Susanne Langer

Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form. New York: Prentice Hall, 1977. Print.

Summary:

In her book, Langer is responding to ideas of the Enlightenment that excluded feeling as a way of knowing. Here Langer is demonstrating that feeling and non-discursive experiences are just as valid ways of knowing. Toward the beginning she establishes that symbols (“articulation and presentation of concepts”) are different from signals (“serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks”) (26). She uses art as an example of non-discursive experiences, how it can convey meaning all at once as a whole, rather than a linear piece by piece ordering to understand the whole. But ultimately art and music are symbols and not language, as she defines language as “a system of symbols” (369). Art shows a feeling to the viewer/ listener/ reader (394). Art can be appreciated and analyzed (406).

Response:

Her writing resonated with me because as she explained how we can have these non-discursive experiences, as through art, I could think of many times that this had been the case for me. In particular, when she wrote that “[i]t is perception molded by imagination that gives us the outward world we know…. In other words: by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only feelings, but a life of feeling” (372). This little passage stuck with me for days. I would return to it over and over because it shifts life from thought or physical reality to one of feeling. Perhaps because feelings are often downplayed in significance in school and work and are often regarded as female or less than logical thought, I was not sure if feelings could hold an equal place. To claim that life was not only about having feelings “but a life of feeling” seemed like a radical shift. It opens up a whole new way of knowing and describing, though it still seems undervalued by many.

Connections/Questions:

One idea that we haven’t talked much about but I’ve now seen a couple of times is the idea of motivation. Vygotsky mentions motivation at the end of his piece and needing to understand it in order for communication to occur, but Langer here disagrees when she is talking about art, which is probably because art isn’t seen as a language (or symbol system), but that art is a symbol. She explains that the knowing of an artist’s motivation for a work is not necessary or even the point of it, which challenges how I’ve often heard art described or talked about (15). Later she returns to this idea by explaining that people “generally assumed that if a work of art expresses anything, in a symbolic and not a symptomatic way, then it must be its author’s common on something,” but she disagrees with this point (394). In some ways this reminded me of Bakhtin and his double speak of the author, which might be similar to what people are trying to do with the artist and art. Then she states that what is more important is to let go of the need to understand the artist and instead focus on “emotional value” (395). Her desire to release the artist’s intentions reminded me of New Criticism, though I do not know enough about the movement to know if they would value feeling as she does in the same way.

Had others written about the importance of feeling as a valid form of understanding?

What led her to this realization and support of feeling?

What happened in theory as a result of her work?

Quotations:

“Philosophy, nevertheless, is a living venture, and philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know” (6).

“The general disorder of our intellectual stock in trade in the realm of aesthetics is further aggravated by the fact that there are two opposite perspectives from which every work of art may be viewed: that of its author and that of its spectators (or hearers, or readers, as the case may be)” (13).

“It is a great mistake to think an artist must constantly bear in mind the particular public that will visit the gallery or the concert hall or the bookstore where his work will make its first appearance. He works for an ideal audience” (393).

“He is not saying anything, not even about the nature of feeling; he is showing. He is showing us the appearance of feeling, in a perceptible symbolic projection…” (394).

“Life is incoherent unless we give it form…. we ‘put into words,’ tell it to ourselves, compose it in terms of ‘scenes.’ So that in our minds we can enact all its important moments” (400).

“The criterion of good art is its power to command one’s contemplation and reveal a feeling that one recognizes a real, with the same ‘click of recognition’ with which an artist knows that a form is true” (405).

“Genius is, in fact, not a degree of talent at all. Talent is special ability to express what you can conceive; but genius is the power of conception” (408).

“If feeling and emotion are really complexes of tension, then every affective experience should be a uniquely determined process of this sort; then every work of art, being an image of such a complex, should express a particular feeling unambiguously; instead of being the “unconsummated symbol” postulated in Philosophy in a New Key, it might have, indeed, a single reference” (373–374).