Abstract

The doctrine that there are “languages of art”, that works of fine art are to be construed somehow as utterances in a language, is an attractive doctrine, judging from the steady inclination of interested theorists to revive it in one way or another. For instance, in a fairly early publication of contemporary aesthetics, T. M. Greene argued that a work of art, in expressing something about the world, could be taken as a proposition, whether or not linguistically paraphrasable. Interestingly enough, Greene did not linger to articulate sufficiently clearly the sense in which works of art could be said to be propositions; though in ascribing truth to them, in a respect proper to explicit statements, it is clear that he meant what he said to be taken quite literally. Again, Susanne Langer has sustained a notably unsuccessful effort to explicate the defensible sense of her muchdebated thesis that “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling”. In a relatively late adjustment, she concedes that “artistic import is expressed, somewhat as meaning is expressed in a genuine symbol, yet not exactly so. The analogy is strong enough to make it legitimate, even though easily misleading, to call the work of art the art symbol”. What Langer’s thesis comes to, then, is the denial that works of art may be construed literally as linguistic utterances or as symbolic utterances that behave in ways formally similar to the uses of language. The analogy between art symbols and “genuine” symbols may, of course, be conceded benignly enough, once the ulterior philosophical claim is dismissed.