I first read this back in the 90's when it came out, and I've kept it on my shelf all these years waiting for time in retirement to read it again. It'I first read this back in the 90's when it came out, and I've kept it on my shelf all these years waiting for time in retirement to read it again. It's a handsome book, and I got excited when I looked at the table of contents, but reading four selected chapters I just didn't find the writing style engaging. I just can't give an enthusiastic rating like I might have before, and that's because in the meantime I've found other writers to convey more excitement about topics which should be exciting for people who have an interest in them. Susan Wise Bauer, or Kenneth Clark come to mind.
In sum: I love the idea behind this book, but the writing leaves me disengaged....more
The determined student of philosophy will want to read Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, which lays out in more detail her concepts and methodology. FThe determined student of philosophy will want to read Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, which lays out in more detail her concepts and methodology. For the rest of, more interested in understanding the visual and aural arts than wrestling with abstract philosophical quandaries, Langer’s Problems of Art, is slightly more approachable and certainly less tedious. The short chapters, based on lectures, are easy enough to digest in a single sitting. Here is a quote to give you an idea of what to expect from Langer:
An artist expresses feeling, but not in the way a politician blows off steam or a baby laughs and cries. He formulates that elusive aspect of reality that is commonly taken to be amorphous and chaotic; that is, he objectifies the subjective realm. What he expresses is, therefore, not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling. So a work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality. But it is neither a confessional nor a frozen tantrum; it is a developed metaphor.
After developing her three primary arguments (expression, form, creation) Langer summarizes that all art, whether rendered successfully or not (and not just according to the artist’s intent), triggers the same responses in humans whether it be primitive cave paintings, African drums, Venus of Milo, Joyce’s Ulysses, or Mozart.
This is all well and good, and I find myself nodding along, saying to myself, “okay, that’s one way of putting it,� but it’s all very wordy and for me philosophically hazy. I’ve read my fair share of philosophy, and at a certain point, as with Heidegger’s Being and Time, the word salad just doesn’t click with me. I think we have to factor in different preferences for processing information. For me, modern neurology explains most of this in a very straight-forward manner: different visual and aural stimuli trigger different responses in the brain (based on a long history of evolution) and yes, the end-result is that African drums, James Joyce, or Wagner all consistently tickle the same neurological responses and therefore formulate an internal narrative that we can reconcile.
I’d say the visual arts fall more readily into Langer’s argument for symbolic metaphor, simply because we are a visually-oriented species and have a vast vocabulary that documents images and body language with their corresponding emotions. This is far trickier with music, and this is where science can take us further down the road of understanding. Consider the study of psychoacoustics which analyzes psychology, neurology, and the physiology of sound with its acoustic interface to determine how the brain interprets sound. A study in Austria asked concert listeners what makes music spiritual, and not surprisingly didn’t get any definitive answers. When volunteers in a controlled group listened to the same music (Bruckner Sym. 7) recorded in a dry studio environment versus one recorded in a spacious cathedral the respondents choice of descriptions changed from “magnanimous� to “elation� or from “restful� to “transcendent� with a fairly statistical commonality among listeners. This is because the long-arced melody remains outside of the relatable scale of human singing, combined with the hushed tremolos giving an overlay of “heavenly� luminosity, or in some listeners a sense of weightless floating. With Langer’s approach you’d never arrive at such specific understanding of how music actually works.
I’m not saying that philosophers from Kant onward (who like to play with mysticism) have lived wasted lives, but the fact is scientific probity does yield more straight-forward results. Readers who prefer roundabout philosophical pondering over neurological science may enjoy Langer’s approach more than I did. ...more
If you are interested in a philosophical take on the meaning of art (literature, visual and aural arts) I suggest reading The Necessity of Art by ErnsIf you are interested in a philosophical take on the meaning of art (literature, visual and aural arts) I suggest reading The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer instead. If your interest is primarily for music there is always Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard Talks, which takes into account intervallic hermeneutics and contextual narrative. Langer focuses on very abstract concepts of non-linguistic communication that won’t even register for most people who enjoy the visual arts or music.
Langer’s writing style is like a cross between the recursive crypticism of Sartre and the tossed word salad of Jordan Peterson’s logorrhea eruditus. With this kind of insular left-brain psychopathy it hard to imagine she ever experienced joy or wonder in life. This mindset fit right in with the emotively reactionary response of post-war fashionable cynicism which dominated the NYC intellectual scene and gave rise to many visual artists and composers who had their fifteen minutes of fame and are now forgotten.
The takeaway of all this is that the very origins of art were communal rituals such as dance and drums that reaffirmed sense of belonging to the community. It was only many thousands of years later that individual expressions of a contemplative nature began to emerge during the long lonely winter sojourns in caves. It took thousands of years more before artistic representational took on wistful and fanciful notions, much later still mysticism and tragedy. But the underlying thesis will not help you sit through Wagner’s Ring if that’s what you were hoping for. ...more
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