Abstract

In conclusion, I ask if any theory of the Expressionist type can adequately account for the communicative aspect of the work of art and I propose that we reinstate the 'beautiful' and 'ugly' as primitive aesthetic predicates to avoid the radical subjectivizing of aesthetic phenomena. ;Broadly speaking, Langer's version of Expressionism holds that a work of art is a symbol whose logical form or structure makes it uniquely fit to mirror that aspect of human experience impervious to the forms of ordinary discourse, namely, our life of feeling and emotion. Consequently my discussion breaks down into the following sections: An examination in the early chapters of Langer's logic of the symbol. Langer distinguishes between two classes of symbol, the discursive symbol or language properly so-called and the presentational symbol or work of art. The former has as its paradigm case, the language of science and thus gives us the forms of the 'objective' natural world; the latter formulates our 'subjective' life of feeling and emotion. What I suggest here is that such a bifurcation of experience is untenable with respect to a comprehensive theory of art. An analysis of Langer's theory of feeling and emotion. I subsume Langer's view under a general type of theory which I call 'affective'--feelings understood as a series of momentary and subcutaneous affects of the psycho-physical organism. My critique, here, takes an explicitly phenomenological direction. I hold that any adequate notion of human feelings must begin with their referential or "worldly" character. A detailed discussion of how we perceive the work as "meaningful." For Langer, the meaning of a work is grasped as a semantic intuition of pure form. I raise objections to this formalist view showing that we cannot account for "meaning" in even ordinary perception without the notion of a temporal schematization. And once we acknowledge the temporal character of ordinary perception, we find that the perception of a work of art as "meaningful" involves even more complex temporal strata. The experiential adequacy of Langer's model, whether her formalist version of Expressionism can do justice to our understanding of the actual arts themselves--music, the plastic arts, and literature. I pay particular attention to the work of Cezanne for the weakness in Langer's model is most apparent when it is applied to an artist whose vision begins with the primacy of nature . ;My purpose in this dissertation is twofold. First, I am concerned with a detailed and systematic critique of Susanne Langer's philosophy of art, Langer's two seminal works, Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form having influenced an entire generation of American humanists. Embedded in this examination of Langer, however, is an argument of even deeper import. For Langer's view is representative of a whole class of theories of the Expressionist type, Expressionism being that philosophy of art which has virtually dominated contemporary aesthetic discussion. My argument, here, centers around the view that Expressionist aesthetics as a whole, is an outgrowth of Cartesianism and as such, is heir to the intensely subjectivistic bias of that tradition. In the course of my discussion, I show that any theory of the Expressionist type thus faces serious logical and epistemological difficulties and is ultimately inadequate to the aesthetic experience itself