. Langer only claims that music tells us how time feels. • Put somewhat technically, this means Bergson was a metaphysician, while Langer was a phenomenologist.
Was she right?? • Once again, back to where we began…. • Most philosophers agree with Ernst Nagel, who read the chapter on music in Philosophy in a New Key, and argued that there is nothing in the training of musicians that would make them experts on human feeling, and psychologists do not usually depend on artists for insights in their work. • But artists still love her….
