Vulgarization of Art Is a Sure Sign of Langer
Her almost widely read and discussed volume is Philosophy in a New Central (1942), a systematic theory of art whichbecame a standard text in numerous undergraduate philosophy classes. Susanne Langer's work is not easy to summarize, but one of her major ideas was that works of fine art are expressive forms, or "iconic symbols" of emotions .
"In the fundamental notion of symbolization ( mystical, practical, or mathematical, information technology makes no difference ) we have the keynote of all humanistic problems. In information technology lies a new conception of 'mentality,' that may illumine questions of life and consciousness, instead of obscuring them as traditional 'scientific methods' have done." (from Philosophy in a New Fundamental )
* Langer set philosophy off from the scientific process. She emphasized that philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience, rather than adding to feel.
* Philosophy is taking ideas that a person expresses - facts and laws, behavior and hypotheses - and request if they are truthful or false.
* Langer asserts that philosophy's task "is to reflect on the pregnant of our ain words, and on the implications of the statements we are entertaining." Literally meaning the focus of philosophical inquiry is to be on words rather than things, actions, or beliefs
* Overall, philosophy attempts to uncover or construct lodge, a procedure of making sense out of an experience.
Langer's Understanding of Poetry, Music, and other forms of Art
* Langer looked at aesthetic bug and bug with expressiveness, emotions in art forms, discourse and symbolic meaning.
* She encouraged a rich and intimate experience with a variety of arts and tried various ways to go beyond the symbol and empathise it in logical and scientific terms.
* Saw two unlike symbols, "discursive" in science and logic, and "presentational" in the arts.
* The arts, such as dance and music were a form of knowledge and truth.
* Langer claims, "all works of art are purely perceptible forms that seem to embody some sort of feeling."
* Music bears some resemblance to the "emotive life" that includes expression.
* Music is neither the cause nor cure of feeling, but it is logical expression, music in her view tin nowadays emotions, moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before.
Langer'due south Agreement of Linguistic communication
* Language is a mark of human; it was created with him. Language expresses relations among acts or things and makes reference to reality either explicitly or implicitly.
* All languages have a stabile vocabulary and grammatical structure.
* People speak "animal language"; they refer to observable signs amidst animals. Such as calling, warning, threatening, expressing emotion are essential uses of brute sounds, and incidental uses of man speech.
* Animate being vocalizations are cocky-expression and an indication of environmental conditions (similar a dog barking to be let in).
* The line betwixt creature and human being is the language line. In a way information technology is like gap between plants and animals.
* Words are elements of speech; they keep their identity even though they are moved around. They continue their "roots" despite grammatical variations. The give-and-take is the ultimate semantic element of spoken communication.
* Spoken communication started because of fauna activity. It was not invented as a purpose, for just humans accept invented instruments for purpose.
* Words go fastened to objects as their names. They become generalized and become things rather than individuals in a style it becomes invented speech.
* Linguistic communication is symbolic.
*
Quotes from Langer's Philosophy of a New Key , Published in 1942
"That man is an animal I certainly believe; and as well, that he has no supernatural essence, "soul" or "entelechy" or "mind stuff" enclosed in his skin. He is an organism, his substance is chemical, and what he does, suffers, or knows, is just what this sort of chemical structure may do, endure, or know. When the structure goes to pieces, it never does, suffers, or knows anything once more. . . . It is actually no harder to imagine that a chemically active body knows, thinks, feels, than that an invisible, intangible something does so, "animates" the body without physical agency, and "inhibits" it without beingness whatsoever place."
"Language, in its literal capacity, is a stiff and conventional medium, un-adapted to the expression of genuinely new ideas, which ordinarily have to break in upon the mind through some great and bewildering metaphor."
" Art, on the other paw, has no consequence; it gives form to something that is only there, every bit the intuitive organizing functions of sense give grade to objects and spaces, color and sound."
"Artistic truth," so chosen, is the truth of a symbol to the forms of feeling nameless forms, but recognizable when they appear in sensuous replica. Such truth, being spring to certain logical forms of expression, has logical peculiarities that distinguish it from prepositional truth: since presentation symbols take no negatives, at that place is no functioning whereby their truth value is reversed, no contradiction."
Susanne Grand. Langer was born in New York City, the daughter of Antonio Knauth, a well-to-do lawyer, and Else M. (Uhlich) Knauth. Her parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Federal republic of germany and settled eventually in Manhattan'due south Upper West Side. Langer herself never lost her German accent.
Langer was educated at a private school. At dwelling house she learned to play the piano and cello quite well. After music had also a central role in her philosophical system. After receiving her B.A. in 1920 from Radcliffe College, Langer went to Europe, where she studied at the University of Vienna in 1921-22. She then returned to Radcliffe, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1926 with her dissertation dealing with logical analysis of meaning. In 1921 she married William L. Langer, a professor of history at Harvard. They divorced in 1942. Langer studied at Radcliffe under the eminent mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who wrote the prefatory note to her volume The Practice of Philosophy (1930).
From 1927 to 1942 Langer was a tutor in Philosophy at Radcliffe. Later working as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware, she was a lecturer at Columbia Academy. Langer was a visiting professor at New York Academy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Ohio State University, Columbus, University of Washington, Seattle, and Academy of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1954 she was appointed professor of philosophy at Connecticut College in New London. She was also a fellow member of the faculty. In 1961 she became professor emerita and reserch scholar in philosophy. Langer was elected in 1960 to the American University of Arts and Sciences. She held likewise honorary degrees from several American colleges and universities. In 1950 she received Radcliffe Alumnae Achievement Medal. In spite of her fame, Langer remained at the border of contemporary academic philosophy.
Langer's first volume was a collection of fairy tales, The Prowl of the Petty Dipper (1923). It was illustrated by Helen Sewell, to whom she dedicated on of her later piece of work, Problems in Art (1957), based on her lectures.
Philosophy in a New Fundamental , a survey symbolism, became a all-time-seller. Langer's earlier absorption into symbolic logic is seen in her try to create a rational basis for aesthetics. The work was much influenced by Ernst Cassirer, whose Sprache und Mythos from 1925 Langer translated into English. Feeling and Course (1953) was written on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. Information technology developed further the ideas of Philosophy in a New Key, and expanded her system of aesthetics from music to the other fields of arts, painting, poetry, dance, etc.
Like Cassirer, Langer argued that man is essentially a symbol-using animate being. Symbolic thought is deeply rooted in the human being nature - it is the keynote to questions of life and consciousness, all humanistic problems. "Fine art is the cosmos of forms symbolic of human feeling," Langer defined. She distinguishes between the open "presentational" symbols of art and "discursive" symbols of language, which cannot reverberate directly the subjective attribute of experience. Langer's view of language is not far from Ludwig Wittgenstein'due south logical theory developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), just when Wittgenstein stopped on the threshold of the unsayable, Langer argued that "music articulates forms which language cannot set forth" - it shows what cannot be said.
Works of fine art do not straight express the artist's experienced emotions, but rather an "thought" of emotion. Artists create virtual objects, illusions. Thus music creates an auditory apparation of time, "virtual time", in painting "virtual space" is the primary illusion, poets create appearances of events, persons, emotional reactions, places etc, "poetic semblances". Langer argues that musical forms behave a close logical resemblance to the forms of homo feelings. Music is a "presentational symbol" of psychic process and its tonal structures bear a close logical similarity to the forms of feeling, "forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, abort, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses". The symbol and the object symbolized accept a mutual logical form.
Langer also distinguishes art as symbol - the work of art as an indivisible whole - from symbols in art, which are elements of the work and often have a literal pregnant. Langer's unconventional use of the term "symbol" has been criticized by a number of philosophers, George Dickie included, but Monroe C. Beardley has noted in his book Aesthetics from Classical Hellenic republic to the Present (1966), that Langer's general concept of fine art as symbol and its evolution "is carried through with keen sensitivity and concreteness."
Subsequently receiving a research grant from the Edgar Kaufmann Charitable Trust, Langer wrote the three-book Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967-1982), her last volume, dealing with "actual living course as biologist notice it... and the actual phenomena of feeling". Office of the yr Langer lived in Former Lyme, where she could work in peace and quietness. Past the publication of the third volume, Langer was 87. The conclusion of the essay was abrogated due to her poor eyesight. Langer died in Sometime Lyme, Connecticut, on July 17, 1985.
For further reading: Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction by William Schultz (2000); Globe Authors 1900-1950 , vol.. two, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Significant, and Aesthetic Theor y by Thousand.Fifty. Hagberg (1995); Thinkers of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical, Bibliographical and Disquisitional Dictionary, ed. by Eastward. Devine (1983); Artful Theory and Fine art: A Report in Susanne K. Langer by R.G. Ghosh (1979); Susanne Langer's Theory of Music every bit Symbol of Feeling: A Critique past Rita LaPlante Raffman (1978); Harmony Through Resolution by Richard Jackson Bremer (1975); Aesthetics: An Introduction by George Dickie (1971); Famous American Women past H. Stoddard (1970); Music and Human being Feeling in Susanne Langer's Aesthetic Theory by Beverly Wayne Shirbroun (1964); Susanne Langer's Music Aesthetics by Fred Blum (1954); 'Symbolism and Art' past Morris Weitz, in Review of Metaphysics , VII (1954); 'Philosophy in a New Key' past Ernst Nagel, in Journal of Philosophy , 40 (1943)
Source: http://eweb.furman.edu/~dcummins/Susanne%20Langer%20.htm
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